Donna Leon - About Face

Ribasso stepped forward and extended his hand to Brunetti, saying, ‘I thought it was you on the phone, but I wasn’t sure.’ He smiled but said nothing further about the call.

‘Maybe I’m watching too many programmes about tough cops on television,’ Brunetti, who was not, said by way of explanation or apology. Ribasso patted him on the shoulder and turned to say hello to Griffoni, addressing her by name. The others took their cue from Ribasso’s manner and nodded at the newcomers, then shifted around and opened up a space large enough for Brunetti and Griffoni to join them.

About three metres away, the body of a man lay on his back at the centre of a space marked off by red and white plastic tape attached to a series of thin metal poles. Without the photo he had already seen, Brunetti might not have recognized Guarino from this distance. Part of his jaw was missing, and what remained of his face was turned away. His coat was dark, so no blood could be seen on it or on the lapels of his jacket. His shirt, however, was a different matter.

Small patches of mud had dried on the knees of his trousers and the right shoulder of his coat, and some strands of what looked like plastic fibre were stuck to the sole of his right shoe. Footsteps had churned up whorls in the frosty mud around the body, cancelling one another out.

‘He’s on his back,’ was the first thing Brunetti said.

‘Exactly,’ Ribasso answered.

‘So where was he moved from?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ribasso said, then, failing to disguise his anger, ‘The idiots were all over the place before they called us.’

‘Which idiots?’ Griffoni asked.

‘The ones who found him,’ Ribasso said, giving in to his anger. ‘Two men in a truck who were making a delivery of copper tubing. They got lost, turned into the road up there,’ he said, waving back the way Brunetti and Griffoni had come. ‘They were about to turn around, but they saw him on the ground and came down to have a look.’

Brunetti could read some of what must have followed from the mass of footprints in the mud around the body and the two breast-like impressions left when one of them knelt beside the dead man.

‘Is it possible they turned him over?’ Griffoni asked, though it sounded as if she hardly believed it.

‘They said they didn’t,’ was the best answer Ribasso could give. ‘And it doesn’t look as though they did, though they certainly walked around enough to destroy any evidence.’

‘Did they touch him?’ Brunetti asked.

‘They said they couldn’t remember.’ Ribasso’s disgust was audible. ‘But when they called, they said there was a dead Carabiniere, so they must have taken out his wallet.’

In the face of this, nothing could be said.

‘Did you know him?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes,’ Ribasso said. ‘In fact, I’m the one who told him to go and talk to you.’

‘About that man he wanted to find?’

‘Yes.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I thought you’d help him.’

‘I tried to.’ Brunetti turned away from the dead man.

The woman, who seemed to be in charge of the scene of crime team, called to Ribasso, who went over and had a word with her. He then signalled to the attendants and told them they could take the body to the morgue at the hospital.

The two men tossed their cigarettes to the ground, adding them to the ones lying there. As Brunetti watched, they took the stretcher over to the dead man and lifted him on to it. Everyone stepped aside to allow them to carry him to the ambulance, where they slid the stretcher into the back. The sound of the slamming doors broke the spell that had rendered them all silent.

Ribasso stepped aside and spoke to the other Carabiniere, who went over to the car, propped himself up against the side, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. The three technicians stripped off their paper suits, rolled them up and put them in a plastic bag, which they tossed into the back of their van. They collapsed their tripod and stashed the cameras in a padded metal case. There was a great slamming of doors and sound of engines, and then the ambulance drove off, followed by the technicians.

Into the expanding silence, Brunetti asked, ‘Why did you call Patta?’

Ribasso’s answer was preceded by an exasperated grunt. ‘I’ve dealt with him before.’ He looked back at the place where Guarino had been, then at Brunetti. ‘It was best to do it officially from the beginning. Besides, I knew he’d pass it on, maybe to someone we could work with.’

Brunetti nodded. ‘What did Guarino tell you?’

‘That you’d try to identify the man in the photo.’

‘Is this your case, too?’

‘More or less,’ Ribasso said.

‘Pietro,’ Brunetti said, taking advantage of the familiarity that had been formed between them the last time. ‘Guarino — may he rest in peace — tried that with me.’ ‘And you threatened to throw him out of your office,’ Ribasso said. ‘He told me.’

‘So don’t start,’ said a relentless Brunetti.

Griffoni’s head turned back and forth as the two men spoke. ‘All right,’ Ribasso said. ‘I said more or less because he talked with me as a friend about it.’

This seemed all Ribasso was prepared to say, so Brunetti prodded him by asking, ‘You said he was working for Nas?’ So that explained Guarino’s interest in the transport of garbage: Nas handled everything that had to do with pollution or the destruction of the physical heritage of the country. Brunetti had long considered the location of their office in Marghera, source of generations of pollution, an ironic, not an accidental, choice.

Ribasso nodded. ‘Filippo studied biochemistry: I think he joined that branch because he wanted to do something useful. Maybe important. They were glad to get him.’

‘How long ago was that?’

‘Eight, nine years. Maybe. I’ve known him only for the last five or six.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask, Ribasso added, ‘We never worked on a case together.’

‘Not this one?’ Griffoni asked.

Ribasso shifted his weight from one foot to another. ‘I told you, he would talk to me.’

‘What else did he tell you?’ Brunetti asked. Quickly, Griffoni broke in to add, ‘It can’t make any difference to him now.’

Ribasso took a few steps towards his car. He turned back to face them. ‘He told me the whole thing stank of Camorra. The man who got killed — Ranzato — he was only one of the people mixed up in it. Filippo was trying to find out how all this stuff got moved around.’

‘How much are we talking about?’ Griffoni broke in to ask. ‘Tons?’

‘Hundreds of tons, I’d say,’ Brunetti added.

‘Hundreds of thousands of tons is closer to the truth,’ Ribasso said, silencing them both.

Brunetti attempted to do the numbers, but he had no idea what weight a truck could carry and so could not do even the most basic calculation. His mind flashed to his children, for it was they and their children who would inherit the contents of those trucks.

Ribasso, as if chastened by his own words, prodded at the frosted mud with the tip of his boot, then looked at them and said, ‘Someone tried to drive him off the road a week ago.’

‘He didn’t tell me that,’ Brunetti said. ‘What happened?’

‘He avoided them. They pulled up level with him — this was out on the autostrada coming down from Treviso — and when they started to move towards him, he slammed on his brakes and pulled over and stopped. They kept going.’

‘Did you believe him?’

Ribasso shrugged and turned back to the place where Guarino’s body had been. ‘Someone got him.’

Brunetti and Griffoni rode back to Piazzale Roma in relative silence, both of them burdened by the sight of death and chilled by their long exposure to the cold and waste of Marghera. Griffoni asked Brunetti why he had failed to tell Ribasso he had identified the man in the photo Guarino had sent him, and Brunetti explained that the Captain, who must surely have known about it, had not considered it necessary to tell him anything. No stranger to the rivalry that existed between the different branches of the forces of order, she said no more.