Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘But they’re over in the main terminal.’

‘The word will pass to them, you can be sure.’

She smiled. ‘I’d certainly hope so.’

‘Have Foa take you home,’ he added casually, perhaps too casually, for she looked at him and smiled.

‘I’ll have him take me to the Misericordia,’ she began, paused to allow Brunetti to try to remember how close to it she lived, and then added, ‘We can walk from there.’

Brunetti had long wondered what Signorina Elettra would think of his interest in her private life. It would be too much to say that her behaviour was at times provocative, just as it would be difficult to find a more suitable word to describe it. He had been too obvious in his offer of Foa’s help, but there was no way now for him to retract the offer.

He picked up the paper. ‘I’ll ask Pucetti to do it through official channels.’ Then, with a smile, he added, ‘The practice will be good for him.’

‘Probably slow him down,’ she said and got to her feet.

She stopped at the door and said over her shoulder, ‘It won’t be necessary for Foa to take me, Commissario: I’ve got some things to do first, so I’m leaving now.’ She did not explain what those things were, nor why she was leaving to do them four hours before she had to be at the airport. Brunetti raised a hand in acknowledgement and farewell, vowing to himself that he would tell no one what she had said.

He went to the officers’ squad room and explained the anomaly of Cavanella’s missing residence, then gave Pucetti the note of his name and address and the places where documents might be found. The young officer was puzzled to learn that Davide Cavanella was not registered as a resident of the city. ‘If you’ve seen him here for years, Commissario, then he’s got to be in the system somewhere,’ the younger man said. ‘If he was deaf, then he probably went to that school in Santa Croce. And there’s got to be some association for people who use sign.’ He added that to Brunetti’s list, expanding

the possibilities. ‘If they live near San Stin, maybe the parroco knew them. And if he worked at this dry cleaning place, then they’d have records.’ He added these to the list.

‘I suspect they let him stay there out of charity,’ Brunetti offered. He knew these women were his first good hope of discovering anything about the dead man. He tried to remember when he had first seen Davide – no, call him by his surname, as though he were a real adult and not a person frozen in childhood – Cavanella there. Ten years ago? Longer than that?

He asked Pucetti for a phone book, which the young officer produced from a drawer in his desk. Only one dry cleaner’s was listed in San Polo. Brunetti wrote the number in his notebook, reluctant to call them until he got back to his own office.

He handed the book to Pucetti, saying, ‘All right, check the Anagrafe, or the school, and call the parroco .’

‘How old was he?’ Pucetti asked, sitting down in front of one of the three computers in the room.

‘Rizzardi guessed him to be in his early forties.’

Pucetti raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought he was much younger.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I guess it was the way you talked about him.’ Pucetti shook his head and typed in the address for the Comune di Venezia.

Quickly he found the site of the Ufficio Anagrafe, but there seemed to be no way to search for the name of a person. Pucetti switched to another page, typed in the name, ‘Davide Cavanella’, glanced at the paper Brunetti had given him and copied the man’s address, but in the absence of a Codice Fiscale number the search could not progress.

Brunetti bent over the screen and asked Pucetti to scroll back to the opening page. When he saw the phone number, he picked up the phone and dialled it.

He gave his name and rank and said that he was calling to try to identify the dead man who had been found in San Polo the day before. He offered the woman he was speaking to the opportunity to call him back at the Questura, but she said that would not be necessary, and what was the man’s name?

‘Davide Cavanella, and he was probably in his early forties.’

‘Then,’ she said, ‘he would have been born in the seventies.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re computerized back to the fifties,’ she said, a note of pride audible in her voice. ‘So if he was born here, we’ll have him.’

Brunetti contented himself with making a polite noise while he left her to it. The sounds she made came through the phone, a combination of humming and clicks of displeasure or surprise. After a few minutes, she spoke to him in the voice of a person whose attention was somewhere else. ‘I can’t find him, Commissario. Are you sure of the spelling? Cavanella with a final A?’

‘Yes.’

‘Davide?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

Again a hum-filled pause, some soft clicks in the background, and then she was back. ‘I’m sorry, Commissario, but he wasn’t born in Venice or Mestre; not between 1965 and 1975, he wasn’t.’

‘Can you check the entire province?’ Brunetti asked.

This was the point when most bureaucrats tired of the novelty of answering questions for the police. Usually, they’d happily answer a few questions, do simple research if asked, but once things became complicated and time-consuming, they started naming supervisors and the need to get authorization or citing rules Brunetti always suspected they invented that instant.

‘I’m not authorized to do that, Commissario,’ she answered in a different voice, the voice he knew so well. ‘Not without an order from a magistrate.’

Brunetti thanked her and hung up.

Pucetti looked up, pulling his eyebrows together in interrogation.

‘Nothing, neither here nor in Mestre, from 1965 to 1975,’ Brunetti explained. Pucetti shrugged, as if this were the sort of answer bureaucracy always gave. ‘Can you,’ Brunetti began and then foundered on the appropriate verb. Get into? Access? Open? The real verb was ‘break into,’ but Brunetti was reluctant to use it, not wanting the corruption of subordinates added to his conscience. ‘Get further information from the social services?’

‘Of course, sir,’ Pucetti said, and Brunetti didn’t know if he was serving as an occasion of sin or as the person who lightened the weights carried by a racehorse. ‘I can even do it with this thing,’ he said, waving dismissive fingers over the keys and adding a noise that condemned the computer to ignominy. ‘It’s easy to find who’s collecting pensions.’ Then, in a voice from which all boasting was absent, Pucetti added, ‘Once you know how to do it.’ Brunetti nodded, his face impassive. ‘I’ll have a look around, sir,’ Pucetti said and turned to the screen.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered and said he would be in his office.

Upstairs, he turned on his own computer and started a search through the phone books of the provinces of Friuli and Treviso, but there were no listings for anyone with the surname Cavanella.

He called down to the front desk and asked the man on duty there to connect him with the office that saw to the sending of the hearse.

This was quickly done, the roster was checked, and within minutes Brunetti found himself talking to the pilot.

‘The call came from the Carabinieri a little before six, Commissario,’ the pilot, Enrico Forti, told him. ‘All they said was that a woman had called to say she had found her son dead in his bed and that we were to pick him up and take him to the hospital. That’s the routine, sir.’

‘And when you got there?’

‘She was at the door. People always are: I guess they hear us coming. The motor, you know.’

‘A woman with red hair?’ Brunetti asked.