A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  The fair-haired girl hesitates, she’s about to say something, and he insists, he’s getting impatient: we’ll go to where this Maurilia Arbati lives, pick her up, and I’ll take her to Headquarters and there we’ll be able to sort this thing out, she posed for the photographs, she’ll know who, how, why. ‘Where does she live?’ he asks curtly.

  The girl gets scared and says, ‘12 Via Nino Bixio,’ as accurately as the manager asked.

  ‘You’re good friends, right?’ Mascaranti asks: to know the address, like that, by heart, they must be good friends. The little fair-haired girl doesn’t reply, but it doesn’t matter, he has another question to ask: ‘Why didn’t Maurilia come up here herself? She’s the one we called for.’

  ‘Maybe she’s off sick,’ the manager says.

  ‘She’s dead,’ the little fair-haired girl says, turning pale, and they make her sit down.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’ Mascaranti wilts: if she’s dead he can’t question her, and if he can’t question her he won’t be able to sort anything out at all.

  ‘She died a year ago,’ the little fair-haired girl says, ‘poor thing, when I heard her name over the loudspeaker just now I felt really bad, after all this time, hearing that they wanted her in the manager’s office as if she was still alive.’

  She had died very simply, she had left her work without saying anything, even to her, and had gone to Rome, probably with someone—a boyfriend, the little fair-haired girl said, modestly—she had wanted to take a swim, maybe she had been taken ill, and the next day they had found her by the Tiber, just outside Rome, washed up on the river bank like an abandoned boat, in her swimming costume, her clothes in the bushes almost a kilometre further down. The little fair-haired girl had found out from Maurilia’s parents when she had phoned them nearly a week later for news of her friend.

  So that was the story and Mascaranti had immediately understood. ‘What’s your name?’ he had asked the little fair-haired girl, he had taken all her particulars, then had gone back to Headquarters and phoned Rome. Maurilia Arbati, death by drowning, found in the Tiber at such and such a spot, at such and such a time, by Signor such and such. From the archive he had even had somebody fetch him the Rome newspapers from that date, and read all the items about her he could find, most of which asked the question: Accident or crime? Did she drown or was she killed? You didn’t need to be a clairvoyant: in four days the two girls who had posed for the photographs on that Minox film had died, the blonde on the first day, the brunette on the fourth. One on the outskirts of Milan, in Metanopoli, the other near Rome, drowned in the Tiber. Both deaths were curiously ambiguous, one a not entirely convincing suicide, the other an accident that aroused everyone’s suspicions.

  Now the ambiguity was over, they had died because they had been killed. With a bit of skill the perpetrators had staged Alberta’s suicide, she even had a letter in her handbag for her sister in which she asked forgiveness for killing herself—had they forced her to write it, or had she written it earlier, really intending to kill herself? And then a kind of accident for the other girl, Maurilia, an unlikely accident: a young Milanese woman who suddenly goes off to Rome to swim in the Tiber and drowns.

  The silent Davide who was getting his voice back even asked a question: ‘But why did they kill one in Milan and one in Rome?’ He was a little naïve.

  Duca, his doctor, explained it to him, patiently: he was the one person he was patient with. ‘Because if in the space of four days, a blonde girl was found drowned here in Milan, in the Lambro, let’s say, and then a brunette with her wrists slashed in Metanopoli, the police might link these two rather mysterious deaths and suspect from the start that there was a connection with something bigger. Whereas this way, the dead girl found drowned in Rome couldn’t possibly have anything to do, at least for the moment, with the dead girl in Metanopoli. The Rome police investigate their drowned girl and the Milan police their suicide, but they don’t find anything because they don’t know there’s any connection. You were the one who uncovered the connection by handing over that film, you were the one who was with Alberta the day before they killed her.’

