Death in a Strange Country Read Free

stooped
down over the corpse.
     
    Brunetti wheeled around
and walked towards the people who stood in what had now become the front rank of
the crowd.
     
    ‘If you’ve given your
names and addresses, you can go. There’s nothing more to see. So you can go,
all of you.’ An old man with a grizzled beard bent sharply to the left to look
past Brunetti and see what the doctor was doing over the body. ‘I said you can
go.’ Brunetti spoke directly to the old man. He straightened up, glanced at Brunetti
with complete lack of interest, then bent back down, interested only in the
doctor. An old woman yanked angrily at the leash of her terrier and went off,
visibly outraged by yet more evidence of police brutality. The uniformed men
moved slowly among the crowd, turning them gently with a word or a hand on the
shoulder, gradually forcing them to move away, abandoning the area to the
police, The last to leave was the old man with the beard, who moved only as far
as the iron railing enclosing the base of the statue of Colleoni, against which
he leaned, refusing to abandon the campo or his rights as a citizen.
     
    ‘Guido, come here a
moment,’ Rizzardi called from behind him.
     
    Brunetti turned and went
to stand beside the kneeling doctor, who held back the dead man’s shirt. About
five inches above his waist, on the left side, Brunetti saw a horizontal line,
jagged at the edges, flesh strangely greyish-blue. He knelt beside Rizzardi in
a chill pool of water to get a closer look. The cut was about as long as his
thumb and now, probably because of the body’s long immersion, gaped open,
curiously bloodless.
     
    ‘This isn’t some tourist
who got drunk and fell into a canal, Guido.’
     
    Brunetti nodded in silent
agreement. ‘What could do something like that?’ he asked, nodding towards the
wound.
     
    ‘A knife. Wide-bladed.
And whoever did it was either very good or very lucky.’
     
    ‘Why do you say that?’
Brunetti asked.
     
    ‘I don’t want to poke
around in there too much, not until I can open him up and see it properly,’
Rizzardi said. ‘But if the angle is right, and that’s indicated by what I can
see from here, then he had a clear path right to the heart. No ribs in the way.
Nothing. Just the least little push, the least little bit of pressure, and he’s
dead.’ Rizzardi repeated, ‘Either very good or very lucky.’
     
    Brunetti could see only
the width of the wound; he had no idea of the path it would have followed
within the body. ‘Could it have been anything else? I mean, other than a knife?’
     
    ‘I can’t be sure until I
get a closer look at the tissue inside, but I doubt it.’
     
    ‘What about drowning? If
it didn’t get his heart, could he still have drowned?’
     
    Rizzardi sat back on his
heels, careful to pull the folds of his raincoat under him to keep them from
the water below. ‘No, I doubt it. If it missed the heart, there wouldn’t have
been enough damage to keep him from pulling himself out of the water. Just look
at how pale he is. I think that’s what happened. One blow. The right angle.
Death would have been almost immediate.’ He pushed himself to his feet and
delivered the closest thing the young man was to get to a prayer that morning. ‘Poor
devil. He’s a handsome young man, and he’s in excellent physical shape. I’d say
he was an athlete or at least someone who took very good care of himself.’ He
bent back over the body and, with a gesture that seemed curiously paternal, he
moved his hand down across his eyes, trying to force them closed. One refused
to move. The other closed for a moment, then slowly slid open and stared again
at the sky. Rizzardi muttered something to himself, took a handkerchief from
his breast pocket, and placed it across the face of the young man.
     
    ‘Cover his face. He died
young,’ muttered Brunetti.
     
    ‘What?’
     
    Brunetti shrugged. ‘Nothing.
Something Paola says.’ He looked away from the face of the