Dressed for Death

by Donna Leon

  Nothing more could be done until the following day, but the carabinieri were careful to post two guards, knowing the fascination the locus of death exerts over many people and afraid that evidence would be destroyed or stolen if the wreck were left unattended through the night.

  As so often happens at that time of year, the next morning dawned rosy-fingered, and by ten the snow was no more than a memory. But the wrecked truck remained, as did the deep scars leading down to it. During the day it was emptied, the wood stacked in low piles in an area well clear of the wreckage. As the carabinieri worked, grumbling at the weight, the splinters, and the mud that churned under their boots, a forensics team began a careful investigation of the truck’s cab, dusting surfaces and slipping all papers and objects into clearly labeled and numbered plastic bags. The driver’s seat had been ripped from its frame by the force of the final impact; the two men working in the cab loosened it further and then peeled back its plastic and cloth cover, looking for something they did not find. Nor did they find anything in any way suspicious behind the plastic paneling of the cabin.

  It was only in the back of the truck that anything at all unusual was found: eight plastic bags, the sort given out by supermarkets, each holding a change of women’s clothing and, in one case, a small prayer book printed in what one of the technicians identified as Romanian. All of the labels had been removed from the clothing in the bags, as turned out to be true of the clothing worn by the eight women killed in the crash.

  The papers found in the truck were no more than what should have been there: the driver’s passport and license, insurance forms, customs papers, bills of lading, and an invoice giving the name of the lumberyard to which the wood was to be delivered. The driver’s papers were Romanian, the customs papers were in order, and the shipment was on its way to a wood mill in Sacile, a small city about a hundred kilometers to the south.

  Nothing more was to be learned from the wreckage of the truck, which was finally, with great difficulty and with enormous disruption of traffic, hauled up to the roadside by winches attached to three tow trucks. There, it was lifted onto a flatbed truck and sent back to its owner in Romania. The wood was eventually delivered to the wood mill in Sacile, which refused to pay the extra charges imposed.

  The strange death of the women was picked up by the Austrian and Italian press, where stories about The Truck of Death appeared in articles variously entitled “Der Todeslaster” and “II Camion della Morte.” Somehow, the Austrians had managed to get hold of three photos of the bodies lying in the snow and had printed them with the story. Speculation was rife: economic refugees? illegal workers? The collapse of communism had removed what would once have been the almost certain conclusion: spies. In the end, the mystery was never resolved, and the investigation died somewhere amid the failure of the Romanian authorities to answer questions or return papers and the Italians’ fading interest. The women’s bodies, as well as that of the driver, were returned by plane to Bucharest, where they were buried under the earth of their native land and under the even greater weight of its bureaucracy.

  Their story quickly disappeared from the press, driven off by the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Milan and the murder of yet another judge. It did not disappear, however, before it was read by Professoressa Paola Falier, assistant professor of English literature at the University of Cà Pesaro in Venice and, not incidental to this story, wife of Guido Brunetti, commissario of police in that city.