Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

One of the lab men came in behind him and looked down at the boy. ‘Should I cover him, sir?’

‘No. Better leave him until the doctor’s seen him. Who’s coming?’

‘Guerriero, sir,’

‘Not Rizzardi?’

‘No, sir. Guerriero’s on duty today.’

Brunetti nodded and went back into the living room. The elastic had begun to rub against his cheek, so he removed the surgical mask and stuffed it into his pocket. The smell was worse for a while, but then it wasn’t. The second lab man went into the kitchen, carrying camera and tripod, and he heard the muted sound of their voices as they discussed how best to record this scene for the little part of history that Marco, a student at the university and dead with a needle stuck in his arm, would fill in the police archives of Venice, pearl of the Adriatic. Brunetti went over to the boy’s desk and stood looking down at a jumble of papers and books, so like the one he had created on his own desk when he was a student, so like the mess his own son left in his wake each morning when he went off to school.

On the inside cover of a history of architecture, Brunetti found his name: Marco Landi. Slowly he went through the papers on the desk, occasionally stopping to read a paragraph or a sentence. Marco, he discovered, had been working on a paper that dealt with the gardens of four of the eighteenth-century villas between Venice and Padova. Brunetti found books and photocopies of articles on landscape architecture, even some sketches of gardens that seemed to have been made by the dead boy. For a long time, Brunetti studied a large drawing of an elaborate formal garden, each plant and tree drawn in exact detail. He could even read the time on the enormous sundial that stood to the left of a fountain: four fifteen. At the bottom of the right side of the drawing, he noticed a pair of rabbits behind a fat oleander, peering curiously at the viewer, both of them seeming content and well fed. He replaced the drawing and picked up another, this one apparently for some other project because it showed a severely modern house, cantilevered out over an open space that could have been a canyon or a cliff. Brunetti studied the drawing, noticing the rabbits again, this time quizzically looking out from behind what appeared to be a piece of modern sculpture on the lawn in front of the house. He set it down and leafed through more of Marco’s drawings. In each of them, the rabbits appeared, sometimes almost impossible to find, so cleverly had they been hidden: once in the window of an apartment building, once peering through the windshield of a car parked in front of a house. Brunetti wondered how Marco’s professors would have greeted the appearance of the rabbits in each new assignment, whether it would have amused or annoyed them. And then he allowed himself to wonder about the boy who put them there, in every drawing. Why rabbits? And why two of them?

He turned his attention from the drawings to a handwritten letter to the left of them. It bore no return address and was postmarked from somewhere in the province of Trento. The postmark was smudged, making the name of the town illegible. He glanced quickly down the page and saw that it was signed ‘Mamma’.

Brunetti looked away a moment before he began to read. It contained the usual family news: Papà busy with the spring planting; Maria, whom Brunetti inferred must be Marco’s younger sister, doing well in school. Briciola had run after the postman again; she herself was well and hoped that Marco was studying and doing well at school and not having any more trouble. No, Signora, your Marco will never have any trouble again, but all that you will have now, and for the rest of your lives, is loss and pain and the terrible sense that you somehow failed this boy. And no matter how deep your knowledge that you were not responsible for it, your certainty that you were will always be deeper and more absolute.

He set the letter down and quickly went through the rest of the papers on the desk. There were more letters from the boy’s mother, but Brunetti did not read them. Finally, in the top drawer of the pine dresser to the left of the table, he found an address book, and in it he found Marco’s parents’ address and phone number. He slipped the small book into the side pocket of his jacket.

A sound at the door made him turn around to see Gianpaolo Guerriero, Rizzardi’s assistant. To Brunetti, Guerriero’s ambition was easily read on his lean young face and in the quickness of his every gesture, or perhaps it was nothing more than that Brunetti knew him to be ambitious and so saw that quality – Brunetti could never bring himself to call it a virtue – in everything the man did. Brunetti wanted to like him because he had seen that he was respectful of the dead with whom he worked, but there was a humourless sincerity in the man that made it difficult for Brunetti to feel toward him anything stronger than respect. Like his superior, he was a careful dresser and today wore a grey woollen suit which complemented his elegant good looks. Behind him came two white-clad attendants from the morgue. Brunetti nodded towards the kitchen, and the men went inside, taking their rolled-up stretcher with them.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ Guerriero called unnecessarily after them. He gave Brunetti his hand.

‘They told me it was an overdose,’ Guerriero said.

‘It looks like it.’ No sounds came from the other room.

Guerriero went into the kitchen, carrying a bag Brunetti couldn’t help noticing bore the Prada logo.

Brunetti remained in the living room and, while he waited for Guerriero to finish, propped himself on the table on his outstretched palms and looked down again at Marco’s drawings. He wanted to smile at the rabbits, but he could not.

Guerriero was inside the room no more than a few minutes. He paused at the door to remove the surgical mask he had put on. ‘If it was heroin,’ the doctor said, ‘and I think it was, it would have been instant. You saw him: he didn’t even have time to get the needle out of his arm.’

Brunetti asked, ‘What would do that to him? Or why would it, if he was an addict?’

Guerriero considered this then answered, ‘If it was heroin, it could have had just about any sort of crap mixed up in it. That could have done it. Or, if he hadn’t been using it for a while, then it could have been no more than an over-reaction to a dosage that wouldn’t have harmed him while he was using it regularly. That is, if he got some stuff that was particularly pure.’

‘What do you think?’ Brunetti asked, and when he saw Guerriero begin to give an automatic, no doubt cautious, reply, he raised his hand and added, ‘entirely unofficially’.

Guerriero thought about this for a long time before he answered, and Brunetti couldn’t escape the idea that the young doctor was weighing up the professional consequences of being discovered to have made an entirely unofficial judgement. Finally, he said, ‘I think it might be the second.’

Brunetti didn’t prod, simply stood there and waited for him to continue.

‘I didn’t check the entire body,’ Guerriero said. ‘Just the arms, but there are no fresh marks, though there are a lot of old ones. If he’s been using heroin recently, he would have been using his arms. Addicts tend to use the same place. I’d say he’s been off the stuff for a couple of months.’

‘But then he went back to it?’

‘Yes, it would seem so. I’ll be able to tell you more after I have a better look at him.’

‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said. ‘Will they take him out now?’

‘Yes. I’ve told them to put him in a bag. With the windows open, it should be better in here soon.’

‘Good. Thank you.’

Guerriero raised a hand in acknowledgement.