Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon Page B

at
four, so Brunetti had to ring the bell that stood to the right of the large
wooden doors. After a few minutes, the door on the right side was pulled open
by a man in a dark blue uniform, and Brunetti gave his name. The man held the
door open, then closed it after them. Brunetti led their way through the main
entrance and paused at the watchman’s window, where he announced himself and
showed his warrant card. The watchman signalled for them to continue down tine
open arcade to the right. Brunetti nodded. He knew the way.
     
    When they stepped through
the door and into the building that held the morgue, Brunetti felt the sudden
drop in temperature. Doctor Peters apparently did as well, for she brought her
arms together across her chest and lowered her head. A white-uniformed
attendant sat at a plain wooden desk at the end of a long corridor. He got to
his feet as they approached, careful to place his book face down in front of
him. ‘Commissario Brunetti?’ he asked.                
                     
       
     
    Brunetti nodded. ‘This is
the doctor from the American base,’ he added, nodding to the young woman at his
side. To one who had looked so frequently upon the face of death, the sight of
a young woman in a military uniform was hardly worthy of notice, so the
attendant passed quickly in front of them and opened the heavy wooden door that
stood to his left.
     
    ‘I knew you were coming, so
I brought him out,’ he said as he led them towards a metal gurney that stood on
one side of the room. All three of them recognized what was under the white
cloth. When they drew up next to the body, the young man looked at Doctor
Peters. She nodded. When he pulled the cloth back, she looked at the face of
the dead man, and Brunetti looked at hers. For the first few moments, her own
remained absolutely still and expressionless, then she closed her eyes and
pulled her upper lip between her teeth. It’she was trying to bite back tears,
she failed, for they welled up and seeped out of her eyes. ‘Mike, Mike,’ she
whispered and turned away from the body.
     
    Brunetti nodded to the
attendant, and he drew the cloth back across the young man’s face.
     
    Brunetti felt her hand on
his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. ‘What killed him?’
     
    He stepped back,
intending to turn and lead her from the room, but her grip tightened and she
repeated, voice insistent, ‘What killed him?’
     
    Brunetti placed his hand
on top of hers and said, ‘Come outside.’
     
    Before he had any idea
what she was doing, she pushed past him and grabbed at the cloth that covered
the body of the young man, ripping it away to expose his body to the waist. The
giant incision of the autopsy, running from navel to neck, was sewn together
with large stitches. Unsewn and seeming quite harmless when compared to the
enormous incision of the autopsy was the small horizontal line that had killed
him.
     
    Her voice came out as a
low moan, and sherepeated the name, ‘Mike, Mike,’ drawing thesound
out in a long, keening wail. She stood beside the body, curiously straight and
rigid, and the noise continued to come from her.          
                 
     
    The attendant stepped
quickly in front of her and fastidiously replaced the cloth, covering bothwounds
and then the face.  
                     
             
     
    She turned to face
Brunetti, and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears, but he saw something
else in them that looked like nothing so much as terror, sheer animal terror.      
                     
         
    ‘Are you all right,
Doctor?’ he asked, voice low, careful not to touch her or approach her in any
way.
     
    She nodded, and the look
of whatever it was passed from her eyes. Abruptly she turned and headed back
towards the door of the mortuary. A few feet from it, she stopped suddenly,
looked around her as It’surprised to find herself where