by Donna Leon
Out from under the underpass and into Campo San Bartolomeo, he cut off to the left, deciding to take the gondola and avoid the bridge, heavy now with late afternoon traffic. Luckily, a gondola was pulled up at the stop, two old ladies standing at the back. He ran across the wooden landing and stepped down into the gondola. “Let’s go,” he called to the gondoliere who stood in the back, leaning against his oar. “Police, take me across.”
Casually, as if he did this every day of the week, the gondoliere in the front pushed against the railing of the steps leading down to the boat, and the gondola slipped backward into the Grand Canal. The one in back shifted his weight and leaned into his oar; the gondola turned and started across the canal. The old women, strangers, grabbed at one another in fear and sat down on the low seat that ran across the back of the boat.
“Can you take me to the end of Calle Tiepolo?” Brunetti asked the man in front.
“You really police?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” he said, digging into his pocket and showing them his warrant card.
“All right.” Saying this, the gondoliere at the front turned to the women and said, in Veneziano, “We’ve got a detour, Signore.”
The old women were too frightened by what was happening to say anything.
Brunetti stood, blind to the boats, blind to the light, blind to anything but their slow passage across the canal. Finally, after what seemed hours, they pulled up at the end of Calle Tiepolo, and the two gondolieri held the boat steady while Brunetti climbed up onto the embankment. He shoved ten thousand lire into the hand of the man in front and turned up the calle, running.
Brunetti had gotten his wind back in the gondola and raced up the calle toward home, then up the first three flights of stairs. He took the fourth and fifth quickly, gasping, legs throbbing. He heard the door above him open, and he looked up to see Paola at the door, holding it open for him.
“Paola,” he began.
Before he could say anything more, she shouted down at him, “I hope you’ll be happy to see what your little detective found out for you. I hope you’ll be happy to see the world you’re taking her into with your questions and your investigations.” Her face was flushed and she was explosive with rage.
He let himself into the apartment and shut the door behind him. Paola turned away from him and walked down the hall. He called her name, but she ignored him and went into the kitchen, slamming the door. He went down to Chiara’s door and stood outside it. Silence. He listened for sobs, for some sound that she was in there. Nothing. He went back up the hall and knocked on the kitchen door. Paola opened it and glared at him, stonyeyed.
“Tell me about this,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He had often seen Paola angry, but he had never seen her like this, shaking with rage or some deeper emotion.
Instinctively Brunetti kept his distance from her and, keeping his voice calm, repeated, “Tell me what’s going on.”
Paola gritted her teeth and sucked air through them. The tendons in her neck were strained and stood out in her flesh. He waited.
Her voice, when it came, was so tight as to be almost inaudible. “She came home this afternoon and said she had something she wanted to watch on the VCR. I was busy in my study, so I told her to go and watch it herself but to keep the volume down.” Paola stopped speaking for a moment and looked at him steadily Brunetti said nothing.
She pulled more air in through her teeth and continued. “After about a quarter of an hour, she started to scream. When I came out of the study, she was in the hall, hysterical. You heard her. I tried to hold her, to talk to her, but she couldn’t stop screaming. She’s in her room now.”
“What happened?”
“She brought home a tape, and she watched it.”
“Where did she get the tape?”
“Guido,” she began, still breathing heavily but more slowly now, “I’m sorry for what I said.”
“It doesn’t matter. Where did she get the tape?”
“From Francesca.”
“Trevisan?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see it?”
She nodded.
“What is it?”
This time she shook her head from side to side. Awkwardly, she raised an arm and pointed back toward the living room.
“Is she all right?”
“Yes. She let me into her room a couple of minutes ago. I gave her some aspirin and told her to lie down. She wants to talk to you. But you have to look at the tape first.”
Brunetti nodded and turned toward the living room, where the television and VCR were. “Should you be with her, Paola?”
“Yes,” Paola said and turned back down the corridor toward Chiara’s room.
In the living room, Brunetti found the television and VCR both turned on a tape in place, played out to the end. He pushed the Rewind button and straightened up, waiting and listening to the snakelike hiss of tape from the machine. He thought of nothing, concentrated on emptying his mind of all possibility.
The faint click brought him back. He pushed the Play button and moved away from the screen, seating himself on a straight-backed chair. There were no credits, no introductory graphic, no sound. The luminous gray disappeared, and the screen showed a room with two windows high up on one wall, three chairs, and a table. The lighting came from the windows and, he thought, from some source of light that stood behind whoever held the camera, for it was evident from the faint unsteadiness of the picture that the camera was handheld.
A noise came from the television, and the camera panned over to reveal a door, which opened, allowing three young men to push into the room, laughing and joking and shoving at one another. When they were just inside the room, the last one turned and reached back through the door. He pulled a woman into the room, and three other men crowded in behind her.
The first three appeared to be in their early teens, two others were perhaps Brunetti’s age, and the last, the one who followed the woman into the room, was perhaps in his thirties. All wore shirts and pants that had a faintly military look, and all wore thick-soled boots that laced up above the ankle.
