Venice Noir

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Tania noticed straight away the veil of anxiety over his face and realized that it would not be easy to get him to relax that evening, unlike other times. Of course, she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t the first time that his work awaited him; Alvise had never taken it lightly, but that evening she saw that he was more nervous than ever. To put him at ease, she lit some perfumed candles that she had dotted around the flat and turned off the lights, creating a much more intimate and warmer atmosphere. Then she went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and returned with a bottle of Raboso and two glasses.

  “Shall we have a drop?” she suggested, moving close to him.

  “Good idea.”

  She smiled and sat astride him, letting her silky dressing gown open to reveal most of her body. Tania poured out the wine for both of them and clinked her glass against Alvise’s.

  “To us!” she said, moving her lips toward his.

  “To us, Tania!” he replied, finally loosening up and kissing her.

  They drank their glasses of wine and then poured another round as they began to caress each other.

  Tania headed over to the hi-fi, put on an Erykah Badu CD, picked the track “Didn’t Cha Know,” and then went back to him. She slipped off his sweater and shirt and unfastened his pants; she took off her dressing gown and, with desire in her eyes, slowly sank down to his feet. He closed his eyes and put his head back against the sofa as he felt her breath on his stomach and then moving lower, grasping his cock and sliding it into the enveloping heat of her mouth.

  After a few seconds Tania stood up, kissed him passionately, and softly asked him to lie down on the sofa, mounting him and slowly slipping him between her thighs.

  Despite the pleasure of the sex, Alvise couldn’t help thinking about what he would have to do a few hours later; a thousand confused thoughts were bouncing around his head and he couldn’t drive them out. He tried to concentrate on screwing, but the Jews came to mind; several feet below they were swaying and rippling with the same motion as Tania. He looked at her wonderful body moving backward and forward above him and the black waves of the lagoon that were waiting for him out there flowed through his mind, together with images of planes landing and taking off. Just like that, without any reason.

  A few moments after they had both come, she climbed off his body, all breathless and sweating. They stayed there in silence for a while, then she put her dressing gown back on and poured another two glasses of Raboso, while Alvise lay with his gaze fixed on the moldy ceiling where a thick blanket of incense had settled.

  “What are you thinking about?” Tania asked, emptying her glass.

  “Nothing.”

  An ocean of silence passed.

  “What the fuck’s up with you tonight, Alvise?”

  He remained silent for another moment, then said, “I think tonight will be the last time, Tania.”

  She picked up a jar of arnica cream and said to him: “Let’s have that shoulder.”

  He gave in to her willingly, and while Tania was massaging his shoulder, he lit the last cigarette in the pack.

  “If you lose, all the worse for you,” she said, reading aloud the motto Alvise had had tattooed on his back as if he were a playing card.

  When the girl had finished, she went over to a cupboard and brought out a box that contained some grass and cigarette papers.

  “So, if I’ve understood right, tonight’s going to be the last carousel?” she said, starting to roll herself a joint.

  “I think so. It’s too risky. I just have to stop playing.”

  “But up till now you’ve earned good money, haven’t you?”

  “I have put quite a bit of money aside.”

  She licked the paper and lit the joint, taking a couple of long drags.

  There was complete silence for a few minutes, then Alvise finally said: “Why don’t you come away with me, Tania? We’ll get out of Venice and start a new life somewhere else!”

  She laughed then fell silent again.

  Alvise glanced at his watch. It said quarter to eleven; the minutes had flown by and it was time to go.

  “Can I have another glass?” he asked her.

  She took hold of the bottle and poured him some more wine, which he drank in one gulp, as if he wanted to draw their evening together to a close with the gesture. Then he put out the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray, stood up, and got dressed.

  “Please be careful!” she told him. She gave him a kiss, and before walking him to the door, added with a smile, “If you lose, all the worse for you,” and winked at him.

  “Don’t worry. See you tomorrow,” he said, starting to leave. “Oh, Tania …” he remembered, “I don’t suppose you’ve got an extra cigarette I could have? I’ve finished mine.”

