by Donna Leon
The strange death of the women was picked up by the Austrian and Italian press, where stories about The Truck of Death appeared in articles variously entitled “Der Todeslaster” and “II Camion della Morte.” Somehow, the Austrians had managed to get hold of three photos of the bodies lying in the snow and had printed them with the story. Speculation was rife: economic refugees? illegal workers? The collapse of communism had removed what would once have been the almost certain conclusion: spies. In the end, the mystery was never resolved, and the investigation died somewhere amid the failure of the Romanian authorities to answer questions or return papers and the Italians’ fading interest. The women’s bodies, as well as that of the driver, were returned by plane to Bucharest, where they were buried under the earth of their native land and under the even greater weight of its bureaucracy.
Their story quickly disappeared from the press, driven off by the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Milan and the murder of yet another judge. It did not disappear, however, before it was read by Professoressa Paola Falier, assistant professor of English literature at the University of Cà Pesaro in Venice and, not incidental to this story, wife of Guido Brunetti, commissario of police in that city.
3
Carlo Trevisan, Avvocato Carlo Trevisan, to give him the title he preferred to hear used when people spoke of him, was a man of very ordinary past, which in no way impinged upon the fact that he was a man of limitless future. A native of Trento, a city near the Italian border with Austria, he had gone to Padua to study law, which he did brilliantly, graduating with the highest honors and the united praise of his professors. From there, he accepted a position in a law office in Venice, where he soon became an expert on international law, one of the few men in the city to interest himself in such matters. After only five years, he left that firm and set up his own office, specializing in corporate and international law.
Italy is a country in which many laws are passed one day, only to be repealed the next. Nor is it strange that, in a country where the point of even the simplest newspaper story is often impossible to decipher, there sometimes exists a measure of confusion as to the exact meaning of the law. The resulting fluidity of interpretation creates a climate most propitious to lawyers, who claim the ability to understand the law. Among these, then, Avvocato Carlo Trevisan.
Because he was both industrious and ambitious, Avvocato Trevisan prospered. Because he married well, the daughter of a banker, he was put in familial and familiar contact with many of the most successful and powerful industrialists and bankers of the Veneto region. His practice expanded along with his waistline until, the year he turned fifty, Avvocato Trevisan had seven lawyers working in his office, not one of them a partner in the firm. He attended weekly Mass at Santa Maria del Giglio, had twice served with distinction on the city council of Venice, and had two children, a boy and a girl, both bright and both beautiful.
On the Tuesday before the feast of La Madonna della Salute in late November, Avvocato Trevisan spent the afternoon in Padua, asked there by Francesco Urbani, a client of his who had recently decided to ask his wife of twenty-seven years for a separation. During the two hours the men spent together, Trevisan suggested that Urbani move certain moneys out of the country, perhaps to Luxembourg, and that he immediately sell his share of the two factories in Verona that he held in silent partnership with another man. The proceeds from those transactions, Trevisan suggested, might well follow the others quickly out of the country.
After the meeting. which he had arranged to coincide with his next appointment, Trevisan met for a weekly dinner with a business associate. They had met in Venice the previous week, so tonight they met in Padua. Like all of their meetings, this one was marked by the cordiality that results from success and prosperity. Good food, good wine, and good news.
Trevisan’s partner drove him to the train station where, as he did every week, he caught the Intercity for Trieste, which would get him to Venice by ten-fifteen. Though he held a ticket for the first-class section, which was at the back of the train, Trevisan walked through the almost empty carriages and took a seat in a second-class compartment; like all Venetians, he sat at the front of the train so as not to have to walk the long platform when the train finally pulled into the Santa Lucia station.
He opened the calfskin briefcase on the seat opposite him and pulled from it a prospectus recently sent to him by the National Bank of Luxembourg, one offering interest rates as high as 18 percent, though not for accounts in Italian lire. He slid a small calculator from its slot in the upper lid of the briefcase, uncapped his Mont Blanc, and began to make rough calculations on a sheet of paper.
The door of his compartment rolled back, and Trevisan turned away to take his ticket from his overcoat pocket and hand it to the conductor. But the person who stood there had come to collect something other than his ticket from Avvocato Carlo Trevisan.
The body was discovered by the conductor, Cristina Merli, while the train was crossing the laguna that separates Venice from Mestre. As she walked past the compartment in which the well-dressed gentleman lay slumped against the window, she first decided not to bother him by waking him to check his ticket, but then she remembered how often ticketless passengers, even well-dressed ones, would feign sleep on this short trip across the laguna, hoping this way not to be disturbed as they stole their thousand-lire ride. Besides, if he had a ticket, he’d be glad to be awakened before the train pulled in, especially if he had to catch the number one boat to Rialto, which left the embarcadero in front of the station exactly three minutes after the train arrived.
She rolled the door open and stepped into the small compartment. “Buona sera, signore. Suo biglietto, per favore.”
