by Donna Leon
Brunetti walked to the right of the building, towards the open fields that he could see stretching out behind it. When he came around to the back of the building, he saw yet another lethargic fence, an acacia tree that had survived only by a miracle, and, in its shade, a policeman asleep in a wooden chair, head nodding forward on his chest.
‘Scarpa,’ the driver called out before Brunetti could say anything. ‘Here’s a commissario.’
The policeman’s head shot up and he was instantly awake, then as quickly on his feet. He looked at Brunetti and saluted. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
Brunetti saw that the man’s jacket was draped over the back of the chair and that his shirt, plastered to his body with sweat, seemed to be a faint pink, no longer white. ‘How long have you been out here, Officer Scarpa?’ Brunetti asked when he approached the man.
‘Since the lab people left, sir.’
‘When was that?’
‘About three, sir.’
‘Why are you still here?’
‘The sergeant in charge told me to stay here until a team came out to talk to the workers.’
‘What are you doing out here in the sun?’
The man made no attempt to avoid the question or to embellish his answer. ‘I couldn’t stand it inside, sir. The smell. I came out here and was sick, and then I knew I couldn’t go back inside. I tried standing for the first hour, but there’s only this little place where there’s any shade, so I went back and got a chair.’
Instinctively, Brunetti and the driver had crowded into that small patch of shade while the other man spoke. ‘Do you know if the team has come out to question them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, sir. They got here about an hour ago.’
‘Then what are you still doing out here?’ Brunetti asked.
The officer gave Brunetti a stony look. ‘I asked the sergeant if I could go back to town, but he wanted me to help with the questioning. I told him I couldn’t, not unless the workers came outside to talk to me. He didn’t like that, but I couldn’t go back inside.’
A playful breeze reminded Brunetti of the truth of that.
‘So what are you doing out here? Why aren’t you in the car?’
‘He told me to wait here, sir.’ The man’s face didn’t change when he spoke. ‘I asked if I could sit in the car - it’s got air-conditioning - but he told me to stay out here if I wouldn’t help with the questioning.’ As if anticipating Brunetti’s next question, he said, ‘The next bus isn’t until quarter to eight, to take people back into the city after work.’
Brunetti considered this and then asked, ‘Where was he found?’
The policeman turned and pointed to a long clump of grass on the other side of the fence. ‘He was under that, sir.’
‘Who found him?’
‘One of the workers inside. He’d come outside to have a cigarette, and he saw one of the guy’s shoes lying on the ground - red, I think - so he went to have a closer look.’
‘Were you here when the lab team was?’
‘Yes, sir. They went over it, taking photos and picking up anything that was on the ground for about a hundred metres around the bush.’
‘Footprints?’
‘I think so, sir, but I’m not sure. The man who found him left some, but I think they found others.’ He paused a moment, wiped some sweat from his forehead, and added, ‘And the first police who were on the scene left some.’
‘Your sergeant?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Brunetti glanced off at the clump of grass then back at the policeman’s sweat-soaked shirt. ‘Go on back to our car, Officer Scarpa. It’s air-conditioned.’ Then to the driver, ‘Go with him. You can both wait for me there.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the policeman said gratefully and reached down to pull his jacket from the back of the chair.
‘Don’t bother,’ Brunetti said when he saw the man start to put one arm in a sleeve.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he repeated and bent to pick up the chair. The two men walked back towards the building. The policeman set the chair down on the cement outside the back door of the building then joined the other man. They disappeared round the side of the building, and Brunetti went towards the hole in the fence.
Ducking low, he passed through it and walked over towards the bush. The signs left by the lab team were all around: holes in the earth where they had driven rods into the earth to measure distance, dirt scuffed into small piles by pivoting footsteps, and, nearer to the clump, a small pile of clipped grass placed neatly to the side: apparently, they’d had to cut down the grass to get to the body and remove it without scratching it on the sharp edges of the leaves.
Behind Brunetti, a door slammed shut, and then a man’s voice called, ‘Hey, you, what are you doing? Get the hell away from there.’
Brunetti turned and, as he knew he would, saw a man in police uniform coming quickly towards him from the back of the building. As Brunetti watched but didn’t move away from the bush, the man drew his revolver from his holster and shouted at Brunetti, ‘Put your hands in the air and come over to the fence.’
Brunetti turned and walked back towards the fence; he moved like a man on a rocky surface, hands held out at his sides to maintain balance.
‘I told you to put them in the air,’ the policeman snarled as Brunetti reached the fence.
He had a gun in his hand, so Brunetti did not try to tell him that his hands were in the air; they just weren’t over his head. Instead, he said, ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant. I’m Commissario Brunetti from Venice. Have you been taking the statements of the people inside?’
