Anonymous Venetian

by Donna Leon

  * * * *

  Anonymous Venetian

  [Commissario Brunetti 03]

  By Dona Leon

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Ah forse adesso

  Sul morir mio delusa

  Priva d’ogni speranza, e di consiglio

  Lagrime di dolor versa dal ciglio.

  Ah, perhaps already

  Deceived by my death

  Deprived of every hope and counsel

  Tears of pain flow from her eyes.

  Mozart,Lucio Silla

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  Chapter One

  The shoe was red, the red of London phone booths, New York fire engines, although these were not images that came to the man who first saw the shoe. He thought of the red of the Ferrari Testarossa on the calendar in the butchers’ showers, the one with the naked blonde draped across it, seeming to make fevered love to the left headlight. He saw the shoe lying drunkenly on its side, its toe barely touching the edge of one of the pools of oil that lay like a spotted curse upon the land beyond the abattoir. He saw it there and, of course, he also thought of blood.

  Somehow, years before, permission had been given to put the slaughterhouse there, long before Marghera had blossomed, though that is perhaps an inopportune choice of verb, into one of the leading industrial centres of Italy, before the petroleum refineries and the chemical plants had spread themselves across the acres of swampy land that lay on the other side of the laguna from Venice, pearl of the Adriatic. The cement building lay, low and feral, within the enclosure of a high mesh fence. Had the fence been built in the early days, when sheep and cattle could still be herded down dusty roads towards the building? Was its original purpose to keep them from escaping before they were led, pushed, beaten up the ramp towards their fate? The animals arrived in trucks now, trucks which backed directly to the high-sided ramps, and so there was no chance that they could escape. And surely no one would want to come near that building; hence the fence was hardly necessary to keep them away. Perhaps because of this, the long gaps in it went unmended, and stray dogs, drawn by the stench of what went on inside, sometimes came through the fence at night and howled with longing for what they knew was there.

  The fields around the slaughterhouse stood empty; as if obeying a taboo as deep as blood itself, the factories stood far off from the low cement building. The buildings maintained their distance, but their ooze and their runoff and those deadly fluids that were piped into the ground knew nothing of taboo and seeped each year closer to the slaughterhouse. Black slime bubbled up around the stems of marsh grass, and a peacock-bright sheen of oil floated on the surface of the puddles that never disappeared, however dry the season. Nature had been poisoned here, outside, yet it was the work that went on inside that filled people with horror.

  The shoe, the red shoe, lay on its side about a hundred metres to the rear of the slaughterhouse, just outside the fence, just to the left of a large clump of tall seagrass that seemed to thrive on the poisons that percolated around its roots. At eleven-thirty on a hot Monday morning in August, a thickset man in a blood-soaked leather apron flung back the metal door at the rear of the slaughterhouse and emerged into the pounding sun. From behind him swept waves of heat, stench, and howls. The sun made it difficult to feel that it was cooler here, but at least the stench of offal was less foul, and the sounds came from the hum of traffic, a kilometre away, as the tourists poured into Venice for Ferragosto, not from the shrieks and squeals that filled the air behind him.

  He wiped a bloody hand on his apron, stooping to find a dry spot down by the hem, then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a package of Nazionale. With a plastic lighter, he lit the cigarette and pulled at it greedily, glad of the smell and acrid taste of the cheap tobacco. A deep-throated howl came from the door behind him, pushing him away from the building, over towards the fence and the shade that was to be found under the stunted leaves of an acacia that had managed to grow to a height of four metres.

  Standing there, he turned his back on the building and looked out across the forest of smokestacks and industrial chimneys that swept off towards Mestre. Flames spurted up from some of them; grey, greenish clouds spilled out of others. A light breeze, too weak to be felt on his skin, brought the clouds back towards him. He pulled at his cigarette and looked down at his feet, always careful, here in the fields, where he stepped. He looked down and saw the shoe, lying on its side beyond the fence.

  It was made out of some sort of cloth, that shoe, not out of leather. Silk? Satin? Bettino Cola didn’t know that sort of thing, but he did know that his wife had a pair made out of the same sort of stuff, and she had spent more than a hundred thousand lire on them. He’d have to kill fifty sheep or twenty calves to earn that much money, yet she’d spend it on a pair of shoes, wear them once, then stuff them in the back of the closet and never look at them again.

  Nothing else in the blasted landscape deserved his attention, so he studied the shoe, pulling at his cigarette. He moved to the left and looked at it from another angle. Though it lay close to a large pool of oil, it appeared to rest on a patch of dry land. Cola took another step to the left, one that drew him out into the full violence of the sun, and studied the area around the shoe, looking for its mate. There, under the clump of grass, he saw an oblong shape that seemed to be the sole of the other one, it too lying on one side.

  He dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the soft earth with his toe, walked down the fence a few metres, then bent low and crept through a large hole, careful of the jagged, rusty barbs of metal that encircled him. Straightening up, he walked back towards the shoe, now a pair of them and perhaps salvageable because of that.