  Tania quickly went back into her tiny living room, retrieved one of her extra-light cigarettes, and handed it to him.

  Alvise left, crossed the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo without meeting a living soul, walked up and down the iron bridge again, and in a few seconds he was back on board his patanella. He switched on the engine, turned around, and retraced his route along Rio della Misericordia, thinking about the work that was awaiting him.

  By now it was eleven, the mist on the canal neither lighter nor more dense than before, and he met only a few small boats on the way. He lit Tania’s extra-light cigarette and after just three puffs he threw it into the water, disgusted, asking himself how anyone could smoke such muck. He passed by the snow-white, gleaming Miracoli church and made a quick sign of the cross, more as a habit to ward off bad luck than out of belief, then he pulled up to get a packet of his cigarettes, at last, from the vending machine near the majestic, imposing façade of San Zanipolo, the largest church in Venice, and finally he resumed his journey home. His shoulder still ached—less than before, but it still ached.

  Dario would be coming around to pick him up at midnight in his boat, and together they would head out into the lagoon, to the island of Santa Maria della Grazia. There, Giorgio would be waiting for them, and they would go take part in the carousel, hoping that everything went according to plan and that no one discovered them: not the extremely fast, slim-line boats of the carabinieri and customs and excise, nor—which would be worse—the “Barracudas,” the name given to the terrifying gang of illegal clam fishermen. These were men capable of anything, with supercharged boats, powerful radar, and lookouts everywhere, with their Albanian deckhands who flew down the canals at forty or fifty knots.

  He lit a cigarette, resumed his journey toward Castello, and, finally, after having passed under twenty-four bridges, arrived in Calle del Lion, where he lived in an old damp flat. It was half past eleven; he moored the patanella and went into the house to get ready. His father had gone to bed awhile ago and the only noise in the flat came from the large clock that stood on the cupboard in the living room, its pendulum incessantly swinging from side to side. It was something that was incredibly important to the old man, a memento of his wife who had died a few years before, but Alvise could not look at it, and definitely did not want to hear it. One of these days he would get rid of it, that damned pendulum, perhaps by throwing it into the lagoon, so that it would be silent forever.

  He went into his bedroom, unlocked an old bedside table eaten by woodworm, and pulled out rolls of large-denomination bank notes held together with yellow elastic bands. He wanted to check that it was all there: more than sixty thousand euros. So much money. A huge amount. Not even by working for years and years like a slave at the petrochemical company would he have been able to save all that money, much less by working as a porter in Piazzale Roma. What was crazy was that he had scraped together that amount in just a few months, working a dozen times or so, for a few hours a night. And if everything went well, that night he would make another five, or perhaps even ten thousand more.

  He put everything back where it had been, covered up the rolls of money, and locked the drawer. Quarter to midnight.

  He dressed warmly
in dark oilskin overalls that made him look like a diver, and put on thick waterproof boots; then he picked up his heavy fishing gloves, his cigarettes, and a lighter.

  Ten minutes to midnight. Outside he heard the rumble of Dario’s boat.

  Alvise took a deep breath, lit a cigarette, and went out.

  The two men greeted each other and set off very slowly, motoring along Rio della Pietà in silence, deep in their own thoughts.

  The farther they traveled, the hazier the yellow lights of the streetlamps in the alleys and along the canals on either side of them became, and the more they were softened by the mist that lay over everything like a gentle shroud. The humidity was so infuriating; it percolated through the bones and made the air feel heavy and a thousand years old.

  In the west, a pale full moon, blurred by the haze, seemed to drowsily watch over the lagoon that lay beneath.

  After a few minutes the two men came out into the San Marco basin, then crossed the San Giorgio Maggiore canal, careful not to hit a couple of vaporetti. Passing alongside the floodlit basilica, they headed for the small island of Santa Maria della Grazia, known as the Cavanella. Once they reached it, Dario switched off the engine and tied the rope to a mooring.

  Compared to Alvise, Dario was a skinny guy, and his past was full of rather disreputable incidents, such as fraud, theft, and mugging. He had been in prison on various occasions—he’d never managed to get away with much—and once he was out, he would always start hanging out again in the roughest neighborhoods of Castello.

