Brunetti found a single sheet of paper on his desk, a report from Interpol in Geneva saying that they had no information about and no record of Francesco Semenzato. Below that neatly typed message, however, there was a brief handwritten note: ‘Rumours here, nothing definite. I’ll ask around.’ And below that was a scrawled signature he recognized as belonging to Piet Heinegger.
His phone rang late that afternoon. It was Lele, saying that he had managed to get in touch with a few friends of his, including the one in Burma. No one had been willing to say anything about Semenzato directly, but Lele had learned that the museum director was believed to be involved in the antiques business. No, not as a buyer but as a seller. One of the men he had spoken to said he had heard that Semenzato had invested in an antique shop, but he knew no more than that, not where it was or who the official owner might be.
‘Sounds like that would create a conflict of interest,’ Brunetti said, ‘buying from his partner with the museum’s money.’
‘He wouldn’t be the only one,’ Lele muttered, but Brunetti let the remark lie. ‘There’s another thing,’ the artist added.
‘What?’
‘When I mentioned stolen art works, one of them said he’d heard rumours about an important collector in Venice.’
‘Semenzato?’
‘No,’ Lele answered. ‘I didn’t ask, but the word is out that I’m curious about him, so I’m sure my friend would have told me if it was Semenzato.’
‘Did he say who it was?’
‘No. He didn’t know. But the rumour is that it’s a gentleman from the South.’ Lele said this as if he believed it impossible for any gentleman to come from the South.
‘But no name?’
‘No, Guido. But I’ll keep asking around.’
‘Thanks. I appreciate this, Lele. I couldn’t do this myself.’
‘No, you couldn’t,’ Lele said evenly. Then, not even bothering to brush off Brunetti’s thanks, Lele said, ‘I’ll call you if I hear anything else,’ and hung up.
Believing that he had done enough for the afternoon and not wanting to be trapped on this side of the city by the arrival of acqua alta, Brunetti went home early and had two quiet hours to himself before Paola got back from the university. When she got home, soaked by the increasing intensity of the rain, she said that she had used the quotation, given the spurious attribution, but still the dreaded marchese had managed to spoil it, suggesting that a writer such as James, who was supposed to have such a good reputation, certainly could have avoided such simple-minded redundancies. Brunetti listened as she explained, surprised at how much he had come, over the last months, to dislike this young man he had never met. Food and wine tempered Paola’s mood, as they always did, and when Raffi volunteered to do the dishes, she radiated contentment and well-being.
They were in bed by ten, she deeply asleep over a particularly infelicitous example of student writing and he deeply engrossed in a new translation of Suetonius. He had just reached the passage describing those little boys swimming in Tiberius’ pool at Capri when the phone rang.
‘Pronto,’ he answered, hoping it wouldn’t be police business but knowing that, at ten to eleven, it probably was.
‘Commissario, this is Monico.’ Sergeant Monico, Brunetti recalled, was in charge of the night shift that week.
‘What is it, Monico?’
‘I think we’ve got a murder, sir.’
‘Where?’
‘Palazzo Ducale.’
‘Who is it?’ he asked, though he knew.
‘The director, sir.’
‘Semenzato?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What happened?’
‘It looks like a break-in. The cleaning woman found him about ten minutes ago and went screaming down to the guards. They went back up to the office and saw him, and they called us.’
‘What have you done?’ He dropped the book on to the floor at the side of the bed and began looking around the room to see where he had left his clothes.
‘We called Vice-Questore Patta, but his wife said he wasn’t there, and she has no idea of how to get in touch with him.’ Either of which, Brunetti reflected, could be a lie. ‘So I decided to call you, sir.’
‘Did they tell you what happened, the guards?’
‘Yes, sir. The man I spoke to said there was a lot of blood, and it looked like he’d been hit on the head.’
‘Was he dead when the cleaning lady found him?’
‘I think so, sir. The guards said he was dead when they got there.’
‘All right,’ Brunetti said, flipping back the covers. ‘I’ll go over there now. Send whoever’s there – who is it tonight?’
‘Vianello, sir. He was here on night shift with me, so he went over as soon as the call came in.’
‘Good. Call Dottor Rizzardi and ask him to meet me there.’
‘Yes, sir, I was going to call him as soon as I spoke to you.’
‘Good,’ Brunetti said, swinging his feet out and putting them on the floor. ‘I should be there in about twenty minutes. We’ll need a team to photograph and take prints.’
‘Yes, sir. I’ll call Pavese and Foscolo as soon as I’ve spoken to Dottor Rizzardi.’
‘All right. Twenty minutes,’ Brunetti said and hung up. Was it possible to be shocked and still not be surprised? A violent death, and only four days after Brett was attacked with similar brutality. While he pulled on his clothing and tied his shoes, he warned himself against jumping to conclusions. He walked around to Paola’s side of the bed, leaned down, and shook her gently by the shoulder.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him over the top of the glasses she had begun, that year, to use for reading. She wore a ragged old flannel dressing gown she had bought in Scotland more than ten years ago and, pulled over it, an Irish knit cardigan her parents had given her for Christmas almost as long ago. Seeing her like that, momentarily confused by his having pulled her from her first deep sleep and peering myopically at him, he thought how much she looked like the homeless and apparently mad women who passed their winter nights in the railway station. Feeling traitorous for the thought, he leaned into the circle of light created by her reading lamp and bent down to kiss her forehead.
