Uniform Justice
Authors: Donna Leon
Contents
About the Author
Donna Leon has lived in Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her previous novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed; including
Friends in High Places
, which won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction,
Through a Glass, Darkly, Suffer the Little Children
, and most recently,
The Girl of His Dreams
.
Also by Donna Leon
Death at La Fenice
Death in a Strange Country
The Anonymous Venetian
A Venetian Reckoning
Acqua Alta
The Death of Faith
A Noble Radiance
Fatal Remedies
Friends in High Places
A Sea of Troubles
Wilful Behaviour
Doctored Evidence
Blood from a Stone
Through a Glass, Darkly
Suffer the Little Children
The Girl of His Dreams
About Face
for Hedi and Agustí Janés
In uomini, in soldati sperare fedeltà?
You expect fidelity in men, in soldiers?
Così fan tutte
– Mozart
1
THIRST WOKE HIM
. It was not the healthy thirst that follows three sets of tennis or a day spent skiing, thirst that comes slowly: it was the grinding, relentless thirst that comes of the body’s desperate attempt to replenish liquids that have been displaced by alcohol. He lay in his bed, suddenly awake, covered with a thin film of sweat, his underwear damp and clinging.
At first he thought he could outwit it, ignore it and fall back into the sodden sleep from which his thirst had prodded him. He turned on his side, mouth open on the pillow, and pulled the covers up over his shoulder. But much as his body craved more rest, he could not force it to ignore his thirst nor the faint nervousness of his stomach. He lay there, inert and utterly
deprived
of will, and told himself to go back to sleep.
For some minutes he succeeded, but then a church bell somewhere towards the city poked him back to consciousness. The idea of liquid seeped into his mind: a glass of sparkling mineral water, its sides running with condensation; the drinking fountain in the corridor of his elementary school; a paper cup filled with Coca-Cola. He needed liquid more than anything life had ever presented to him as desirable or good.
Again, he tried to force himself to sleep, but he knew he had lost and now had no choice but to get out of bed. He started to think about which side of bed to get out of and whether the floor of the corridor would be cold, but then he pushed all of these considerations aside as violently as he did his blankets and got to his feet. His head throbbed and his stomach registered resentment of its new position relative to the floor, but his thirst ignored them both.
He opened the door to his room and started down the corridor, its length illuminated by the light that filtered in from outside. As he had feared, the linoleum tiles were harsh on his naked feet, but the thought of the water that lay ahead gave him the will to ignore the cold.
He entered the bathroom and, driven by absolute need, headed to the first of the white sinks that lined the wall. He turned on the cold tap and let it run for a minute: even in his
fuddled
state he remembered the rusty warm taste of the first water that emerged from those pipes. When the water that ran over his hand was cold, he cupped both hands and bent down towards them. Noisy as a dog, he slurped the water and felt it moving inside him, cooling and saving him as it went. Experience had taught him to stop after the first few mouthfuls, stop and wait to see how his troubled stomach would respond to the surprise of liquid without alcohol. At first, it didn’t like it, but youth and good health made up for that, and then his stomach accepted the water quietly, even asked for more.
Happy to comply, he leaned down again and took eight or nine large mouthfuls, each one bringing more relief to his tortured body. The sudden flood of water triggered something in his stomach, and that in turn triggered something in his brain, and he grew dizzy and had to lean forward, hands propped on the front of the sink, until the world grew quiet again.
He put his hands under the still-flowing stream and drank again. At a certain point, experience and sense told him any more would be risky, so he stood up straight, eyes closed, and dragged his wet palms across his face and down the front of his T-shirt. He lifted the hem and wiped at his lips; then, refreshed and feeling as if he might again begin to contemplate life, he turned to go back to his room.
And saw the bat, or what his muddled senses first perceived as a bat, just there, off in the
distance
. It couldn’t be a bat, for it was easily two metres long and as wide as a man. But it had the shape of a bat. It appeared to suspend itself against the wall, its head perched above black wings that hung limp at its sides, clawed feet projecting from beneath.
He ran his hands roughly over his face, as if to wipe away the sight, but when he opened his eyes again the dark shape was still there. He backed away from it and, driven by the fear of what might happen to him if he took his eyes from the bat, he moved slowly in the direction of the door of the bathroom, towards where he knew he would find the switch for the long bars of neon lighting. Befuddled by a mixture of terror and incredulity, he kept his hands behind him, one palm flat and sliding ahead of him on the tile wall, certain that contact with the wall was his only contact with reality.
Like a blind man, he followed his seeing hand along the wall until he found the switch and the long double row of neon lights passed illumination along one by one until a daylike brightness filled the room.
Fear drove him to close his eyes while the lights came flickering on, fear of what horrid motion the bat-like shape would be driven to make when disturbed from the safety of the near darkness. When the lights grew silent, the young man opened his eyes and forced himself to look.
Although the stark lighting transformed and revealed the shape, it did not entirely remove its
resemblance
to a bat, nor did it minimize the menace of those trailing wings. The wings, however, were revealed as the engulfing folds of the dark cloak that served as the central element of their winter uniform, and the head of the bat, now illuminated, was the head of Ernesto Moro, a Venetian and, like the boy now bent over the nearest sink, racked by violent vomiting, a student at San Martino Military Academy.
2
IT TOOK A
long time for the authorities to respond to the death of Cadet Moro, though little of the delay had to do with the behaviour of his classmate, Pietro Pellegrini. When the waves of sickness abated, the boy returned to his room and, using the
telefonino
which seemed almost a natural appendage, so often did he use and consult it, he called his father, on a business trip in Milano, to explain what had happened, or what he had just seen. His father, a lawyer, at first said he would call the authorities, but then better sense intervened and he told his son to do so himself and to do it instantly.
Not for a moment did it occur to Pellegrini’s father that his son was in any way involved in the death of the other boy, but he was a criminal
lawyer
and familiar with the workings of the official mind. He knew that suspicion was bound to fall upon the person who hesitated in bringing a crime to the attention of the police, and he also knew how eager they were to seize upon the obvious solution. So he told the boy – indeed, he could be said to have commanded him – to call the authorities instantly. The boy, trained in obedience by his father and by two years at San Martino, assumed that the authorities were those in charge of the school and thus went downstairs to report to his commander the presence of a dead boy in the third-floor bathroom.
The police officer at the Questura who took the call when it came from the school asked the name of the caller, wrote it down, then asked him how he came to know about this dead person and wrote down that answer, as well. After hanging up, the policeman asked the colleague who was working the switchboard with him if they should perhaps pass the report on to the
Carabinieri
, for the Academy, as a military institution, might be under the jurisdiction of the
Carabinieri
rather than the city police. They debated this for a time, the second one calling down to the officers’ room to see if anyone there could solve the procedural problem. The officer who answered their call maintained that the Academy was a private institution with no official ties to the Army – he knew, because his dentist’s son was a student there – and so they were the ones who should respond to the call.
The
men on the switchboard discussed this for some time, finally agreeing with their colleague. The one who had taken the call noticed that it was after eight and dialled the interior number of his superior, Commissario Guido Brunetti, sure that he would already be in his office.
Brunetti agreed that the case was theirs to investigate and then asked, ‘When did the call come in?’