  “What time is it?” he asked Alvise.

  “Twenty past twelve.”

  “Ten minutes to go. Giorgio should be here any minute now.”

  They got off the boat and each lit a cigarette.

  Dario breathed his first drags deeply, and then said: “Let’s make the most of it. Once we’re over there we won’t be able to smoke, otherwise they’ll be able to see us from a distance.”

  “Right,” said Alvise.

  Dario rubbed his beard and pulled a Luger P08 out of his jacket, checking that it was loaded and stroking the barrel. At that moment they heard the chugging sound of a boat coming toward them from the Giudecca. When it was about fifty yards from the mooring, it flashed three times like beams from a lighthouse. It was the prearranged signal. It was Giorgio. Dario then picked up a flashlight from his boat and responded in the same way. By then, it was a few minutes past twelve thirty.

  Giorgio was about forty, most of those years spent either in his local bar on the Giudecca or at the Rialto fish market, where every morning he was paid to unload crates of the fish that God provided in the lagoon. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail; he was huge, and he never laughed. Never. His nickname was “Musoduro,” or Hardnose, and he always went around armed with a nine-millimeter Beretta M9 Parabellum.

  His boat looked like a spaceship: it was a large drift boat with a 150-horsepower engine, a big echo-sounder on board, and those enormous rigs that suck up the whole of the sea, innumerable cages, vibrating dredges, rotating rakes, turboblowers, and a gigantic hydraulic pump. Plus various ropes as thick as a man’s wrist, heavy nets, two mini flashlights to be used only if necessary, and a small tender where additional loads could be taken aboard if the catch had been good.

  “Let’s go. The clams are waiting for us!” he said in the lumbering voice of someone who utters only a few words every three or four hours.

  They all boarded the drift boat, which was called Doge, and headed out with the engine purring quietly. They left the Cavanella landing and after a few minutes entered the dark lagoon blanketed by a layer of mist that rippled over the surface of the water like the oppressive incense Tania had lit.

  Alvise’s heart was beating fast, he could feel his hands and feet starting to sweat, and thoughts began to run through his head: they moved quickly, appearing in an instant, racing around, and then disappearing. Just like moths in the bulb of a streetlamp. He was aware that the risk they were running was high; he understood that going to scour the lagoon bed in the prohibited area was a very dangerous business; he knew that if the Barracudas were to find them, he and his two accomplices would be in serious trouble.

  It was because of this that he was sweating and because of this that he had a strange sense of foreboding, and he had already decided in his heart that this would be the last time. The last. Of course, you could earn well—very well—chiseling a bit from those men: poisonous “megaclams” fished from the dead, toxic water opposite the petrochemical company, near the industrial waste pipes.

  A business that made a good deal of money, as the Barracudas well knew; they ran an out-and-out criminal operation to catch the largest and most contaminated clams: thousands of tons sold on the mainland, but also in Rome, Milan, Naples. An illegal turnover of hundreds of millions of euros that then disappeared in the casinos of Slovenia or Montenegro, in luxury hotels and spas in the Dolomites, in holiday villages in Thailand.

  The three men on board the Doge headed toward Fusina; they entered the Scoasse canal and were absorbed by the darkness of the night. Dario had his eyes closed and looked like he was praying, Giorgio was scanning the lights of the petrochemical plant on the horizon, and Alvise kept scratching his neck and rubbing his aching shoulder: he couldn’t clear his mind of those disturbing premonitions, and even if he tried to focus on the tackle that lay at his feet, a series of hideous figures crowded into his thoughts in a flurry of grotesque and frightening images. The lingering smell of the incense drifted into his mind, along with the annoying pendulum of the clock in the living room and the nodding heads of the Jews in the yeshiva. For an instant he even seemed to feel seasick, something that was impossible, he thought.

  At a certain point, Giorgio veered to the right and took the Fasiol canal. Quarter to one. They looked like a small militia ready to swoop, ready for a precise military assault.

