by Donna Leon
“Who do you think you are, police?” the man asked and glanced down at the magazine that lay open in front of him.
Wordlessly, Brunetti took his wallet from his pocket and pulled out his warrant card. He dropped it on the open page. “Did a woman in a gray coat come in here?”
“Signora Ceroni,” the man said, looking up as he handed Brunetti’s card back to him.
“Where’s her car?”
“Fourth level. She’ll be down in a minute.”
The sound of a motor from the circular ramp that led to the upper parking levels gave proof of this. Brunetti turned away from the window and walked over to the doorway that led outside and to the road to the mainland. He placed himself in the center of the open door and stood, hands at his side.
The car, a white Mercedes, came down the ramp and turned toward the door. The headlights caught Brunetti full in the face, blinding him for a moment, forcing him to narrow his eyes to slits.
“Hey, what are you doing?” the man called to Brunetti, climbing down from his chair and coming out of his booth. He took a step toward Brunetti, but just then the car’s horn shrieked out, deafening in the enclosed space, and he jumped back, crashing against the doorjamb. He watched the car cover the ten meters between itself and the man in the doorway. He shouted again, but the man didn’t move. He told himself to run across and push the policeman out of the way, but he couldn’t force himself to move.
The horn sounded again, and the man closed his eyes. The sharp squeal of the brakes forced him to open them, and as he watched, the car swerved wildly on the oil-slick floor as it turned away from the policeman, who still hadn’t moved. The Mercedes sideswiped a Peugeot sedan parked in slot seventeen and then swerved back toward the door, coming to a stop less than a meter from the policeman. As the attendant watched, the policeman walked up to the passenger door and opened it. He said something, waited a moment, and climbed into the car. The car shot off and through the door, turned left and toward the causeway, and the attendant, unable to think of anything better to do, called the police.
27
As they started across the causeway, toward the lights of Mestre and Marghera, Brunetti studied Signora Ceronis profile, but she ignored him and looked straight ahead, so he looked off to the right, to the lighthouse of Murano and, even farther out, the lights of Burano. “It’s very clear tonight,” he said. “I think I can see Torcello out there.”
She sped up and was soon traveling faster than any of the other cars on the causeway. “If I turned the wheel to the right, we’d go over the edge and into the water,” she said.
“I imagine you’re right,” Brunetti answered.
She took her foot off the accelerator, and they slowed down. A car swept past them on the left. “When you came to the agency,” she said, “I knew it was just a matter of waiting for you to come back. I should have left then.”
“Where would you have gone?”
“Switzerland, and from there to Brazil.”
“Because of business contacts in Brazil?”
“I couldn’t have used them, could I?”
Brunetti thought about this for a moment before he answered, “No, given the circumstances, I suppose you couldn’t. Then why Brazil?”
“I have money there.”
“And in Switzerland?”
“Of course. Everyone has money in Switzerland,” she snapped.
Brunetti, who didn’t, knew what she meant and so answered, “Of course.” Then he asked, “But you couldn’t stay there?”
“No. Brazil’s better.”
“I suppose so. But now you can’t go.”
She said nothing.
“Do you want to tell me about it? We’re not at the Questura, and you don’t have your lawyer, I know, but I’d like to know why.”
“Is this police or just you?”
He sighed. “I’m afraid there’s no difference, not anymore.”
She looked at him then, not for the words but for the sigh. “What will happen?” she asked.
“To you?”
“Yes.”
“It depends on …” he began to say, thinking that it would depend on what her reason had been. But then he remembered that there were three of them, and so that wasn’t true. Motive would matter very little to the judges, not with three men dead, and all apparently in the coldest of blood. “I don’t know. It won’t be good.”
“I don’t think I care,” she said, and he was surprised to hear the lightness with which she spoke.
“Why?”
“Because they deserved it, all of them.”
Brunetti was about to say that no one deserved to die, but then he remembered the tape and said nothing.
“Tell me,” he said.
“You know that I worked for them?”
“Yes.”
“No, not that I work for them now. I mean for years, ever since I came to Italy.”
“For Trevisan and Favero?” he asked.
“No, not for them, but for men like them, the ones who ran it before they sold it to Trevisan.”
“He bought it?” Brunetti asked, surprised to hear her talk about it as though it were a store.
“Yes. I don’t know how it happened. But what I do know is that, one day, the men who were running the business were gone, and Trevisan was the new boss.”
“And you were …?”
“I was what you would call ‘middle management.’” She used the English term, voice heavy with irony.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I was no longer peddling my ass on the street.” She glanced across at him then to see if she had shocked him, but the look Brunetti gave her was as calm as his voice when he asked, “How long did you do that?”
“Work as a prostitute?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I came here as a prostitute,” she said and then paused. “No, that’s not true. I came here as a young woman, in love with my first lover, an Italian who promised to give me the world if only I’d leave my home and follow him here. I did, and he didn’t.
