by Donna Leon
The body having been examined and photographed, Scarpa ordered it taken to the Ospedale Civile for autopsy, telling Rizzardi that he wanted it done quickly. He ordered the members of the crime team to begin searching the apartment, although from its wild disorder it was clear that this had already been done. After Rizzardi's silent departure, the lieutenant chose to search the small room at the back of the house that had apparently belonged to Florinda Ghiorghiu. Not much larger than a closet, the room appeared not to have suffered the attentions of whoever had searched the living room. It contained a narrow bed and a set of shelves curtained by a worn piece of fabric that had perhaps once been a tablecloth. When Scarpa pulled the cloth to one side, he saw two folded blouses and an equal number of changes of underwear. A pair of black tennis shoes stood side by side on the floor. On the windowsill beside the bed were a photograph in a cheap cardboard frame of three small children, and a book he didn't bother to examine. Inside a cardboard folder he found photocopies of official documents: the first two pages of Florinda Ghiorghiu's Romanian passport and copies of her Italian residence and work permits. Born in 1953, her occupation was given as 'domestic helper'. There was a second-class return train ticket between Bucharest and Venice, the second half still unused. Because there was no table and no chair in the room, there was no other surface to inspect.
Lieutenant Scarpa pulled out his telefonino and called the Questura to get the number for the Frontier Police at Villa Opicina. Calling the number, he gave his name and rank and a brief account of the murder. He asked when the next train from Venice was expected to cross the border. Saying that their suspect might be on that train and firmly emphasizing that the killer was Romanian, he added that, should she manage to reach Romania, there was little chance of extraditing her, so it was of the utmost importance that she be removed from the train.
He said he'd fax her photo as soon as he got to the Questura, re-emphasized the viciousness of the crime, and hung up.
Leaving the scene of crime team to continue its examination of the apartment, Scarpa ordered the pilot to take him back to the Questura, where he faxed Ghiorghiu's form to the Frontier Police, hoping that the photo would come through clearly. That done, Lieutenant Scarpa went to speak to his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, to inform him of the speed with which violent crime was being pursued.
In Villa Opicina, the fax came through as the officer in charge of the Frontier Police, Captain Luca Peppito, was phoning the capostazione at the railway station, telling him that the Zagreb express would have to be halted long enough to allow him and his men to search for a violent killer who was attempting to flee the country. Peppito replaced the phone, checked that his pistol was loaded, and went downstairs to collect his men.
Twenty minutes later, the Intercity to Zagreb pulled into the station and slowed to a halt that normally lasted only long enough for the engines to be changed and the passengers' passports to be checked. In recent years, customs inspection between these two minor players in the game of a united Europe had become perfunctory and generally led to nothing more than the payment of duty on the odd carton of cigarettes or bottle of grappa which were no longer viewed as a threat to the economic survival of either nation.
Peppito had sent men to both ends of the train and placed two more at the entrance to the station; all were under orders to examine the passports of any female passengers alighting from the train.
Three men climbed on at the back of the train and started to work their way forward, examining the passengers in every compartment and checking that no one was in the toilets, while Peppito and a pair of officers began the same process, working backwards from the first carriage.
It was Peppito's sergeant who spotted her, sitting in a window seat in a second-class compartment, in the first carriage behind the engine. He almost overlooked her because she was asleep or pretending to be, her head turned towards the window and resting against it. He saw the broad Slavic planes of her face, her hair grown out white at the roots for lack of care, and the squat, muscular frame so common among women from the East. Two other people sat in the compartment, a large red-faced man reading a German-language newspaper, and an older man working on one of the word puzzles in Settimana Enigmistica. Peppito slid the door back, banging it against the frame. That shook the woman awake; she looked about her with startled eyes. The two men looked up at the uniformed officers, and the older one asked, 'Si?' expressing his irritation only in the tone.
'Gentlemen, leave the compartment,' commanded Peppito. Before either of them could protest, he allowed his right hand to wander over to the butt of his pistol. The men, making no attempt to take their suitcases, left the compartment. The woman, seeing the men leave, got to her feet, acting as though she thought the order was meant for her as well.
As she tried to squeeze past Peppito, he gripped her left forearm with a firm hand. 'Documents, Signora,' he spat out.
She looked up at him, her eyes blinking quickly. 'Cosa?’ she said nervously.
'Documenti,' he repeated, louder.
She smiled nervously, a placatory tightening of the muscles of her face, demonstrative of harmlessness and good will, but he saw the way her eyes shifted down the corridor towards the door. 'St, Si, Signore. Momento. Momenta,' she said in an accent so strong the words were almost incomprehensible.
A plastic bag hung from her right hand. 'La borsa,' Peppito said, indicating the bag, which was from Billa, and meant to hold groceries.
At his gesture, she whipped the bag behind her. 'Mia, mm,' she said, stating possession but demonstrating fear.
'La borsa, Signora,' Peppito said and reached for it.