  ‘Roba di puttana ,’ he muttered under his breath, seeing the heel on the first shoe, taller than the pack of cigarettes in his pocket: only a whore would wear such things. He reached down and picked up the first shoe, careful to keep from touching the outside. As he had hoped, it was clean, had not fallen into the oily puddle. He took a few steps to the right, reached down and wrapped two fingers around the heel of its mate, but it appeared to be caught on a tuft of grass. He lowered himself to one knee, careful to see where he knelt, and gave the shoe a sharp tug. It came loose, but when Bettino Cola saw that what he had pulled it loose from was a human foot, he leaped back from the bush and dropped the first shoe into the black puddle from which it had survived the night.

  * * * *

  Chapter Two

  The police arrived on the scene twenty minutes later, two blue and white sedans from the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. By then, the field at the back of the slaughterhouse was filled with men from inside the building, brought out into the sun by curiosity about this different kind of slaughter. Cola had run drunkenly back inside as soon as he saw the foot and the leg to which it was attached and gone into the foreman’s office to tell him there was a dead woman in the field beyond the fence.

  Cola was a good worker, a serious man, and so the foreman believed him and called the police immediately without going outside himself to check and see that Cola was telling the truth. But others had seen Cola come into the building and came to ask what it was, what had he seen? The foreman snarled at them to get back to work: the refrigerated trucks were waiting at the loading docks, and they didn’t have time to stand around all day and gabble about some whore who got her throat cut.

  He didn’t mean this literally, of course, for Cola had told him only about the shoe and the foot, but the fields between the factories were well-known territory to the men who worked in the factories - and to the women who worked in those fields. If she’d got herself killed there, then she was probably one of those painted wrecks who spent the late afternoon standing at the side of the road t
hat led from the industrial zone back into Mestre. Quitting time, time to go home, but why not a quick stop at the side of the road and a short walk back to a blanket spread beside a clump of grass? It was quick, they expected nothing of you except ten thousand lire, and they were, more and more often now, blondes come in from Eastern Europe, so poor that they couldn’t make you use anything, not like the Italian girls on Via Cappuccina, and since when did a whore tell a man what to do or where to put it? She probably did that, got pushy, and the man had pushed back. Plenty more of them and plenty more coming across the border every month.

  The police cars pulled up and a uniformed officer got out of each. They walked towards the front of the building, but the foreman reached them before they got to the door. Behind him stood Cola, feeling important to be the centre of all this attention, but still faintly sick from the sight of that foot.

  ‘Is it you who called?’ the first policeman asked. His face was round, glistening with sweat, and he stared at the foreman from behind dark glasses.

  ‘Yes,’ the foreman answered. ‘There’s a dead woman in the field behind the building.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘No,’ the foreman answered, stepping aside and motioning Cola to step forward. ‘He did.’

  After a nod from the first one, the policeman from the second car pulled a blue notebook out of his jacket pocket, flipped it open, uncapped his pen, and stood with the pen poised over the page.

  ‘Your name?’ asked the first policeman, the dark focus of his glance now directed at the butcher.

  ‘Cola, Bettino.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘What’s the use of asking his address?’ interrupted the foreman. ‘There’s a dead woman out there.’

  The first officer turned away from Cola and tilted his head down a little, just enough to allow him to peer at the foreman over the tops of his sun-glasses. ‘She’s not going anywhere.’ Then, turning back to Cola, he repeated, ‘Address?’

  ‘Castello 3453.’

  ‘How long have you worked here?’ he asked, nodding at the building that stood behind Cola.

  ‘Fifteen years.’

  ‘What time did you get here this morning?’

  ‘Seven-thirty. Same as always.’

  ‘What were you doing in the field?’ Somehow, the way he asked the questions and the way the other one wrote down the answers made Cola feel they suspected him of something.

  ‘I went out to have a cigarette.’

  ‘The middle of August, and you went out into the sun to have a cigarette?’ the first officer asked, making it sound like lunacy. Or a lie.

  ‘It was my break time,’ Cola said with mounting resentment. ‘I always go outside. I like to get away from the smell.’ The word made it real to the policemen, and they looked towards the building, the one with the notebook incapable of disguising the contraction of his nostrils at what they met.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Just beyond the fence. She’s under a clump of bushes, so I didn’t see her at first.’

  ‘Why did you go near her?’

  ‘I saw a shoe.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I saw a shoe. Out in the field, and then I saw the second one. I thought they might be good, so I went through the fence to get them. I thought maybe my wife would want them.’ That was a lie: he had thought he could sell them, but he didn’t want to tell this to the police. It was a small lie, and entirely innocent, but it was only the first of many lies that the police were going to be told about the shoe and the person who wore it.

  ‘Then what?’ the first policeman prompted when Cola added nothing to this.

  ‘Then I came back here.’

  ‘No, before that,’ he said with an irritated shake of his head. ‘When you saw the shoe. When you saw her. What happened?’