‘Was that the sovereign call of duty?’ she asked, immediately awake.
‘Yes. Semenzato. The cleaning woman found him in his office at the Palazzo Ducale.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Murdered?’
‘It looks that way.’
She removed her glasses and placed them on the papers that spilled across the covers in front of her. ‘Have you sent a guard to the American’s room?’ she asked, leaving it to him to follow the swift logic of what she said.
‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but I will as soon as I get to the Palazzo. I don’t think they’d risk two in the same night, but I’ll send a man over.’ How easily ‘they’ had come into existence, created by his refusal to believe in coincidence and Paola’s to believe in human goodness.
‘Who called?’ she asked.
‘Monico.’
‘Good,’ she said, recognizing the name and familiar with the man. ‘I’ll call him and tell him about the guard.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up. I’m afraid this will take a long time.’
‘So will this,’ she said, leaning forward and gathering up the papers.
He bent again and this time kissed her on the lips. She returned his kiss and turned it into a real one. He straightened up and she surprised him by wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her face into his stomach. She said something that was too mumbled to understand. Gently, he stroked her hair, but his mind was on Semenzato and Chinese ceramics.
She pulled herself away and reached for her glasses. Putting them on, she said, ‘Remember to take your boots.’
Chapter Nine
WHEN COMMISSARIO Brunetti of the Venice police arrived at the scene of the murder of the director of th
e most important museum in the city, he carried in his right hand a white plastic shopping bag which bore in red letters the name of a supermarket. Inside the bag were a pair of size ten rubber boots, black, which he had bought at Standa three years before. The first thing he did when he arrived at the guards’ station at the bottom of the staircase that led up to the museum was hand the bag to the guard he found there, saying he’d pick it up when he left.
As he placed the bag on the floor beside his desk, the guard said, ‘One of your men is upstairs, sir.’
‘Good. More will be coming soon. And the coroner. Has the press showed up yet?’
‘No, sir.’
‘What about the cleaning woman?’
‘They had to take her home, sir. She couldn’t stop crying after she saw him.’
‘That bad, is it?’
The guard nodded. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood.’
A head wound, Brunetti remembered. Yes, there’d be a lot of blood. ‘She’s bound to make a stir when she gets there, and that means someone will call Il Gazzetino. Try to keep the reporters down here when they arrive, will you?’
‘I’ll try, sir, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good.’
‘Keep them here,’ Brunetti said.
‘Yes, sir.’
Brunetti looked down the long corridor that led to a flight of stairs at the end. ‘Is the office up there?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir. Turn left at the top. You’ll see the light at the end of the passage. I think your man is in the office.’
Brunetti turned away and started down the corridor. His steps echoed eerily, reverberating back at him from both sides and from the staircase at the end. Cold, the penetrating damp cold of winter, seeped out from the pavement below him and from the brick walls of the corridor. Behind him, he heard the sharp clang of metal on stone, but no one called out, so he continued down the corridor. The night mist had set in, painting a slippery film of condensation on the broad stone steps under his feet.
At the top, he turned left and made towards the light pouring from an open door at the end of the passage. Halfway there, he called out, ‘Vianello?’ Instantly, the sergeant appeared at the door, dressed in a heavy woollen overcoat, from under the bottom of which protruded a pair of bright yellow rubber boots.
‘Buona sera, signore,’ he said, and raised a hand in a gesture that was part salute, part greeting.
‘Buona sera, Vianello,’ Brunetti said. ‘What’s it like in there?’
Vianello’s lined face remained impassive when he answered, ‘Pretty bad, sir. It looks like there was a struggle: the place is a mess, chairs turned over, lamps knocked down. He was a big man, so I’d say there had to be two of them. But that’s just first impressions. I’m sure the lab boys can tell us more.’ He stepped back as he spoke, leaving room for Brunetti to follow him inside.
It was just as Vianello said: a floor lamp pitched forward against the desk, its glass dome shattered across the surface; a chair sprawled on its side behind the desk; a silk carpet lying in a bunched heap in front of the desk, its long fringe caught around the ankle of the man who lay dead on the floor beside it. He lay on his stomach, one arm trapped under the weight of his body, the other flung out ahead of him, fingers cupped upward, as if already begging mercy at the gate of heaven.
Brunetti looked at his head, at the grotesque halo of blood that surrounded it, and he quickly looked away. But wherever his eye rested, he saw blood: drops of it had fallen on the desk, a thin trickle of it led from the desk to the carpet, and more of it covered the cobalt blue brick which lay on the floor half a metre from the dead man.
‘The guard downstairs said it’s Dottor Semenzato,’ Vianello explained into the silence that radiated out from Brunetti. ‘The cleaning lady found him at about ten thirty. The office was locked from the outside, but she had a key, so she came in to check that the windows were closed and to clean the room, and she found him here. Like that.’