  If things went well, as they had the previous times, in less than ten minutes they would have fished about forty kilograms of clams. After two hours they would have picked up almost a ton. All toxic, full of dioxins, oils used for cooling power transformers, and pesticides. After a couple of days someone would have bought them in their fishmonger’s or eaten them in some restaurant or trattoria, with a certificate of provenance, transport papers, and a clean bill of health, all false and deftly provided by Giorgio thanks to substantial bribes. If everything went smoothly, in one night they could earn perhaps forty thousand euros in the teeth of the Barracudas, the real professionals in a racket that generated as much money as drugs, if not more. Millions and millions of euros. Cash.

  It was the dirty war of the lagoon, a kind of wild west.

  In the meantime, their boat proceeded toward the center of the lagoon with the engine chugging steadily, passing the wooden poles dotted here and there to mark out the navigation channels. These would emerge unexpectedly in front of the boat; often, on the tops of the poles there were seagulls perching that appeared suddenly like specters among the thinning banks of mist. Around them there was a strong smell of decay and putrid water, a disgusting stench of dead fish and rotten seaweed; they saw nylon bags, floating pieces of wood, and plastic bottles drifting at the mercy of the tides, rising and falling, never floating away, as if that vast pool of semistagnant water were a huge lake of gasoline, dense and frighteningly flat.

  Once they arrived in the middle of the open water, Alvise raised his head and looked around: at that moment the mist was less opaque, and behind him Venice was clearly visible, lit up in the night with the bell tower of San Marco looming over the red rooftops of the city.

  They were finally on the last stretch; Giorgio turned into the Canale Vecchio in Fusina and advanced toward point X, located exactly in the middle of the lagoon, between Venice and Marghera. It was as if the place were suspended between the most beautiful city in the world and the ugliest: on one side the magical lights shining on the history, the eternal beauty, the architectural and artistic elegance of the bride of the s
ea; on the other, the cold halogen beams of the floodlights illuminating one of the largest centers of Europe’s chemical industry as if it were daytime. As if you found yourself between an aesthetic paradise and a visual hell.

  Giorgio headed confidently toward the shallows; he glanced at the readings on the echo-sounder and then switched off the engine. As the drift boat glided forward another twenty yards, everything fell into a deep and unsettling silence.

  “We’re here!” he said.

  Dario stood up, grabbed the rope, and dropped the anchor right in front of the channel where the chemical plants dumped their waste. Alvise tipped the boat’s engine back and submerged it almost completely in the cloudy water, then took a large iron pole, fastened it to the engine, and rammed it into the bottom of the lagoon bed with all the strength he had. He felt an agonizing pain in his shoulder that suddenly spread into the whole of his chest like a powerful electric shock, but despite everything he stood fast and got ready for the most important part of the operation.

  Silence.

  A few minutes past one. Around them the lapping of the small black waves that broke against the hull. A sense of uneasiness permeated the entire area. A black sensation, as black as the deep night that enveloped them. Black like the water beneath their feet. Black like the feeling Alvise experienced as he maneuvered the iron pole and fitted it to the engine.

  “All done?” Giorgio asked him in a whisper.

  “Done!”

  Dario signaled his okay to Giorgio, grabbed hold of a large cage, and lowered it off the stern, alongside the engine.

  “Let’s go!” he said.

  Giorgio turned the key in the electrical control panel and switched on the Doge’s powerful engine; at that point the double propellers began to spin dizzyingly, eating into the sand and ripping at the lagoon bed. Alvise held tightly onto the iron pole, while Giorgio accelerated and Dario dropped the cage under the water and prepared another. Without saying a word, the three men each focused on his own task and continued like that for a few minutes, until, at long last, their actions achieved their predetermined goal and the boat started to turn like a carousel. Sure enough, the keel of the Doge began to move and spin around, at first slowly but then faster and faster, in a kind of whirling loop-the-loop. At that moment, the propellers on the outboard motor began to stir up a vast quantity of frothy sludge. Giorgio was hardly able to pull up the first cage: it was already full of clams, thick, fat, and bloated with hot and horribly polluted water.