The woman appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties and was wearing a dark skirt and sweater. She wore no makeup, and her hair hung loose and tangled, as though it had been pulled free from a bun or a kerchief. Though the film was in color, it was impossible to tell the color of her eyes save that they were dark, and terrified.
Brunetti could hear the men talking, but he couldn’t understand what they said. The three youngest ones laughed at something one of the older ones said, but the woman turned to him and stared at him after he spoke, as if unable, or unwilling, to believe what she had heard. With unconscious modesty, she folded her hands across her chest and lowered her head.
For a long moment, no one spoke and no one moved, and then a voice called out, very close to the camera, but none of the people on the screen had spoken. It took Brunetti a moment to realize that it must have been the cameraman who had spoken. From the tone, it must have been a command or some sort of encouragement. When he spoke, the woman’s head shot up and she looked toward the camera, but not into the lens, a bit to the left, at the person who held it. The voice near the camera spoke again, this time louder, and this time the men moved in response to it.
Two of the young ones came up on either side of the woman and grabbed her by the arms. The one in his thirties came up to her and said something. She shook her head from side to side, and he punched her. He didn’t slap her; he punched her just in front of the ear. And then, quite calmly, he took a knife from his belt and slit her sweater open, all down the front. She started to scream, and he hit her again, then pulled the sweater free from her body, leaving her naked from the waist up. He ripped a sleeve from the sweater and, when she opened her mouth to speak to him or to scream, he shoved it into her mouth.
He spoke to the two men who held her, and they lifted her up onto the table. He gestured to
the two older ones. They moved quickly around the table and grabbed her feet, pinning her legs to the table. The one with the knife used it again, this time to slash her skirt from the hem to the waistband. He peeled it away from her as if breaking open a new book to the center pages.
The cameraman spoke again, and the man with the knife moved around to the other side of the table; his body had been blocking the lens. He set the knife down on the edge of the table and unzipped his pants. He wore no belt. He clambered up onto the table and lay on top of the woman. The two men who held her legs had to back off so as not to be kicked by him as he thrust into her. He lay on top of her for a few minutes, then climbed down the other side of the table. One of the young ones went next, and then the other two.
The sound grew confused, for the men were calling to one another and laughing, and the cameraman seemed to be egging them on. Like a low continuo, the woman moaned and whimpered through all of this, but it was almost impossible to pick up the sound she made.
The last to use her were the two middle-aged men. One of them balked at the table and shook his head, but this was met with hoots of derision, and so he too climbed on the table and took his turn. The last one, the oldest, was so eager that he pushed the other one from her body and mounted her.
When all six were done, the camera moved for the first time and came in very close. It moved lovingly up and down her body, pausing here and there, wherever there was blood. It paused on her face. Her eyes were closed, but the voice that Brunetti’s was now thinking of as the cameraman’s called softly to her, and she opened her eyes, just inches from the camera. He heard her gasp and heard her head crack against the table as she pulled it roughly to the side in a vain attempt to hide from the camera.
The lens pulled back and more of her body came onto the screen. When he was back in his original position, the cameraman called out again, and the first one who had used her picked up the knife. The cameraman spoke again, more urgently, and the one with the knife, as casually as if he had been asked to prepare the chicken for that night’s dinner, drew the blade across the woman’s throat. Blood splattered across his arm and hand, and the other men laughed at the foolish look that filled his face as he leaped back from her body. They were still laughing as the camera slid in for one last look at her body. It didn’t have to be particular anymore: there was plenty of blood now. The screen darkened.
The tape continued to play, but the only sound was its quiet whir and a faint humming sound that Brunetti, after a moment’s confusion, realized was coming from himself. He stopped and tried to get up, but he was prevented by his hands, which he couldn’t release from the edge of the chair. He looked down at them, fascinated, and willed his fingers to relax. After a moment, they did, and he got to his feet.
He had recognized enough of the language to know it was Serbo-Croatian. Months ago, he had read a brief article in the Corriere della Sera about these tapes, made in the death traps that the cities of Bosnia had become, made and then brought out to be reproduced and sold. He had, at the time, chosen not to believe what he read, unable, or perhaps unwilling, even with what he had seen for these last decades, to believe his fellow man capable of this last obscenity. And now, like St. Thomas the Doubter, he had plunged his hand into the open wound and so had no choice but to believe.
He turned off the television and the VCR. He went down the corridor to Chiara’s room. The door was open and he went in without knocking. Chiara lay propped up on her pillows. She had one arm wrapped around Paola, who sat on the side of the bed, and in the other she held to herself a much-chewed and battered toy beagle she had had since her sixth birthday.
“Ciao, Papà,” she said as he came in. She looked up at him but she didn’t smile.
“Ciao, angelo,” he said and came to stand closer to the bed. “I’m sorry you saw that, Chiara.” He felt as stupid as the words.
Chiara looked at him sharply, seeking a reproach in his words, but found none, only a searing remorse she was too young to recognize. “Did they really kill her, Papà?” she asked, destroying at once his hope that she had fled from the video before the end.
