Black Run. Antonio ManziniЧитать онлайн книгу.
You come on in with me and enjoy the show. Didn’t you choose to be a policeman?”
“Actually, no, I didn’t. But it’s a long story.” He dropped his head and followed his boss.
There was no need to take off his coat, because the autopsy room was more or less the same temperature as outside. Under Fumagalli’s lab coat Schiavone could see a turtleneck sweater. He wore latex gloves and a sort of green apron spattered with brown splotches. “And to think I complain about my shitty job!” Rocco said to him.
As usual, Fumagalli didn’t bother to say hello, limiting himself to waving his hand in the two policemen’s direction and leading them to the second room, which was a small waiting room. There the doctor gave both policemen a surgical mask, plastic shoe covers, and a strange paper smock.
“All right, the two of you come with me.”
In the middle of the room was a nice big autopsy table, and on top of the table lay the corpse, mercifully covered with a white cloth.
In the room you could hear a faucet drip, along with the continuous hum of the recycling air vents, which were spreading a mixture of ferocious stenches as they circulated the air in the morgue. Disinfectant, rust, rotten meat, hard-boiled eggs. Italo Pierron felt as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus, bent over and clapped his hands to his mouth, then hurried away to lose the breakfast that had just come surging up his esophagus.
“All right, now that we’re alone,” said Rocco with a smile, “have you had a chance to work on him?”
“I’ve tried to reassemble all the pieces. I’ve done easier jigsaw puzzles,” the doctor replied, and uncovered the corpse.
“Fuck!” came out of the deputy police chief’s mouth, clear and loud and straight from the heart.
There was no body. There was just a series of shredded pieces of flesh, more or less reassembled to form an object that only remotely resembled anything human.
“How can you work with this?”
Fumagalli cleaned his lenses. “Nice and slow. Like doing art restoration.”
“Sure, but those guys are fixing a masterpiece, and it’s a pleasure to look at.”
“This is a masterpiece too,” said Fumagalli. “It’s God’s handiwork, or didn’t you know?”
In the deputy police chief’s head, the suspicion that lengthy and involuntary interactions with human corpses had finally undermined the Livornese physician’s mental equilibrium finally became a certainty.
“Can I smoke in here?” asked Rocco, slipping his hand into his pocket.
“Of course. You want me to get you a whiskey, or maybe something a little lighter? Shall I put on some lounge music? Would you like that? All right, let’s get to work.”
The medical examiner pointed to a point on the corpse’s right pectoral: “He has a tattoo.”
Some writing and signs that Rocco couldn’t decipher. “What’s it say?”
“Maa vidvishhaavahai,” said Alberto. “Luckily, I was able to read it.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s a Hindu mantra. It means roughly: ‘May no obstacle arise between us.’ ”
“And how do you know that?”
Alberto smiled behind his thick-lensed glasses. “I’m a guy who knows how to find out things.”
The dead man’s face was crushed. Out of the red-and-black mush, which reminded Rocco of a painting by a major Italian artist whose name he couldn’t quite recall, jutted teeth, bits of lips, yellowish filaments.
“This is the first strange thing,” Alberto began, lifting a piece of handkerchief that must once have been a bandanna.
“Indeed, how very strange,” said Rocco, “a piece of handkerchief. Never seen anything like it.”
“All right, let’s cut out the cheap irony, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay. But you started it when you brought up the whiskey and the lounge music.”
“So the dead man has this red handkerchief in his trachea.”
“In his what?” asked Rocco.
“In his trachea.”
“Is there any way that the snowcat shoved it in when it ran over his face?” Rocco hypothesized.
“No. It was crumpled up. And when I unfolded it, look at the treat I found inside.” Alberto Fumagalli pulled out a sort of metal cup in which a slimy purple thing lay, with what appeared to be two little mints beside it.
“What’s that? A piece of rotten eggplant?”
“The tongue.”
“Oh, Jesus fucking—”
“And there were a couple of teeth to go with it. You see? They look like two Tic Tacs.” The doctor continued, “The snowcat crushed the poor man’s head, and the pressure pushed in this piece of handkerchief. It was in his mouth.”
“It made him swallow it?”
“Or else he swallowed it himself.”
“Sure, but if he swallowed it, then he was still alive!”
“Maybe so, Rocco. Maybe so.” Alberto took a deep breath. “So then I expressed the hypostases.”
“Translation, please.”
Fumagalli rolled his eyes in annoyance.
“Why are you getting pissed off? I studied law, not medicine! As if I were to ask you to define usucaption.”
“Usucaption is a Latin term for ‘acquisitive prescription,’ in which ownership of property can be gained through continuous possession thereof, beyond a specified period of time—”
“Enough!” Rocco interrupted him. “Let’s get back to these hypotheses.”
“Hypostases,” Alberto corrected him. “Now then, hypostases form when the heart stops beating. Blood pressure drops, and the blood flows by gravity to the lowest areas of the corpse. And since the body was lying in a supine position … there, you see?” Fumagalli gently lifted the poor wretch’s torso. There was a squeaking sound, as if he’d dragged a jellyfish across the floor. “You see these reddish-purple spots?”
They were barely visible. They looked like very faint bruises.
“Yes,” said Rocco.
“When the heart stops pumping, then what happens? The blood follows its most natural path, that is, wherever the force of gravity tends to pull it. Are you with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“Good. The body was lying supine, and therefore the blood flowed to the back. Yesterday when I got there, they were just starting to form.”
“Which means what?”
“These things form three or four hours after death. That means this poor sucker died more or less three hours before I got there. So I got there at about ten, and he died between six and seven. More likely seven than six, I’d say.”
“He didn’t die. He was killed between six and seven.”
“If you want to be exact. That’s right.”
Rocco Schiavone went on staring at those mangled remains. “Also in an attempt to be exact, could you tell me how someone killed him?”
“I’ll have to take a look at the internal organs. To rule out poisoning or suffocation. That’ll take me a little while. Come with me.” The doctor moved away from the autopsy table. But Rocco stood