  ‘So,’ said Davide—some people go from silence to being unable to stop talking—’if I’d handed over that film to the police immediately and told them everything that Alberta had told me, the culprits might have been found immediately.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Duca, his clandestine doctor, said. His patient had every possible guilt complex, not a single one escaped him. ‘Except that you’d have had to know that the thing Alberta left in your car along with her handkerchief was a cartridge and contained exposed film. But you didn’t know that. And your father would have broken your bones one by one as soon as he found out you’d got involved in something like this.’ A little laugh from Carrua who knew his powerful friend, Engineer Pietro Auseri, and a knowing smile from Mascaranti. ‘You’re not guilty of anything. So calm down and pour us some beer.’

  ‘I think we can draw a few conclusions,’ Carrua said. ‘First point: white slave trade. I don’t think there’s any doubt.’

  No, there wasn’t any doubt. Even though he was a doctor and an apostle, he was hungry and finished the few remaining canapés.

  ‘Second point: white slave trade on a large scale. We aren’t dealing with a couple of shabby local pimps who’ve made contact with a couple of shabby pimps from some other country, to exchange a few unfortunate girls. We’re dealing with an organised gang of people who’ll stop at nothing, who are prepared to kill to prevent their activities getting out. I think that, too, is clear.’

  Fairly clear, even though Duca, as an apostle, did not believe in big organisations. There may well be a few rogues here, but good ones, and he already knew where Carrua was going with this. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you want to inform Interpol, that’s perfectly fine. In the end you’ll discover everything, but it’s going to take a long time because you don’t have a lead. These two girls weren’t professionals, they were amateurs, two girls working for themselves, two unfortunate girls, but of good family. Every now and again they went out on the streets, but they had no links to the world of prostitution, they didn’t have pimps. Their parents, their relatives, their friends don’t know anything about their activity, these were girls with jobs and even in the places where they worked everybody talks well of them: serious girls, decent, punctual, in fact they’d have had to have been that way or they’d have been found out after a few weeks. The only lead we have is that film, but we don’t know who the photographer was, he’s vanished into thin air, and the girls who posed for those photographs are dead. Yes, of course, you’ll get these people in the end, but it’s going to take a long time. I can’t wait that long.’

  Another little laugh from Carrua. ‘Really? So how would you suggest we hurry things up?’

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure yet, but I’d like to start with a hypothesis.’

  ‘What hypothesis?’

  ‘That these men have started their work again. They got scared when the film went missing, killed the two girls, then probably laid low for about three or four months. Then, once it was obvious the police believed the brunette had killed herself and the blonde had had an accident, they started moving again. Milan must be very lucrative, you’d start again, too, if you were in their place.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like you associating me with that kind of work,’ Carrua said: being in a hotel, he was trying hard not to shout. ‘But yes, I’d start again.’

  ‘If you start working again,’ Duca went on, ‘even though he was sure Carrua had already understood, ‘you do the same things you did a year ago, the same things that proved to be very lucrative, that is, you go in search of new girls, who are only just entering the circuit, and you make them enter your circuit before the competition gets them. So we can start from that hypothesis: the men we’re interested in are working again, here in Milan, even now, this evening.’

  Carrua was motionless, as if turned to wood,
that was how he was when he concentrated. ‘All right, if we assume they are working again, we set the usual trap. We take a girl, send her out on the streets to do what the girls in the photographs were doing and at some point she’ll be picked up by one of these men, and once we’ve caught one, we’ll catch them all. It’s worth a try. What do we have to lose?’

  It might not work out like that. ‘The girl could lose a lot. Who do you have in mind?’

  ‘Mascaranti has a personal archive of women who could do it.’

  ‘Think about it, Superintendent Carrua, you can’t use a professional. These people are looking for fresh fruit, just plucked from the branch. You can’t deceive them with a whore disguised as a semi-virgin. And I’m sorry if I said whore.’

  ‘It’s all right, don’t get angry.’

  ‘But I also have fresh fruit, just off the branch,’ Mascaranti said, the phrase had the syntactic tone of a salesman offering the best merchandise.

