The Anonymous Venetian

294 Pages·1995·0.91 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 the heel on the first
shoe, taller than the pack of cigarettes in his pocket: only a whore would wear
such things. He reached down and picked up the first shoe, careful to keep from
touching the outside. As he had hoped, it was clean, had not fallen into the oily
puddle. He took a few steps to the right, reached down and wrapped two fingers
around the heel of its mate, but it appeared to be caught on a tuft of grass. He
lowered himself to one knee, careful to see where he knelt, and gave the shoe a
sharp tug. It came loose, but when Bettino Cola saw that what he had pulled it
loose from was a human foot, he leaped back from the bush and dropped the first
shoe into the black puddle from which it had survived the night.
Chapter Two
The police arrived on the scene twenty minutes later, two blue and white sedans
from the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. By then, the field at the back of the
slaughterhouse was filled with men from inside the building, brought out into the
sun by curiosity about this different kind of slaughter. Cola had run drunkenly
back inside as soon as he saw the foot and the leg to which it was attached and
gone into the foreman’s office to tell him there was a dead woman in the field
beyond the fence.
Cola was a good worker, a serious man, and so the foreman believed him
and called the police immediately without going outside himself to check and
see that Cola was telling the truth. But others had seen Cola come into the
building and came to ask what it was, what had he seen? The foreman snarled at
them to get back to work: the refrigerated trucks were waiting at the loading
docks, and they didn’t have time to stand around all day and gabble about some
whore who got her throat cut.
He didn’t mean this literally, of course, for Cola had told him only about
the shoe and the foot, but the fields between the factories were well-known
territory to the men who worked in the factories - and to the women who worked
in those fields. If she’d got herself killed there, then she was probably one of
those painted wrecks who spent the late afternoon standing at the side of the road
that led from the industrial zone back into Mestre. Quitting time, time to go
home, but why not a quick stop at the side of the road and a short walk back to a
blanket spread beside a clump of grass? It was quick, they expected nothing of
you except ten thousand lire, and they were, more and more often now, blondes
come in from Eastern Europe, so poor that they couldn’t make you use anything,
not like the Italian girls on Via Cappuccina, and since when did a whore tell a
man what to do or where to put it? She probably did that, got pushy, and the man
had pushed back. Plenty more of them and plenty more coming across the border
every month.
The police cars pulled up and a uniformed officer got out of each. They
walked towards the front of the building, but the foreman reached them before
they got to the door. Behind him stood Cola, feeling important to be the centre of
all this attention, but still faintly sick from the sight of that foot.
‘Is it you who called?’ the first policeman asked. His face was round,
glistening with sweat, and he stared at the foreman from behind dark glasses.
‘Yes,’ the foreman answered. ‘There’s a dead woman in the field behind the
building.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No,’ the foreman answered, stepping aside and motioning Cola to step
forward. ‘He did.’
After a nod from the first one, the policeman from the second car pulled a
blue notebook out of his jacket pocket, flipped it open, uncapped his pen, and
stood with the pen poised over the page.
‘Your name?’ asked the first policeman, the dark focus of his glance now
directed at the butcher.
‘Cola, Bettino.’
‘Address?’
‘What’s the use of asking his address?’ interrupted the foreman. ‘There’s a
dead woman out there.’
The first officer turned away from Cola and tilted his head down a little,
just enough to allow him to peer at the foreman over the tops of his sun-glasses.
‘She’s not going anywhere.’ Then, turning back to Cola, he repeated, ‘Address?’
‘Castello 3453.’
‘How long have you worked here?’ he asked, nodding at the building that
stood behind Cola.
‘Fifteen years.’
‘What time did you get here this morning?’
‘Seven-thirty. Same as always.’
‘What were you doing in the field?’ Somehow, the way he asked the
questions and the way the other one wrote down the answers made Cola feel
they suspected him of something.
‘I went out to have a cigarette.’
‘The middle of August, and you went out into the sun to have a cigarette?’
the first officer asked, making it sound like lunacy. Or a lie.
‘It was my break time,’ Cola said with mounting resentment. ‘I always go
outside. I like to get away from the smell.’ The word made it real to the
policemen, and they looked towards the building, the one with the notebook
incapable of disguising the contraction of his nostrils at what they met.
‘Where is she?’
‘Just beyond the fence. She’s under a clump of bushes, so I didn’t see her at
first.’
‘Why did you go near her?’
‘I saw a shoe.’
‘You what?’
‘I saw a shoe. Out in the field, and then I saw the second one. I thought they
might be good, so I went through the fence to get them. I thought maybe my
wife would want them.’ That was a lie: he had thought he could sell them, but he
didn’t want to tell this to the police. It was a small lie, and entirely innocent, but
it was only the first of many lies that the police were going to be told about the