‘Who are you?’ stammered the young man, even though he had immediately recognised his visitors. ‘What are you doing in my house?’ The spinet fell silent.
‘It’s over, Labia. The time for reckoning has come.’ Pisani’s voice left no doubt about the nature of their visit.
‘I . . . What reckoning? But, Avogadore Pisani, do you know who I am?’ Paolo’s face under the layers of paint was ashen.
‘Dismiss your . . . friends.’ Pisani had instinctively used the familiar form of address, as he would when addressing criminals.
At the wave of a hand, the young men, heads down, filed out of the room through a side door, their coloured skirts sweeping the floor. ‘Call me if you need me, master,’ the youngest one, dressed in the body stocking, said quietly. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
Labia walked over to a window, furtively cleaning his face with a napkin dipped in water. He put on a jacket of pink wool. ‘What’s wrong, Avogadore Pisani?’ Labia confronted Marco. ‘Since when has a gentleman not been allowed to enjoy the pleasures of villeggiatura in his own house?’
‘Villeggiatura in late December? Doesn’t it strike you as a little out of season? And from what I’ve seen,’ he continued, ‘two crimes are being committed here: dressing in feminine clothing, which is proof of sodomy under Venetian law, and, far worse, the corruption of minors. That boy in the body stocking is still an adolescent.’
Paolo Labia drew himself up to his full height, throwing out his hollow chest and standing arrogantly in front of Pisani, spindly legs well apart.
‘Take care how you talk to a Labia, Avogadore. My family is rich and powerful, like your own. What do you think you can do to me? Your accusations need to be proved!’
At this, Marco lost his temper. He seized the corner of the tablecloth on the nearest table and pulled it sharply, sending plates, glasses and bottles flying before they shattered on the floor. ‘You dare to talk to me about families? Disgusting murderer! I’m not here about your miserable vices, I’m here to make you confess to your crimes!’ The worried face of a young boy peeked around a door, but he withdrew as soon as he caught Marco’s eye.
Daniele intervened. ‘Sit down, Labia. We need to question you about a murder that happened eighteen months ago.’
Paolo looked agitated: it was what he had feared from the moment he’d seen them.
‘You will tell us everything you saw and took part in, and the chancellor here will record your statement, which you will then sign. Once that is done, you will come with us to Venice.’
Labia reluctantly obeyed and the others also sat down around the table. Cingoli set out the bound volume used to record statements and his pens and inkwell. Marco looked around for a few clean glasses and a new carafe of wine, which he poured out for his companions. Then, feeling a little calmer, he started the interrogation.
‘Paolo Labia, we are informed that on the evening of 23 May 1751, together with your friends Piero Corner, Marino Barbaro and Biagio Domenici, you took part in the kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl, Marianna Biondini, whose body you then disposed of. You shall answer these charges before the law.’
‘I? What are you talking about? Who is this Biondini girl? I didn’t do anything,’ Labia began in an attempt to defend himself.
‘That’s enough, Labia!’ Pisani’s fist hammered the table, shaking it. ‘We already know everything! The girl’s friend told us. She was present when Marianna was abducted and she can identify you. Lucrezia Scalfi has also confessed to overhearing you all talking at her house after you had committed the murder.’
‘That whore . . .’ muttered Labia. ‘Well then,’ he continued, with a renewed spark of arrogance, ‘if you magistrates already know everything, why have you come to trouble me?’
Marco stood up abruptly, seized Labia by the lapel and slapped him across the face with such force that he fell to the floor, knocking over the chair, which broke into pieces. Daniele rushed to pick him up and, while the latter wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, shot a disapproving glance at Marco.
‘Nicely done,’ complained Labia, replacing his wig. ‘You’re three against one . . .’ Then he looked furtively at Pisani and said, ‘You wouldn’t have done that if you’d interrogated me in Venice with my lawyer.’ But the quiver in his voice belied his bluster.