“I told you I was from Mostar. That means my family was Moslem. Not that anyone in my family ever saw the inside of a mosque. Except for my uncle, but everyone thought he was crazy. I even went to school with the sisters. My family said I’d get a better education, so I had twelve years of Catholic schools.”
He noticed that they were driving along the right side of the canal that flowed between Venice and Padua, the road of the Palladian villas. Even as he recognized the road, one of the villas appeared on the other side of the canal, its outline faintly visible in the moonlight, a single light burning in the window of an upper floor.
“The story is a cliché, so I won’t tell you about it. I was in love, I came here, and within a month I was on the streets. Without a passport, with no Italian; but I’d had six years of Latin with the sisters, learning all the prayers, so it was easy for me to learn. It was also easy to learn what I had to do to succeed. I’ve always been very ambitious, and I saw no reason why I couldn’t succeed at this.”
“And what did you do?”
“I was very good at my work. I kept myself clean, and I became helpful to the man who controlled us.”
“Helpful in what way?”
“I’d tell him about the other girls. Twice I told him about girls who were preparing to run away.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were beaten. I think he broke some of the fingers of one of them. They seldom did us enough damage to make us stop working. Bad for business.”
“How else were you helpful?”
“I’d give them the names of clients, and I think some of them were blackmailed. I was good at spotting the nervous ones, and I’d ask them about themselves, and sooner or later they all ended up talking about their wives. If they looked like they’d be good targets, I’d learn their names and then their addresses. It was very easy. Men are very weak. I think it’s vanity that does it.
”
After a few moments’ silence, Brunetti asked, “And then what?”
“And then they took me off the streets. They realized that I could be much more useful to them in a managerial capacity.” Again, she used the English words, speaking almost without accent, in and out of the language with the ease of a seal slipping in and out of the water.
“What did you do in that ‘managerial capacity?” he asked, matching her lack of accent.
“I’d talk to the new girls, explain things to them, and advise them to do as they were told.” She added irrelevantly, “I learned Spanish quickly, and that helped.”
“Was it profitable?”
“The higher I rose in the organization, yes. I saved enough in two years to buy the travel agency.”
“But you still worked for them?”
She looked at him before she said, “You never stop working for them once you start.” She stopped at a red light but didn’t turn to him. Hands locked on the top of the wheel, she looked straight ahead.
“None of this bothered you? Doing all of this?”
She shrugged and, when the light changed, shifted into gear. They drove on.
“The business was expanding tremendously. There were more and more girls every year, every month, it seemed. We’d bring them in—”
He interrupted her. “Is that what the travel agency was for?”
“Yes. But after a time, it almost didn’t make sense to import them, so many were coming in from the East and from North Africa. So we changed our organization to adjust to this. We’d simply pick them up after they got here. It cut down tremendously on overhead. And it was easy enough to get them to hand over their passports. Well, if they had passports. A lot of them didn’t.” Her voice grew prim, almost officious. “It’s amazing how easy it is to get into this country. And stay here.”
Another villa came up on the right, but Brunetti barely glanced at it. “The tapes?” he reminded her.
“Ah yes, the tapes,” she said. “I knew about them for months before I saw them. That is, I knew about them in theory, knew that tapes were being sent up from Bosnia, but I didn’t know what they were. Trevisan and Favero and Lotto, all of them were excited about them because of the profits they saw. All they had to do was pay a few thousand lire for a blank tape and reproduce it, and then, at least in America, they could sell it for at least twenty or thirty times what they had paid for the tape. In the beginning, they just sold the master tapes. I think they got a few million lire for them, but then they decided that they wanted to go into distribution themselves; that’s where they said the money was.
“It was Trevisan who asked me what I’d suggest. They knew I had a good instinct for business, so they asked me. I told them exactly what I thought, that I couldn’t tell them anything until I’d seen the tapes. Even then, I was thinking of them as a product and the whole thing as a problem in marketing.” She glanced at him. “I even thought of it that way, in those terms. Product. Marketing.” She sighed.
“So Trevisan spoke to the other two and they agreed to have me look at a few tapes. But they insisted that I do it with them; they didn’t trust me, they didn’t trust anyone with the master tapes, not once they realized how valuable they were.”
“And did you see them?” he asked when he thought she was not going to continue.
“Oh yes, I saw them. I saw three of them.”
“Where?”
“At Lotto’s apartment. He was the only one who didn’t have a wife living with him, so we went there.”
“And?”
“And we watched the tapes. That’s when I decided.”
“Decided what?”
“To kill them.”
“All three of them?” Brunetti asked.
“Of course.”
After a moment he asked, “Why?”
“Because they enjoyed those films so much. Favero was the worst. He got so aroused during the second one that he had to leave the room. I don’t know where he went, but he didn’t come back until they were over.”
“And the other two?”
“Oh, they were excited too. But they had seen them before, all of the tapes, and so they could control themselves.”
“Were they the same kind of tapes as the one I saw?”
“Did a woman get killed?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then it was the same as these. She’s raped, usually repeatedly, and then she’s killed.” For all of the emotion in her voice, she could have been describing training films for flight attendants.
