Venice Noir

by Maxim Jakubowski

  On really bad nights, a truck-jacking goes wrong.

  Porto Marghera is all about sealed containers and bonded warehouses. Everything that moves through the port is valuable. Stolen goods fuel the black market in the north of Italy, and as far south as Bologna. A ship comes in, and while it is being offloaded, one of the dockers makes a quiet phone call. Next thing, the truck is stopped by an armed gang as it is heads out toward the Malcontenta and the ring road. Next day, Acer laptops, Samsung mobile phones, or German washing machines are being offered around at half the usual retail price. On rare occasions, the driver tries to defend his load beyond the call of duty. If he does, he dies. The drivers know it; they just hand over the keys most of the time, and walk away from harm. Quite frequently, the tipster makes two phone calls, trying to double his take. The hijackers get hijacked by a rival gang—the Mafia of the Brenta versus the Mafia of Marghera—and then the shooting starts. The docker gets a bullet from whoever wins. You can’t bet on two horses. The body count tends to be high.

  But a naked man in a lake of sludge?

  Me and Marcello climb out of the patrol car, and the sludge oozes over the tops of our shoes. There’s nothing we can do about it. We switch on our flashlights and start wading through the shit. It looks like wet cement, as I said earlier, and it sucks at your feet. You have to go slow, or it pulls off your shoes. It feels even worse than it looks. It doesn’t just soak your shoes and socks, it seems to eat its way inside them like hydrochloric acid. This sludge is a compound of all the nasty things we tell ourselves we should never touch: dirt and filth, untreated sewage, illegal industrial runoff, petroleum and oil scum, spillage from all the chemical factories and processing plants that give Via delle Macchine its name. It drains off into the lagoon eventually, poisoning the fish and polluting the mussels that are being cultivated in the shallow waters. This sludge is the sum of the liquid waste that heavy industry produces.

  The dead man is half sunk in it.

  I play my torch along the length of his nude body.

  “No sign of a wound. No exit, no entry. What’s your guess, stabbed or shot?”

  Marcello looks at me. “Dead,” he says.

  He turns around and starts wading back toward the patrol car and the radio.

  He’s going to call for backup, the murder squad, forensics, an ambulance from the city mortuary. They should be here within fifteen minutes, then we can get back into our patrol car, turn up the heat to dry off our shoes, socks, and trouser cuffs, and head out onto the three bridges circuit again.

  He wades back.

  “Done,” he says.

  We stand there looking down at the body, then Marcello offers me an untipped Nazionale. We light up, take a few slow puffs. We’ll have to wait by the body. And it’s way too early for the sirens. It’s like standing on a moon that’s soaking wet and very noisy. All around us we can hear the thump of heavy engines, the shrill whirring of machinery slicing through the night. The wheels of industry, they call it, though it tends to be steam hammers, swooshing pistons, and suction pumps in Porto Marghera.

  Suddenly, there’s a flash of light from the ENI oil refinery at the dead end of the street, down by the banks of the lagoon. A blue flame with an orange core surges twenty feet into the star-speckled sky. It lights up the wooden trestles of the musselfarming rigs in the water close by, burns with a roaring fizz for a minute or more, then stops as suddenly as it started.

  “Gas will be up ten cents tomorrow,” Marcello says.

  “What do you think happened?” I ask him.

  “What happened where? They’re burning off excess gas—”

  “The body,” I say. “What do you think happened to him?”

  “Why don’t you go and ask him?”

  This is Venetian humour. Marcello doesn’t give a fuck. What has it got to do with us? He flicks his cigarette away, and a ghostly flame flares up as it hits what looks like a pool of water, but isn’t.

  I look at the dead man instead.

  My dream is to get off the night patrol and into criminal investigations. If I could work it out before the detectives arrive, maybe I’d stand a chance. The victim is stark naked, and he is lying in the middle of one of the most frequently traveled streets in Porto Marghera. No one has reported a thing. Not even an anonymous phone tip-off. He could have been there for five minutes or five hours. If he’d been there five hours, the cops on the three bridges shift before us should have seen him. Should have … Sometimes, we do the same thing. We skip a beat, park somewhere out of sight for an hour, smoking and dozing, then we write it up as a no-incident circuit. And yet, the body looks clean. Closer to minutes than hours. There is a spattering of mud like octopus stings across the back of his legs, but nothing else. If he’d been there an hour, with trucks passing by all through the night, there wouldn’t be any white flesh left to see.

