Fatal Remedies Part 16

'No, why? Tell me.'

'Too easy,' Paola said dismissively. 'It was obvious from the beginning that she wanted to get me to talk about it, about why I did it. Why else would she bring up all that nonsense about girls being expendable?'

Brunetti walked beside her, her elbow tucked into the angle of his arm. He nodded. 'Maybe she believed it.' They walked a few more paces, considering this, then he said, 'I always hate to see women like that.'

'Like what?'

'Who don't like women.' They walked a few more steps. 'Can you imagine what a cla.s.s of hers must be like?' Before Paola could answer he continued, 'She's so sure of everything she says, so absolutely certain she's found the single truth.' He paused for a moment. 'And imagine what it would be like to have her on your exam committee. Differ from her on anything and there goes your chance for a degree.'

'Not that anyone would want one in cultural anthropology, anyway.' Paola remarked.

He laughed out loud and in complete agreement. As they turned into their calle calle he slowed his steps, then stopped and turned her so that she was facing him. 'Thank you, Paola,' he said. he slowed his steps, then stopped and turned her so that she was facing him. 'Thank you, Paola,' he said.

'For what?' she asked in feigned innocence.

'For avoiding combat.'

'It would have ended up with her asking me why I let myself get arrested and I don't think she's anyone I want to talk about that with.'

'Stupid cow,' Brunetti muttered.

'That's a s.e.xist remark,' Paola observed.

'Yes, isn't it?'

19.

Their foray into society left them both wanting no more of it, so they resumed their policy of refusing invitations of any sort. Though both Paola and Brunetti chafed under the restriction of staying home night after night and Raffi seemed to find their continued presence worthy of ironic comment, Chiara loved having them there every evening and insisted on engaging them in card games, watching endless television programmes about animals and initiated a Monopoly tournament that threatened to stretch into the new year.

Each day, Paola went off to the university and Brunetti to his office at the Questura. For the first time in their careers, they were glad of the endless mountains of paperwork created by the Byzantine state which employed them both.

Because of Paola's involvement with the case, Brunetti made up his mind not to attend Mitri's funeral, something he ordinarily would have done. Two days after it, he decided to read again through the lab and scene-of-crime reports of Mitri's murder, as well as Rizzardi's four-page report on the autopsy. It took him a good part of the morning to get through them all, and the process left him wondering why it was that both his professional and his personal life seemed to be so much taken up with going over the same things again and again. During his temporary exile from the Questura he had finished rereading Gibbon and was currently tackling Herodotus, and for when that was finished, he had the Iliad Iliad ready at hand. All the deaths, all the lives cut short by violence. ready at hand. All the deaths, all the lives cut short by violence.

He took the autopsy report and went down to Signorina Elettra's office, where he found her looking like the antidote to everything he'd just been thinking about. She wore a jacket redder than any he had ever seen and a white silk-crepe blouse open to the second b.u.t.ton. Strangely enough, she was doing nothing when he came in, simply sitting at her desk, chin lodged in one palm, staring out of the window towards San Lorenzo, a sliver of which was visible in the distance.

'Are you all right, Signorina?' he asked when he saw her.

She sat up and smiled. 'Of course, Commissario. I was just wondering about a painting.'

'A painting?'

'Uh huh,' she said, putting her chin back on her hand and staring off again.

Brunetti turned to follow her gaze, as if he thought the painting in question might be there, but all he saw was the window and, beyond it, the church. 'Which one?' he asked.

'That one in the Correr, of the courtesans with their little dogs.' He knew it, though he could never remember who had painted it. They sat, as absent and bored as Signorina Elettra had seemed when he came in, looking away to the side, as if uninterested in the thought that life was about to happen to them.

'What about it?'

'I've never been sure if they were courtesans or just wealthy women of those times, so bored with having everything and with nothing at all to do every day that all they could do was sit and stare.'

'What makes you think of that?'

