Anonymous Venetian

by Donna Leon

  ‘There’s never been any trouble, not that I know of, but I don’t know how well they get on. I don’t think they’re in competition over clients, if that’s what you mean.’

  Brunetti wasn’t sure what he meant and realized that his questions would have no clear focus until he read the files in the blue folder or until someone could identify the body of the dead man. Until they had that, there could be no talk of motive and, until that, there could be no understanding what had happened.

  He stood, glanced at his watch. ‘I’d like your driver to pick me up at eight-thirty tomorrow morning. And I’d like the artist to have the sketch ready by then. As soon as you have it, even if it’s tonight, get at least two officers to start making the rounds of the other transvestites, to see if any of them know who he is or if they’ve heard that anyone from Pordenone or Padova is missing. I’d also like your men to ask the whores - the women, that is, if the transvestites use the area where he was found or if they know of any of them who ever has in the past.’ He picked up the file. ‘I’ll read through this tonight.’

  Gallo had been taking notes of what Brunetti said, but now he stood and walked with him to the door.

  ‘I’ll see you then tomorrow morning, Commissario.’ He headed back towards his desk and reached for the phone. ‘When you get downstairs, there’ll be a driver waiting to take you back to Piazzale Roma.’

  As the police car sped back over the causeway towards Venice, Brunetti looked out to the right, at the clouds of grey, white, green, yellow smoke billowing up from the forest of smokestacks in Marghera. As far as the eye could see, the pall of smoke enveloped the vast industrial complex, and the rays from the declining sun turned it all into a radiant vision of the next century. Saddened by the thought, he turned away and looked off towards Murano and, beyond it, the distant tower of the basilica of Torcello, where, some historians said, the whole idea of Venice had begun more than a thousand years ago, when the people of the coast fled into the marshes to avoid the invading Huns.

  The driver swerved wildly to avoid an immense camper-van with German plates that suddenly cut in front of them then swerved off to the parking island of Tronchetto, and Brunetti was pulled back to the present. More Huns, and now no place to hide.

  He walked home from Piazzale Roma, paying little attention to what or whom he passed, his mind hovering over that bleak field, still seeing the flies that swarmed around the spot under the grass where the body had been. Tomorrow, he would go and see the body, talk to the pathologist, and see what secrets it might reveal.

  He got home just before eight, still early enough for it to seem like he was returning from a normal day. Paola was in the kitchen when he let himself into the apartment, but there were none of the usual smells or sounds of cooking. Curious, he went down the corridor and stuck his head into the kitchen; she was at the counter, slicing tomatoes.

  ‘Ciao , Guido,’ she said, looking up and smiling at him.

  He tossed the blue folder on the kitchen counter, walked over to Paola, and kissed the back of her neck.

  ‘In this heat?’ she asked, but she leaned back against him as she said it.

  He licked delicately at her skin.

  ‘Salt depletion,’ he said, licking again.

  ‘I think they sell salt pills in the pharmacies. Probably more hygienic,’ she said, leaning forward, but only to take another ripe tomato from the sink. She cut it into thick slices and added them to the ones already arranged in a circle around the edge of a large ceramic plate.

  He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of acqua minerale, and reached for a glass from the cabinet above his head. He filled the glass, drank it down, drank another, then capped the bottle and replaced it in the refrigerator.

  From the bottom shelf, he removed a bottle of Prosecco. He ripped the silver foil from the cap, then slowly pushed the cork up with both thumbs, moving it slowly and working it back and forth gently. As soon as the cork popped from the bottle, he tilted it to one side to prevent the bubbles from spilling out. ‘How is it that you knew how to keep champagne from spilling when I married you and I didn’t?’ he asked as he poured some of the sparkling wine into his glass.

  ‘Mario taught me about it,’ she explained, and he knew immediately that, from the twenty or so Marios they knew, she was talking about her cousin, the vintner.

  ‘Want some?’ he asked.

  ‘Just give me a sip of yours. I don’t like to drink in this heat; it goes right to my head.’ He reached his arm around her and held his glass to her lips while she took a small sip. ‘Basta,’ she said. He took the glass and sipped at the wine.

  ‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘Chiara’s out on the balcony. Reading.’ Did Chiara ever do anything else? Except maths problems and beg for a computer?

  ‘And Raffi?’ He’d be with Sara, but Brunetti always asked.

  ‘With Sara. He’s eating dinner at her house, and then they’re going to a movie.’ She laughed with amusement at Raffi’s doglike devotion to Sara Paganuzzi, the girl two floors down. ‘I hope he’s going to be able to pry himself away from her for two weeks to come to the mountains with us,’ Paola said, not meaning it at all: two weeks in the mountains above Bolzano, an escape from the grinding heat of the city, were enough to lure even Raffi away from the delights of new love. Besides, Sara’s parents had said she could join Raffaele’s family for a weekend of that vacation.

