A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  ‘You play chess?’ The man had switched off the floodlights at the far end and had come towards them, fiddling with his little photographic cigarette lighter.

  ‘I was the best in my school.’

  He finally managed to take that little object out of the cigarette lighter—it was almost like a little telephone receiver for a doll, two small spools joined on one side by a strip of metal—and put it down next to the chessboard together with the camera. Something spiritual went through him, or rather through his hands, they started dancing over the chessboard with an airy lightness. ‘So maybe you’ve understood where the trick is. There are two white pawns on the seventh rank ready to move forward, but the attacking move can’t be from these pawns, I think the white king has to move to a square where he can escape being constantly checked by the black rook.’

  She had already worked out the same move, but it revolted her to tell that to this disgusting individual. She hadn’t seen a chessboard for about ten years: it took her back to her days at boarding school, the nuns’ habits rustling as they walked through the dormitories, the cold winter mornings in the frozen church, the mass that seemed endless, torn as she was between her lingering sleepiness and her growing hunger, and the recreation period in the hall on rainy days, with competitions for reading, sewing, draughts, chess, because they must have been sporting nuns with a strong competitive spirit. And because of that memory, the only decent thing in this indecent place was that abstract, geometric object with those symbolic wooden pieces. ‘No, I think the first move should actually be the advancement of a white pawn,’ she said, but not to him, it was as if she was talking to one of her classmates at school, a long way from this place and this time and this Maurilia who was laboriously, clumsily clothing her sexuality again, stumbling over the hooks of her bra which she seemed unable to do up.

  ‘But then the black rook will capture the advanced pawn and the white king will be in check,’ he said. For a moment there was a very different thought in the way he looked at her: ‘I didn’t know whores were so good at chess.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. She could still hear the rain pouring in the beautiful, or maybe not so beautiful but at least quiet, recreation hall on those long-gone days, and she was sad that she couldn’t remember the classmates she’d played chess with, their faces, their voices, anything. ‘Because the white bishop—’

  ‘The white bishop can’t avoid capture by the rook,’ he interrupted her, passionately, and there was something disgusting even in that intellectual passion.

  ‘I didn’t mean that the bishop could avoid capture by the rook,’ she replied curtly. ‘I meant that the bishop goes here, to f8 and allows the pawn on g7 to go forward, free from the rook’s attack.’ Unfortunately, Maurilia, having finally arranged her bra, had approached her, and was almost leaning on her now, her warm damp body still anxious for proximity, protection, assurance that she had not been forgotten, and the soft noise of the rain coming from the garden of the school faded immediately in Alberta. She looked at that hungry, demanding human being in a significant way.

  ‘Oh, yes, the money,’ he said without smiling, ‘I’ll be right back, then I’ll see if your theory about the bishop works, I think it might.’

  He went into the next room, and Alberta, with an instinctive gesture, took that little object composed of two round wheels. She had understood clearly what it was and what it contained: the film with the repugnant photographs of two unfortunate naked women, and one of the two unfortunate women was her, perhaps more than Maurilia, who at least didn’t really know, and would never really know, what was happening to her.

  ‘There, thirty for you,’ the young man said, coming back from the other room, his eyes still a little distant, in the world of that chess problem, and in his hand were two envelopes, the promised reward had been put gallantly into envelopes, and he gave one envelope to her and the other to Maurilia, ‘and thirty for you.’ At the door, before they went out, he said to her, ‘If the bishop’s move is right, then you’re really good, I’d been thinking about it all morning and hadn’t found it.’ He closed the door behind them impatiently, came back into the room, lit a cigarette and stared at the chessboard. So, first move e7 pawn to e8, which promotes to a queen. But the black rook immediately captures the queen. At this point the bishop enters the scene, in other words a3 to f8, he moved the bishop to f8 and immediately saw that it worked like that: the rook had the white king in check … No, he couldn’t, because after the third check he had to give himself up to the bishop, and no other move black made, with any piece, could stop the second white pawn from advancing, and white winning the game. Exactly as the girl had said. Pleased, but a little irritated that a girl like that should know more about chess than he did, he picked up the Minox from its place next to the chessboard and looked for the cartridge, but it wasn’t there, not even among the other chess pieces. He didn’t look hard, he was quite intelligent, and he’d already figured it out. He couldn’t run after the girls, it had been about ten minutes, he’d been ensnared by the chessboard, that filthy brunette had done it by luring him with the chess pieces.

