by Donna Leon
“Where would you like to go, sir?” the young officer asked as he slipped the car into gear.
“On vacation. On Saturday,” he said, but only in his mind and only to himself. And to Patta. “Take me to where you found him,” Brunetti directed.
At the other end of the causeway that led from Venice to the mainland, the young man pulled off in the direction of Marghera. The laguna disappeared, and soon they were riding down a straight road blocked with traffic and with a light at every intersection. Progress was slow. “Were you there this morning?” The young man turned and glanced back at Brunetti, then looked again at the road. The back of his collar was crisp and clean. Perhaps he spent his entire day in this air-conditioned car.
“No, sir. That was Buffo and Rubelli.”
“The report I got says he’s a prostitute. Did someone identify him?”
“I don’t know about that, sir. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Why is that?”
“Well, sir, that’s where the whores are, at least the cut-rate ones. Out there by the factories. There’s always a dozen or so of them, on the side of the road, in case anyone wants a quickie on the way home from work.”
“Even men?”
“I beg your pardon, sir? Who else would use a whore?”
“I mean even a male whore. Would they be likely to be out there, where the men who use them could be seen stopping on their way home from work? It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing too many men would want their friends to know about.”
The driver thought about that for a while.
“Where do they usually work?” Brunetti asked.
“Who?” the young man asked cautiously. He didn’t want to be caught again by another trick question.
“The male whores.”
“They’re usually along Via Cappuccina, sir. Sometimes at the train station, but we try to stop that sort of thing during the summer when so many tourists pass through the station.”
“Was this one a regular?”
“I don’t know about that, sir.”
The car pulled off to the left, cut down a narrow road, then turned right onto a broad road lined with low buildings on either side. Brunetti glanced down at his watch. Almost five.
The buildings on either side of them were farther and farther apart from one another now, the spaces between them filled with low grass and the occasional bush. A few abandoned cars stood at crazy angles, their windows shattered and their seats ripped out and flung beside them. Each building appeared to have once been surrounded by a fence, but most of these now hung drunkenly from the posts that had forgotten about holding them up.
A few women stood at the side of the road, two of them in the shade created by a beach umbrella sunk into the dirt at their feet.
“Do they know what happened here today?” Brunetti asked.
“I’m sure they do, sir. Word about something like that spreads quickly.”
“And they’re still here?” Brunetti asked, unable to conceal his surprise.
“They’ve got to live, haven’t they, sir? Besides, if it was a man who got killed, then there’s no risk to them, or I suppose that’s the way they’d look at it.” The driver slowed and pulled to the side of the road. “This is it, sir.”
Brunetti opened his door and got out. Heat and humidity slid up and embraced him. Before him stood a long, low building; on one side, four steep cement ramps led up to double metal doors. A blue and white police sedan was parked at the bottom of one of the ramps. No name was visible on the building, and no sign of any sort identified it. The smell that surged toward them made that unnecessary.
“I think it was in back, sir,” the driver volunteered.
Brunetti walked to the right of the building, toward the open fields that he could see stretching out behind it. When he came around to the back of the building, he saw yet another lethargic fence, an acacia tree that had survived only by a miracle, and, in its shade, a policeman asleep in a wooden chair, head nodding forward on his chest.
“Scarpa,” the driver called out before Brunetti could say anything. “Here’s a commissario.”
The policeman’s head shot up and he was instantly awake, then as quickly on his feet. He looked at Brunetti and saluted. “Good afternoon, sir.”
Brunetti saw that the man’s jacket was draped over the back of the chair and that his shirt, plastered to his body with sweat, seemed no longer white, but a faint pink. “How long have you been out here, Officer Scarpa?” Brunetti asked when he approached the man.
“Since the lab people left, sir.”
“When was that?”
“About three, sir.”
“Why are you still here?”
“The sergeant in charge told me to stay here until a team came out to talk to the workers.”
“What are you doing out here in the sun?”
The man made no attempt to avoid the question or to embellish his answer. “I couldn’t stand it inside, sir. The smell. I came out here and got sick, and then I knew I couldn’t go back inside. I tried standing for the first hour, but there’s only this little place where there’s any shade, so I went back and got a chair.”
Instinctively, Brunetti and the driver had crowded into that small patch of shade while the other man spoke. “Do you know if the team has come out to question them?” Brunetti asked.
“Yes, sir. They got here about an hour ago.”
“Then what are you doing still out here?” Brunetti asked.
The officer gave Brunetti a stony look. “I asked the sergeant if I could go back to town, but he wanted me to help with the questioning. I told him I couldn’t, not unless the workers came outside to talk to me. He didn’t like that, but I couldn’t go back inside.”
A playful breeze reminded Brunetti of the truth of that.
“So what are you doing out here? Why aren’t you in the car?”
“He told me to wait here, sir.” The man’s face didn’t change when he spoke. “I asked if I could sit in the car—it’s got airconditioning—but he told me to stay out here if I wouldn’t help with the questioning.” As if anticipating Brunetti’s next question, he said, “The next bus isn’t until a quarter of eight, to take people back into the city after work.”
Brunetti considered this and then asked, “Where was he found?”