He nodded. “I’m afraid so, Chiara.”
“Why?” Chiara asked, her voice as filled with confusion as horror.
His mind flew up and away from the room. He tried to think noble thoughts, tried to think of something to say that would assure his child, convince her that, however wicked what she had seen, the world was a place where things like that were random, and humanity remained good by instinct and impulse.
“Why, Papà? Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know, Chiara.”
“But they really killed her?” she asked.
“Don’t talk about it,” Paola interrupted her and bent to kiss the side of her head, pulling her closer.
Undeterred, Chiara repeated, “Did they, Papà?”
“Yes, Chiara.”
“She really died?”
Paola looked up at him, trying to silence him with her eyes, but he answered, “Yes, Chiara, she really died.”
Chiara pulled the battered dog onto her lap and stared down at it.
“Who gave you the tape, Chiara?” he asked.
She pulled at one of the dog’s long ears, but not roughly, remembering that this was the one that was ripped. “Francesca,” she finally answered. “She gave it to me before class this morning.”
“Did she say anything about it?”
She picked up the dog and held it, standing upright, on her lap. Finally she answered, “She said she’d heard I was asking questions about her because of what happened to her father. She thought I was doing it for you because you’re a cop. And then she told me to look at the tape if I wanted to see why someone might want to kill her father.” She tilted the dog from side to side and made it walk toward her.
“Did she say anything else, Chiara?”
“No, Papà, just that.”
“Do you know where she got the tape?”
“No. That’s all she said, that it would show why someone would want to kill her father. But what does Francesca’s father have to do with that?”
“I don’t know.”
Paola stood, so abruptly that Chiara let go of the beagle and it fell to the floor. Paola bent and snatched it up with one hand and stood holding it for a moment, clutching the tattered thing in a death grip. Then, very slowly, she bent down and returned it to Chiara’s lap, ran her hand across the top of her daughter’s head, and left the room.
“Who were they, Papà?”
“I think they were Serbs, but I’m not sure. Someone who knows the language will have to listen to them, and then we’ll know.”
“What will you do about it, Papà? Will you arrest them and send them to prison?”
“I don’t know, darling. It won’t be easy to find them.”
“But they should go to prison, shouldn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think Francesca meant about her father?” A possibility occurred to Chiara and she asked, “That wasn’t him holding the camera, was it?”
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Then what did she mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I have to find out.” He watched her try to tie the dog’s ears together. “Chiara?”
“Yes, Papà?” She looked up at him, certain that he would say something that would make it all right, that would fix it and make it be as though it hadn’t happened.
“I think you better not talk to Francesca anymore.”
“And not ask any more questions?”
“No, not that, either.”
She absorbed this, then asked hesitantly, “You’re not mad at me, are you?”
Brunetti stooped down beside the bed. “No, I’m not mad at you at all.” He wasn’t sure if he could control his voice and so paused a moment, then said, pointing to the dog, “Be careful you don’t pull Bark’s ear off.”
“He’s a silly dog, isn’t h
e?” Chiara asked. “Who ever heard of a dog with bald spots?”
Brunetti rubbed a finger across the dog’s nose. “Most dogs don’t get chewed on, Chiara.”
She smiled at that and swung her legs out from under the covers. “I think I better do my homework now,” she said, standing up.
“All right. I’ll go talk to your mother.”
“Papà?” she said as he went toward the door.
“Hmm?” he asked.
“Mamma’s not mad at me either, is she?”
“Chiara,” he answered, voice not entirely steady, “you are our greatest joy.” Before she could say anything, he deepened his voice and added, “Now do your homework.” Brunetti waited to see her smile before he left the room.
In the kitchen, Paola stood at the sink, whirling something around in the salad spinner. When he came in, she looked up and said, “The whole world could fall down, and still we’d have to have dinner, I suppose.” He was relieved to see her smile when she said it. “Chiara all right?”
Brunetti shrugged. “She’s doing her homework. I don’t know how she is. What do you think? You know her better than I do.”
She took her hand off the spinning knob and looked at him. The whirring sound filled the room, and when it slowed to a stop, she asked, “Do you really believe that?”
“Believe what?”
“That I know her better than you do?”
“You’re her mother,” Brunetti said as if that would explain it.
“Oh, Guido, you’re so blind at times. If you were a coin, Chiara would be the other side.”
Hearing Paola say that made him feel, strangely enough, very tired. He pulled one of the chairs out and sat down at the table. “Who knows? She’s young. Maybe she’ll forget.”
“Will you?” Paola asked, coming to sit opposite him.
Brunetti shook his head. “I’ll forget the details of the film, but I’ll never forget that I saw it, never forget what it means.”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” Paola said. “Why would anyone want to see such a thing? It’s obscene.” She paused a moment and then added, voice filled with surprise at finding herself using such a term, “It’s evil. That’s what’s so horrible about it; I feel as though I’ve looked through a window and seen human evil looking back at me.” After a moment, she asked, “Guido, how could those men do that? How could they do that and continue to think of themselves as human?”