Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

Inside, Rizzardi went over and examined the bodies from above. Then he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and bent down to touch the girl’s, and then the boy’s, throat. He set his leather bag on the floor and squatted down beside the girl, then reached across her body and slowly rolled her away from the boy and on to her back. She lay, staring up at the ceiling, and one shattered hand came drifting across her body and slapped down on to the floor, startling Brunetti, who had chosen to avert his eyes.

He came closer and stood above Rizzardi, looking down. Her short hair was hennaed a dark red and lay close to her head, greasy and dirty. He noticed that her teeth, which showed through the slit of her bloody mouth, were glistening and perfect. Blood had hardened around her mouth, though the flow from her savaged nose had apparently run into her eyes as she lay on the floor. Had she been pretty? Had she been plain?

Rizzardi placed a hand on Zecchino’s chin and tilted his head toward the light. ‘They were both killed by blows to the head,’ he said, pointing to a place on the left of Zecchino’s forehead. ‘It’s not easy to do and requires a lot of strength. Or a lot of blows. And the dying isn’t quick. But at least they don’t feel much, not after the first few blows.’ He looked at the girl again, turned her face to the side to examine a darkening concavity at the back of her head. He looked down at two marks on her upper arms. ‘I’d say she was held while she was hit, possibly with a piece of wood, or maybe a pipe,’

Neither of them thought it necessary to comment on this or to add, ‘Like Rossi.’

Rizzardi got to his feet, slipped off the gloves, and put them in the pocket of his jacket.

‘When can you do it?’ was all Brunetti could think of to say.

‘This afternoon, I think.’ Rizzardi knew better than to ask Brunetti if he wanted to attend. ‘If you call me after five, I should know something.’ Before Brunetti could respond, Rizzardi added, ‘But it won’t be much, not much more than what we see here.’

After Rizzardi had left, the crime team began their deadly parody of domesticity: sweeping, dusting, picking up small things that had fallen to the floor and seeing that they were put in safe places. Brunetti forced himself to go through the pockets of the young people, first the discarded clothing that lay beside and atop the mattresses, then, after he’d accepted a pair of lab gloves from Del Vecchio, the clothing that they still wore. In the breast pocket of Zecchino’s shirt, he found three more plastic envelopes, each containing white powder. He passed them to Del Vecchio, who carefully labelled them and placed them inside his evidence kit.

Rizzardi, he was glad to see, had closed their eyes. Zecchino’s naked legs reminded him of the legs he’d seen in photos of those stick figures standing at the front gates of concentration camps: there was only skin and sinew, little sign of muscle. And how knobby his knees were. One pelvic bone was exposed, cutting sharp. Red pustules covered both of his thighs, though Brunetti couldn’t tell if they were suppurating scars from old injections or symptoms of skin disease. The girl, though alarmingly thin and almost breast-less, was not as cadaverous as Zecchino. At the realization that both were now, and for ever, cadaverous, Brunetti turned away from them and went downstairs.

Because he was in charge of this part of the investigation, the least he could do for the dead was remain until the bodies had been removed and the lab teams were satisfied that they had found, sampled, and examined everything that might be of future use to the police in finding the killers. He walked to the end of the calle and looked across at the garden on the other side, glad that forsythia always succeeded in looking so happy, however hastily dressed.

They would have to ask, of course, canvass the area and see who could remember seeing anyone going into the calle or into the building. When he turned around, he saw that a small group of people had already gathered at the other end of the calle, where it opened out on a larger street, and he started towards them, the first questions already forming in his mind.

As he expected, no one had seen anything, neither that day nor at any time in the last few weeks. No one had any idea that it was possible to get into the building. No one had ever seen Zecchino, nor could they remember ever having seen a girl. Since there was no way to force them to speak, Brunetti didn’t make the effort to disbelieve them, but he knew from long experience that, when dealing with the police, few Italians could remember much beyond their own names.

The other questioning could wait until after lunch or the evening, when the people in the buildings in the area could be expected to be at home. But no one, he knew, would admit having seen anything. The word would quickly spread that two drug addicts had died in the building, and it would be the rare person who would see their deaths as anything special, certainly not as something worth the trouble of being questioned by the police. Why put up with endless hours of being treated as a suspect? Why run the risk of having to take the time off from work to be asked further questions or to attend a trial?

He knew the police were not viewed with anything even approaching sympathy by the general public; he knew how badly the police treated them, no matter how they fell into the orbit of an investigation, either as suspect or witness. For years he had tried to train the men under him to treat witnesses as people who were willing to be of help, as, in a sense, colleagues, only to walk past questioning rooms where they were being hectored, threatened, verbally abused. No wonder people fled in fear from the very idea of providing information to the police: he’d do the same.

The thought of lunch was intolerable: so was the idea of taking the memory of what he had just seen into the company of his family. He called Paola then went back to the Questura and sat there, doing whatever he could to dull his mind with routine, waiting for Rizzardi to call. It would not be news, the cause of their deaths, but it would at least be information, and he could put that in a file and perhaps take comfort from having imposed this small bit of order upon the chaos of sudden death.

For the next four hours, he sorted through two months’ backlog of papers and reports, neatly writing his initials at the bottom of folders he’d examined without understanding. It took him all afternoon, but he cleared his desk of papers, even went so far as to take them down to Signorina Elettra’s office and, in her absence, leave her a note, asking that she see to their filing or consignment to whoever was due to read them next.

When this was done, he went down to the bar at the bridge and had a glass of mineral water and a toasted cheese sandwich. He picked up that day’s Gazzettino from the counter and saw, in the second section, the article he had planted. As he expected, it said far more than he had, suggesting that arrest was imminent, conviction inescapable, and the drug trade in the Veneto effectively destroyed. He dropped the paper and went back to the Questura, noticing on the way that the sparse yellow tops of forsythia were pushing their way over the top of the wall on the other side of the canal.

At his desk, he checked his watch and saw that it was late enough to call Rizzardi. He was just reaching for the phone when it rang.

‘Guido,’ the pathologist began with no introduction, ‘when you looked at those kids this morning, after I left, did you remember to wear gloves?’

It took a moment for Brunetti to overcome his surprise, and he had to think for a moment before he remembered. ‘Yes. Del Vecchio gave me a pair.’