Donna Leon - About Face

Did he need a more perfect comparison with the Mafia? Brought back to life by the Americans after the war to control the perceived Communist menace, it had got out of control and, as with the cane toad, its expansion north and south could not be stopped. It could be pierced and stabbed, but it would spring back to life. ‘We need crows,’ Brunetti said out loud, looked up, and saw Vianello at the door.

‘It’s the autopsy report,’ Vianello said in an ordinary voice, as though he had not heard Brunetti speak. He handed Brunetti a manila envelope and, even before Brunetti nodded to him, took a seat in front of his desk.

Brunetti slit open the envelope and slid out the photos, surprised to see that they were no bigger than postcards. He put them on his desk and removed some sheets of paper, placing them to the side of the photos. He looked at Vianello, who had noticed how small the photos were.

‘Economy measure, I suppose,’ Vianello observed.

Brunetti tapped the edges straight on his desk and began to look through the crime-scene photos, passing them to Vianello after he had studied each one. Postcard size: indeed, what better postcards for the new Italy? His mind fled to the possibility of an entire new line of tourist posters and souvenirs: the squalid shack in which Provenzano had been arrested, the illegal hotel complexes inside national parks, the twelve-year-old Moldavian prostitutes at the sides of the road?

Or perhaps they could create a deck of playing cards. Bodies? Reduce the size of one of the photos of Guarino and they could begin a deck composed of the bodies found only in the last few years. Four suits: Palermo, Reggio Calabria, Naples, Catania. A joker? And who would that be, filling in wherever he was needed? He thought of the cabinet minister rumoured to be in their pocket — he would do nicely.

A light cough from Vianello put an end to Brunetti’s grim flight of fancy. Brunetti handed him another photo, and then another. Vianello took them with increasing interest, all but snatching at the last of them. When Brunetti looked across at his assistant, he saw that his face was grim with shock. ‘These are scene of crime photos?’ he asked, as if he needed Brunetti’s assurance to be able to believe it.

Brunetti nodded. ‘You were there?’ Vianello asked, though it was not really a question.

At Brunetti’s repeated nod, Vianello tossed the photos face up on to Brunetti’s desk. ‘ Gesù Bambino , who are these clowns?’ Vianello stabbed an angry forefinger on to one of the photos, where the toes of three different pairs of shoes could be seen. ‘Whose feet are these?’ he demanded. ‘What are they doing so close to the body if it’s being photographed?’ He jabbed his finger on the imprints left by a pair of knees. ‘And whose are these?’

He shoved the photos around and found one taken from a distance of two metres, showing the two Carabinieri standing behind the body, apparently in conversation. ‘Both of them are smoking,’ Vianello said. ‘So whose cigarette butts are going to be in the evidence bags, for the love of God?’

The Ispettore lost all patience and pushed the photos back towards Brunetti. ‘If they’d wanted to contaminate the scene, they couldn’t have done a better job.’

Vianello pressed his lips together and retrieved the photos. He lined them up in a row, then switched them around so that they could be read, left to right, as the camera approached the body. The first showed a radius of two metres around the body, the second a radius of one. In both photos, Guarino’s outstretched right hand was clearly visible in the bottom left of the photo. In the first photo, his hand lay on a clear field of dark brown mud. In the fourth, a cigarette butt was visible about ten centimetres from his hand. Guarino’s head and chest filled the last photo, blood soaked into the collar and front of his shirt.

Vianello could not prevent himself from appealing to the gold standard. ‘Alvise couldn’t make a worse mess.’

Brunetti finally said, ‘I think that’s probably it: the Alvise factor. It’s simple human stupidity and error.’ Vianello started to say something, but Brunetti did not stop. ‘I know it would be more comfortable, somehow, to blame it on conspiracy, but I think it’s just the usual mess.’

Vianello considered this then shrugged, saying, ‘I’ve seen worse.’ After a time, he asked, ‘What does the report say?’

Brunetti opened the papers and started to read through them, passing each one to Vianello as he finished reading it. Death had indeed been instant, the bullet having ripped through Guarino’s brain before emerging from his jaw. The bullet had not been found. There followed some speculation about the calibre of the gun used in the crime, and it ended with the bland statement that the mud on Guarino’s lapels and knees was different in composition and bore higher traces of mercury, cadmium, radium, and arsenic than did the mud under his body.

‘“Higher?”’ Vianello asked as he handed the papers back to Brunetti. ‘God help us,’ Vianello said.

‘No one else will.’

The Inspector was reduced to raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘What do we do now?’

‘There remains Signorina Landi,’ Brunetti answered, much to the Ispettore’s confusion.

They met the next day, he and Dottoressa Landi, at the train station of Casarsa, having agreed to split the distance between Venice and Trieste. He paused on the steps of the station, hit by the warmth of the sun. Much in the manner of a sunflower, he turned his face towards it and closed his eyes.

‘Commissario?’ a woman’s voice called from the row of cars parked in front of him. He opened his eyes and saw a short dark woman with black hair step from a car. He noticed first that her hair, cut as short as a boy’s, glistened wetly with gel, then that her body, even inside the padding of a grey down parka, was slim and youthful.

He walked down the steps and over to the car. ‘Dottoressa,’ he said formally, ‘I want to thank you for agreeing to meet me.’ She came barely to his shoulder and appeared to be in her thirties, though not by much. What makeup she wore had been carelessly applied, and she had already gnawed off most of her lipstick. It was a sunny day up here in Friuli, but her eyes were pulled tight by more than the sun. Regular features, normal nose, a face made memorable because of the hair and the evidence of strain.

He took her hand. ‘I thought we might go somewhere and talk,’ she said. She had a pleasant voice a bit heavy on the aspirants. Tuscan, perhaps.

‘Certainly,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I don’t know this area at all well.’

‘I’m afraid there isn’t all that much to know,’ she said, getting back into the car. When both of them were buckled in, she started the engine, saying, ‘There’s a restaurant not far from here.’ With a shiver, she added, ‘It’s too cold to stay outside.’

‘Whatever you like,’ Brunetti answered.

They drove though the centre of town. Pasolini, Brunetti remembered, had come from here, had fled in disgrace, gone to Rome. As they drove down the narrow street, Brunetti thought how lucky Pasolini had been to have been driven out of all of this undistinguished orderliness. How to live in a place like this?

Beyond the town, they drove down a highway, each side lined with houses or businesses or commercial buildings of some sort. The trees were naked. How bleak the winter was up here, Brunetti thought. And then came the thought of how bleak the other seasons would be.

No expert, Brunetti could not judge how well she drove. They turned to the left or right, passed through roundabouts, switched to smaller roads. Within minutes he was completely lost, could not have pointed in the direction of the station had his life depended on it. They passed a small shopping centre with a large optician’s shop, then down another road lined with bare trees. And then to the left and into a parking lot.