The Golden Egg Read Online Free PDF Page B

Rizzardi began, said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and set the phone down. He was back in a few seconds
and said, ‘Davide Cavanella, or at least that’s the name written on the papers that came with him. Someone at the address must have given it to them.’
    â€˜What caused his death?’
    â€˜It could be suicide,’ the pathologist said.
    â€˜Suicide?’ repeated an astonished Brunetti. ‘But he was a deaf mute. And he may have been retarded.’ He had no idea why those two things should exclude the possibility of suicide, but they did.
    â€˜I’m not sure I see the connection,’ Rizzardi answered mildly. ‘If anything, I’d think those poor devils would be more likely to kill themselves than the rest of us. At least we have the comfort of complaining about our lives and having people listen to us.’
    â€˜Are you joking, Ettore?’ Brunetti asked.
    After a brief pause, Rizzardi said, ‘I might have been, when I said it, but I think it’s true. I don’t know about you, but it helps me to be able to complain or to be angry and have people tell me I’m right to think the way I do.’
    â€˜Me, too,’ Brunetti agreed. Then he asked, ‘How’d he die?’
    â€˜It started out the most peaceful way, and then it got ugly,’ the pathologist said.
    â€˜What does that mean?’
    â€˜He took sleeping pills, quite a lot of them, with what I think was hot chocolate and something sweet: biscuits or cake. And a lot of these pills are brightly coloured.’
    â€˜Excuse me?’
    â€˜You said he might have been retarded,’ the pathologist explained. ‘The pills might have looked like sweets to him.’
    Brunetti considered this possibility and then asked, ‘And then?’
    â€˜He fell asleep on his back, and then he started to vomit,’ Rizzardi began, paused and then asked, ‘You know what happens, don’t you?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    It was some time before Rizzardi spoke again. ‘It must be awful. You think you’re going to go to sleep peacefully, and then you end up choking to death. Poor devil. Terrible. Terrible.’
    It had happened to Brunetti only once, choking, when he was a young man and a piece of bread got caught in his throat. Luckily, he’d been eating in a trattoria, and even more luckily, the waiter serving the next table had dropped the plates he was carrying and grabbed Brunetti from behind, yanking him to his feet and enclosing him in an iron grip. A terrified Brunetti had coughed up the piece of bread, followed quickly by everything he had eaten that day. Draped across the table, his sleeve in a plate of pasta, Brunetti had slowly gasped himself back to life and, returned to it, had been astonished to find himself in an almost empty room.
    Decades later, he could still remember the terror that had gripped him and the certainty that he was going to die. One thing that had astonished him at the time was his perception that everything was happening with courtly slowness. His hands had moved at a snail’s pace to grasp his own throat; the plates the waiter let fall when he started towards Brunetti had floated to the floor as slowly as snowflakes. And the sharp jolt of pressure to his chest that had saved his life had taken for ever to come.
    He still remembered that strange prolongation of time, and the sense, when he looked up from the table, breathing almost normally, that time had slipped back to its normal pace.
    â€˜ . . . no sign of organic damage,’ he heard Rizzardi say.
    â€˜What?’ Brunetti asked.
    â€˜I didn’t find any sign of organic damage.’
    â€˜But he died,’ said a confused Brunetti, trying to recall what little he knew of physiology. ‘Choking would stop the oxygen, wouldn’t it?’ Beyond that, he had no idea what the actual cause of death would be. Lack of oxygen to the brain? Or to the lungs and then to the