She reached down and picked up the sleeping rabbit, whose eyes did not open. She began to stroke the rabbit’s single ear. Finally she said, ‘He never told me, but I think it was more than the job that was bothering him.’
‘Do you have any idea what it might have been?’ Brunetti asked.
She shrugged, disturbing the rabbit with the motion. It jumped to the floor again but this time walked over to a radiator and lay down beside it.
‘I suppose it was a woman,’ she said at last. ‘It usually is, isn’t it?’
None of the men answered her.
‘He never spoke about it, if that’s what you want to know. And I didn’t ask him because I didn’t want to know. It was none of my business.’
After that, she explained to them what her business was: make appointments; send samples to the labs and register the results for each animal; send bills and keep the accounts; occasionally help with exams and treatments. Luca and another assistant, who was not there that day, greeted patients, fed the animals, and helped Doctor Nava with procedures; no, he had never been threatened by the owner of a pet, though some had been distressed by the death of their animals. On the contrary, most people saw his concern for their pets and liked him as a result.
Yes, he lived upstairs, had been there for the last three months or so. When Brunetti told her that they had keys and wanted to have a look at his apartment, she said she saw no reason why they couldn’t do so.
She led them to a door at the far end of the corridor, explaining, ‘Because it was originally all one house, the entrance to his apartment is from here.’
Brunetti thanked her and opened the door with a key from the set that had been in Nava’s pocket and that he had taken from the evidence room. At the top of the stairs another door, unlocked, opened into a large, open space running from the back of the building clear to the front, as though the original builders had stopped before dividing it into separate rooms. To say it was sparsely furnished was to understate the case: a two-seat sofa faced a small television placed on the floor, a neat pile of DVDs on the floor in front of it. A wooden table stood in front of the window that gave on to the back of the house and provided a view of the houses opposite. To the left of the window was a two-ring electric cooker on a narrow wooden table; frequent scrubbing had worn away the enamel. Clean pots hung from hooks above a small sink. On top of a small refrigerator was a ceramic bowl filled with apples.
A single bed stood under the eaves at the back of the room, blanket and sheet tucked in with military precision. Opposite it, along the other wall, was another bed covered with a tightly tucked Mickey Mouse blanket and a hillock of toy animals.
A cardboard wardrobe stood against the back wall. Brunetti looked inside and saw a few suits and an overcoat whose weight was turning the closet’s crossbar into a U. Below these were a few pairs of small sneakers and to their right three pairs of larger shoes, one pair of which, Brunetti observed, were well-worn brown tasselled loafers. Plastic-wrapped white shirts lay stacked on a shelf above the clothes bar. The shelf below held the neatly folded underwear and clothing of a small boy.
The bathroom was just as spartan as the rest of the apartment but surprised Brunetti by being very clean. In fact, the apartment held no empty cups, old clothing, food wrappers, dirty plates, or any of the detritus Brunetti associated with the homes of the abandoned or solitary.
A few magazines and books lay on the table next to the man’s bed. Brunetti drifted over and picked them up. There was a book about vegetarianism and, stuck into it, a photocopied chart of the combinations of grains and vegetables that would best create protein and amino acids. There was a printout of an article about lead poisoning and what appeared to be a veterinarian textbook on bovine diseases. Brunetti flicked through this, looked at two photos, and set the book down again.
The other men walked around the apartment, but neither stooped to pick up anything interesting or stopped to point out an object or an incongruity. The bathroom held nothing but soap, razors, and towels. A chest of drawers at the end of the bed held clean and folded men’s underwear and, in the bottom drawer, clean towels and sheets.
There was none of the mess left behind by the permanent residence of a child. Only the clothing said anything about the persons using the apartment, and all it said was that it was a man of a certain size and a small boy.
‘You think it’s just the way he lived, or has someone been in here?’ Brunetti finally asked.
Vezzani shrugged, reluctant to answer. Vianello gave another long look around and then said, ‘I hate to say it, but I think he lived like this.’
‘Poor devil,’ Vezzani said. Soon after, none of them having found anything further to say, they left.
17
THE MEN AGREED it would be wiser to go to the slaughterhouse the following morning, when the place would be at work. As Vezzani drove them across the bridge to Piazzale Roma, Brunetti stared from the right side of the car at the vast industrial complex of Marghera. His thoughts were not on the daily ration of death pumped out by the chimneys he viewed but on the slaughterhouse and the idea of early morning as the best time for sudden death. Had not the KGB taken people off in the dark of night, their victims’ senses dulled with sleep?
The ringing of Vianello’s phone broke into these reflections, and from his seat in the back of the car the Inspector said, ‘That was Foa. He says he can’t pick us up. He’s docked below Patta’s place, waiting for him and his wife to come down. He’s got to take them to Burano.’
‘Police business, no doubt,’ Vezzani commented, giving evidence that Patta’s reputation extended even to the Questura in Mestre.
‘If the police have to investigate a restaurant, it is,’ Vianello answered. Brunetti told him to tell the pilot he was still waiting for a report on the tides for the night of Nava’s murder. Vianello passed on the message and snapped his phone closed.
‘You guys have any idea how lucky you are?’ Vezzani asked.
Brunetti turned to him and asked, ‘To work for Patta?’
Vezzani laughed. ‘No, to work in Venice. There’s hardly enough crime worth talking about.’ Before either of them could protest, he said, ‘I don’t mean this Nava guy, but in general. The worst criminals are the politicians, but since there’s nothing we can do about them, they don’t count. So what do you get? A few break-ins, some tourist who gets his wallet stolen? The guy who kills his wife and calls you up to confess? So you spend your days reading notices from the idiots in Rome, or waiting for the next Minister of the Interior to be arrested so you get a new boss and new notices, or you walk down the street to have a coffee and sit in the sun and read the newspaper.’ He tried to make it sound like a joke, but Brunetti suspected he meant every word of it.
Brunetti took a quick glance into the rear-view mirror but saw only Vianello’s left shoulder. In a level voice, he said, ‘People pray for rain. Perhaps we should pray for murder.’
Vezzani took his eyes off the road and glanced quickly at Brunetti, but there was nothing to read in Brunetti’s face, just as there had been nothing to read in his voice.
At Piazzale Roma, Brunetti and Vianello got out of the car and reached in to shake Vezzani’s hand, then Brunetti said they’d get one of their own drivers to take them to the slaughterhouse the next morning. Vezzani did not bother to protest, said goodbye, and drove off.
Brunetti looked at Vianello, who shrugged.
‘If that’s the way he thinks, there’s nothing we can do about it,’ Brunetti said.
Vianello followed him towards the embarcadero of the Number One. The Inspector could get home more quickly by taking the Number Two, so Brunetti took this as a sign that Vianello wanted to continue the conversation.