  Twenty or thirty minutes, I estimate. That’s how long—

  “They’re fucking slow tonight. You figure there’s been a pileup on the ring road?”

  “Who knows?”

  I look back at the body. A naked john? It isn’t likely. They pull up their zippers and feel for their wallets before they try to run. I take out a packet of Marlboro 100s and offer one to Marcello. A hit job? One of the Mafia warlords? One of the soldiers? We would need to turn him over and wipe the sludge off if we wanted to see his face, but I know Marcello Pigozzo won’t go for that. It would be a dirty job, certainly, but there’s the bigger question of tampering with a crime scene. We wouldn’t get promoted if anyone saw us touching the body. No, we’d get the push instead. Then again, I think, if it was a crime boss, you’d shoot him. More than once. You’d riddle him with bullets, make sure he didn’t live to come after you.

  “No exit wounds. No bullet in the back,” I say. “You think he was knifed?”

  Marcello doesn’t say a word, just turns his wrist and shines his flashlight on his watch. “Twenty minutes,” he mutters. “It’s already two o’clock. My feet are freezing. What the hell are those jerks doing?”

  If he’s been jabbed with a knife, I think, he’s either a sailor or a whore’s mark. Maybe both. I can’t see his face, but I guess that he is a European. His skin is stark white against the graybrown sludge, no sign of a suntan above the waistband of the underpants that he isn’t wearing. A man who lives indoors, who never goes to the beach in Sottomarina or Jesolo, who never takes a foreign holiday. He works indoors too, maybe sitting behind a desk all day in an office. That’s what I assume from the flabby bulge above his hips, his flaccid buttocks, the lack of muscle in his extended right arm.

  He’s not a sailor, though he might be an officer.

  “You hear it?” Marcello flicks his cigarette butt at the puddle, misses, and it sizzles in the slime. Far off, you can just about hear the sound of an ambulance siren. Nonny-nonny-no! Nonny-nonny-no! “About fucking time,” he adds. “I don’t want to stand here much longer. Move an inch, and a stench comes up. Unless that’s you farting?”

  I hear a squad car somewhere, like a braying donkey a long way off.

  Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw!

  “I think he’s one of the money men,” I say. “An important guy. They gave him a girl, told him to have some fun, then shot him though the temple while he was doing it. They burned his clothes, dumped the body out here. They knew we’d find him. They wanted him to be—”

  “You should work for Radio Mestre,” Marcello interrupts, moving out into the center of Via delle Macchine, holding up his hands, waving them high above his head as the headlights come racing toward him, watching as the squad car skids to a halt, slewing sideways into the mud, sending up a scythe of sludge that covers Marcello from head to foot.

  My partner curses as the car door opens and the night inspector climbs out.

  He’s been warned. Inspector Zambòn is wearing yellow rubber boots and an old blue boilersuit. “You, just fucking shut it!” he snarls at Marcello, and he comes stomping over toward me, kickin
g up sludge like a kid playing in the mud. “Well, what do we have?”

  “A body, sir.”

  It sounds obvious, but what else can I say?

  “So I see,” he says sarcastically. “No clothes? No ID? Tire tracks …” He pauses, looks out across the sea of sludge. It’s like a plowed field. At least a thousand heavy-duty truck tires have traveled up and down Via delle Macchine in the last twelve hours. “No tire tracks worth the mentioning, I suppose. Forensics will be coming soon …”

  Another siren sounds. It’s close. A quick, repeated blip-blip, a flash of orange light, then it’s on us. The large black Fiat van skids and slithers to a halt, far too close to the body, less than six feet away, causing the sludge to shift in a tsunami tidal wave. One minute the body is marble white, the next it’s a gray-brown sludge, almost invisible except for the buttock islands.

  “Who the fuck is driving that vehicle?” the inspector yells out. No one answers, so he turns to me. “And what the fuck are you doing here? Don’t you have work to do?”

  Two minutes later, we’re back on the main road, heading for the Malcontenta, giving Piazzale Roma and Venice a miss. Marcello lives in Chirignago, which is just a short way off our regular route. I take him home. Top apartment in a block of eight. He’s cursing like a savage. Fucking CID, fucking van drivers, fucking sludge. I follow him into the hallway. His wife Marisa takes one quick look, then smiles, hurrying off to get him clean clothes, telling him to take a shower, offering me a cup of coffee and a dry pair of socks.