‘Listen carefully, Labia,’ intervened Zen. ‘It would be better for you to confess everything straight away. You’ve hidden away here because you know that it’s not only the law that’s waiting for you in Venice, but someone who’s already killed your friends, and that you will be next.’
Labia’s face was now ashen, and he lowered his gaze.
‘If you confess, you’ll be brought to Venice under our protection, and you’ll stand trial. There is also the chance that the death sentence might be commuted to perpetual exile and you might save your life.’
‘But if you insist on remaining silent,’ Marco stated, ‘given that I will be the one to draw up the charges, you can be certain that I will accuse you of every single indictment that the law allows.’
Labia was silent for quite some time, sitting in front of his accusers, his head in his hands. At last, he started to talk in a tired voice.
He told them how, on that infamous Sunday eighteen months earlier, all four of them had dined at the Corner palace and they had drunk heavily. In the afternoon they had grown bored and, it being a fine afternoon, they had decided to go to the fair, where there was always entertainment to be had. They had wandered around among the crowds for a while and Biagio had asked Piero to buy him a new dagger, a wonderful thing with a damascene scabbard. They’d eaten some fritters and had stopped to admire the acrobats, when Piero had suddenly exclaimed, ‘Look who’s here!’, pointing at two girls, pretty young commoners, one of whom was wearing a scarlet cloak.
‘Now we’ll have fun,’ Piero had shouted as he’d made his way towards them, elbowing his way through the crowd. The girls had also seen them and were trying to move away as quickly as possible.
‘Who are they?’ Biagio had asked his master.
‘Oh, one of them is a seamstress who works for my mother,’ Piero had explained. ‘She’s called Marianna Biondini and you’ll have seen her around the house. She always pretends to be uninterested when she sees me, but let’s see if she can get away from me now.’
‘What do you want to do here, with all these people around?’ Barbaro had asked.
‘Just have a bit of fun.’
They had all started to follow the girls, calling out to them to see if they would reply. But the girls paid no attention and soon disappeared into the narrow streets behind Saint Mark’s.
‘How did you find them again?’ asked Zen. The chancellor’s pen scratched furiously across the paper.
‘Purely by chance. We walked around the taverns for a while and had a few more drinks. It was already dark when we spotted the two girls saying goodbye to each other under the lamp post in Campo San Zaccaria.’
‘Silence!’ Piero had whispered, stepping back into the shadows. It was late and there was no one around.
The brunette headed off up a side street, leaving the other one, the Biondini girl, alone. In a flash all four of them had surrounded her. She tried to escape but found herself cornered against the wall.
‘You can’t slip away from me this time,’ Piero had sneered, seizing hold of her by the waist.
She was terrified. She managed to utter the words, ‘No! Help!’ but her voice was too feeble to be heard.
Her unwillingness had excited them even more. Even Biagio had joined in and started to touch her. It was he who suggested, ‘Not here. Let’s take her to Piero’s casino; it’s not far.’
‘Good idea,’ Barbaro had agreed.
In a trice they had gagged her with a handkerchief and wrapped her in her cloak. Biagio threw her over his shoulder and the others helped.
‘What did you do?’ interrupted Pisani.
‘Oh . . . I enj
oyed watching. Girls don’t interest me.’
Piero Corner had for some months leased a small apartment in Corte Rotta, only a short walk from San Zaccaria. It had three rooms and was well furnished, and he’d go there to gamble with friends or to be with any girls or married women he’d picked up.
Marianna struggled, but in a few minutes the group had reached the apartment without meeting a soul. The three friends dumped the girl on the floor in the middle of the room and unwound her cloak. Her eyes were wide with terror as she tried to tear off the gag and pull herself to her feet.
Corner had stopped her. ‘If you’re good and don’t scream, I’ll take it off, but if you continue to struggle then I’ll bind your hands too.’
The poor girl sat motionless, but huge tears started to roll down her cheeks. ‘I beseech you! What have I done to you? Let me go!’ she had pleaded as soon as she could talk.
‘No one wants to hurt you,’ replied Barbaro, but he was laughing. ‘You’ll see what a party we’ll have! Because you’ve already enjoyed other men, haven’t you, pretty whore?’