Brunetti still said nothing, merely moved over to one of the windows and looked down into the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale. All was quiet; the statues of the giants continued to guard the staircase; not even a cat moved to disturb the moonlit scene.
‘How long have you been here?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. ‘Eighteen minutes, sir. I touched his pulse, but it was gone, and he was cold. I’d say he’d been dead at least a couple of hours, but the doctor can tell us better.’
From off to the left, Brunetti heard a siren shriek out and shatter the tranquillity of the night, and for a moment he thought it was the lab team, arriving in a boat and being stupid about it. But the siren rose in pitch, its insistent whine ever louder and more strident, and then it wailed its slow way down to the original note. It was the siren at San Marco, calling out to the sleeping city the news that the waters were rising: acqua alta had begun.
The noise of their actual arrival camouflaged by the siren, the two men of the lab crew set their equipment down in the hall outside the room. Pavese, the photographer, stuck his head into the room and saw the dead man on the floor. Apparently unmoved by what he saw, he called across to the other two, voice raised to be heard above the siren, ‘You want a whole set, Commissario?’
Brunetti turned from the window at the sound of the voice and walked over towards him, careful not to go near the body until it had been photographed and the floor around it checked for fibres and hairs or possible scuff marks. He wondered if this caution served any real purpose: Semenzato’s body had been approached by too many people, and the scene was already contaminated.
‘Yes, and as soon as you’re done with them, see what there is in the way of fibres and hairs, then we’ll have a look.’
Pavese displayed no irritation at having his superior tell him to do the obvious and asked, ‘Do you want a separate set of the head?’
‘Yes.’
The photographer busied himself with his equipment. Foscolo, the second member of the team, had already assembled the heavy tripod and was attaching the camera to it. Pavese bent down and rummaged in his equipment bag, pushing aside rolls of film and slim packets of filters, and finally pulled out a portable flash that trailed a heavy electrical cord. He handed the flash to Foscolo and picked up the tripod. His quick professional glance at the body had been enough. ‘I’ll get a couple of the whole room from here, Luca, then from the other side. There’s an electrical outlet under the window. When I’m done with the shot of the entire room, we’ll set up there, between the window and the head. I want to get a few of the whole body, then we’ll switch to the Nikon and do the head. I think the angle from the left would be better.’ He paused for a moment, considering. ‘We won’t need the filters. The flash is enough to get the blood.’
Brunetti and Vianello waited outside the door, through which burst the intermittent glow of the flash. ‘You think they used that brick?’ Vianello finally asked.
Brunetti nodded. ‘You saw his head.’
‘They wanted to make sure, didn’t they?’
Brunetti thought of Brett’s face and suggested, ‘Or perhaps they liked doing it.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Vianello said. ‘I suppose it’s possible.’
A few minutes later, Pavese stuck his head out. ‘We’re finished with the photos, Dottore.’
‘When will you have them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘This afternoon, about four, I’d say.’
Brunetti’s acknowledgement of this was cut off by the arrival of Ettore Rizzardi, medico legale, there to represent the state in declaring the evident, that the man was dead, and then to suggest the probable cause of death, in this case not hard to determine.
Like Vianello, he was wearing rubber boots, though his were a conservative black and came only to the hem of his overcoat. ‘Good evening, Guido,’ he said, as he came in. ‘The man downstairs said it’s Semenzato.’ When Brunetti nodded, the doctor asked, ‘What happened?’
Rather
than answer, Brunetti stepped aside, allowing Rizzardi to see the unnatural posture of the body and the bright splashes of blood. The technicians had been at work, and now strips of bright yellow tape surrounded two rectangles the size of phone books in which faint scuff marks were visible.
‘Can we touch him?’ Brunetti asked Foscolo, who was now busy sprinkling black powder on the surface of Semenzato’s desk.
The technician exchanged a quick glance with his partner, who was placing tape around the blue brick. Pavese nodded.
Rizzardi approached the body first. He set his bag down on the seat of a chair, opened it, and removed a pair of thin rubber gloves. He slipped them on, crouched beside the body, and stretched his hand towards the dead man’s neck, but, seeing the blood that covered Semenzato’s head, he changed his mind and reached, instead, for the outflung wrist. The flesh he touched was cold, the blood inside it for ever stilled. Automatically, Rizzardi shot back his starched cuff and looked at the time.
The cause of death was not far to seek: two deep indentations penetrated the side of his head, and there seemed to be a third on his forehead, though Semenzato’s hair had fallen forward in death to cover it partially. Bending closer, Rizzardi could see jagged pieces of bone within one of the holes, just behind the ear.
Rizzardi dropped on to both knees to get greater leverage and reached under the body to shift it over on to its back. The third indentation was now clearly visible, the flesh around it bruised and blue. Rizzardi reached down and lifted first one dead hand and then the other. ‘Guido, look at this,’ he said, indicating the back of the right hand. Brunetti knelt beside him and looked at the back of Semenzato’s hand. The skin on the knuckles was scraped raw, and one of the fingers was swollen and bent brokenly to one side.
‘He tried to defend himself,’ Rizzardi said, then looked down the length of the body that lay below him. ‘How tall would you say he is, Guido?’