'Oh, I don't know,' she answered with a shrug.

'Are you bored with this?' he asked, encompa.s.sing the office and all it signified with a wave of his hand and hoping her answer would be no.

She turned her head and looked up at him. 'Are you joking, Commissario?'

'No, not at all. Why do you ask?'

She studied his face for a long time before saying, 'I'm not at all bored with it. Quite the opposite.' Brunetti was not surprised in the least at how glad he was to hear this. After a moment's pause, she added, 'Though I'm never quite sure just what my position is here.'

Brunetti had no idea what she meant by that. Her official t.i.tle was Secretary to the Vice-Questore. She was also meant to be of part-time secretarial help to Brunetti and another commissario, but she had never written a letter or a memo for either of them. 'I suppose you mean your real position, as opposed to your official position,' he suggested.

'Yes, of course.'

Brunetti's hand, the one holding the reports, had fallen to his side during all this. He raised it in front of him, held it a bit towards her and said, 'I think you are our eyes and our nose, and the living spirit of our curiosity, Signorina.'

Her head rose from her hand and she graced him with one of her radiant smiles. 'How nice it would be to read that in a job description, Commissario.'

'I think it would be best,' Brunetti said, shaking the folder in the general direction of Patta's office, 'if we left your job description alone, as written.'

'Ah,' was all she said, but the smile grew even warmer.

'And didn't worry about what to call the help you give us.'

Signorina Elettra leaned forward and reached for the folder. Brunetti handed it to her. 'I was wondering if it would be possible to check and see if this method of killing has been used before and, if so, by whom and on whom?'

'The garotte?'

'Yes.'

She shook her head in little angry movements. 'If I hadn't been so busy feeling sorry for myself, I would have thought of that,' she said. Then, quickly, 'All of Europe or only Italy, and how far back?'

'Start with Italy and if you don't come up with anything spread out, beginning with the south.' It seemed to Brunetti a Mediterranean way of killing a person. 'Go back five years. Then ten if you don't find anything.'

She turned and flicked her computer to life, and Brunetti was struck by how completely an extension of her mind he had come to believe it. He smiled and left her office, leaving her to it, wondering if this was more s.e.xist behaviour on his part, or if it degraded her in some way for him to think of her as being somehow part of a computer. On the steps, he found himself laughing, as it were, out loud, aware of what life with a zealot could do to a man and happy to realize he didn't care.

Vianello was standing outside his office when he got back, obviously waiting for him. 'Come in, Sergeant. What is it?'

The sergeant followed Brunetti into the room, Iacovantuono, sir.' When Brunetti didn't respond, Vianello went on, 'The people in Treviso have been asking around.'

'Asking around about what?' Brunetti enquired and waved the other man to a chair.

'About his friends.'

'And his wife?' Brunetti asked. There could be no other reason for Vianello's visit.

Vianello nodded.

'And?'

'It seems that woman who called was right, sir, though they still haven't located her. They fought.' He sat quietly and listened. Vianello continued, 'One woman who lives in the next building said that he beat her, that she was in the hospital once.'

'And was she?'

'Yes. She fell down in the bathroom, or at least that's what she said.' Both of them had heard many women say that.

'Did they check the times?' he asked, knowing he didn't have to explain further.

'The man found her on the stairs at twenty to twelve, Iacovantuono arrived at work a little after eleven.' Before Brunetti could say anything, Vianello continued, 'No, no one knows how long she was lying there.'

'Who's been asking?'

'That one we spoke to when we were up there the first time, Negri. When I told him about the phone call we had, he said he'd already begun talking to the neighbours. It's routine for them, too. I told him we thought the call was false.'

'And?'

Vianello shrugged. 'No one saw him leave for work. No one knows exactly when he arrived. No one knows how long she was lying there.'

