Seconds. Yes, because I don’t think more than a few seconds could have passed since the moment I fell. If I hadn’t seen the two men behind us, if I hadn’t seen Giulia’s expression, I could easily have kept thinking I’d slipped on the icy pavement.
In reality I was unconscious for at least fifteen minutes, one of the doctors would explain to me later.
They stole everything. Including the car.
But they didn’t rape me.
Don’t say anything.
I can’t tell you what time it was. Even my Swatch is gone. Nor can I tell you how it was possible that no one noticed me crawling along the fun-filled streets, so close to incredibly busy nightclubs. Someone must have seen me.
Probably people were so used to seeing strange things around there that they weren’t curious enough to ask what a girl with her face covered in blood was doing crawling around on her hands and knees in the middle of the night.
They would have thought I was a prostitute.
And maybe they would have thought that I went looking for it.
I manage to get to Via Fratelli Bandiera, God knows how. On the other side of the street the lights of the clubs are still lit. The sound of guitars and drumbeats escapes from the Vapore.
I think I can hear confused shouting.
But not even a glimpse of any other people.
I drag myself across the road; I pass between the cars parked under the flyover and spot the red Guardia di Finanza building. I would never have thought that one day I would be happy to see it.
It takes so little to change your opinions.
In fact, I made a lot of discoveries that night:
1. Venice isn’t a safe place.
2. People have no problem leaving you to die in the street.
3. People do it because they’re afraid.
4. This fear is caused by the fact that the world isn’t the place we’d like it to be.
The most important thing of all, however, I only discovered many days later, when I left the intensive care unit:
The world is the way it is mainly because there are people who think the same way I used to think.
Now, you’ll probably say that the head injury is making me talk crap.
A psychologist called it post-traumatic stress disorder. Disorder … psychologists have a great talent for euphemisms. After the third euphemism I told mine to fuck off. He told me it’s normal for a patient to tell him to fuck off. I ask him if it’s normal for them not to pay his bill. He smiles benevolently. I throw the first object that comes to hand (a metal pen holder). I miss him by a whisker, unfortunately. He is totally gobsmacked and I have him cowering in his chair like an asshole.
My father paid the bill anyway.
The world is what it is mainly because there are people who think the same way I used to think.
Not just people with left-wing views, you understand. There are also people who aren’t left-wing who believe that most immigrants are the victims, not the criminals. That poor people are fundamentally good whereas the rich are bad. And that we, the moralists, are the executioners (because the more radical you are, the more you think it’s other people who are moralists—even those who, although they think like you, don’t think enough like you).
The most cynical among you will say—and you won’t mince your words—that I’m a hypocritical whore. You’ll object that one can’t pass judgment based solely on personal experiences, however dramatic they may be.
An intelligent person, as I claim to be (and on this point, you’re right—I’ve claimed to be one for years), should strive to maintain his or her objectivity.
Otherwise you end up with the same old prejudices.
I have just one reply to your objection: kiss my ass.
And, furthermore, do you know where you can stick your objectivity?
But I don’t want to be any cruder that I have to, so I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.
On that hospital bed, between my mother’s tear-jerking performance and the indignant tirades of my lawyer brother, a series of new thoughts began to take shape in my brain.
Thoughts that didn’t resemble even vaguely the politically correct ideas I had held since my university years.
Racist thoughts.
Thoughts dripping with a furious anger.
And the more I thought about what I would have liked to do to those two animals, the better I felt.
My father was the one who took it worst. From the day when I was admitted to hospital, he had become a permanent visitor at the police station on Via Colombo, where he had several friends in positions of power.
I was forgetting: my father is a lawyer too.
“Those sons of bitches will rot in jail,” he swore.
I don’t know why, but this possibility made me even more angry instead of reassuring me.
“Jail? They deserve hanging!” my brother snapped.
Well … this is just talk, I thought, although even hanging seemed to me to be letting them off lightly.
And I didn’t yet know that Giulia and I had made the front page of all the local and national papers.
Or rather, it was Giulia, not me, who made the front pages, the dead one of the two of us.
Her body had been found a few days after the crime, in a canal somewhere near Fusina.
And no one thought they needed to tell me.
Poor thing. She’s already suffering from shock, they would have thought as soon as they heard the news.
They even went to the funeral, while I was stuck in my bed at the Angelo hospital dosed up on painkillers.
I don’t know what expressions were worn by my circle of friends and acquaintances. And who knows if even they talked about me. Probably they were offended, seeing as I hadn’t wanted any visitors except for my relatives. They were bound to resent it. And deep down they surely thought I’d only survived because I wasn’t as hot as Giulia.
Maybe Zaira, Chiara, Caterina, and the others thought it was partly my fault because I’d parked under the flyover when everyone knows that girls shouldn’t wander around on their own at night in the “social laboratory.”
I’m sure that, even if they didn’t say it, they thought the wrong woman had died. Giulia was nice, good, beautiful, never started an argument. She never forced her opinions on anyone (because, let’s face it, she didn’t have any).