  Half an hour and we’re back on the road.

  “About that body,” I say.

  “Don’t talk to me about that fucking body!” Marcello snaps. “I don’t know, and I don’t fucking want to know!”

  We had a quiet night after that. Nothing happened. No one else disturbed our peace.

  I couldn’t forget the body in the sludge, though. It was an unforgettable sight. It was like walking into a modest church and discovering a fine marble statue that you didn’t expect. Sooner or later, I would have asked Inspector Zambòn about it, though I never did get the chance. It was big news down at Mestre Central the following week. Zambòn had been suspended, the desk sergeant reported. Paid leave while he was waiting for the case to come up.

  “That naked body in Marghera last Thursday night?” I asked, hoping. I couldn’t help but wonder whether my guess had been right. A Mafia boss, a commissioned hit job, taken out by the opposition, something along those lines.

  “He’s been charged with corruption, according to the magistrate. Didn’t you notice those fancy suits he was always wearing? He was taking money, hand over fist, the sly bastard. Been at it for years, apparently.”

  The Porto Marghera investigation didn’t come to much, and I never did find out who was handling the case. I saw it mentioned in one of the local newspapers, Il Gazzettino, I think it was. Mystery Man Found Dead, the headline said. No name, no story, nothing. A body in Via delle Macchine, the newspaper noted dutifully. A middle-aged man. There was no sign of a wound. A massive blood clot to the brain was the probable cause of death. The corpse had been ditched, unclaimed, unwanted. The hack managed to squeeze the fact that the body was naked into the very last line.

  He didn’t bother to mention the sludge.

  2. A Domestic Crime … or Three

  They gave me two months of sick leave when I caught a bullet in the shoulder.

  Ten days in the hospital in Mestre, then I was discharged. I had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, so I spent a week in front of the television watching any damned thing that came on, doing the rehabilitation exercises the physiotherapist had taught me, cooking, eating, sleeping, trying not to smoke too much, taking an occasional stroll, slowly going out of my mind. When I started hitting the red wine immediately after breakfast, I decided that I had to do something constructive.

  But what?

  My apartment is on the first floor of an apartment block in a quiet cul-de-sac beyond the city hospital, the swimming pool, the tennis club, and a bridge that crosses the canals. It’s an assigned council flat. You don’t need to be on the housing list if you’re a policeman in Mestre. There are two other cops living in the building, but we are all very careful never to tell anyone how we got decent living accommodations so close to the town center. Piazzetta della Pace is an idyllic spot in its dead-end way. If I spit out of my bathroom window, I can hit the river. There are two of them, as a matter of fact, which converge right there outside my window. They are drainage canals, rather than natural rivers, and they have no names. They carry runoff irrigation water from the agricultural plain through the town of Mestre and out into the Venetian lagoon. A couple of years back, I lost my car when the canals overflowed and flooded my garage. Well, I looked out of the window one morning, my hand trembling at the thought of red wine on my tongue, and that was when I saw the opportunity awaiting me.

  I hadn’t been fishing for years, but I still had a rod and a tackle box in the garage.

  There’s no access to the river bank from the parking area behind my place, but I had noticed a gate in the chain fence of the old lady who lives in a rundown cottage next to the development. Her name is Amalia Bianchini, but I just call her Signora Amalia, like everyone else in the neighbor–hood. She’s a kind of myth around here: all the kids believe that she’s a witch, and their parents tend to avoid her.

  I say hello whenever I see her, and I see and hear her quite a lot. She is in her eighties, a lean country woman with a narrow wrinkled face, bright blue eyes, gray hair that drifts in loose strands from beneath the black scarf that she always wears. Her clothes never change, summer or winter—that black scarf, an old gray overcoat, a pair of old rubber boots. She’s the last of an ancient tribe in modern Mestre, a contadina, a peasant, struggling to survive in sprawling suburbia.

  The town must have grown up all around her, slowly swallowing the countryside, covering it with ugly apartment blocks of three, four, or five storys. Whenever I leave for work, she stands up, eases her bones, waves at me, and says something totally incomprehensible in a language that died out many generations ago.

  At least she smiles, which no one else in Piazzetta della Pace ever does.