The man’s eyes were small, and there wasn’t much in the way of intelligence to be read in them, but there was enough there for Brunetti to realize that the man saw the trap opening at his feet. He could ask to see proof, ask a commissario of police for his warrant card, or he could allow a stranger claiming to be a police official to go unquestioned.
‘Sorry, Commissario, I didn’t recognize you with the sun in my eyes,’ the sergeant said, though the sun shone over his left shoulder. He could have got away with it, earning Brunetti’s grudging respect, had he not added, ‘It’s hard, coming out into the sun like this, from the darkness inside. Besides, I wasn’t expecting anyone else to come out here.’
The name tag on his chest read ‘Buffo’.
‘It seems that Mestre is out of police commissari for the next few weeks, so I was sent out to handle the investigation.’ Brunetti bent down and walked through the hole in the fence. By the time he stood up on the other side, Buffo’s revolver was back in its holster, the flap snapped securely closed.
Brunetti started towards the back door of the slaughterhouse, Buffo walking beside him. ‘What did you learn from the people inside?’
‘Nothing more than what I got when I answered the first call this morning, sir. A butcher, Bettino Cola, found the body at a little past eleven this morning. He had gone outside to have a cigarette, and he went over to the bush to have a look at some shoes he said he saw lying on the ground.’
‘Weren’t there any shoes?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. They were there when we got here.’ From the way he spoke, anyone hearing him would believe that Cola had placed them there to divert suspicion from himself. As much as any civilian or criminal, Brunetti hated Tough Cops. ‘The call we got said there was a whore in a field out here, a woman. I answered the call and took a look, but it was a man.’ Buffo spat.
‘The report I received said he’s a prostitute,’ Brunetti said in a level voice. ‘Has he been identified?’
‘No, not yet. We’re having the morgue people take pictures, though he was beat up pretty badly, and then we’ll have an artist make a sketch of what he must have looked like before. We’ll show that around, and sooner or later someone will recognize him. They’re pretty well known, those boys,’ Buffo said with something between a grin and a grimace, then continued, ‘If he’s one of the locals, we’ll have an ID on him pretty soon.�
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‘And if not?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Then it will take longer, I guess. Or maybe we won’t find out who he is. Small loss, in either case.’
‘And why is that, Sergeant Buffo?’ Brunetti asked softly, but Buffo heard only the words and not the tone.
‘Who needs them? Perverts. They’re all full of AIDS, and they think nothing about passing it on to decent working men.’ He spat again.
Brunetti stopped, turned, and faced the sergeant. ‘As I understand it, Sergeant Buffo, these decent working men about whom you are so concerned get AIDS passed on to them because they pay these “perverts” to let them ram their cocks up their asses. Let us try not to forget that. And let us try not to forget that, whoever the dead man is, he’s been murdered, and it is our duty to find the murderer. Even if it was a decent working man.’ Saying that, Brunetti opened the door and went into the slaughterhouse, preferring the stench there to the one he left outside.
* * * *
Chapter Four
Inside, he learned little more: Cola repeated his story, and the foreman verified it. Sullenly, Buffo told him that none of the men who worked in the factory had seen anything strange, not that morning and not the day before. The whores were so much a part of the landscape that no one now paid any real attention to them or to what they did. No one could remember that particular area behind the slaughterhouse ever being used by the whores: the smell alone would explain that. But had one of them been seen in that area, no one was likely to have noticed.
After learning all of this, Brunetti went back to his car and asked the driver to take him to the Questura in Mestre. Officer Scarpa, who had put his jacket back on, got out of the car and joined Sergeant Buffo in the other. As the two cars headed back towards Mestre, Brunetti opened his window half-way to let some air, however hot, into the car and dilute the smell of the slaughterhouse that still clung to his clothing. Like most Italians, Brunetti had always scoffed at the idea of vegetarianism, scorning it as yet another of the many self-indulgences of the well-fed, but today the idea made complete sense to him.
At the Questura, his driver took him to the first floor and introduced him to Sergeant Gallo, a cadaverous man with sunken eyes who looked like the years spent in pursuit of the criminal had eaten into his flesh from the inside.
When Brunetti was seated at the side of Gallo’s desk, the sergeant told him there was little else to add to what Brunetti had been told, though he did have the initial, verbal report from the pathologist: death had resulted from a series of blows to the head and face and had taken place from twelve to eighteen hours before the body was found. The heat made it difficult to tell. From pieces of rust found in some of the wounds and from their shape, the pathologist guessed that the murder weapon had been a piece of metal, most probably a length of pipe, but surely something cylindrical. The lab analysis of stomach contents and blood wouldn’t be back until Wednesday morning at the earliest, so it was impossible to say yet whether he had been under the influence of drugs or alcohol when he was killed. Since many of the prostitutes in the city and almost all of the transvestites were confirmed drug users, this was likely, though there seemed to be no sign on the body of intravenous drug use. The stomach was empty, though there were signs that he had eaten a meal within the twenty-four hours before he was killed.