“How many tapes were there?” Brunetti asked.
“I don’t know. There were at least seven that I know of, not including the three I saw. But those were the ones they sold outright; these three were the ones they wanted to reproduce and distribute.”
“What did you tell them when you saw the tapes?”
“I told them I’d need a day or so to think about it. I said that I knew someone in Brussels who might be interested in buying copies for the Belgian and Dutch markets. But I’d already decided that I would kill them. It was just a matter of finding the best way to do it.”
“Why?”
“Why what? Why did I wait, or why did I decide to kill them?”
“Why did you decide to kill them?”
She allowed the car to slow in response to a car ahead of them that was slowing to turn off to the right. When the lights of the other car disappeared, she turned to Brunetti. “I’ve thought about that a great deal, Commissario. I think the thing that decided me was that they enjoyed the tapes so much; that surprised me, that they would. And I realized, as I sat and watched the three of them, that they not only had no idea that there was anything wrong in watching the videos, but they didn’t think it was wrong to commission them.”
“Were they commissioning them?”
She turned her eyes back to the road. “Please, Commissario, don’t be dull. If there were no market for such things, they wouldn’t be made. Trevisan and his friends created a market, and then they saw to it that it was supplied. Before I saw the tapes and saw what was on them, I’d heard Trevisan and Lotto talking about sending a fax to Sarajevo to order more of them. They were as casual as if they were calling to order a case of wine or to tell their broker to buy or sell some stock. It was business for them.”
“But then you saw the tapes?”
“Yes. But then I saw the tapes.”
“Did you think about whether it was wrong to murder them?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Commissario. It wasn’t wrong. It was right. I never questioned that, not from the beginning. And before you can ask, yes, I’d do it again.”
“Is it because the women are Bosnian? Moslem?”
She made a sound he thought was a chuckle. “It doesn’t matter who the women are. Were. They’re dead now, so it makes no difference to them what happens, poor things.” She thought about his question for a moment. “No, that didn’t make any difference.” She took her eyes from the road and looked at him. “People talk about humanity and crimes against humanity, Commissario. The newspapers are filled with editorials, and politicians talk and talk and talk. And no one does anything. All we get is talk and noble sentiments, and still things like this go on; women get raped and murdered, and now we make movies and watch it happening.” He heard her anger, but it made her speech slower, not faster. “So I decided to stop them. Because nothing else would.”
“You could have come to the police.”
“And what, Commissario? Have them arrested for what? Is it a crime, what they were doing?”
Brunetti didn’t know and was ashamed to admit it.
“Is it?” she insisted.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “But you could have exposed them and their business with the prostitutes. That would have stopped them.”
She laughed out loud. “How dull you are, Commissario. I had no desire to stop the prostitution, none at all. I make a very good living f
rom that. Why would I want to stop it?”
“Because of what’s done to the women, the same thing that happened to you.”
She spoke more quickly now, out of irritation, not anger. “It would happen to them wherever they were. They’d be whores and victims in their own countries.”
“Aren’t some of them killed?”
“What do you want me to do, Commissario, tell you I’m taking vengeance for all the poor dead prostitutes of the world? I’m not. I’m trying to tell you why I did it. If they were arrested, everything would have come out. I would have been arrested, as well. And what would have happened? A few months in jail while they waited for a trial, and then what? A fine? A year in jail? Two? You think that’s enough for what they did?”
Brunetti was too tired to argue ethics with this woman. “How did you do it?” He’d settle for facts.
“I knew Trevisan and Favero were having dinner, and I knew which train Trevisan always took back. I took the same train. The carriages are always empty at the end of the trip, so it was very easy.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“I don’t know. It was all very fast.”
“Where did you get the gun?”
“A friend,” she said, giving this as the only explanation.
“And Favero?”
“During the dinner, he went to the bathroom, and I put barbiturates in his wine, vin santo. I made him order a half bottle after dinner because it was sweet and I knew it would cover the taste.”
“And at his house?”
“He was supposed to drive me to the train station so I could get a train back to Venice. But, halfway there, he fell asleep at a red light. I pulled him over and changed seats, then drove the car back to his house. He had one of those automatic door openers for the garage, so I opened the door, drove in and left the motor running, then pulled him back under the wheel and hit the button to close the door. I ran out of the garage as it was closing.”
“Lotto?”
“He called me and said he was worried, wanted to talk to me about what was happening.” Brunetti watched her profile as it appeared and disappeared in the lights of the infrequent cars which passed them. Her face remained calm through all of this. “I told him it would be better if we talked out of the city, so he agreed to meet me in Dolo. I told him I had some business on the mainland and would meet him on that back road in Dolo. I got there early, and when he pulled up, I got out of my car and into his. He was in a panic. He thought his sister had killed Trevisan and Favero, and he wanted to know if I thought so too. He was afraid that she was going to kill him. So all of the business would be hers. And her lover’s.”