A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  PRAISE FOR

  GIORGIO SCERBANENCO

  “A gem … A vivid portrait of Milan’s seamy underbelly … Scerbanenco reveals Duca Lamberti to us; in doing so, he also unveils the Italian hardboiled hero.”

  —CRIME FICTION LOVER

  “Scerbanenco’s dark, moody novels have much in common with the darkest of Scandinavian crime fiction … This forgotten noir classic from 1966 is finally available in translation. That’s good news!”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “There is courage in his books, the courage to call things by their name … No filters shield you from the reality, which is as desperate, fierce, and stark as in the best novels of James Ellroy or Jim Thompson.”

  —CARLO LUCARELLI

  “[Scerbanenco can be] as dark as Leonardo Sciascia, as deadpan realistic as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, as probing in his observation of people as Simenon, as humane as Camilleri, as noir as Manchette … but with a dark, dark humor all his own.”

  —DETECTIVES BEYOND BORDERS

  “The Duca Lamberti novels are world-class noir, and their publication in English is long, long overdue.”

  —THE COMPLETE REVIEW

  GIORGIO SCERBANENCO was born in Kiev in 1911 to a Ukrainian father and an Italian mother, grew up in Rome, and moved to Milan at the age of eighteen. In the 1930s, he worked as a journalist and attempted some early forays into fiction. In 1943, as German forces advanced on the city, Scerbanenco escaped over the Alps to Switzerland, carrying nothing but a hundred pages of a new novel he was working on. He returned to Milan in 1945 and resumed his prolific career, writing for women’s magazines, including a very popular advice-for-the-lovelorn column, and publishing dozens of novels and short stories. But he is best known for the four books he wrote at the end of his life that make up the Milano Quartet, A Private Venus, Traitors to All, The Boys of the Massacre, and The Milanese Kill on Saturdays. Scerbanenco drew on his experiences as an orderly for the Milan Red Cross in the 1930s to create his protagonist Duca Lamberti, a disbarred doctor; it was during this period that he came to know another, more desperate side of his adopted city. The quartet of novels was immediately hailed as noir classics, and on its publication in 1966, Traitors to All received the most prestigious European crime prize, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. The annual prize for the best Italian crime novel, the Premio Scerbanenco, is named after him. He died in 1969 in Milan.

  HOWARD CURTIS translates books from French, Italian, and Spanish, and was awarded the John Florio Prize (2004) as well as the Europa Campiello Literary Prize (2010).

  MELVILLE INTERNATIONAL CRIME

  A PRIVATE VENUS

  First published in Italy in 1966 as Venere Privata by

  Edizioni Garzanti S.p.A., Milano

  Copyright © 1966 Giorgio Scerbanenco Estate

  Published in agreement with Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale

  First published in the United Kingdom by Hersilia Press

  Translation copyright © 2012 Hersilia Press

  First Melville House printing: March 2014

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-336-6

  A catalog record for this book is

  available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue for a Shop Assistant

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Translator’s notes

  PROLOGUE FOR A SHOP ASSISTANT

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Antonio Marangoni. I live over there in Cascina Luasca; I’ve been going to Rogoredo by bicycle every morning for more than fifty years.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time on these old geezers, let’s go back to the paper.’

  ‘He’s the one who found the girl, he can describe her for us, otherwise we’ll have to go to the morgue, and we’re already late.’

  ‘I saw her when the ambulance arrived, she was wearing a sky-blue dress.’

  ‘A sky-blue dress. What colour hair?’

  ‘Dark, but not black.’

  ‘Dark, but not black.’

  ‘She had these big round sunglasses.’

  ‘Round sunglasses.’

  ‘I couldn’t see much of her face, it was covered by her hair.’

  ‘Move on please, there’s nothing to see.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see, the officer’s right, let’s go back to the paper.’

  ‘Move on, now. Why aren’t you lot at school?’

  ‘Yes, what are all these kids doing here?’

  ‘When I arrived I could smell blood.’

  ‘Go on, Signor Marangoni.’

  ‘I could smell blood.’

  ‘Yes, she must have lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘I couldn’t smell anything, too much time had passed before we got here in the van.’

  ‘Go on, officer.’

  ‘They’ll tell you all you need to know at Headquarters. I’m here to keep the riff-raff away, I don’t talk to reporters. But you couldn’t smell the blood, that’s just not possible.’

  ‘Well, I smelt it, and I have a good nose. I got off my bike because I needed to pass water, I put the bike down on the ground.’

  ‘Go on, Signor Marangoni.’

  ‘I went to the bushes, the ones over there, and that’s when I saw the foot, well the shoe anyway.’

  ‘Move on now, keep moving, there’s nothing to see, all these people looking at a bit of empty field.’

  ‘At first all I saw was the shoe, I didn’t see the foot inside it, so I reached out my hand.’

  ‘Alberta Radelli, twenty-three years old, shop assistant, found in Metanopoli, near Cascina Luasca, the body was found at 5:30 in the morning by Signor Antonio Marangoni, sky-blue dress, dark hair, not black, round glasses, I’ll go and phone this in, then I’ll come back and pick you up.’