  ‘Mascaranti, you didn’t have to say it,’ Duca said, irritably but patiently: a doctor always knows how to keep his self-control. ‘I know you have your informants even in good families, you even have them in clinics, among nurses, to keep an eye on the use of morphine and other pleasures, but try to understand the work that this fresh fruit of yours would have to do: let herself be approached by a whole lot of men before finding the one we’re looking for, if she finds him. A girl who may be a virgin, who may have a boyfriend, won’t do this work for you just to please the police.’

  Silence. Then Carrua said, ‘It seems to be raining,’ he stood up and went to the window and saw the neon signs in the Piazza Cavour reflected in the wet street. ‘Maybe you have the girl we need,’ he said without turning; he realised that it was raining softly, gently, summer rain without a storm.

  ‘Yes, if I were a criminal I would have one,’ Duca said, also standing up. ‘Maybe I am a criminal.’ He went and sat down on the bed, picked up the phone and asked the switchboard for a number. ‘Is it really raining?’ he asked stupidly. The other two had also stood up, they suddenly seemed extremely interested in the rain, and they turned their backs on him and started looking out of the other window.

  ‘Livia, please.’ A man’s voice had answered, a middle-aged man, he thought.

  ‘Do you want to speak to Signorina Livia Ussaro?’ the man said, stubbornly.

  ‘Yes, signore, please.’ It must be her father.

  ‘Could you please tell me who’s calling?’ The fellow clearly believed in the formalities, phone calls from men must annoy him.

  ‘Duca Lamberti.’

  ‘Luca Lamberti?’

  ‘No, Duca, D for Domodossola,’ he was starting to get annoyed, too. He heard Livia’s voice in the background: ‘It’s all right, dad,’ then in the foreground, warm, with nothing at all frigid in it: ‘I’m sorry, that was my dad.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too.’ How polite they both were. But was it really raining? ‘I need to see you, immediately. Is that possible?’

  ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for you to call.’

  He wasn’t being very honest, he was virtually pimping. ‘I’ll come and pick you up in ten minutes. OK?’

  ‘Fine. I’ll wait out front.’

  He put the phone down and looked at the three men standing in the middle of the room. Was it really raining? Then he’d be able to take her to the Torre Branca, Milan’s touching answer to the Eiffel Tower: in this weather there wouldn’t be anybody there. He stood up. ‘I should be able to tell you something tomorrow,’ he said to Carrua.

  ‘No, I’ll tell you now,’ Carrua said, as if letting fly at him. ‘You’re not to do anything. Drop it now, don’t get mixed up in our work any more. I absolutely forbid it.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, almost respectfully: he was from Emilia Romagna, he knew how to keep a cool head.

  ‘Two girls have already been killed,’ Carrua said: he was from Sardinia, red-blooded and calculating.

  ‘I know that. I know it perfectly well.’

  ‘You’re a private citizen, not a policeman. A third woman’s corpse is not in your remit. I caution you against taking any further interest in this case.’

  ‘All right,’ Duca said, already by the door. He had been cautioned, seriously cautioned, Carrua was not joking. ‘Good night.’

  ‘Duca, be careful.’

  He went out without answering. They were right, but they didn’t understand, they had to follow the law, and the law is strange sometimes, it favours criminals and ties honest men’s hands.

  It really was raining, and in less than ten minutes he had already picked up Livia from outside her building, and in less than twenty, with the Giulietta, they got to the Torre Branca, and in another three minutes they were in the round bar of the Torre, more than a hundred metres above the Po Valley and in particular over the complex of Sant’Ambrogio. It was raining harder than ever, the summer drizzle was turning into a storm, and through the windows, as if from a plane, they saw the sky turn bright with streaks of lightning. The portable radio which the barman had kept on was like a pan full of chestnuts exploding. An unused film set, perfect for the dirty business he had to talk to her about.