The policeman turned and pointed to a long clump of grass on the other side of the fence. “He was under that, sir.”
“Who found him?”
“One of the workers inside. He’d come outside to have a cigarette, and he saw one of the guy’s shoes lying on the ground—red, I think—so he went to have a closer look.”
“Were you here when the lab team was?”
“Yes, sir. They went over it, taking photos and picking up anything that was on the ground for about a hundred meters, around the bush.”
“Footprints?”
“I think so, sir, but I’m not sure. The man who found him left some, but I think they found others.” He paused a moment, wiped some sweat from his forehead, and added, “And the first police who were on the scene left some.”
“Your sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.”
Brunetti glanced off at the clump of grass, then back at the policeman’s sweat-soaked shirt. “Go on back to our car, Officer Scarpa. It’s air-conditioned.” Then to the driver, “Go with him. You can both wait for me there.”
“Thank you, sir,” the policeman said gratefully and reached down to pull his jacket from the back of the chair.
“Don’t bother,” Brunetti said when he saw the man start to put one arm in a sleeve.
“Thank you, sir,” he repeated and bent to pick up the chair. The two men walked back toward the building. The policeman set the chair down on the cement outside the back door of the building, then joined the driver. They disappeared around the side of the building, and Brunetti went toward the hole in the fence.
Ducking low, he passed through it and walked over
toward the bush. The signs left by the lab team were all around: holes in the earth where they had driven rods to measure distance, dirt scuffed into small piles by pivoting footsteps, and, nearer the clump, a small pile of clipped grass placed neatly to the side; apparently, they’d had to cut down the grass to get to the body and remove it without scratching it on the sharp edges of the leaves.
Behind Brunetti a door slammed shut, and then a man’s voice called, “Hey, you, what are you doing? Get the hell away from there.”
Brunetti turned and, as he knew he would, saw a man in police uniform coming quickly toward him from the back of the building. As Brunetti watched but didn’t move away from the bush, the man drew his revolver from his holster and shouted at Brunetti, “Put your hands in the air and come over to the fence.”
Brunetti turned and walked back toward the fence; he moved like a man on a rocky surface, hands held out at his sides to maintain his balance.
“I told you to put them in the air,” the policeman snarled as Brunetti reached the fence.
The policeman had a gun in his hand, so Brunetti did not try to tell him that his hands were in the air, they just weren’t over his head. Instead, he said, “Good afternoon, Sergeant. I’m Commissario Brunetti from Venice. Have you been taking the statements of the people inside?”
The man’s eyes were small, and there wasn’t much in the way of intelligence to be read in them, but there was enough there for Brunetti to realize that the man saw the trap opening at his feet. He could ask to see proof, ask a commissario of police for his warrant card, or he could allow a stranger claiming to be a police official to go unquestioned.
“Sorry, Commissario, I didn’t recognize you with the sun in my eyes,” the sergeant said, although the sun shone over his left shoulder. He could have gotten away with it, earning Brunetti’s grudging respect, had he not added, “It’s hard, coming out into the sun like this from the darkness inside. Besides, I wasn’t expecting anyone else to come out here.”
The name tag on his chest read “Buffo.”
“It seems that Mestre is out of police commissari for the next few weeks, so I was sent out to handle the investigation.” Brunetti bent down and walked through the hole in the fence. By the time he stood up on the other side, Buffo’s revolver was back in his holster, the flap snapped securely closed.
Brunetti started toward the back door of the slaughterhouse, Buffo walking beside him. “What did you learn from the people inside?”
“Nothing more than what I got when I answered the first call this morning, sir. A butcher, Bettino Cola, found the body at a little past eleven this morning. He had gone outside to have a cigarette, and he went over to the bush to have a look at some shoes he said he saw lying on the ground.”
“Weren’t there any shoes?” Brunetti asked.
“Yes. They were there when we got here.” From the way he spoke, anyone hearing him would believe that Cola had placed them there to divert suspicion from himself. As much as any civilian or criminal, Brunetti hated Tough Cops.
“The call we got said there was a whore in a field out here, a woman. I answered the call and took a look, but it was a man.” Buffo spat.
“The report I received said he’s a prostitute,” Brunetti said in a level voice. “Has he been identified?”
“No, not yet. We’re having the morgue people take pictures, though he was beat up pretty badly, and then we’ll have an artist make a sketch of what he must have looked like before. We’ll show that around, and sooner or later someone will recognize him. They’re pretty well-known, those boys,” Buffo said with something between a grin and a grimace, then continued. “If he’s one of the locals, we’ll have an ID on him pretty soon.”
“And if not?” Brunetti asked.
“Then it will take longer, I guess. Or maybe we won’t find out who he is. Small loss, in either case.”
“And why is that, Sergeant Buffo?” Brunetti asked softly, but Buffo heard only the words and not the tone.
“Who needs them? Perverts. They’re all full of AIDS, and they think nothing about passing it on to decent working men.” He spat again.