  Brunetti said nothing to this, poured himself another half glass of wine. ‘Caprese?’ he asked, nodding at the ring of tomatoes on the plate in front of Paola.

  ‘Oh, supercop,’ Paola said, reaching for another tomato. ‘He sees a ring of tomatoes with spaces left between each slice, pieces just big enough to allow a slice of mozzarella to be slipped in between them, and then he sees the fresh basil standing in a glass to the left of his fair wife, right beside the fresh mozzarella that lies on a plate. And he puts it all together and guesses, with lightning-like induction, that it’s insalata caprese for dinner. No wonder the man strikes fear into the heart of the criminal population of the city.’ She turned and smiled at him when she said this, gauging his mood to see if she had perhaps pushed too far. Seeing that, somehow, she had, she took the glass from his hand and took another slip. ‘What happened?’ she asked as she handed the glass back to him.

  ‘I’ve been assigned to a case in Mestre.’ Before she could interrupt, he continued. ‘They’ve got two commissari out on vacation, one in hospital with a broken leg, and another one on maternity leave.’

  ‘So Patta’s given you away to Mestre?’

  ‘There’s no one else.’

  ‘Guido, there’s always someone else. For one, there’s Patta himself It wouldn’t hurt him to do something else but sit around in his office and sign papers and fondle the secretaries.’

  Brunetti found it difficult to imagine anyone allowing Patta to fondle her, but he kept that opinion to himself.

  ‘Well?’ she asked when he said nothing.

  ‘He’s got problems,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Then it’s true?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been dying to call you all day and ask you if it was. Tito Burrasca?’

  When Brunetti nodded, she put her head back and made an indelicate noise that might best be described as a hoot. ‘Tito Burrasca,’ she repeated, turned back to the sink and grabbed another tomato. ‘Tito Burrasca.’

  ‘Come on, Paola. It’s not all that funny.’

  She whipped around, knife still held in front of her. ‘What do you mean, it’s not that funny? He’s a pompous, sanctimonious, self-righteous bastard, and I can think of no one who deserves something like this better than he does.’

  Brunetti shrugged and poured more wine into his glass. So long as she was fulminating against Patta, she might forget Mestre, though he knew this was only a momentary deviation.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ she said, turning around and apparently addressing this remark to the single tomato remaining in
the sink. ‘He’s been hounding you for years, making a mess of any work you do, and now you defend him.’

  ‘I’m not defending him, Paola.’

  ‘Sure sounds like it to me,’ she said, this time to the ball of mozzarella she held in her left hand.

  ‘I’m just saying that no one deserves this. Burrasca is a pig.’

  ‘And Patta’s not?’

  ‘Do you want me to call Chiara?’ he asked, seeing that the salad was almost ready.

  ‘Not before you tell me how long this thing in Mestre is likely to take.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A murder. A transvestite was found in a field in Mestre. Someone beat in his face, probably with a pipe, then carried him out there.’ Did other families, he wondered, have pre-dinner conversations as uplifting as his own?

  ‘Why beat in the face?’ she asked, centring on the question that had bothered him all afternoon.

  ‘Rage?’

  ‘Um,’ she said, slicing away at the mozzarella and then interspersing the slices with the tomato. ‘But why in a field?’

  ‘Because he wanted the body far away from wherever he killed him.’

  ‘But you’re sure he wasn’t killed there?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem so. There were footprints going up to the place where the body was, then lighter ones going away.’

  ‘A transvestite?’

  ‘That’s all I know. No one has told me anything about age, but everyone seems sure he was a prostitute.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it?’

  ‘I have no reason not to believe it. But I also have no reason to believe it.’

  She took some basil leaves, ran them under cold water for a moment, and chopped them into tiny pieces. She sprinkled them on top of the tomato and mozzarella, added salt, then poured olive oil generously over the top of everything.

  ‘I thought we’d eat on the terrace,’ she said. ‘Chiara’s supposed to have set the table. Want to check?’ When he turned to leave the kitchen, he kept the bottle and glass with him. Seeing that, Paola set the knife down in the sink. ‘It’s not going to be finished by the weekend, is it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not likely.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘We’ve got the reservations at the hotel. The kids are ready to go. They’ve been looking forward to it since school got out.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she repeated. Once, about eight years ago, he had managed to evade her questions about something; he couldn’t remember what it was. He’d got away with it for a day.

  ‘I’d like you and the kids to go to the mountains. If this finishes on time, I’ll come up and join you. I’ll try to come up next weekend at any rate.’

  ‘I’d rather have you there, Guido. I don’t want to spend my vacation alone.’

  ‘You’ll have the kids.’

  Paola didn’t deign to grace this with rational opposition. She picked up the salad and walked towards him. ‘Go see if Chiara has set the table.’