Later, when she talked about it, she thought she remembered the smell, remembered noticing it as soon as she slid back the door of the overheated compartment. She took two steps toward the sleeping man and raised her voice to repeat, “Suo biglietto, per favore.” So deeply asleep, he didn’t hear her? Not possible; he must be without a ticket and now trying to avoid the inevitable fine. Over the course of her years on the trains, Cristina Merli had come almost to enjoy this moment: asking them for identification and then writing out the ticket, then collecting the fine. So too did she delight in the variety of the excuses that were offered to her, all by now grown so familiar that she could recite them in her sleep: I must have lost it; the train was just pulling out, and I didn’t want to miss it; my wife’s in another compartment and she has the tickets.
Conscious of all this, knowing she would now be delayed, right at the end of the long trip from Turin, she was sudden in her gestures, perhaps even harsh.
“Please, signore, wake up and show me your ticket,” she said, leaning down over him and shaking his shoulder. At the first touch of her hand, the man in the seat leaned slowly away from the window, toppled over onto the seat, and slid to the floor. As he fell, his jacket slid open and she saw the red stains that covered the front of his shirt. The smell of urine and excrement rose up unmistakably from his body.
“Maria Vergine,” she gasped, and backed very slowly out of the compartment. To her left, she saw two men coming toward her, passengers moving toward the door at the front of the carriage. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but that door at the front is blocked; you’ll have to use the one behind you.” Used to this, they turned and walked back toward the rear of the carriage. She glanced out the window and saw that the train was almost at the end of the causeway. Three, perhaps four minutes remained until the train drew to a stop in the station. When it did, the doors would open and the passengers would get out, taking with them whatever memories they might have of the trip and of the people they had seen in the corridors of the long train. She heard the familiar clicks and bangs as the train was shunted to the proper track and the nose of the train slid under the roof of the station.
She had worked for the railway for fifteen years and had never known it to happen, but she did the only thing she could think of doin
g: she stepped into the next compartment and reached up to the handle of the emergency brake. She pulled at it and heard the tiny pop as the tattered string broke apart, and then she waited, not without a distant, almost academic curiosity, to see what would happen.
4
The wheels locked, and the train slid to a halt; passengers were knocked to the floor of the corridors and into the laps of strangers sitting opposite them. Within seconds, windows were yanked down and heads popped out, searching up and down the track for whatever it was that had caused the train to grind to a stop. Cristina Merli lowered the window in the corridor, glad of the biting winter air, and stuck her head out, waiting to see who would come toward the train. It turned out to be two of the uniformed polizia ferrovia who came running up the platform. She leaned out the window and waved at them. “Here, over here.” Because she didn’t want anyone except the police to hear what she had to tell them, she said nothing more until they were directly underneath her window.
When she told them, one of them broke away and ran back toward the station; the other moved toward the engine to tell the engineer what was going on. Slowly, with two false starts, the train began to crawl into the station, inching its way up the track until it came to a halt at its usual place on track five. A few people stood on the platform, waiting for passengers to get down from the train or to climb aboard themselves for the late-night trip to Trieste. When the doors didn’t open, they mulled together, asking one another what was wrong. One woman, assuming that this was yet another train strike, threw her hands into the air and her suitcase to the ground. As the passengers stood there, talking and growing irritated at the unexplained delay, yet another proof of the inefficiency of the railways, six police officers, each carrying a machine gun, appeared at the front of the platform and walked along the train, positioning themselves at every second car. More heads appeared at the windows, men shouted down angrily, but no one listened to anything that was said. The doors of the train remained locked.
After long minutes of this, someone told the sergeant in charge of the officers that the train had a public address system. The sergeant pulled himself up into the engine and began to explain to the passengers that a crime had been committed on the train and that they were being held there in the station until the police could take their names and addresses.
When he finished speaking, the engineer unlocked the doors and the police swung themselves aboard. Unfortunately, no one had thought to explain anything to the people waiting on the platform, who consequently crowded onto the train, where they quickly became confused with the original passengers. Two men in the second carriage tried to push past the officer in the corridor, insisting that they had seen nothing, knew nothing, and were already late. He stopped them by raising his machine gun across his chest in front of them, effectively blocking off the corridor and forcing them into a compartment, where they grumbled about police arrogance and their rights as citizens.
In the end, there proved to be only thirty-four people on the train, excluding those who had crowded on behind the police. After half an hour, the police got their names and addresses and asked if they had seen anything strange on the train. Two people remembered a black peddler who got off at Vicenza, one said he’d seen a man with long hair and a beard coming out of the toilet before they pulled into Verona, and someone had seen a woman in a fur hat get off at Mestre, but aside from that, no one had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.
Just as it began to look as though the train would be there all night, and people were beginning to straggle off to telephone relatives in Trieste to tell them not to expect their arrival, an engine backed its way into the far end of the track and attached itself to the rear of the train, suddenly converting it into the front. Three blue-uniformed mechanics crawled under the train and detached the last carriage, the one in which the body still lay, from the rest of the train. A conductor ran along the platform, yelling, “In partenza, in partenza, siamo in partenza,” and passengers scrambled back up into the train. The conductor slammed a door, then another one, and pulled himself up onto the train just as it started to move slowly out of the station. And Cristina Merli stood in the office of the stationmaster, attempting to explain why she should not be subject to a fine of one million lire for having pulled the train’s alarm.