She had crawled into a corner. ‘No! I’m a well-brought up girl. I’m going to be married . . .’ Her eyes looked in desperation from one man to the other.
‘And you mean to say that you’ve never had it off with your beloved? We’re patricians,’ he’d joked. ‘We’re entitled to jus primae noctis. Come on, who’s going to be first?’
‘No, no, it’s no fun that way. We’re not animals.’ Corner had started to give instructions. ‘What we’ll do now is drink a good bottle of Malvasia, then we’ll play some dances. You, Labia, given that you’re not one for the women, why don’t you strike a tune on the guitar?’
Labia had started to play while the others drank heavily.
‘And what did the girl do?’ interrupted Marco, feeling his stomach heaving.
‘She crouched in a corner and whined like a bitch.’ Labia smirked at the memory.
Enraged, Marco lost control a second time. This time the slap threw Labia into the chancellor’s arms and knocked the inkwell over, spilling ink on to the table.
‘You filthy whoreson of a sodomite!’ shouted the avogadore as Vanni Cingoli tried to mop up the spreading pool of ink with blotting paper. ‘You’re not even a man, and you were there watching, without helping her . . . You were enjoying yourself, weren’t you, pervert? You’re worse than the others!’
‘It’s easy, Signor Avogadore, to insult a pederast, isn’t it?’ Despite his agitation, Labia had managed to recover a shred of dignity. ‘I know that my friends were depraved, but they were also the only ones who allowed me to join them. Do you think it’s a pleasure being a sodomite? Everyone looks down on us, without asking whether it’s our fault or nature’s. We have no choice in the matter, but nor do we have the luxury of choosing our friends.’
Pisani calmed down. ‘Go on,’ he said in a low tone.
When they were completely drunk, they threw dice for the girl. Corner won, or they let him win.
‘She’s mine! I’m going first!’ he had shouted in triumph. ‘Form a procession!’
They had lifted up the girl and carried her to the bed. She wasn’t crying now; she barely had the strength to defend herself, let alone struggle. Piero had closed the door. They were all silent. Ten minutes passed, then the silence was broken by a shrill scream. Piero emerged from the room, covered with blood. ‘She really was a virgin,’ he said.
Then Marino Barbaro went in, and he really took his time. Outside the room they could hear a series of cries that became increasingly weaker.
Then it was Biagio’s turn. He’d only shut himself in the room for a couple of minutes when they heard a long, harrowing groan, followed by silence.
The time passed. At last Biagio came out. Hanging his head and hastily dressed, he pulled the door shut behind him. He seemed strangely ill at ease. ‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ he stammered, ‘but she’s not moving.’
They had all rushed into the room. Marianna lay on the bed in a pool of blood, her eyes wide, her face a mask of terror, deathly still.
‘What have you done to her, you bloody fool?’ Corner had shouted, holding Biagio by the collar.
‘It wasn’t me,’ Biagio had remonstrated. ‘I don’t know what happened, but just when I was enjoying it, I heard a sound, like something ripping . . .’
‘She’s dead,’ Barbaro remarked. ‘You’ve given her an internal haemorrhage, or perhaps a heart attack. What are we going to do?’
Then Corner said, ‘For Christ’s sake! I can’t think straight with all this blood everywhere. Let’s get out of here.’
The poor girl had been dressed as best they could and wrapped in the scarlet cloak, then they had loaded her into a gondola, taking advantage of the darkness. The four of them had cleaned any traces of blood and had hidden the bloody linen among the waste of a nearby convent. The rest of the story was as it had been told by Lucrezia Scalfi. Labia merely confirmed that it was Biagio who had taken responsibility for disposing of the body.
Silence fell in the salon of Villa Labia. Even Paolo sat, head down, as if he’d only just understood the scale of the crime. The room was growing darker by the minute. The chancellor went to look for a flint to light the candles.