  Cola spoke quickly, hoping that would get him through and rid of it. ‘I picked up one shoe, and then I saw the other one. It was under the bush. So I pulled on it. I thought it was stuck. So I pulled again, and it came off.’ He swallowed once. Twice. ‘It was on her foot. That’s why it wouldn’t come off’

  ‘Did you stay there long?’

  This time it was Cola who suspected lunacy. ‘No. No. No, I came back into the building and told Banditelli, and he called you.’

  The foreman nodded to confirm this.

  ‘Did you walk around back there?’ the first policeman asked Cola.

  ‘Walk around?’

  ‘Stand around? Smoke? Drop anything near her?’

  Cola shook his head in a strong negative.

  The second one flipped the pages of his notebook and the first said, ‘I asked you a question.’

  ‘No. Nothing. I saw her and I dropped the shoe, and I went into the building.’

  ‘Did you touch her?’ the first one asked.

  Cola looked at him with eyes wide with amazement. ‘She’s dead. Of course I didn’t touch her.’

  ‘You touched her foot,’ the second policeman said, looking down at his notes.

  ‘I didn’t touch her foot,’ Cola said, though he couldn’t remember now if he had or had not. ‘I touched the shoe, and it came off her foot.’ He couldn’t keep himself from asking, ‘Why would I want to touch her?’

  Neither policeman answered this. The first one turned and nodded to the second, who flipped his notebook closed. ‘All right, show us where she is.’

  Cola stood rooted to the spot and shook his head from side to side. The sun had dried the blood that spattered down the front of his apron, and flies buzzed around him. He didn’t look at them. ‘She’s at the back, out beyond the big hole in the fence.’

  ‘I want you to show us where she is,’ the first policeman said.

  ‘I just told you where she is,’ Cola snapped, voice rising up sharply.

  The two policemen exchanged a glance that somehow managed to suggest that Cola’s reluctance was significant, worth remembering. But they turned away from him and from the foreman and walked around the side of the building, saying nothing.

  It was noon and the sun beat down on the flat tops of the officers’ uniform caps. Beneath them, their hair was sopping, their necks running with sweat. At the back of the building, they saw the large hole in the fence and made towards it. Behind them, filtering through the death squeals that still came from the building, they heard human sounds and turned towards them. Clustered around the back entrance of the building, their aprons as red with gore as Cola’s, five or six men huddled in a tight ball. Used to this curiosity, the policemen turned back to the fence and headed towards the hole. Bowing low, they went through it in single file and then off to the left, towards a large spiky clump of bush that stood beyond the fence.

  The officers stopped a few metres from it. Knowing to look for the foot, they easily found it, saw its sole peering out from beneath the low branches. Both shoes lay just in front of it.

  The two of them approached the foot, walking slowly and looking at the ground where they walked, as careful to avoid the malevolent puddles as to keep from stepping in anything that might be another footprint. Just beside the shoes, the first one knelt down and pushed the waist-high grass aside with his hand.

  The body lay on its back, the outer side of the ankles pressed into the earth. The policeman reached forward and pushed at the grass, exposing a length of hairless calf. He removed his sun-glasses and peered into the shadows, following with his eyes the legs, long and muscular, following across the bony knee, up to the lacy red underpants that showed under the bright red dress that was pulled back over the face. He stared a moment longer.

  ‘Cazzo ,’ he exclaimed and let the grass spring back into place.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ the other one asked.

  ‘It’s a man.’

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  Chapter Three

  Ordinarily, the news that a transvestite prostitute had been found in Marghera with his head and face beaten in would have created a sensation even among the jaded
staff at the Venice Questura, especially during the long Ferragosto holiday, when crime tended to drop off or take on the boring predictability of burglaries and break-ins. But today it would have taken something far more lurid to displace the spectacular news that ran like flame through the corridors of the Questura: Maria Lucrezia Patta, wife of Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, had that weekend left her husband of twenty-seven years to take up residence in the Milano apartment of - and here each teller of the tale paused to prepare each new listener for the bombshell - Tito Burrasca, the founding light and prime mover of Italy’s pornographic film industry.

  The news had dropped from heaven upon the place beneath just that morning, carried into the building by a secretary in the Ufficio Stranieri, whose uncle lived in a small apartment on the floor above the Pattas and who claimed to have been passing the Pattas’ door just at the moment when terminal hostilities between the Pattas had erupted. Patta, the uncle reported, had shouted Burrasca’s name a number of times, threatening to have him arrested if he ever dared come to Venice; Signora Patta had returned fire by threatening not only to go and live with Burrasca, but to star in his next film. The uncle had retreated up the steps and spent the next half hour trying to open his own front door, during which time the Pattas continued to exchange threats and recriminations. Hostilities ceased only with the arrival of a water taxi at the end of the calle and the departure of Signora Patta, who was followed down the steps of the building by six suitcases, carried by the taxi driver, and by the curses of Patta, carried up to the uncle by the funnel-like acoustics of the staircase.