‘No, this is good enough,’ Brunetti said, looking down. Unasked, the attendant pulled back the white sheet that covered the face, then looked up at Brunetti to see if he should continue. Brunetti nodded, and the attendant pulled the sheet from the body and folded it quickly into a neat rectangle.
Though Brunetti had seen the photos, nothing had prepared him for the wreckage in front of him. The pathologist had been interested only in exploration and cared nothing for restoration; if a family were ever found, they could pay someone to attend to that.
No attempt had been made to restore the man’s nose, and so Brunetti looked down at a concave surface with four shallow indentations, as if a retarded child had made a human face with clay but instead of a nose had simply punched a hole. Without the nose, recognizable humanity had fled.
He looked at the body, seeing if it could give him an idea of age or physical condition. Brunetti heard his own intake of breath when he realized that the body looked frighteningly like his own: the same general build, a slight thickening around the waist, and the scar from a childhood appendectomy. The only difference seemed to be a general hairlessness, and he leaned down closer to study the chest, brutally bisected by the long incision of the autopsy. Instead of the wiry, grizzled hair that grew on his own chest, he saw faint stubble. ‘Did the pathologist shave his chest before the autopsy?’ Brunetti asked the attendant.
‘No, sir. It’s not heart surgery he did on him, only an autopsy.’
‘But his chest has been shaved.’
‘His legs, too, if you look.’
Brunetti did. They were.
‘Did the pathologist say anything about that?’
‘Not while he was working, sir. Might be something in his report. You had enough?’
Brunetti nodded and stepped back from the corpse. The attendant flung the sheet out in front of him, waved it in the air as though it were a tablecloth, and floated it perfectly in place over the body. He slid the body back inside, closed the door, and quietly turned the handle.
As they started back towards the desk, the attendant said, ‘He didn’t deserve that, whoever he was. The word here is that he was on the street, one of those fellows who dress up as women.’
For a moment, Brunetti thought the man was being sarcastic, but then he heard the tone under the words and realized he was serious.
‘You the one who’s going to try to find out who killed him, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I hope you do. I suppose I can understand if you want to kill someone, but I can’t understand killing him like that.’ He stopped and looked up inquisitively at Brunetti. ‘Can you, sir?’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘As I said, sir, I hope you get the man who did it. Whore or no whore, no one deserves to die like that.’
Chapter Six
‘You saw him?’ Gallo asked when Brunetti returned to the Questura.
‘Yes.’
‘Not at all pretty, is it?’
‘You saw him, too?’
‘I always try to see them,’ Gallo said, voice uninflected. ‘It makes me more willing to work to get the person who killed them.’
‘What do you think, Sergeant?’ Brunetti asked, lowering himself into the chair at the side of the sergeant’s desk and laying down the blue folder as if he meant it to serve as a physical sign of the murder.
Gallo thought for almost a full minute before he answered. ‘I think it could have been done in the midst of tremendous rage.’ Brunetti nodded at this possibility. ‘Or, as you suggested earlier, Dottore, in an attempt to disguise his identity.’ After a second, Gallo amended this, perhaps recalling what he had seen in the morgue, ‘Or to destroy it.’
‘That’s pretty impossible in today’s world, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’
‘Impossible?’
‘Unless a person is entirely alien to a place or lives without any family or friends, their disappearance will be noticed in a few days – a few hours in most cases. Nobody manages to disappear any more.’
‘Then perhaps rage makes more sense,’ Gallo said. ‘He could have said something to a client, done something that set him off. I don’t know much about the men in the file I gave you yesterday. I’m not a psychologist or anything like that, so I don’t know what drives them, but my guess is that the men who, ah, who pay them are far less stable than the men they pay. So rage?’
‘What about carrying him out to a part of the city where whores are known to work?’ Brunetti asked. ‘That suggests intelligence and planning rather than rage.’
Gallo responded quickly to the testing that was being given him by this new commissario. ‘Well, after he did it, he could have come to his senses. Maybe he killed him in his own place or a place where one of them was known, so he’d have to move the body. And if he’s the sort of man – the killer, I mean – if he’s the sort of man who uses these transvestites, then he’d know where the whores go. So maybe that would seem the logical place to leave him, so other people who use them would be suspected.’
‘Yes…’ Brunetti agreed slowly, and Gallo waited for the ‘but’ that the commissario’s tone made inevitable. ‘But that’s to suggest that whores are the same as whores.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir.’
‘That male whores are the same as female whores, or that, at least, they work in the same place. From what I heard and saw yesterday, it looks like that area out by the slaughterhouse is a place the female whores use.’ Gallo considered this, and Brunetti added, prodding, ‘But this is your city, so you’d know more about that than I would, coming in as something of a foreigner.’ Complimenting, as well.
Gallo nodded. ‘It’s usually the girls who work those fields out by the factories. But we’re getting more and more boys – a lot of them are Slavs and North Africans – so maybe they’ve been forced to move into new territory.’
‘Have you heard any rumours about this?’
‘I haven’t personally, sir. But I usually don’t have much to do with the whores, not unless they’re involved in violent crimes.’
‘Does that happen very often?’
Gallo shook his head. ‘Usually, if it does happen, the women are afraid to tell us about it, afraid they’ll end up in jail, no matter who’s responsible for the violence. A lot of them are illegals, so they’re afraid of coming to us, afraid of being deported if they get in any sort of trouble. And there are a lot of men who like to beat them up. I guess they learn how to spot those, or the other girls pass the word and they try to avoid them.
‘I’d guess that the men are better able to protect themselves. If you read that file, you saw how big some of them are. Pretty, even beautiful, some of them, but they’re still men. I’d imagine they’d have less of that sort of trouble. Or if they had it, they’d at least know how to defend themselves.’
‘Have you got the autopsy report yet?’ Brunetti asked.
Gallo picked up a few pieces of paper and handed them to him. ‘It came in while you were at the hospital.’
Brunetti began to read through it quickly, familiar with the jargon and technical terms. No puncture wounds on the body, so the deceased wasn’t an intravenous drug user. Height, weight, general physical condition: all those things that Brunetti had seen were listed here, but in exact, measured detail. Mention was made of the make-up the attendant had talked about but no more than to say that there had been significant traces of lipstick and eyeliner. There was no evidence of recent sexual activity, either active or passive. Examination of the hands suggested a sedentary occupation; the nails were trimmed bluntly, and there was no callousing on the palms. Patterns of bruising on the body confirmed the supposition that he had been killed somewhere else and carried to the place where he was found, but the intense heat in which he had lain made it impossible to determine how much time had elapsed between his murder and his discovery, more than to say it could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty hours.