Anonymous Venetian

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti said good-morning and asked where he could find Giovanni Feltrinelli.

  At the mention of the name, theportiere shoved his chair back and got to his feet. ‘I’ve warned him not to have any more of you come to this building. If he wants to do his job, then he can go do it in your cars or in the open fields, with the other animals, but he’s not going to do his filthy work here, or I’ll call the police.’ As he said it, his right hand reached out for the telephone on the wall behind him, his fiery eyes running up and down Brunetti with disgust he did nothing to disguise.

  ‘I am the police,’ Brunetti said softly and pulled his warrant card from his wallet, holding it out for the old man to see. He took it roughly from Brunetti, as if to suggest that he, too, knew where these things could be faked, and pushed his glasses up on his nose to read it.

  ‘It looks real,’ he finally admitted and handed it back to Brunetti. He took a dirty handkerchief from his pocket, removed his glasses, and began to rub at the lenses, first one and then the other, carefully, as though he had spent his life doing this. He put them back on, careful to hook them behind each ear, put the handkerchief back in his pocket, and asked Brunetti, in a different voice, ‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘Nothing. We need to question him about someone else.’

  ‘One of his faggot friends?’ the old man asked, returning to his aggressive tone.

  Brunetti ignored the question. ‘We’d like to speak to Signor Feltrinelli. Perhaps he can give us some information.’

  ‘Signor Feltrinelli? Signor?’ the old man asked, repeating Brunetti’s words but turning the formality into an insult. ‘You mean Nino the Pretty Boy, Nino the Cocksucker?’

  Brunetti sighed tiredly. Why couldn’t people learn to be more discriminating in whom they chose to hate, a bit more selective? Perhaps even a bit more intelligent?

  Why not hate the Christian Democrats? Or the Socialists? Or why not hate people who hated homosexuals?

  ‘Could you tell me Signor Feltrinelli’s apartment number?’

  The old man retreated behind his desk and sat back down to his task of sorting the mail. ‘Fifth floor. The name’s on the door.’

  Brunetti turned and left without saying anything further. When he was at the door, he thought he heard the old man mutter, ‘Signor,’ but it could have been only an angry noise. On the other side of the marble-floored hallway, he pushed the button for the elevator and stood waiting for it. After a few minutes, the elevator still had not come, but Brunetti refused to go back to ask the portiere if it was working. Instead, he moved over to the left, opened a door to the stairs, and climbed to the fifth floor. By the time he reached it, he had to loosen his tie and pull the cloth of his trousers away from his thighs, where it clung wetly. At the top, he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped at his face.

  As the old man had said, the name was on the door: ‘Giovanni Feltrinelli - Architeito’.

  He glanced at his watch: 11.35. He rang the bell. In immediate response, he heard quick footsteps approach the door. It was opened by a young man who bore a faint resemblance to the police photo Brunetti had studied the night before: short blond hair, a squared and masculine jaw, and soft dark eyes.

  ‘Si?’ he said, looking up at Brunetti with a friendly smile of enquiry.

  ‘Signor Giovanni Feltrinelli?’ Brunetti asked, holding out his warrant card.

  The young man barely glanced at the card, but he seemed to recognize it immediately, and that recognition wiped the smile from his face.

  ‘Yes. What do you want?’ His voice was as cool as his smile had become.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you, Signor Feltrinelli. May I come in?’

  ‘Why bother to ask?’ Feltrinelli said tiredly and opened the door wider, stepping back to let Brunetti enter.

  ‘Permesso ,’ Brunetti said and stepped inside. Perhaps the title on the door didn’t lie: the apartment had the symmetrical look of a living space that had been planned with skill and precision. The living-room into which Brunetti walked was painted a flat white, the floor a light herring-bone parquet. A few kelims, colours muted with age, lay on the floor, and two other woven pieces -Brunetti thought they might be Persian - hung on the walls. The sofa was long and low, set back against the far wall, and appeared to be covered in beige silk. In front of it stood a long glass-topped table with a wide ceramic platter placed on one side. One wall was covered with a bookshelf, another with framed architectural renderings of buildings and photographs of completed buildings, all of them low, spacious, and surrounded by wide expanses of rough terrain. In the far corner stood a high draughting table, surface tilted to face the room and covered with outsized sheets of tissue paper. A cigarette burned in an ashtray which perched at a crazy angle on the slanted surface of the draughting table.

  The symmetry of the room kept pulling the viewer’s eye back to its centre, to that simple ceramic platter. Brunetti sensed strongly that this was being done, but he didn’t understand how it had been achieved.

  ‘Signor Feltrinelli,’ he began, ‘I’d like to ask you to help us, if you can, in an investigation.’

  Feltrinelli said nothing.

  ‘I’d like you to look at a picture of a man and tell us if you know him or recognize him.’