  Despite the heat, he never sweated, but at that moment he started to sweat. Slowly he put the chess pieces back in their box, thinking, if his anxiety could be called thinking, put the magazine on the chessboard and the box with the pieces on the magazine, tidily, but his disgusting hands were shaking, then he made up his mind and went to the phone hanging on the wall next to the door.

  Which was why, when Alberta got out of the taxi in front of her building, after having seen Maurilia home, she saw a young man waiting, who was very well-dressed in a light Prince of Wales check suit, and a faded yellow tie, his hair was thick but very tidy and he had a kind smile. He looked a little short-sighted.

  ‘Excuse me, signorina.’

  Here in the Viale Montenero, at a quarter past one in the afternoon, everyone was at lunch, at least those few people who had stayed in Milan. There was literally nobody in the street, almost as if they had never existed or couldn’t exist in that heat. Every now and again a car passed, and in about ten minutes a tram might pass along the ring road. She stopped, calmly aggressive, because it had never occurred to her to take liberties in the area where she lived, and she stopped partly because the young man was barring her way, not only with his body, but also with his myopic but feral look, which was in marked contrast to his polite smile.

  ‘I’m sorry, signorina, but I think you have a roll of film in your handbag, a roll of film you took half an hour ago from a photographer’s studio. Do you mind giving it back to me?’ and he even held out his hand in ironic trustfulness. His face, which seemed fat even though it wasn’t, it was the powerful slab-like jaws that gave that impression of fat, turned nasty only for a moment, just to show her that she should be afraid.

  As in fact she was afraid, but didn’t show it, nobody could force her to yield, even a single abrupt word provoked a cold, irrepressible rebelliousness in her.

  ‘I don’t know you, I haven’t taken anything, I don’t know what you’re talking about, leave me alone or I’ll start screaming.’

  ‘Go ahead and scream,’ he said, very calmly, taking her hand and trying to push her. ‘While you’re screaming let’s get in this car, it’ll be easier to talk there.’

  A car passed, she did not scream, but resisted the push. ‘I really am going to scream.’

  ‘Maybe you are. And maybe we’ll both end up in a police station. I wouldn’t like that to happen, and I don’t think you would either. On the other hand, if you give me that roll of film, I’ll leave immediately and you’ll avoid lots of things. Apart from the police, you’ll avoid vitriol being thrown in your face.’ He tried again to push her towards the Mercedes 230 parked a dozen metres further along the street, but Alberta suddenly escaped from him with a jerk that was unexpectedly strong in a woman and ran into the dark, hot entrance hall of her building, ran up the stairs, first floor, second, third, looked over
the banisters, no, the man wasn’t following her, she would have time to open the door to her apartment, her sister was at the phone company, she didn’t come home for lunch. She managed to open it, went in, closed the door, and all at once felt ashamed: she felt contempt for her own fear when the man had grabbed her arm.

  She went into the living room and looked out of the window at the street, through the blinds incrusted with year-old dust. There was nobody there and nobody was passing, even the Mercedes 230 had gone.

  She wouldn’t give in, never. Livia was right, she didn’t want to descend into that cesspit, she would go to the police, hand over the film, and tell them everything, the middle-aged man in the Flaminia, he had even said he would get her a job as a shop assistant in Hamburg, but what kind of shop assistant? It was so easy to understand, but the nausea was too much: enough now.