  ‘Then I realised there was a foot inside the shoe and I felt sick, I moved all those weeds and I saw her, it was obvious straight away that she was dead.’

  PART ONE

  Isn’t summing up a man’s life a kind of prayer?

  1

  After three years in prison he had learned to pass the time with whatever was at hand, but for the first ten minutes he smoked a cigarette without thinking of any game to play. It was only when he threw the cigarette end down on the gravel drive that it struck him: the number of little stones in the various drives and garden paths was a finite number. Even the number of grains of sand in all the beaches in the world was a finite number that could be calculated, however large it was, and so, staring down at the ground, he started to count. In five square centimetres there might be an average of eighty stones, so he calculated visually the area of all the drives and paths that led to the villa ahead of him and concluded that all the gravel in all the drives, which seemed infinite, consisted of a mere one million six hundred thousand stones, with a ten per cent margin of error.

  Then, suddenly, there was a crunching sound
on the gravel, and he lifted his head for a moment: a man had emerged from the villa and was coming along the biggest drive towards him. Now that the man had appeared he had time to play a game, so, sitting on that small concrete shelf that functioned as a bench, he leaned forward and picked up a handful of stones. The game consisted of guessing two things: one, if the number of stones was an odd or even number, and two, if that number was higher or lower than a chosen number: twenty, for example. To win you had to guess both things. He estimated that he had an even number of stones in his fist, and a number lower than twenty. He opened his fist and counted: he had won, there were eighteen stones.

  ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, Dr. Lamberti.’ The man had come level with him, and his voice was solemn and tired, the voice of a weary emperor. Leaning forward like that, Duca saw only the man’s legs, thin legs inside narrow trousers: a young man’s trousers, although the man wasn’t young, as he saw as soon as he got up to shake the hand he was holding out. He was a middle-aged man, little but powerful, his hair shaved to almost nothing, his beard shaved down to the root, his hand also little but with a grip of steel.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said to the little emperor. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ In prison he had learned not to say more than he needed to. At his trial, while Signora Maldrigati’s niece was crying over her murdered aunt, but omitting to mention the millions she had inherited from that same aunt, he had wanted to speak, but his defence lawyer, almost with tears in his eyes, had whispered in his ear that he shouldn’t say a word, not one: he would tell the truth, and the truth is death; anything but the truth in a courtroom, at a trial. Or in life.

  ‘It’s very hot in Milan,’ the little man said, and sat down next to him on the concrete bench. ‘Here in the Brianza, on the other hand, it’s always cool. Do you know the Brianza?’

  He couldn’t have called him here to talk about the weather in the Brianza, he was just building up to it. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘as a boy I used to come here by bicycle, Canzo, Asso, the lake.’

  ‘By bicycle,’ the little man said. ‘I used to come here by bicycle, too, when I was young.’

  The conversation seemed to be over. In the dusk, the garden was almost dark, some lights went on in the villa, a bus passed on the main road twenty metres below the villa, its horn sounding almost like a piece by Wagner.

  ‘It’s gone out of fashion these days,’ the little man resumed, ‘they all chase the sun on the French Riviera or the islands, whereas here in the Brianza, only half an hour’s drive from Milan, the air’s as clear as if you were in Tahiti. I think it’s because people always want to go a long way from where they are. A place is never beautiful if it’s too close. My son regards this villa as a kind of punishment cell, whenever I tell him to come here he does it as a penance. Maybe he’s right: it may be cooler, but it’s a bit boring.’ It was almost dark now, the lighted windows in the villa were the only light. In a different voice, the little man said, ‘Were you told why I wanted to see you, Dr. Lamberti?’

  No, Duca said, he hadn’t been told. What he had been told, though, was who this man who seemed so modest, so simple, really was: one of the magnificent five, in other words one of the top five engineers in the field of plastics, Engineer Pietro Auseri, late fifties, a man who could create anything out of anything; a special kind of plastic was named after him, Auserolo, he had three degrees, his fortune must be considerable, but officially he was only a freelance engineer with an old office in an old street in Milan.

  ‘I thought they would have told you,’ the little man said. The tiredness had gone from his voice, only the authority remained, he had clearly said all he had to say on the topics of the weather and tourism.

  ‘All I was told was that you might have a job for me,’ Duca said. It was dark now, more lights came on in the villa, a dim trail of light reached as far as the spot where they were.

  ‘Yes, in a way it’s a job,’ Auseri said. ‘Do you mind if we talk here? My son’s in the house and I don’t want you to see him until after we’ve talked.’

  ‘That’s fine by me.’ He liked this little middle-aged man: he was no fool. Over the past few years, inside prison and out, Duca had seen whole armies of fools and he could almost tell them from the smell, from a finger, from a single hair in their eyebrows.

  ‘You’re a doctor,’ Auseri said.

  He didn’t reply immediately, but a few moments later, and in that darkness, in that silence, it was a long pause. ‘I was. I’m sure you were told.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Auseri said, ‘but you’re still a doctor. And I need a doctor.’