‘There’s one other thing,’ murmured Pisani, almost talking to himself. ‘Where is the body now? Where did Biagio take it?’ And he hoped wholeheartedly that Labia knew.
Labia began to talk again. For a few days, Biagio hadn’t appeared. Then one evening they’d all met at Corner’s house and here he’d told them what had happened.
On the night of the crime, after leaving Lucrezia’s house with the corpse still in the boat, Biagio had already decided where to go. In total darkness and dipping his oar in the water with the greatest caution, he had taken almost an hour to approach the Lido, not far from the fortress of San Niccolò, where a garrison was housed. He could hear them singing, and they were certainly half drunk because of the feast day, but he’d have been in terrible trouble if they’d seen him.
He’d moored the boat to a pole close to shore, near the Jewish cemetery. He’d then heaved himself on to the embankment and, moving swiftly like a cat, had reached the old wrought-iron gate. The chain that held it shut was merely looped around the rails and Biagio had soon opened it. He’d then hidden among the tombstones.
The cemetery hadn’t been used for over a century and there was moss on all the stone sepulchres. Biagio had chosen one of the oldest and with a great effort had pushed the cover sideways just enough to create a space into which he could drop the corpse.
Then, as silently as he’d come and still to the sound of the soldiers’ singing, he had collected Marianna’s body from the gondola and had slid it into the old tomb until it had been swallowed into the darkness. Then he’d shut the tomb once again.
‘Ingenious,’ commented Daniele. ‘But how will we ever find her? I hope we won’t have to open up every tomb in the cemetery.’
‘No,’ added Paolo Labia. ‘The tomb containing Marianna Biondini’s body is the third one, in the fourth row on the right from the entrance.’
‘So why did you run away from Venice after all this time?’ Marco asked.
‘You said it yourself, Your Excellency,’ confessed Paolo, looking down. He had lost every shred of self-confidence and was visibly shaking. ‘No one had the remotest idea that it was us. The police believed the story that the girl had run off for reasons of her own. We were completely safe, even if things were never the same again between us. In the end we saw a lot less of each other. But when I heard that Barbaro and Corner were dead, I was afraid. I immediately thought that someone must be taking revenge for the girl’s death, even if it was so long ago . . . I knew that I would be safe here in the country. Then news of Biagio’s death reached me. What I want to know is, who is hunting us down now that over a year has passed?’
CHAPTER 27
It was night when they arrived, cold and wet, in Venice. Once
they reached the New Prisons, Pisani sent Daniele and the chancellor off home and the guards to get something to eat. He personally completed the procedure for detaining Labia in custody.
Despite the fact that his previous arrogance and bluster had long since dissipated, the young patrician had still insisted that he should be accompanied by two of his personal servants, who were now dressed in the family livery rather than in crinolines, and he hastily sent them to inform his family.
The whole procedure was completed with the utmost discretion. From the prisons, Pisani led the way across the covered bridge to the ducal palace, followed by two guards and the prisoner. They walked through numerous chambers and galleries, and eventually came to the office of Corrado Memmo, secretary to the inquisitors. Having been roused from his bed and having struggled into his formal robe, he seemed to be in poor spirits, and his mood certainly did not improve when he recognised the heir of the powerful Labia family.
‘Your Excellency,’ he stuttered, still half asleep. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I would have thought that was clear. Accommodate the prisoner, Paolo Labia, in a cell in the Piombi.’
Pisani added nothing further and the secretary did not dare to ask for explanations. He merely recorded the prisoner’s name in the register and then summoned Pietruccio, the warden.
The procession headed off again, following Pietruccio, a lightly built and rather curved figure, who seemed to struggle under the heavy burden of an enormous bundle of keys. Their steps echoed through the cold, deserted corridors before they headed up endless flights of steps leading to the attics of the ducal palace.
Labia trailed along disconsolately. For the first time since that terrible night, he had started to realise the true gravity of the crime, and he was filled with shame and remorse. His sole consolation was that he was safe; whoever had killed the others could not harm him in the Piombi.
Murder in Venice Page 24