  She looked in the kitchen for something to eat, then stretched out on one of the two little beds with the bears and dogs and butterflies on the headboard, and even managed to fall asleep, then woke up, in the silence, in the stifling heat of mid-afternoon, and after she had been awake a few seconds, just like that, in the silence, the telephone rang.

  Maybe it was Livia, she needed Livia, she had to tell her everything. She got up and went to the phone.

  ‘Alberta, Alberta.’

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’ It was Maurilia. The most scared voice she had ever heard, the voice of terror.

  ‘It’s Maurilia, Alberta, it’s Maurilia.’

  ‘I hear you, what is it? Where are you?’ She was not afraid yet, or rather, she didn’t want to be afraid.

  ‘It’s Maurilia, Alberta, it’s Maurilia.’

  ‘What’s happening? What’s wrong?’

  A man’s voice replied, and she recognised it even though she had heard it only once and it had only said a few words.

  ‘I think you recognised your friend Maurilia’s voice.’ His tone was even more threatening than before.

  She didn’t reply, but he went on, knowing that she had heard him perfectly well. ‘You just have to take that roll of film back to the studio where you were this morning. Right now, because the photographer is waiting for it. You wouldn’t want anything unpleasant to happen to your friend Maurilia. Don’t pretend you don’t understand, that’ll only make it worse for you and your friend.’

  She did not reply, she was about to shout out that she would go there, immediately, but with the police, only she couldn’t, because they had hung up at the other end. That was when she understood what was happening.

  4

  Everything was going wrong, the only thing that worked was the air conditioning in those two rooms in the Hotel Cavour, cool without being damp and without smelling odd; everything was going badly wrong in a way that the confident, efficient Milanese who passed, sweating, along the Via Fatebenefratelli or through the Piazza Cavour couldn’t begin to imagine, even though they read stories like this every day in the Corriere. For them, these stories belonged to a fourth dimension, devised by an Einstein of crime, who was even more incomprehensible than the Einstein of physics. What was real, for those people in the street, was going to the tobacconist to buy filter cigarettes, so that they didn’t feel so bad about smoking, and every now and again thinking about the next morning, the office, the work that had to be finished before the boss summoned them, or looking for a moment at those two girls standing alone waiting for the tram, with their low-cut tops. These were the natural dimensions of life, the rest they only read about and were as evanescent as things you only read about, he stabbed his wife 27 times, or else, housewife with five children involved in vast drug ring, or else gunfight between rival gangs in Viale Monza, all this was only reading, quite stimulating, but then they went back home and found the gas bill waiting to be paid. No, down there on the street, they couldn’t imagine how bad things were, even though up here they seemed like four carving forks with all those plates on the table filled with canapés, rolls, breadsticks with the tips covered in sweet ham from San Daniele, vases of butter in ice, rounds of pâté and bottles of beer in small silver buckets.

  The only one wearing a jacket was Davide, and maybe he was the only other thing that was working apart from the air conditioning: suddenly in his life he had encountered beer, it had been an abrupt, passionate encounter, which greatly accelerated the detoxifying therapy, beer might be fattening, but someone like Davide would need a whole barrel of it before he got fat. As his alcohol intake decreased, Davide was slowly regaining the power of speech and a kind of masculine energy. Just then, he said, with a glass coaster in his hand, ‘Doesn’t anybody want the pâté?’ and offered it around.

  Mascaranti shook his head, and so did Carrua, because he was there, too, also without a jacket, chewing rather than smoking his cigarette. And Duca also shook his head, and looked tenderly at Davide as he spread pâté on a small slice of bread. Ten more days, more or less, and his patient would be able to live happily on mineral water and milk.

  ‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ Carrua said, putting the cigarette down in the saucer of his filter coffee. ‘With the photographer.’

  Mascaranti still had his little notebook in his hand. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘There was nothing left at 78 Via Farini the day before Alberta Radelli’s death, it was all above board. The two rooms had been rented by a German more than a year earlier, but the landlord and caretaker of the building had seen this German only a couple of times, the only person working in the studio was a young man, a friend of the German, who told the caretaker his name was Caserli, or Caselli, but he’s not sure, because he didn’t see him often. Both the young man and the other man vanished into thin air a year ago.’