That big mouth with the rich daddy survived. The bigassed fanatic with her red Marxist views and evergreen hope. The one who doesn’t practice what she preaches.
I decided I didn’t want anything more to do with any of them.
Along with Giulia, all my friends died too.
I don’t hold anything against my family for keeping me in the dark. I would have done the same in their place, and if I had seen my blue, purple, and red face, my head half shaved, if I had read my medical records, I would probably have alerted the nearest mental institution.
Broken nose, fractured skull, brain hemorrhage, various broken bones (ribs, humerus, tibia, to list just the most important). A couple of cracked vertebrae, because I had the good fortune that the two men’s combat boots weren’t steelcapped, unlike the chain with which one of them delivered the first and final blows.
“It’s a miracle you’re still alive and haven’t suffered any permanent damage,” that southern idiot of a commissario (and friend of my father) had said to me.
“Pure Venetian,” my father had replied; he was proud of his pedigree. “We’re hard-headed.”
“It’s lucky for you that those two Moroccans thought they’d killed her.”
Two Moroccans? How did they know they were two Moroccans? I asked myself.
Yet again, no one had thought there was any need to tell the victim that the murder suspects had been arrested the day before Giulia’s naked body was regurgitated by one of those canals full of industrial waste.
A body that was pretty well decomposed, I imagined.
“We wanted to protect you,”
my mother had said.
And then my brother, elated: “The evidence they’ve gathered is convincing, to say the least.”
How could I bear a grudge?
They had always warned me and I’d said they were paranoid. My brother always objected to my more exotic acquaintances, and I’d called him a fascist.
I mostly paid for my studies myself. They gave me about a thousand euros a month, but I said their money was dirty, made from the sweat and exploitation of people like those who nearly killed me.
My body took nearly a year to heal completely.
There were still scars, but by then I didn’t care about my appearance anymore.
The one positive note was that everything that had happened had got me down to my ideal weight for the first time in my life. And it had given me a nice ass. In fact, the rehabilitation program had made me develop a taste for the gym. I had become acquainted with my abdominals and with the muscles in my arms.
My tits had turned into pecs and my buttocks into a gluteus maximus.
Not much in the way of consolation, I hear you say.
Well … I’d say it was, and you’ll soon see why.
First, however, I have to tell you about Abdullah Boukhari (nineteen) and R.H. (sixteen).
Abdullah was born in a little village near Agadir on the southern Atlantic coast of Morocco. Shitty childhood in a shantytown. Dealer in cannabis and whoring for the occasional elderly Englishman ever since he learned to put his dick to work. Before leaving Morocco on a boat he’d even spent a couple of months in jail. A tough jail where he had the opportunity to enjoy new sexual experiences.
R.H. came from Casablanca. He used to visit Italy regularly, staying with an uncle who worked in a textile factory somewhere near Vicenza. His childhood wasn’t great either, but nowhere near as bad as his accomplice’s. He could have just stood around catching flies at home, if his father hadn’t died and his uncle hadn’t had the bright idea of bringing him to Eldorado.
The two meet in Jesolo, where they push drugs together outside the discos. However, they’re a bit too young to work freelance and so they end up being used by some of their fellow Moroccans.
This situation doesn’t particularly suit them so before long they decide to clear out and come to our happy town.
They don’t manage to make a living for themselves here, however, so they seek help from social services. They’re put up in a hostel. They’re given food and clothes.
R.H. would have liked to go back to his uncle and try earning an honest living, but Abdullah persuades him not to.
Two weeks later they start scouring the areas with the liveliest nightlife, on the lookout for easy money.
A month after that they see us coming out of the Molo.
Giulia’s blond hair dazzles them; they can’t think clearly, what with the alcohol and drugs.
They follow us. They attack us.
Abdullah is the worst. He has brought a chain with him, complete with padlock. He is the one who splits my head open. “That bitch is still alive then?” he allegedly said before the police took turns letting him have some of what he gave me.
Their plan was to rob us. Then, when they saw what Giulia looked like, they improvised. They bundled her into the car and drove her to Fusina where they raped her.
It was Abdullah who killed her, hitting her repeatedly with the chain.
Conclusion: Abdullah is in prison, paid for by the taxpayer, and will likely stay there for a while, though there’s always a chance that good behavior or some pardon will let him out. And even if he does the full thirty years, when he gets out—with a clean slate, transformed and rehabilitated—he’ll still have at least a third of his life to enjoy.
R.H., on the other hand, ended up in a rehabilitation center because lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and astrologers showed that he was a victim of both his older accomplice and circumstance. However, he shoved his dick in my friend too.
He kicked me too.
But he did it because of French colonialism and society.
It took me awhile to find him.
And it wasn’t particularly easy to kill him.
It was my first murder. Well, what did you expect? That it would be a walk in the park?