  Feltrinelli walked over to the draughting table and picked up the cigarette. He drew hungrily at it, then crushed it out in the ashtray with a nervous gesture. ‘I don’t give names,’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti asked, understanding him but not wanting to show that he did.

  ‘I don’t give the names of my clients. You can show me all the pictures you want, but I won’t recognize any of them, and I don’t know any names.’

  ‘I’m not asking you about your clients, Signor Feltrinelli,’ Brunetti said. ‘And I’m not interested in who they are. We have reason to believe that you might know something about this man, and we’d like you to take a look at the sketch and tell us if you recognize him.’

  Feltrinelli walked away from the table and went to stand beside a small window in the wall on the left, and Brunetti realized why the room had been constructed the way it had: the whole purpose was to draw attention away from that window and from the bleak brick wall that stood only two metres from it. ‘And if I don’t?’ Feltrinelli asked.

  ‘If you don’t what, recognize him?’

  ‘No. If I don’t look at the picture?’

  There was no air-conditioning and no fan in the room, and it reeked of cheap cigarettes, an odour which Brunetti imagined he could feel sinking into his damp clothing, into his hair. ‘Signor Feltrinelli, I am asking you to do your duty as a citizen, to help the police in the investigation of a murder. We are seeking merely to identify this man. Until we do, there is no way we can begin that investigation.’

  ‘Is he the one you found out in that field yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you think he might be one of us?’ There was no need for Feltrinelli to explain who ‘us’ were.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s not necessary for you to know that.’

  ‘But you think he’s a transvestite?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a whore?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti answered.

  Feltrinelli turned away from the window and came across the room towards Brunetti. He extended his hand. ‘Let me see the picture.’

  Brunetti opened the folder in his hand and drew a Xerox copy of the artist’s sketch from it. He noticed that the damp palm of his hand had been stained a brightblue by the dye of the paper cover of the folder. He handed the sketch to Feltrinelli, who looked at it carefully for a moment, then used his other hand to cover the hairline and study it again. He handed it back to Brunetti and shook his head. ‘No, I’ve never seen him before.’

  Brunetti believed him. He put the photo back into the folder. ‘Can you think of anyone who might be able to help us find out who this man is?’

  ‘I a
ssume you’re checking through a list of those of us with arrest records,’ Feltrinelli said, voice no longer so confrontational.

  ‘Yes. We don’t have a way to get anyone else to look at the picture.’

  ‘You mean the ones who haven’t been arrested yet, I suppose,’ Feltrinelli said and then asked, ‘Do you have another one of those drawings?’

  Brunetti pulled one from the folder and handed it to him and then handed him one of his cards. ‘You’ll have to call the Questura in Mestre, but you can ask for me. Or for Sergeant Gallo.’

  ‘How was he killed?’

  ‘It will be in this morning’s papers.’

  ‘I don’t read the papers.’

  ‘He was beaten to death.’

  ‘In the field?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that, Signore.’

  Feltrinelli went and placed the drawing face up on the draughting table and lit another cigarette.

  ‘All right,’ he said, turning back to Brunetti. ‘I’ve got the drawing. I’ll show it to some people. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Are you an architect, Signor Feltrinelli?’

  ‘Yes. I mean I have the laurea d’architettura. But I’m not working. I mean I have no job.’

  Nodding towards the tissue paper on the drawing-board, Brunetti asked, ‘But are you working on a project?’

  ‘Just to amuse myself, Commissario. I lost my job.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Signore.’

  Feltrinelli put both hands in his pockets and looked up at Brunetti’s face. Keeping his voice absolutely neutral, he said, ‘I was working in Egypt, for the government, designing public-housing projects. But then they decided that all foreigners had to have an AIDS test every year. I failed mine last year, so they fired me and sent me back.’

  Brunetti said nothing to this, and Feltrinelli continued, ‘When I got back here, I tried to find a job, but, as you surely know, architects are as easily found as grapes at harvest time. And so ...’ He paused here, as if in search of a way to put it. ‘And so I decided to change my profession.’

  ‘Are you referring to prostitution?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘You’re not concerned about the hazard?’

  ‘Hazard?’ Feltrinelli asked, and came close to repeating the smile he had given Brunetti when he opened the door. Brunetti said nothing. ‘You mean AIDS?’ Feltrinelli asked, unnecessarily.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s no hazard for me,’ Feltrinelli said and turned away from Brunetti. He went back to the draughting table and picked up his cigarette. ‘You can let yourself out, Commissario,’ he said, taking his place at the table and bending down over his drawing.

  * * * *

  Chapter Eight

  Brunetti emerged into the sun, the street, the noise and turned into a bar that stood to the right of the apartment building. He asked for a glass of mineral water, then for a second one. When he had almost finished that, he poured the water at the bottom of the glass on to his handkerchief and wiped futilely at the blue dye on his hand.