  ‘We should be able to track down the German,’ Carrua said, ‘you can’t rent premises without giving your particulars.’

  ‘Of course he gave them, here they are,’ and Mascaranti read, with a vague southern accent, a series of syllables coming from thousands of years back in the Black Forest, which his accent made a little genteel. ‘It’s an invented name and address, at least the police in Bonn, where this guy was supposed to be living, say there’s no name like it either in the official register of the city or in their own records.’

  All that effort on the part of Mascaranti to find the studio, knowing nothing but the number, 78, and then when he had found it, there hadn’t been anybody or anything there for a year, nor had any trace been left behind.

  ‘One thing is clear,’ Duca said, mainly to Carrua, but also to Mascaranti, ‘to have rented those rooms using a false name, and then to have unfurnished it so quickly in the days after Alberta Radelli’s death, they must have considered the work they were doing there very important, and if the work consisted of taking photographs of naked women the caretaker must have seen girls going in and out.’

  ‘Yes, I questioned the caretaker’s wife, too,’ Mascaranti said. ‘Girls did pass through every now and again, but not very often, and she even told me what they were doing, she and her husband had gone a couple of times to see, the young man had invited them up. They were photographing little model cars, trucks, harvesters, she told me, and sometimes the girls were there as background, they use women to advertise all kinds of things these days.’

  A cover: industrial photos meaning nude photos. It had stood up very well, for more than a year, under the eyes of the police, and it had stood up even after they disappeared, so that Mascaranti had spent all evening seething with anger.

  ‘Now let’s talk about the other girl,’ Carrua said.

  The police often succeed through repetition, by repeating that two plus two equals four in the end you discover something more, but there wasn’t anything more to be discovered about Maurilia.

  ‘Maurilia Arbati,’ Mascaranti read in the notebook, ‘twenty-seven years old, worked at La Rinascente, in the department selling fabrics, towels, that kind of thing.’

  Twenty-seven: in the Minox photos she didn’t look it, she had reached the age of twenty-seven
as a nice, hard-working girl, the personnel department at the store had never had to reprimand her, and suddenly at that relatively advanced age, she enters the dark world of adventure.

  So Mascaranti goes to La Rinascente and gets to talk to the right manager.

  ‘Impossible, do you know how many girls there are here?’ the manager says. ‘How are we going to find her knowing only that her first name is Maurilia?’

  ‘With that,’ Mascaranti says, pointing to the telephone that connects to the store’s loudspeakers. ‘You put out this message, for example: Signorina Maurilia is asked to report to the manager’s office immediately. Or even better: Signorina Maurilia, or any of her workmates who knows her, is asked to report to the manager’s office immediately.’

  The manager calls a female clerk, she comes in, writes down the message and puts it out, once, twice, three times in succession, then waits three minutes and puts it out again, to all floors, to every corner of the store, through dozens of loudspeakers, so that it’s heard by all the people buying feeding bottles, Marie Therese chandeliers, flippers, ties for daddy, they hear the call, soft, not loud, but clear, the name Maurilia perfectly pronounced. As the clerk is just about to put the message out for the third time, the secretary admits a very short fair-haired girl, she doesn’t look much more than a child, although there are a number of things to indicate that she isn’t.

  ‘Maurilia?’ Mascaranti asks.

  ‘No, I’m a friend of hers.’

  ‘This gentleman is from the police,’ the manager says sternly. ‘Try to answer his questions as accurately as you can.’

  ‘What’s Maurilia’s surname?’ Mascaranti asks.

  ‘Arbati,’ the fair-haired girl says.

  Triumphantly, Mascaranti writes the name in the little notebook, in three minutes he’s tracked down the blonde from the photograph, he’s home and dry. ‘Where does she live?’