  Signora Amalia works all day in her large garden, growing fruits and vegetables, tending her vines, her hens, and the rabbits that she keeps in a shed. As I said before, when I don’t see her, I often hear her. That is, I hear an agonized squawk, or a high-pitched scream, and I know what she’ll be having for lunch or dinner. Hens lay eggs, and rabbits breed. She slays one or the other at least once a week. I saw her one day swinging a chicken around and around by its neck. It was brutal, mercifully over in a couple of seconds. Murder in the name of subsistence. You could call it domestic crime number one, though it sounds melodramatic. I couldn’t slaughter a hen if you paid me. Another day, I saw her going into the rabbit hutch with a rusty roncola, which is a big curved knife, the peasant’s scimitar. Could you slaughter a rabbit in cold blood, skin it, gut it, roast it in the oven?

  I know what it was that got me into Signora Amalia’s good graces.

  She’s a gattara. That is, she keeps cats. She always has two or three of them trailing at her heels. I like cats, but in my job I really cannot have one. Who would feed it when I’m asleep all day and out on patrol all night? Having said that, in recent months, I had noticed one cat in particular that followed her around. Whenver I was passing her gate, I would stop and play with it. Il Rosso was the name she gave to it, but I always thought of him as Big Red, a cross between a Persian and a ginger tom, an Angora ball of orange flames, with a tail to die for. Affectionate wasn’t the word for Il Rosso. It was hard to tear yourself away when he started to purr, rolling onto his back, inviting you to stroke his belly.

  I got out my fishing rod and tackle box, and I stopped outside her cottage, waiting until I caught sight of her in the garden. Long before the old lady appeared, Il Rosso came to greet me. He licked my hand, rubbed his head against my legs. I
hadn’t felt so loved in one hell of a long time. He was such an affectionate, trusting creature, and he seemed to have taken a shine to me. I was down on my haunches, tickling his ears, when the old lady appeared.

  “Signora Amalia, can I use your gate out onto the river bank?” I asked.

  Ten minutes later, I was sitting on the riverbank with a can of worms, courtesy of the old lady. I’d been planning to use a lure, but she took me to her compost heap, turned over a sheet of cardboard, and uncovered a mass of earthworms that would have fed a thousand fish. I could use her gate anytime I wanted, she said. On one condition. I had to bring her back a fish. Or two, if I was really lucky. Well, I’m no big game hunter, and I hadn’t been fishing for years, but catching fish from the spot where the two canals become one is like fishing in an aquarium full of piranhas. You threw in a worm, you pulled out a fish. It was, I must admit, almost too easy. Still, it kept me busy, it kept me away from the wine, and casting the line was the sort of exercise I needed for my wounded shoulder. Every time I passed through her gate and into the garden, Il Rosso came running, and old Signora Amalia was right behind him. I’d hand her a couple of half-pound perch, and Il Rosso would let out a meow of thanks. At least that’s what it sounded like to me.

  Maybe a week had gone by when I asked her if she was happy with the fish that I was bringing her. I was thinking of the cats, thinking of Il Rosso in particular, who seemed to be getting bigger by the day.

  I have to try and give an impression of what she said—that is, of what I thought she might have said. The dialect was a problem, as I mentioned earlier. She smiled, she made a face. “They’re a wee bit bony,” she said. “They get stuck in your teeth.”

  It set me thinking. Did she mean too bony for the cats, or was she eating the fish that I had been pulling out of an open sewer?

  The more I thought about it, the more perplexed I became. Those fish were big, and kind of swollen. There was a slimy puffiness to their bellies, which were olive-green instead of natural pearl. Those canals were chemical wastepipes, I realized. Thousands of tons of additives and fertilizers had been spread over the surrounding fields to produce bigger tomatoes, more grapes, a larger yield of maize. Those chemicals would leach through the soil, drain into the canals, and end up in the Venetian lagoon, where legends of monster catfish abound. If Signora Amalia were to die, would I have poisoned her? Signora Amalia didn’t die, but I stopped going fishing. I started taking long walks instead. Next thing, I was jogging. I only had one thing on my mind. Get fit, and fast. End the tedium. Get back to work. I was jogging toward the gate of our apartment block in Piazzetta della Pace when it hit me. I hadn’t seen Il Rosso for a couple of days. As a rule, he would squeeze through the bars of the gate and wait for me, until I stopped and paid him some attention. There was no sign of Il Rosso.