  ‘Is it about Alberta that you wanted to see me again?’ Livia asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She was wearing a dress with white flowers on a black background, large flowers, rather in the same style as the dress she had worn the other time, a small black straw handbag, her lips and nails painted pale orange, a large wristwatch, a man’s watch, almost out of place with such a feminine dress. Particular signs: the way in which she looked at him, he wasn’t being honest with her.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  He told her everything, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, hoping she would then say no.

  She didn’t say either yes or no, instead she launched into what sounded as if it was going to be a long speech. He had to let her carry on, it was the only satisfaction he could give her, he had nothing to offer her but blood and tears, like Churchill.

  ‘I haven’t done any other experiments like that since Alberta died,’ his Livia Ussaro said, while the thunder roared ever louder in the background. ‘Her death was the ultimate evidence that private prostitution is impossible. I wrote in my notes that a woman is a piece of merchandise that’s too much in demand, she represents a financial and social element that’s too large for a whole structure of interests not to be created around her.’

  Old ideas, but correct ones. Little Miss General Topics wasn’t expounding any revolutionary theories, just presenting the facts.

  ‘It isn’t possible for a woman, especially nowadays, for her own reasons and of her own free will, to carry out such activities privately. Everything is structured to take a percentage from her, to “protect” her, to “organise” her. Two years ago, during my first experiments, a corset maker insisted on giving me some suspenders, she’d already understood and I pretended to accept, then she told me that she knew a gentleman who’d be able to offer me much bigger gifts. A parking warden had seen me get out of the car of one of these men and had also understood. He said, “Listen, you don’t have to make so much effort looking for something, and besides, it isn’t good to go around the streets by yourself. Let me handle it for you. There are lots of foreigners who ask me what they can do. You stay at home, and when there’s something I’ll phone you, isn’t that better?” Of course, it would have been much better, but apart from the fact that he wanted half, it would have become a professional activity, whereas I wanted to see if it was possible to remain an amateur. It isn’t possible. I got very scared once, and I don’t scare easily. Without realising it, I’d stopped for a moment in the Via Visconti di Modrone. It was afternoon, I didn’t know it was an allotted area, at least in the evening, I was careful never to go where the professionals were, but that time I made a mistake. Suddenly a man got off a moped, it couldn’t have been any clearer who he was if he’d worn a sign around his neck with the word pimp on it. What he said, more or le
ss, was this: “Don’t think you can do as you like. Tell me who your friend is and I’ll smash his face in.” He wouldn’t believe I didn’t have a friend. “I see,” he said, “your friend doesn’t want you any more, that means you’re free, if you want to come over to me, I’ll be your friend.” He wanted to force me to be part of his stable, but there were too many people about and I managed to get away. But I was really scared.’

  Livia was obviously completely mad, and he really would be a criminal to take advantage of such lucid madness. But maybe she would say no. In the meantime the lightning was dancing around them, the barman interrupted them to say that he was scared of storms and would never again agree to work in a place like this.

  ‘Basically these days there’s only one form of semi-prostitution without pimping. They could be nice girls who have an elderly friend, some even have two, plus a boyfriend, if they have one. Or they could be women separated from their husbands who have to be helped by someone, and if this someone is of modest means, he helps them for a while, a few months, then they have to look for another. Some of these nice ladies have sewing machines at home, and they sew for their neighbours, their acquaintances, a few distant relatives. Every now and again someone comes to see them. “How are you, signora?” “Oh so-so,” it may be a neighbour from where they lived before, or the pharmacist who gives them credit. “Don’t be offended, signora, I brought you something.” “Oh, you shouldn’t have, I can’t accept that.” “It’s only a handbag, it isn’t a diamond ring.” ’

  How well she imitated the voices, was this tower really solid? Go on talking, my darling, and then say no.

  ‘In my opinion, that kind of prostitution is odious, because it’s hypocritical. I’d never do anything like that.’ She was talking, oh, yes.

  She liked things to be clear and above board: really mad people didn’t like shades of grey, compromises. Maybe the tower was very solid, but in any case the storm suddenly abated, the lightning stopped, the rain and thunder faded.