She turned halfway round, but Peppito was a strong man and managed to pull her back towards him. He released her arm and grabbed the bag. He opened it and looked inside: all he saw were two ripe peaches and a purse. He took the purse and let the bag fall to the floor. He glanced at the woman, whose face had grown as white as the hair showing at her roots, and flicked open the small plastic purse. He recognized the hundred-Euro notes instantly and saw that there were many of them.
One of his men had gone off to tell his colleagues that they had found her, and the other stood in the corridor, trying to explain to the two men that they would be allowed back to their seats as soon as the woman had been removed from the train.
Peppito snapped the purse shut and moved to put it in the pocket of his jacket. The woman, seeing this, reached for it, but Peppito batted her hand away and turned to say something to the men in the corridor. He was standing at the entrance of the compartment, and when she lunged towards him with her entire body, she drove him back into the corridor, where he lost his balance and fell on to one side. That was all it took for the woman to slip past him and run to the open door at the front of the carriage. Peppito called out and struggled to his feet, but by the time he was standing, she was down the steps and racing along the platform beside the train.
Peppito and the policeman closest to him ran to the door and jumped down on to the platform; both drew their pistols. The woman, still running and now clear of the engine, turned and saw the guns in their hands. At the sight of them she screamed aloud and leapt from the platform down on to the tracks. In the distance could be heard, at least by anyone not caught up in the panic and tension of this scene, the arrival of a through freight train on its way south from Hungary.
The policemen and their shouts followed the running woman. She looked up, saw the approaching train, glanced back to calculate the distance between herself and the policemen, and decided to risk it. She ran forward a few more steps, staying close to the tracks, then suddenly veered and jumped to the left, just metres before the train would reach her. The policemen shouted, the whistle of the train blared at the same moment as the shriek of the brakes filled the air. Perhaps it was one of these noises that caused her to falter; perhaps she merely put her foot down on the rail instead of the gravel. Whatever the reason, she fell to one knee, then instantly pushed herse
lf up and lunged forward. But, as the policemen had seen from the greater distance, it was too late, and the train was upon her.
Peppito never mentioned it again, what happened then, at least not after he described it in his report that afternoon. Nor did the officer with him, nor the men in the engine of the freight train, though one of them had seen it happen before, three years ago, just outside Budapest.
Later, the papers reported that seven hundred Euros had been found in the woman's purse. Signora Battestini's niece, who held power of attorney for her aunt, declared that she had, the previous day, collected her aunt's pension at the post office and taken it to her: seven hundred and twelve Euros.
Given the state of the Romanian woman's body, no attempt was made to check for traces of Signora Battestini's blood. One of the men who had been in the compartment with her said that she had seemed very disturbed when she got on to the train in Venice but had grown noticeably calmer the farther they got from the city, and the other one said she had been careful to take the plastic bag with her when she went down the corridor to the toilet.
In the absence of other suspects, it was declared that she was the likely murderer, and it was decided that police energies could be better employed than in continued investigation of the case. It was not closed, merely left unattended: in the normal course of things, it would disappear for lack of attention and, after the sensational headlines which greeted the murder and the Romanian's flight had been forgotten, it would join them in oblivion.
The authorities attempted to establish at least the bureaucratic evidence relating to the murder of Maria Grazia Battestini. Her niece said that the Romanian woman, whom she had known only as Flori, had been with her aunt for four months before the crime. No, the niece had not hired her: that was all in the hands of her aunt's lawyer, Roberta Marieschi. Dottoressa Marieschi, it turned out, served as lawyer for a number of elderly persons in the city, and for many of them she procured maids and domestic helpers, primarily from Romania, where she had contacts with various charitable organizations.
Dottoressa Marieschi knew nothing more about Florinda Ghiorghiu than what was contained in her passport, a copy of which Dottoressa Marieschi had in her possession. The original was found in a cloth bag tied to the waist of the woman who had fallen under the train and, when cleaned and examined, it turned out to be false, and not even a very good forgery. Dottoressa Marieschi, when questioned about this, replied that it was not her job to recertify the validity of passports which the Immigration Police had accepted as genuine, merely to find clients for whom the persons bearing those passports - and here she took the opportunity to repeat the phrase, 'which the Immigration Police had accepted as genuine' - might be suitable.
She had met the Ghiorghiu woman only once, four months before, when she had taken her to Signora Battestini's home and introduced the two women. Since then, she had had no further contact with her. Yes, Signora Battestini had complained about the Romanian woman, but Signora Battestini was in the habit of complaining about the help that was sent to her.