  Was it a criminal act for a prostitute with AIDS to have sex? Unprotected sex? It was so long since policemen had treated prostitution as a crime that Brunetti found it difficult to consider it as such. But surely, for anyone with AIDS knowingly to have unprotected sex, surely that was a crime, though it was entirely possible that the law lagged behind the truth in this, and it was not illegal. Seeing the moral quicksand that distinction created ahead of him, he ordered a third glass of mineral water and looked at the next name on the list.

  Francesco Crespo lived only four blocks from Feltrinelli, but it might as well have been a world away. The building was sleek, a tall glass-fronted rectangle which must have seemed, when it was built ten years ago, right on the cutting edge of urban design. But Italy is a country where new ideas in design are never prized for much longer than it takes to put them into effect, by which time the ever-forward-looking have abandoned them and gone off in pursuit of gaudy new banners, like those damned souls in the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno, who circle round for all eternity, seeking a banner they can neither identify nor name.

  The decade that had elapsed since the construction of this building had carried fashion away with it, and now the building looked like nothing so much as an upended box of spaghettini. The glass in the windows gleamed, and a small patch of land between it and the street was manicured with precision, but none of that could save it from looking entirely out of place among the other lower, more modest buildings amidst which it had been erected with such futile confidence.

  He had the apartment number and was quickly carried to the seventh floor by the air-conditioned elevator. When the door opened, Brunetti stepped out into a marble corridor, also air-conditioned. He walked to the right and rang the bell of apartment D.

  He heard a sound inside; but no one came to the door. He rang again. The sound wasn’t repeated, but still no one came to the door. He rang the bell a third time, keeping his finger pressed to it. Even through the door he could hear the shrill whine of the bell and then a voice calling, ‘Basta. Vengo.’

  He took his finger off the bell, and a moment later the door was yanked open by a tall, heavy-set man in linen slacks and what looked like a cashmere turtle neck. Brunetti glanced at the man for an instant, saw two dark eyes, angry eyes, and a nose that had been broken a number of times, but then his eyes fell again to the high neck of the sweater and found themselves imprisoned there. The middle of August, people collapsing on the street from the heat, and this man wore a cashmere turtle neck. He pulled his eyes back to the man’s face and asked, ‘Signor Crespo?’

  ‘Who wants him?’ the man asked, making no attempt to disguise both anger and menace.

  ‘Commissario Guido Brunetti,’ he answered, again showing his warrant card. This man, like Feltrinelli, needed only the slightest of glances to recognize it. He suddenly stepped a bit closer to Brunetti, perhaps hoping to force him back into the corridor with the offensive presence of his body. But Brunetti didn’t move, and the other man stepped back. ‘He’s not here.’

  From another room, both of them heard the sound of something heavy falling to the floor.

  This time it was Brunetti who took a step forward, backing the other man away from the door. Brunetti continued into the room and walked over to a thronelike leather chair beside a table on which stood an immense spray of gladioli in a crystal vase. He sat in the chair, crossed his legs, and said, ‘Then perhaps I’ll wait for Signor Crespo.’ He smiled. ‘If you have no objection, Signor...?’

  The other man slammed the front door, wheeled towards a door that stood on the other side of the room, and said, ‘I’ll get him.’

  He disappeared into the room beyond, closing the door behind him. His voice, deep and angry, resounded through it. Brunetti heard another voice, a tenor to the bass. But then he heard what seemed to be a third voice, another tenor, but a full tone higher than the last. Whatever conversation went on behind the door took a number of minutes, during which Brunetti looked around the room. It was all new, it was all visibly expensive, and Brunetti would have wanted none of it, neither the pearl grey leather sofa nor the sleek mahogany table that stood beside it.

  The door to the other room opened, and the heavy-set man came out, followed closely by another man a decade younger and at least three sizes smaller than him.

  ‘That’s him,’ the one in the sweater said, pointing to Brunetti.

  The younger man wore loose pale-blue slacks and an open-necked white silk shirt. He walked across the room towards Brunetti, who stood and asked, ‘Signor Francesco Crespo?’

  He came and stood in front of Brunetti, but then instinct or professional training seemed to exert itself in the presence of a man of Brunetti’s age and general appearance. He took a small step closer, raised a hand in a delicate, splay-fingered gesture, and placed it at the base of his throat. ‘Yes, what would you like?’ It was the
higher tenor voice Brunetti had heard through the door, but Crespo tried to make it deeper, as if that would make it more interesting or seductive.

  Crespo was a bit shorter than Brunetti and must have weighed ten kilos less. Either through coincidence or design, his eyes were the same pale grey as the sofa; they stood out sharply in the deep tan of his face. Had his features appeared on the face of a woman, they would have been judged no more than conventionally pretty; the sharp angularity conveyed by his masculinity made them beautiful.