Anonymous Venetian

338 Pages·2016·1.94 MB·English

by  Leon Donna

Anonymous Venetian

[Commissario Brunetti 03]
By Dona Leon

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
Ah forse adesso
Sul morir mio delusa
Priva d’ogni speranza, e di consiglio Lagrime di dolor
versa dal ciglio.

Ah, perhaps already
Deceived by my death
Deprived of every hope and counsel Tears of pain flow
from her eyes.

Mozart,Lucio Silla
Chapter One

The shoe was red, the red of London phone booths, New York
fire engines, although these were not images that came to the
man who first saw the shoe. He thought of the red of the
Ferrari Testarossa on the calendar in the butchers’ showers,
the one with the naked blonde draped across it, seeming to
make fevered love to the left headlight. He saw the shoe lying
drunkenly on its side, its toe barely touching the edge of one of
the pools of oil that lay like a spotted curse upon the land
beyond the abattoir. He saw it there and, of course, he also
thought of blood.

Somehow, years before, permission had been given to put
the slaughterhouse there, long before Marghera had
blossomed, though that is perhaps an inopportune choice of
verb, into one of the leading industrial centres of Italy, before
the petroleum refineries and the chemical plants had spread
themselves across the acres of swampy land that lay on the
other side of the laguna from Venice, pearl of the Adriatic. The
cement building lay, low and feral, within the enclosure of a
high mesh fence. Had the fence been built in the early days,
when sheep and cattle could still be herded down dusty roads
towards the building? Was its original purpose to keep them
from escaping before they were led, pushed, beaten up the
ramp towards their fate? The animals arrived in trucks now,
trucks which backed directly to the high-sided ramps, and so
there was no chance that they could escape. And surely no one
would want to come near that building; hence the fence was
hardly necessary to keep them away. Perhaps because of this,
the long gaps in it went unmended, and stray dogs, drawn by
the stench of what went on inside, sometimes came through
the fence at night and howled with longing for what they knew
was there.
The fields around the slaughterhouse stood empty; as if
obeying a taboo as deep as blood itself, the factories stood far
off from the low cement building. The buildings maintained
their distance, but their ooze and their runoff and those deadly
fluids that were piped into the ground knew nothing of taboo
and seeped each year closer to the slaughterhouse. Black slime
bubbled up around the stems of marsh grass, and a peacock-
bright sheen of oil floated on the surface of the puddles that
never disappeared, however dry the season. Nature had been
poisoned here, outside, yet it was the work that went on inside
that filled people with horror.

The shoe, the red shoe, lay on its side about a hundred
metres to the rear of the slaughterhouse, just outside the
fence, just to the left of a large clump of tall seagrass that
seemed to thrive on the poisons that percolated around its
roots. At eleven-thirty on a hot Monday morning in August, a
thickset man in a blood-soaked leather apron flung back the
metal door at the rear of the slaughterhouse and emerged into
the pounding sun. From behind him swept waves of heat,
stench, and howls. The sun made it difficult to feel that it was
cooler here, but at least the stench of offal was less foul, and
the sounds came from the hum of traffic, a kilometre away, as
the tourists poured into Venice for Ferragosto, not from the
shrieks and squeals that filled the air behind him.

He wiped a bloody hand on his apron, stooping to find a
dry spot down by the hem, then reached into his shirt pocket
and pulled out a package of Nazionale. With a plastic lighter,
he lit the cigarette and pulled at it greedily, glad of the smell
and acrid taste of the cheap tobacco. A deep-throated howl
came from the door behind him, pushing him away from the
building, over towards the fence and the shade that was to be
found under the stunted leaves of an acacia that had managed
to grow to a height of four metres.
Standing there, he turned his back on the building and
looked out across the forest of smokestacks and industrial
chimneys that swept off towards Mestre. Flames spurted up
from some of them; grey, greenish clouds spilled out of others.
A light breeze, too weak to be felt on his skin, brought the
clouds back towards him. He pulled at his cigarette and looked
down at his feet, always careful, here in the fields, where he
stepped. He looked down and saw the shoe, lying on its side
beyond the fence.

It was made out of some sort of cloth, that shoe, not out of
leather. Silk? Satin? Bettino Cola didn’t know that sort of thing,
but he did know that his wife had a pair made out of the same
sort of stuff, and she had spent more than a hundred thousand
lire on them. He’d have to kill fifty sheep or twenty calves to
earn that much money, yet she’d spend it on a pair of shoes,
wear them once, then stuff them in the back of the closet and
never look at them again.

Nothing else in the blasted landscape deserved his
attention, so he studied the shoe, pulling at his cigarette. He
moved to the left and looked at it from another angle. Though it
lay close to a large pool of oil, it appeared to rest on a patch of
dry land. Cola took another step to the left, one that drew him
out into the full violence of the sun, and studied the area
around the shoe, looking for its mate. There, under the clump
of grass, he saw an oblong shape that seemed to be the sole of
the other one, it too lying on one side.

He dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the soft earth
with his toe, walked down the fence a few metres, then bent
low and crept through a large hole, careful of the jagged, rusty
barbs of metal that encircled him. Straightening up, he walked
back towards the shoe, now a pair of them and perhaps
salvageable because of that.

‘Roba di puttana ,’ he muttered under his breath, seeing