Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

‘When will the autopsy be held, Dottore?’

Carraro kept his head lowered over Brunetti’s warrant card, as if reading the words there could make them change or take on some new significance. He turned it over and looked at the back, found it as empty of useful information as his mind of the proper response. At last, he looked up at Brunetti and asked, the arrogance in his voice replaced by suspicion, ‘Who called you?’

‘I don’t think it’s important why we’re here,’ Brunetti began, deliberately using the plural and hoping to suggest a hospital filled with policemen requisitioning records, X-rays, and patient charts, questioning nurses and other patients, all bent on discovering the cause of Franco Rossi’s death. ‘Isn’t it enough to know that we are?’

Carraro handed the card back to Brunetti and said, ‘We don’t have an X-ray machine down here, so when we saw his arms, we sent him to Radiology and then Orthopaedics. It was the obvious thing to do. Any doctor would have done the same thing.’ Any doctor in the Ospedale Civile, Brunetti reflected, but said nothing.

‘Were they broken?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Of course they were, both of them, the right in two places. We sent him up there to have them set and cast. There was nothing else we could do. It was standard procedure. As soon as that was taken care of, they could have sent him somewhere else.’

‘Neurology, for example?’ Brunetti asked.

By way of answer, Carraro did no more than shrug his shoulders.

‘I’m sorry, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with oily sarcasm, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear your answer.’

‘Yes, they could have.’

‘Did you observe any damage that would suggest he should be sent to Neurology? Did you make mention of it on your records?’

‘I think so,’ Carraro said evasively.

‘You think so or you know so?’ Brunetti demanded.

‘I know so,’ Carraro finally admitted.

‘Did you make note of damage to the head? As if from a fall?’ Brunetti asked.

Carraro nodded. ‘It’s on the chart.’

‘But you sent him to Orthopaedics?’

Carraro’s face coloured again with sudden anger. What would it be, Brunetti wondered, to have your health in the hands of this man? ‘The arms were broken. I wanted to get them attended to before he went into shock, so I sent him to Orthopaedics. It was their responsibility to send him to Neurology.’

‘And?’

Under Brunetti’s eyes, the doctor was replaced by the bureaucrat, retreating at the thought that any suspicion of negligence was more likely to fall on his shoulders than on those who had actually treated Rossi. ‘If Orthopaedics failed to send him on for further treatment, that’s not my responsibility. You should be talking to them.’

‘How serious was the injury to his head?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I’m not a neurologist,’ Carraro answered instantly, just as Brunetti had thought he would.

‘A moment ago, you said you noted the injury on his chart.’

‘Yes, it’s there,’ Carraro said.

Brunetti was tempted to tell him that his own presence there had nothing to do with a possible charge of malpractice, but he doubted that Carraro would believe him or, even if he did, that it would make a difference. He’d dealt with many bureaucracies in his career, and bitter and repeated experience had taught him that only the military and the Mafia, and perhaps the Church, were as likely as the medical profession to fall into the instant goosestep of mutual protection and denial, regardless of the cost to justice, truth, or life.

‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with a finality the other man clearly found surprising. ‘I’d like to see him.’

‘Rossi?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s in the morgue,’ Carraro explained, his voice as cool as the place itself. ‘Do you know the way?’

‘Yes.’

Mercifully, Brunetti’s path took him outside and along the main courtyard of the hospital, and so he had a brief glimpse of sky and blossoming trees; he wished he could somehow store up the beauty of the plump clouds glimpsed through the pink blossoms and take it with him. He turned into the narrow passageway that led to the obitorio, vaguely troubled to realize how familiar he was with the way to death.

At the door, the attendant recognized him and greeted him with a nod. He was a man who, through decades of dealing with the dead, had taken on their silence.

‘Franco Rossi,’ Brunetti said by way of explanation.

Another nod and the man turned away from the door, leading Brunetti into the room where a number of white-sheeted forms lay on hip-high tables. The attendant led Brunetti to the far side of the room and stopped by one of the tables, but he made no effort to remove the cloth. Brunetti looked down: the raised pyramid of the nose, a dropping off at the chin, and then an uneven surface broken by two horizontal lumps that must be the plaster-cast arms, and then two horizontal tubes that ended where the feet jutted off to the sides.

‘He was my friend,’ Brunetti said, perhaps to himself, and pulled the cloth back from the face.

The indentation above the left eye was blue and destroyed the symmetry of the forehead, which was strangely flattened, as if it had been pushed in by an enormous palm. For the rest, it was the same face, plain and unremarkable. Paola had once told him that her hero, Henry James, had referred to death as ‘the distinguished thing’, but there was nothing distinguished about what lay under Brunetti’s gaze: it was flat, anonymous, cold.

He pulled the cloth back over Rossi’s face, distracted by the desire to know how much of what lay there was Rossi; and if Rossi was no longer there, why what was left deserved so much respect. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the attendant and left the room. His response to the greater warmth of the courtyard was completely animal: he could almost feel the hair on the back of his neck smooth itself down. He thought about going to Orthopaedia to see what sort of justification they might engage in, but the sight of Rossi’s battered face lingered, and he wanted nothing so much as to get out of the confines of the hospital. He gave in to this desire and left. He paused again at the desk, this time showing his warrant card, and asked for Rossi’s address.

The porter found it quickly and added the phone number. It was a low number in Castello, and when Brunetti asked the porter if he knew where it was, he said he thought it must be down by Santa Giustina, near the shop that used to be the Doll Hospital.

‘Has anyone been here to ask for him?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No one while I’ve been here, Commissario. But his family will have been called by the hospital, so they’ll know where to go.’

Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost one, but he doubted that the usual summons to lunch would be heeded by Franco Rossi’s family, if he had one, that day. He knew that the dead man worked in the Ufficio Catasto and had died after a fall. Beyond that, he knew only what little he had inferred from their one brief meeting and even briefer phone conversation. Rossi was dutiful, timid, almost a cliché of the punctilious bureaucrat. And, like Lot’s wife, he had turned solid when Brunetti suggested he step out on to the terrace.

He started down Barbaria delle Tolle, heading in the direction of San Francesco della Vigna. On his right, the fruit vendor, the one with the wig, was just closing, draping a green cloth over the open boxes of fruit and vegetables in a gesture Brunetti found disturbingly reminiscent of the way he had pulled the cloth over Rossi’s face. Around him, things went on as normal: people hurried home to lunch and life went on.

The address was easy to find, on the right side of the campo, two doors beyond what had now become yet another real estate agency, rossi, franco, was engraved on a narrow brass plaque next to the doorbell for the second floor. He pressed the bell, waited, then pressed it again, but there was no answer. He pressed the one above but got the same result, and so he tried the one below it.