5
Guido Brunetti did not learn of the murder of Avvocato Carlo Trevisan until the following morning, and he learned of it in a most unpolicemanlike manner, from the shouting headlines of II Gazzettino, the same newspaper which had twice applauded Avvocato Trevisan’s tenure as city counsellor. “Avvocato Assassinato sul Treno,” the headline cried, while La Nuova, ever drawn to melodrama, spoke of “Il Treno della Morte.” Brunetti saw the headlines while on his way to work, stopped and bought both papers, and stood in the Ruga Orefici to read both articles while early-morning shoppers pushed past him unnoticed. The article gave the barest facts: shot to death on the train, body found as it crossed the laguna, police conducting the usual investigation.
Brunetti looked up and allowed his eyes to wander sightlessly across the banked stalls of fruit and vegetables. “The usual investigation”? Who had been on duty last night? Why hadn’t he been called? And if he hadn’t been called, which one of his colleagues had?
He turned away from the newsstand and continued walking toward the Questura, calling to mind the various cases upon which they were working at the moment, trying to calculate who would be given this one. Brunetti was himself almost at the end of an investigation that had to do, in Venice’s minor way, with the enormous spiderweb of bribery and corruption that had been radiating out from Milan for the last few years. Superhighways had been built on the mainland, one to connect the city to the airport, and billions of lire had been spent to build them. It was not until after construction was completed that anyone had troubled to consider that the airport, one with fewer than a hundred daily flights, was already well served by road, public buses, taxis, and boats. It was only then that anyone thought to question the enormous expenditure of public moneys on a road which no stretch of the imagination could view as being in any way necessary. Hence Brunetti’s involvement, and hence the warrants that had gone out for both the arrest and the freezing of the assets of the owner of the construction firm that had done the major portion of the work on the road, and of the three members of the city council who had fought most vociferously for his being awarded the contract.
Another commissario was busy with the Casino where, yet once again, the croupiers had found a way to beat the system and skim off a percentage. The other was involved with an ongoing investigation of Mafia-controlled businesses in Mestre, an investigation that appeared to have no limits and, alas, no end.
And so it was no surprise for Brunetti to arrive at the Questura and be greeted by the guards at the front door with the news, “He wants to see you.” If Vice-Questore Patta wanted to see him this early, then perhaps Patta had been called last night and not one of the commissari. And if Patta was sufficiently interested in the death to be here this early, then Trevisan was more important or more powerfully connected than Brunetti had realized.
He went up to his own office and hung up his coat, then checked his desk. There was nothing on it that hadn’t been there when he had left the night before, which meant that any papers already generated by the case were down in Patta’s office. He went down the back steps and into the Vice-Questore’s outer office. Behind her desk, looking as though she was there only to meet the photographers from Vogue, sat Signorina Elettra Zorzi, today arrayed, as were the lilies of the field, in a white crêpe de chine dress that fell in diagonal, but decidedly provocative, folds across her bosom.
“Buon giorno, Commissario,” she said, looking up from the magazine open on her desk and smiling.
“Trevisan?” Brunetti asked.
She nodded. “He’s been on the phone for the last ten minutes. The mayor.”
“Who called whom?”
“The m
ayor called him,” Signorina Elettra answered. “Why, does it matter?”
“Yes, it probably means we have nothing to go on.”
“Why?”
“If he called the mayor, it would mean that he was sure enough about something to assure him that we had a suspect or would soon have a confession. That the mayor called him means Trevisan was important and they want it settled fast.”
Signorina Elettra closed her magazine and moved it to the side of the desk. When she had first started working for Patta, Brunetti remembered, she used to put them in the drawer when she wasn’t reading them; now she didn’t even bother to turn them facedown.
“What time did he get here?” Brunetti asked.
“Eight-thirty.” Then, before Brunetti asked, she told him, “I was already here, and I told him you’d been in and had gone out to see if you could talk to the Leonardis’ maid.” He had spoken to the woman the afternoon before as part of his investigation of the builder, spoken to her and learned nothing.
“Grazie,” he said. Brunetti had more than once reflected upon the strangeness of the fact that a woman with Signorina Elettra’s natural inclination toward the duplicitous should have chosen to work for the police.
She glanced down at her desk and saw that a red light on her phone had ceased to blink. “He’s finished talking,” she said.
Brunetti nodded and turned away. He knocked on Patta’s door, waited for the shouted “Avanti,” and went into the office.
Though the Vice-Questore had arrived early, he had apparently had ample time to perform his toilette; the scent of some pungent aftershave hung in the air, and Patta’s handsome face glowed. His tie was wool, his suit silk; no slave to tradition, the Vice-Questore. “Where have you been?” was Patta’s greeting.
“At the Leonardis’. I thought I could talk to their maid.”