  Duca counted the windows in the villa: there were eight of them, four on the ground floor and four on the first floor. ‘I can’t practice any more. I can’t even give injections—especially not injections. Weren’t you told?’

  ‘I was told everything, but it doesn’t matter.’

  Curious. ‘If you need a doctor,’ Duca said, ‘and choose one who’s been struck off the register and can’t even prescribe an aspirin, then it must matter a bit.’

  ‘No,’ the emperor said, politely but authoritatively. In the darkness he held out the packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘I even spent three years in prison.’ He took a cigarette and Auseri lit it for him. ‘For murder.’

  ‘I know,’ Auseri said, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’

  Then maybe nothing really mattered.

  ‘My son is an alcoholic,’ Auseri said in the darkness, smoking. ‘He’s in that room on the first floor right now, the only lighted window on the first floor. That’s his room. He must have managed to hide a few bottles of whisky from me, and he’s tanking himself up while he’s waiting for us.’

  From his voice, it was obvious that his son didn’t matter all that much to him either.

  ‘He’s twenty-two,’ Auseri said, ‘two metres tall and weighs, I think, ninety kilos. Up until last year he didn’t worry me too much, the only thing that made me a bit sad was that he wasn’t very bright. I couldn’t send him to university, I only managed to get him through his high school exams by bribing his teachers. He’s also very shy and submissive. To be honest, he’s a big lump.’

  In other words, tall and stupid. Auseri’s bitter voice seemed to come from out of nowhere, it somehow just materialised in the dark air.

  ‘I wasn’t too upset that he was like that,’ Auseri said. ‘I don’t care about the joy having a genius as a son may bring. When he was nineteen, I sent him to work for Montecatini. He went through all the offices and departments, so that he could learn; he didn’t learn much, but he kept going. Then last year he started drinking. For the first few months he managed to hide his vice, then he started going in late to work, or not going in at all, then I had to keep him at home because he was going into work with whisky bottles, the flat kind, in his pocket. You are listening, aren’t you?’

  Oh, yes, in prison he had learned to listen; his cellmates all had long stories to tell, lies of course, stories about how they were innocent, how they’d been ruined by women, every one of them was an Abel killed by Cain or an Adam corrupted by Eve. The engineer, though, was telling him something different, something sadder and more meaningful, and he was really listening. ‘Of course,’ he replied.

  ‘I need to explain a lot of things so that you’ll understand,’ Auseri said. In the darkness, his voice did not lose any of its authority, but rather became more stubborn. ‘My son gets drunk three times a day. By lunchtime he’s completely drunk, he doesn’t eat anything and falls asleep. In the afternoon he gets drunk a second time, then sleeps until dinnertime. At dinner he eats, but he begins with the third course, and falls asleep in his chair. That’s what he’s been doing for most of the past year, unless I’ve physically prevented him.’

  For a twenty-two-year-old it was a worrying way of drinking. ‘You must have tried a lot of things to stop him from drinking.’ He couldn’t yet figure out what was wanted of him, but he was making an effort to be polite. �
�Keeping him away from whichever friends of his are making him drink.’

  ‘My son doesn’t have any friends,’ Auseri said. ‘He’s never had any, not even in elementary school. He’s an only child. I was widowed eleven years ago but, busy as I’ve been with my work, I never abandoned him to tutors and governesses. I know him well, he’s never played tennis with anyone, he’s never gone to the swimming pool, to the gym, or to a dance with friends. Since he’s had his car, he’s only used it for drives along the autostrada. The only normal thing about him is that he likes driving fast. One of these days he’ll kill himself, and his alcohol problem will be solved.’

  Duca waited for the bitter emperor to start speaking again. He had to wait a long time.

  ‘I did a lot of things to stop him drinking.’ Auseri was in expository mode now, as if listing the sections of a disastrous balance sheet. ‘The first method was persuasion, talking to him. I’ve never in my life known anybody to be persuaded of anything with words, but I had to try. Psychologists say young people need to be persuaded, not controlled, but my attempts at persuasion were all defeated by the whisky. I talked, and he drank. Then I tried the restrictive method. No money, maximum surveillance, I was with him for almost two weeks, without ever leaving him alone. We were in St. Moritz; we passed the hours looking at the swans on the lake, with our umbrellas in our hands, because it rained all the time, but he managed to drink all the same, he drank at night, because we slept in separate rooms. Somebody working in the hotel must have brought him something to drink without my knowledge, and by the morning he was blind drunk.’

  Every now and again they looked at the only lighted window on the first floor: the drinker’s room, though all you could see was the light, the play of light on the ceiling.

  ‘The third method didn’t give any better results,’ Auseri said. ‘I’m a great believer in corporal punishment. Slaps and punches force a man to think fast about the best way to avoid them. Every time I found my son drunk, I’d hit him, a lot, and hard. My son respects me, and even if he’d tried to rebel I would have crushed him. After that corporal punishment, my son would cry and try to tell me that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t want to drink, but couldn’t stop himself. After a while, I abandoned that method, too.’