  * * * *

  Chapter Five

  He read through the files that night before going to sleep and found in them evidence of a world he had perhaps known existed but about which he had known nothing either detailed or certain. To the best of his knowledge, there were no transvestites in Venice who worked as prostitutes. There was, however, at least one transsexual, and Brunetti knew of this person’s existence only because he had once had to sign a letter attesting that Emilio Marcato had no criminal record, this before Emilia could have the sex listed on her carta d’identit à changed to accord with the physical changes already made to her body. He had no idea of what urges or passions could lead a person to make a choice so absolutely final; he remembered, though, being disturbed and moved to an emotion he had chosen not to analyse by that mere alteration of a single letter on an official document: Emilio - Emilia.

  The men in the file had not been driven to go so far and had chosen to transform only their appearance: face, clothing, make-up, walk, gesture. The photos attached to some of the files attested to the skill with which some of them had done this. Half of them were utterly unrecognizable as men, even though Brunetti knew that was what they were. There was a general softness of cheek and fineness of bone that had nothing of the masculine about them; even under the merciless lights and lens of the police camera, many of them appeared beautiful, and Brunetti searched in vain for a shadow, a jut of chin, for anything that would mark them as men and not as women.

  Sitting beside him in bed and reading the pages as he handed them to her, Paola glanced through the photos, read one of the arrest reports, this one for the sale of drugs, and handed the pages back to him with no comment.

  ‘What do you think?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘All of this.’ He raised the file in his hand. ‘Don’t you find these men strange?’

  Her look was a long one and, he thought, replete with distaste. ‘I find the men who hire them much stranger.’

  ‘Why?’

  Pointing to the file, Paola said, ‘At least these men don’t deceive themselves about what they’re doing. Unlike the men who use them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Guido. Think about it. These men are paid to be fucked or fuck, depending on the taste of the men paying them. But they have to dress up as women before the other men will pay them or use them. Just think about that for a minute. Think about the hypocrisy there, the need for self deceit. So they can say, the next morning, “Oh, Ges ù Bambino, I didn’t know it was a man until it was too late,” or, “Well, even if it turned out to be a man, I’m still the one who stuck it in.” So they’re still real men, macho, and they don’t have to confront the fact that they prefer to fuck other men because to do that would compromise their masculinity.’ She gave him a long look. ‘I suspect sometimes that you don’t really bother to think about a lot of things, Guido.’

  That, loosely translated, generally meant that he didn’t think in the same way she did. But this time Paola was right: this was something he hadn’t ever thought about. Once he had discovered them, women had conquered Brunetti, and he could never understand the sexual appeal of any - well, there really was only one - other sex. Growing up, he had assumed that all men were pretty much like him; when he had learned that they were not, he was too convinced in his own delight to give anything other than an intellectual acknowledgement to the existence of the alternative.

  He remembered, then, something Paola had told him soon after they met, something he had never noticed: that Italian men were constantly touching, fondling, almost caressing their own genitals. He remembered laughing in disbelief and scorn when she told him, but the next day he had begun to pay attention, and, within a week, had realized just how right she was. Within another week, he had become fascinated by it, overwhelmed by the frequency with which men on the street brought that hand down to give an inquisitive pat, a reassuring touch, as if afraid they had fallen oft Once, walking with him, Paola had stopped and asked him what he was thinking about, and the fact that she was the only person in the world he would not be embarrassed to tell just what it was he had been thinking about at that moment convinced him, though a thousand things had already done so, that this was the woman he wanted to marry, had to marry, would marry.

  To love and want a woman had seemed absolutely natural to him then, as it continued to do now. But the men in this file, for reasons he could read about and know, but which he could never hope to understand, had turned from women and sought the bodies of other men. They did so in return for money or drugs or, no doubt, sometimes in the name of love. And one of them, in what wild embrace of hatred had he met his violent end? And for what reason?

  Paola slept peacefully beside him, a curved lump in which rested his heart’s delight. He placed the file on the table beside the bed, turned off the light, wrapped his arm around Paola’s shoulder and kissed her neck. Still s
alty. He was soon asleep.

  When Brunetti arrived at the Mestre Questura the following morning, he found Sergeant Gallo at his desk, another blue folder in his hand. As Brunetti sat, the policeman passed the folder to him, and Brunetti saw for the first time the face of the murdered man. On top lay the artist’s reconstruction of what he might have looked like, and, below that, he saw the photos of the shattered reality from which the artist had made his sketch.

  There was no way of estimating the number of blows the face had suffered. As Gallo had said the night before, the nose was gone, driven into the skull by one especially ferocious blow. One cheekbone was entirely crushed, leaving a shallow indentation on that side of the face. The photos of the back of the head showed a similar violence, but these would have been blows that killed rather than disfigured.