‘What about his clothing?’ he asked Gallo.
‘Red dress, some sort of cheap synthetic material. Red shoes, barely worn, size forty-one. I’ll have them checked to see if we can find the manufacturers.’
‘Are there any photos?’ Brunetti asked.
‘They won’t be ready until tomorrow morning, sir, but from the reports of the men who brought him in, you might not want to see them.’
‘That bad, eh?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Whoever did it to him must really have hated him or been out of his mind when he did it. There’s no nose left.’
‘Will you get an artist to make a sketch?’
‘Yes, sir. But most of it’s going to be guesswork. All he’ll have is the shape of the face, the eye colour. And the hair.’ Gallo paused for a moment and added, ‘It’s very thin, and he’s got a large bald spot, so I’d guess he wore a wig when, ah, when he worked.’
‘Was a wig found?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, sir, there wasn’t. And it looks like he was killed somewhere else and carried there.’
‘Footprints?’
‘Yes. The technical team said they found a set of them going towards the clump of grass and coming away from it.’
‘Deeper when going?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So he was carried out there and dumped under that clump of grass. Where did the footprints come from?’
‘There’s a narrow paved road that runs along the back of the field behind the slaughterhouse. It looks like he came from there.’
‘And on the road?’
‘Nothing, sir. It hasn’t rained in weeks, so a car, or even a truck, could have stopped there, and there’d be no sign of it. There’s just those footprints. A man’s. Size forty-three.’ Brunetti’s size.
‘Do you have a list of the transvestite prostitutes?’
‘Only those who have been in trouble, sir.’
‘What sort of trouble do they get into?’
‘The usual. Drugs. Fights among themselves. Occasionally, one of them will get into a fight with a client. Usually over money. But none of them has ever been mixed up in anything serious.’
‘What about the fights? Are they ever violent?’
‘Nothing like this, sir. Never anything like this.’
‘How many of them are there?’
‘We’ve got files on about thirty of them, but I’d guess that’s just a small fraction of them. A lot of them come down from Pordenone or in from Padova. It seems business is better for them there, but I don’t know why.’ The first place was the nearest big city to both American and Italian military installations: that would account for Pordenone. But Padova? The university? If so, things had changed since Brunetti took his law degree.
‘I’d like to take a look at those files tonight. Can you make me copies of them?’
‘I’ve already had that done, sir,’ Gallo said, handing him a thick blue file that lay on his desk.
As he took the folder from the sergeant, Brunetti realized that, even here in Mestre, less than twenty kilometres from home, he was likely to be treated as a foreigner, so he sought for some common ground that would establish him as a member of a working unit, not the commissario come in from out of town. ‘But you’re Venetian, aren’t you, Sergeant?’ Gallo nodded and Brunetti added, ‘Castello?’ Again, Gallo nodded, but this time with a smile, as if he knew the accent would follow him, no matter where he went.
‘What are you doing out here in Mestre?’ Brunetti asked.
‘You know how it is, sir,’ he began. ‘I got tired of trying to find an apartment in Venice. My wife and I looked for two years, but it’s impossible. No one wants to rent to a Venetian, afraid you’ll get in and they’ll never be able to get you out. And the prices if you want to buy - five million a square metre. Who can afford that? So we came out here.’
‘You sound like you regret it, Sergeant.’
Gallo shrugged. It was a common enough fate among Venetians, driven out of the city by skyrocketing rents and prices. ‘It’s always hard to leave home, Commissario,’ he said, but it seemed to Brunetti that his voice, when he said it, was somewhat warmer.
Returning to the issue at hand, Brunetti tapped a finger on the file. ‘Do you have anyone here they talk to, that they trust?’
‘We used to have an officer, Benvenuti, but he retired last year.’
‘No one else?’
‘No, sir.’ Gallo paused for a moment, as if considering whether he could risk his next statement. ‘I’m afraid many of the younger officers, well, I’m afraid they treat these guys as something of a joke.’
‘Why do you say that, Sergeant Gal
lo?’
‘If any of them makes a complaint, you know, about being beat up by a client - not about not being paid, you understand. That’s not something we have any control over - but about being beat up, well, no one wants to be sent to investigate it, even if we have the name of the man who did it. Or if they do go to question him, usually nothing happens.’
‘I got a taste of that, even something stronger, from Sergeant Buffo,’ Brunetti said.
At the name, Gallo compressed his lips but said nothing.
‘What about the women?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The whores?’
‘Yes. Is there much contact between them and the transvestites?’