Brunetti stopped, turned, and faced the sergeant. “As I understand it, Sergeant Buffo, these decent working men about whom you are so concerned get AIDS passed on to them because they pay these ‘perverts’ to let them ram their cocks up their asses. Let us try not to forget that. And let us try not to forget that, whoever the dead man is, he’s been murdered, and it is our duty to find the murderer. Even if it was a decent working man.” Saying that, Brunetti opened the door and went into the slaughter-house, preferring the stench there to the one outside.
4
Inside, he learned little more; Cola repeated his story, and the foreman verified it. Sullenly, Buffo told him that none of the men who worked in the factory had seen anything strange, not that morning and not the day before. The whores were so much a part of the landscape that no one any longer paid real attention to them or what they did. No one could remember that particular area behind the slaughterhouse ever being used by the whores—the smell alone would explain that. Had one of them been seen in that area, no one was likely to have paid much attention.
After learning all of this, Brunetti went back to his car and asked the driver to take him to the Questura in Mestre. Officer Scarpa, who had put his jacket back on, got out of the car and joined Sergeant Buffo in the other. As the two cars headed back toward Mestre, Brunetti opened his window halfway to let some air, however hot, into the car and dilute the smell of the slaughterhouse, which still clung to his clothing. Like most Italians, Brunetti had always scoffed at the idea of vegetarianism, scorning it as yet another of the many self-indulgences of the well-fed, but today the idea made complete sense to him.
At the Questura, his driver took him to the second floor and introduced him to Sergeant Gallo, a cadaverous man with sunken eyes who looked like the years spent in pursuit of the criminal had eaten into his flesh from the inside. When Brunetti was seated at the side of Gallo’s desk, the sergeant told him there was little else to add to what Brunetti had been told, although he did have the initial, verbal report from the pathologist: death had resulted from a series of blows to the head and face and had taken place from twelve to eighteen hours before the body was found. The heat made it difficult to tell. From pieces of rust found in some of the wounds, and from their shape, the pathologist guessed that the murder weapon had been a piece of metal, most probably a length of pipe, but surely something cylindrical. The lab analysis of stomach contents and blood wouldn’t be back until Wednesday morning at the earliest, so it was impossible to say yet whether he had been under the influence of drugs or alcohol when he was killed. Since many of the prostitutes in the city and almost all of the transvestites were confirmed drug users, this was likely, although there seemed to be no sign on the body of intravenous drug use. The stomach was empty, but there were signs that he had eaten a meal within the six hours before he was killed.
“What about his clothing?” he asked Gallo.
“Red dress, some sort of cheap synthetic material. Red shoes, barely worn, size forty-one. I’ll have them checked to see if we can find the manufacturer.”
“Are there any photos?” Brunetti asked.
“They won’t be ready until tomorrow morning, sir, but from the reports of the men who brought him in, you might not want to see them.”
“That bad, eh?” Brunetti asked.
“Whoever did it to him must really have hated him or been out of his mind when he did it. There’s no nose left.”
“Will you get an artist to make a sketch?”
“Yes, sir. But most of it’s going to be guesswork. All he’ll have is the shape of the face, the eye color. And the hair.” Gallo paused for a moment and added, “It’s very thin, and he’s got a large bald spot, so I’d guess he wore a wig when, ah, when he worked.”
“Was a wig found?” Brunetti asked.
“No, sir, there wasn’t. And
it looks like he was killed somewhere else and carried there.”
“Footprints?”
“Yes. The technical team said they found a set of them going toward the clump of grass and coming away from it.”
“Deeper when going?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So he was carried out there and dumped under that clump of grass. Where did the footprints come from?”
“There’s a narrow paved road that runs along the back of the field behind the slaughterhouse. It looks like he came from there.”
“And on the road?”
“Nothing, sir. It hasn’t rained in weeks, so a car, or even a truck, could have stopped there and there’d be no sign of it. There’s just those footprints. A man’s. Size forty-three.” Brunetti’s size.
“Do you have a list of the transvestite prostitutes?”
“Only those who have been in trouble, sir.”
“What sort of trouble do they get into?”
“The usual. Drugs. Fights among themselves. Occasionally, one of them will get into a fight with a client. Usually over money. But none of them has ever been mixed up in anything serious.”
“What about the fights? Are they ever violent?”
“Nothing like this, sir. Never anything like this.”
“How many of them are there?”
“We’ve got files on about thirty of them, but I’d guess that’s just a small fraction. A lot of them come down from Pordenone or in from Padova. It seems ‘business is pretty good for them there.” The first place was the nearest big city to both American and Italian military installations; that would account for Porde-none. But Padova? The university? If so, things had changed since Brunetti took his law degree.
“I’d like to take a look at those files tonight. Can you make me copies of them?”
“I’ve already had that done, sir,” Gallo said, handing him a thick blue file that lay on his desk.
As he took the folder from the sergeant, Brunetti realized that, even here in Mestre, less than twenty kilometers from home, he was likely to be treated as a foreigner, so he sought for some common ground that would establish him as a member of a working unit, not the commissario come in from out of town. “But you’re Venetian, aren’t you, Sergeant?” Gallo nodded and Brunetti added, “Castello?” Again, Gallo nodded, but this time with a smile, as if he knew the accent would follow him, no matter where he went.