Though so many things had happened since he'd last seen him, Brunetti still had a clear memory of the face of the pizzaiolo, pizzaiolo, his eyes dark with grief. 'There's nothing we can do,' he finally told Vianello. his eyes dark with grief. 'There's nothing we can do,' he finally told Vianello.

'I know. But I thought you'd like to be put in the picture.'

Brunetti nodded his thanks, and Vianello went back down to the officers' room.

Half an hour later, Signorina Elettra knocked on his door. She came in, holding a few sheets of paper in her right hand.

'Is that what I think it is?' he asked.

She nodded. 'There have been three murders similar to this in the last six years. Two were Mafia hits, or appear to have been.' She came over to his desk and placed the first two papers side by side in front of him and pointed to the two names. 'One in Palermo and one in Reggio Calabria.'

Brunetti read the names and the dates. One man had been found on the beach, another in his car. Both had been strangled with a thin piece of what was probably plastic-coated wire: no threads or fibres were found around the neck of either victim.

She put another piece of paper beside the other two. Davide Narduzzi had been killed in Padova a year ago and a Moroccan street vendor had been accused of the crime. He had disappeared, however, before he could be arrested. Brunetti read the details: it looked as if Narduzzi had been taken from the back and strangled before he could react. The same description fitted the two other murders. And that of Mitri.

'The Moroccan?'

'No trace.'

'Why is this name familiar?' Brunetti asked.

'Narduzzi?'

'Yes.'

Signorina Elettra placed the last piece of paper in front of Brunetti. '"Drugs, armed robbery, a.s.sault, a.s.sociation with the Mafia, and suspicion of blackmail,"' she read from the list of the accusations that had been brought against Narduzzi during his brief life. 'Think of the sort of friends a man like this would have. No wonder the Moroccan disappeared.'

Brunetti had been reading quickly to the bottom of the page. 'If he ever existed.'

'What?'

'Look at that,' he said, pointing to one of the names on the list. Two years before, Narduzzi had been involved in a fight with Ruggiero Palmieri, a supposed member of one of the most violent criminal clans in northern Italy. Palmieri had ended up in the hospital, but had refused to press charges. Brunetti knew enough about men like this to be aware that such a matter would be settled privately.

'Palmieri?' Signorina Elettra asked. 'It's a name I don't know.'

'Just as well. He's never worked - if that's the right word - here. Thank G.o.d.'

'You know him?'

'I met him once, years ago. Bad. A bad man.'

'Would he do this?' she asked, tapping a finger on the other two papers.

'I think that's his job, eliminating people,' Brunetti answered.

'Then why would this other one, Narduzzi, cause trouble with him?'

Brunetti shook his head. 'I have no idea.' He read through the three brief reports again, then got to his feet. 'Let's see what you can find out about Palmieri,' he said and went down to her office with her.

It wasn't very much, unfortunately. Palmieri had gone into hiding a year ago, after being identified as one of three men involved in the robbery of an armoured car. Two guards had been wounded, but the thieves had not succeeded in getting the more than eight billion lire being transported in the truck.

Reading between the lines, Brunetti could see that no great expenditure of police energy or resource would have been made to find Palmieri: no one had been killed, nothing had been taken. But now they were dealing with murder.

Brunetti thanked Signorina Elettra and went down to Vianello's office. The sergeant sat with his head lowered over a stack of papers, his forehead resting on his two cupped palms. No one else was in the room, so Brunetti watched him for a while, then approached the desk. Vianello heard him and looked up.

'I think I'd like to call in some favours,' Brunetti said with no introduction.

'From whom?'

'People in Padova.'

'Good people or bad people?'

'Both. How many do we know?'

If Vianello was flattered to be included in the plural, he gave no sign of it. He thought for a while and finally answered, 'A couple. Of both sorts. What are we going to ask them?'

'I'd like to know about Ruggiero Palmieri.' He saw the name register with Vianello and watched as he began to search for the names of anyone, good or bad, who might be able to tell them something about him.