The idea came to me while watching Kill Bill on DVD. For months my best friend had been Amazon.co.uk., where I bought the classics of the American action genre. My favorites were films about revenge and those where ordinary people get really pissed off and wreak bloody havoc in the style of Sam Peckinpah.
I had always loved Tarantino, despite never having seen any of his films. I had read loads of reviews and knew he was a master of the pulp genre. Senseless violence, but with a lot of irony and a voguish stylistic flavor. There was deep irreverence and extensive quoting from the great filmmakers, so cinema buffs like us were bound to like him.
I absolutely loved Kill Bill. I watched it dozens of times and in my head I pictured myself wandering around Mestre in a yellow tracksuit, armed with a sword, searching for those two shits.
However pissed off you might think I am, I never thought—not even for a second—that what I saw could ever happen in real life.
Not until I met Rado at the gym.
Rado deserves a whole chapter to himself, but I don’t want to bore you with pointless details.
Rado was thirty-seven. He was a Serb. Not bad looking either—tall, slim, muscular. He had fought in the war—or rather, wars. He had fought in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Rado had been a Chetnik.
Then things had all gotten a bit fucked up over there, so he shaved off his beard and came to Italy to seek his fortune in the import-export business.
Rado was my “man of providence.”
We became friends. He appreciated my new body and couldn’t care less about the scar that had made my right eyebrow too high.
He fucked like a god. I doubt my ex-friends had ever experienced anything like it. And how else could someone fuck if he had killed dozens of men. Some in cold blood, but mostly not.
We went out together. We became lovers. We rented an apartment in Via Cappuccina.
And when I introduced him to my family, it caused quite a scene.
Rado taught me everything I know.
He taught me to make friends with guns. To take them apart, to clean them, to tell one from another. To appreciate the differences in caliber and weight. To test the recoil.
He taught me to shoot, and for my thirty-fourth birthday he gave me a beautiful .22 caliber Sig Sauer with a silencer.
It was Rado who put me in touch with the Balkan underworld. And it was he and his friend Pavel who discovered where R.H. was hiding—real name Reduan Hamoud.
Both of them had offered to sort him out for me, but I was opposed to the idea as a matter of principle.
I had to look him in the eye before killing him.
Reduan seemed to have started a new life. That’s what you say, isn’t it, when someone fucks up then—who knows how—realizes what they’ve done and tries to behave as if it never happened?
He was working in Venice as a waiter in a little restaurant for tourists behind the Zattere.
By now he was nineteen and the state had decided that he had paid his debts to society.
I’m sure that even if he sees me he won’t recognize me.
I sit down at an outside table with a view of San Sebastiano, and I wait for someone to bring me a menu. As luck would have it, it’s Reduan who attends to me, just like three years before.
He looks at me and says hello with an ivory smile. Clearly he doesn’t recognize me. And how could he? My body is thin now, almost mannish. I have short hair and there isn’t a trace of makeup on my face. My nose isn’t aquiline anymore, just a bit flat.
If they’d seen me that evening, in jeans and a military jacket, not even my old friends would have recognized me.
“I’d like a diavolo pizza,” I tell him. “And a beer.”
“Small?”
“Are you kidding?”
Reduan smiles. A nice smile.
We look each other in the eye. His eyes aren’t evil. Large. Round. Dark. Framed with eyelashes that look drawn on.
A good-looking boy, it has to be said.
He’s bound to be thinking that the old lady is flirting.
I eat the pizza. I drink the beer. I order a coffee and pass time reading Il Gazzettino.
It gets to midnight and there are only a few of us left in the restaurant. I pay the bill and head out before I start attracting too much attention. A few yards away there’s a bar that serves my purpose. Full of people getting drunk.
I order another beer and start drinking it outside, mingling with the summer crowds.
From my position I have a great view.
I have time for another couple of beers before the owner of the restaurant next door turns off the lights and Reduan comes out with two of his coworkers.
I have already paid for the beers.
I wait for the three men to head down an alley, then I start following them at a safe distance.
I begin to worry that they’re going to stick with him all the way home.
Instead, they separate at Piazzale Roma.
Reduan gets on the 7 bus with me behind him. He looks tired.
Half an hour later we cross the Dell’Amelia flyover and get off just after the bypass. The same bypass that witnessed the attack on me.
Reduan crosses Via Miranese and heads quickly toward Via Ancona.
I keep following him, thinking it would have been better if I hadn’t drunk four beers. It’s not that my head is spinning, but I have the feeling of being surrounded by shadows.
I’m wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses.
There are two boys sitting on scooters in front of a gate leading to a block of flats. They glance at us then go back to smoking their joint.
Reduan walks along, unsuspecting, not even a dozen yards ahead of me. It’s still too far. I lengthen my stride and pull out the .22, the silencer ready for the occasion. Via Ancona is bathed in darkness. Just one streetlamp works out of every three and the sky is covered with clouds.
Suddenly, as if warned by a sixth sense, Reduan turns around.
He notices the gun.
Venice Noir Page 4