Because the case remained in limbo, the niece could get no answer to her questions about the state of her aunt's apartment, whether it was still a protected crime scene or not. When she tired of the lack of response, she consulted with Dottoressa Marieschi, who assured her that the conditions of her aunt's will were sufficiently clear to guarantee her undisputed possession of the entire building. A week after Signora Battestini's death the two women met and discussed at length the legal status of the dead woman's estate. Assured by the lawyer's words, the niece went into the apartment the day after their conversation and cleaned it. Whatever she judged to be of potential value or importance was placed into cardboard boxes and taken up to the attic. The remainder of her aunt's clothing and personal possessions were put into large plastics- garbage bags and left outside the door of the apartment. The next day the painters went in, Dottoressa Marieschi having convinced the heiress that it would be best to buy some new furniture and rent the apartment to tourists by the week. She would see to the business of finding suitable tenants, and no, if the arrangements remained informal and payment was made in cash, she saw no reason why it would be necessary to declare this income to the authorities. After consulting once again with Dottoressa Marieschi, the heiress agreed to restore the apartments, with a view to charging high rents for them.
And so things rested, as little as three weeks after the death of Maria Grazia Battestini. Her worldly possessions sat in the attic, tossed carelessly into boxes by someone with no interest in them beyond the vague hope that some day, when she got around to taking a closer look at them, something in one of them might prove to be of value; and her apartment, newly painted, was already the subject of a very serious inquiry from a Dutch cigar manufacturer, who was interested in renting it for the last week of August.
3
Thus things stood, contentment shared equally among them: the police, who had effectively closed, though they had not solved, the case; Signora Battestini's niece, Graziella Simionato, who anticipated a convenient and welcomed new income; and Roberta Marieschi, who applauded herself for having so successfully retained the Battestini family on her list of clients. No doubt things would so have remained had it not been for the dominant household god of Venice, indeed of all towns and cities: gossip.
Late in the afternoon of the third Sunday in August, the shutters were pushed open on the windows of a second-floor apartment just off the Canale della Misericordia, not far from the Palazzo del Cammello. The owner of the apartment, Assunta Gismondi, was a graphic designer who had lived in Venice all her life, though she now worked primarily for an architect's studio in Milano. After pushing back the shutters to allow some air into the stifling apartment, Signora Gismondi, from the habit of years, looked across the canal at the windows directly opposite and was surprised to see the shutters of the second-floor apartment closed. She was surprised, though hardly disappointed.
She unpacked her suitcase, hung up some clothes and stuffed others in the washing machine. She looked through the post that had accumulated during the three weeks she had been in London, checked her faxes and read them, but because she had been in email contact with her lover, as well as with the employers who had sent her to London on the training course, she did not bother to turn on her computer to check for new messages. Instead, she took her shopping bag and went out to the Billa on Strada Nuova, the only place where she would be able to get enough food to prepare a meal for herself that evening. The idea of eating in another restaurant filled her with horror. She would rather stay home and eat pasta with olio e peperoncino than sit alone again and eat among strangers.
Billa on Strada Nuova was open, and Signora Gismondi was able to fill her bag with fresh tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, salad, and, for the first time in three weeks, find decent fruit and cheese that did not require the payment of a week's salary for even the smallest of portions. Back in her apartment, she poured olive oil into a frying pan, chopped up two, then three, then four cloves of garlic and let them simmer slowly, breathing in the scent with a joy that was almost religious in its intensity, happy to be home, among the objects, the smells and the sights she loved.
Her lover called half an hour later and told her he was still in Argentina, where things were a mess and getting worse, but he planned to be back in a week or so, when he'd fly up from Rome for at least three days. No, he'd tell his wife he had to go to Torino for business; she wouldn't care, anyway. When she replaced the phone, Assunta sat in her kitchen and ate a plate of pasta with a sauce of tomatoes and grilled eggplant, then ate two peaches and finished a half-bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Glancing out the window at the house across the way, she whispered a silent prayer that the shutters would never open again, in which case she would never request another favour of life.
The next morning, on her way to her favourite bar for a coffee and a brioche, she stopped at the newsagent's for the paper.
'Good morning, Signora,' the man behin
d the counter greeted her. ‘I haven't seen you for a while. Vacation?'
'No. In London. For work.'
'Did you enjoy it?' he asked, his tone making it clear that he had serious doubts as to whether that were possible.
She picked up the Gazzettino and read bold headlines that foretold imminent political collapse, ecological disaster, and a crime of passion in Lombardia. How sweet to be home. She shrugged in belated response to his question, as if to suggest the unlikelihood of enjoying work, no matter in what city, no matter in what land.
It was all right’ she finally equivocated. 'But it's good to be home. And you? Anything new?'
'You haven't heard, then?' he said, face suddenly alight at the pleasure of being the first to pass on bad news.
'No. What?'
'The Battestini woman, the one across from you. You haven't heard?'
She thought of the shutters, suppressing the hope that sprang up inside her. 'No. Nothing. What?' She placed the newspaper on the counter and leaned towards him.
'She's dead. Murdered,' he said, caressing the word.
Signora Gismondi gasped her surprise, then demanded, 'No. What happened? When?'
'About three weeks ago. The doctor found her; you know, that one who goes in to see the old people. Someone'd beaten in her head.' He paused to see the effect of his news, judged her to be satisfactorily stunned, so went on, 'My cousin knows one of the cops who found her, and he said whoever did it must really have hated her. At least that's what my cousin said he said’