Venice Noir

by Maxim Jakubowski

  An expression flickers across his face that I’ve seen somewhere before. He opens his mouth to say something, perhaps to shout out, but I second-guess him and plant a bullet in his arm.

  Fuck, I think to myself, since I had aimed for his heart. Fuck those beers.

  Now the Moroccan really does start screaming. A highpitched scream, almost like a woman.

  He starts to run off, holding his arm and shouting, Help, Mommy! or fuck knows what in the language of where he’s from.

  I follow him and when I’m a couple of steps away I shoot him three more times. Two shots miss their target and hit a parked car, one hits him in the back.

  I stand over him. I smile when I see he’s crying.

  “I’ll tell Abdullah you’re waiting for him,” I say, then I empty the magazine into his chest.

  His screams and the Renault’s car alarm have brought a few people to their windows, but the darkness and my disguise are enough to guarantee me a degree of anonymity.

  Once I get back to Via Miranese I call Rado and tell him to come pick me up in front of the Cadoro supermarket.

  I felt a strange euphoria. I felt a lightness. I would have liked to sing. There wasn’t a single trace of remorse in me, nor any regrets.

  It’s true that the actual moment was very different from how I had imagined it. And that the words I’d dreamed about saying for months and months had come out a bit wrong. As if the voice that spoke them still belonged to the girl I had been before that evening in Marghera.

  I had killed a man.

  And nothing happened.

  It was like New Year’s Day or the day after your birthday when you’re young. You think you ought to feel different, but in the end it’s just another day gone by.

  The nights that followed I slept like a log. No dreams. No nightmares.

  They wrote about the murder in the papers. About the man in the cap. About the brutality with which that poor boy (with a criminal record) had been killed. In a neighborhood where people don’t usually get killed. Where criminals go to live, not to commit crimes. It’s not like it’s Naples.

  I was sure the police were groping around in the dark. I had been careful not to leave any clues. And the gun, despite its sentimental value, was now lying at the bottom of the Salso canal.

  Of course, there was the possibility that during their inquiries the police would come up with the idea of questioning me.

  If they did, I would be ready.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the police officer, sounding rather contrite. “In spite of what he did to me, I would never have wished him dead.”

  It was clear that the policeman didn’t believe me, but that didn’t matter. Despite my new look, I am still the daughter of a well-known Venetian lawyer. I have a first-class degree, and the evening of the murder I was at the cinema with my fiancé, who at that moment was in Milan on business.

  “What did you say your boyfriend’s name is?”

  I hadn’t said. “Radovan Petrovi,” I stated, realizing that it wasn’t quite the same as saying Giacomo Baldan.

  The officer made a note.

  “Should I call my father?”

  He looked up from his notebook. “Not at all. These are just formalities. You can go home and forget the whole thing.”

  I went home and poured myself a double.

  Rado had gone to Milan to find out if it were possible to get the other Moroccan out of jail early. In a body bag, obviously.

  I phoned him and told him about the questioning. It was probable they would want to talk to him as well.

  Although my revenge wasn’t yet complete, I started to think about what I would do afterward.

  Going back to the museum wasn’t even an option. I had shut down my old life, as I’ve already explained.

  However, in Mestre you can’t be out of work without being noticed. Especially if your boyfriend is a professional criminal.

  I spent a couple of hours in front of the mirror and came to the conclusion that I should dress in a way that is more in keeping with my social position.

  Then, in the following order, I would have to: a) get back in touch with my family; b) ask my father and brother to give me a shitty job in their law firm; c) arrange for Abdullah to join his friend as soon as possible; and d) say goodbye to Rado.

  The last would be the most difficult, because my little Rado isn’t the type to appreciate being dumped.

  And it wouldn’t be easy to find someone who fucks like him, but at my age sex isn’t everything. Right?

  I sorted out points a) and b) in the days that followed.

  “Good grief, you look like a lesbian,” said my brother; we hadn’t seen each other for almost a year. Still, it was better than the words with which he said goodbye to me: “If I’d known you were going to end up with a Slav, I would have made sure you stayed a communist.”

  My father and my mother were nicer. They believed in the parable of the prodigal son, and I really missed my mother’s roast pork.

  “We understand how hard it’s been for you. But don’t think it’s been all that easy for us either. You don’t know how worried we’ve been.”

  Meanwhile, I was stuffing myself like someone at the end of Ramadan. Speaking of Ramadan, I’ll tell you now that—point c)—he would hang himself in his cell three months after I started work as a PA in the family firm. Just so you don’t think my return to the fold was peppered with good intentions.

  Quite the opposite.

  The first dinner with my family ended in hugs and kisses. My brother walked me to the Accademia Vaporetto stop, his arm protectively draped around my shoulders.

  “Have you ever thought of taking a self-defense class?” he said to me as we walked along. “It could make you safer.”

  I responded with a smile, remembering that before resolving point d) I would have to scrounge a couple of guns from him.

  As expected, Rado didn’t take it very well. He started yelling. He threatened to kick my ass, but then he got the picture.

  He said that I wasn’t the only woman he was fucking anyway. But that, despite everything, he would miss all our little games. He made it clear that he was always around if I should ever want to start them up again.

  We stayed friends.

  The day I moved into the penthouse with a view of the Salute, bought for me by my parents, he gave me a new .22 (this time an elegant Walther P22) and told me that now that I had an interesting job, we could also do a bit of business together.

  I took possession of a walnut desk in the Rialto office and a Mercedes SLK parked in Piazzale Roma.

  Awhile later I head back to the Molo. Not to go on the prowl, because I still don’t like provincial pretty boys, and now if I want to fuck properly I know where to go.

  While some say the recession is passing and Italy is about to enter a new era, people always behave the same way. They dance, they drink, they dance, they flirt, they drink, they go to the bathroom to snort a bit of the good stuff they get from Rado’s friends, they dance. In short, they enjoy themselves.

  I watch them for a while, then I get bored and leave.

  I park a long way from the entrance, under the flyover, near the Fincantieri warehouses. Quite a way on foot.

  For the occasion, I’m wearing a tiny miniskirt that emphasizes my nice firm ass.

  I walk. It’s cold. A nice cold like the cold I feel inside.

  The night is quiet. There isn’t a soul around.

  They say a woman shouldn’t wander the streets of Marghera on her own anymore.

  Behind me footsteps echo between the walls of the empty buildings. It looks like even the high-tech service sector has decided to go elsewhere.

  A man’s voice. The accent is Italian.

  Perhaps.

  There’s the smell of rape in the air.

  I pull out my gun from under my Cavalli jacket, and before I turn around I think that, after tonight, Batman can go fuck himself.

  COMISARIO CLELIA VINCI
>
  BY BARBARA BARALDI

  Mestre

  Translated from Italian by Judith Forshaw

  I

  Night had fallen like a heavy blanket over the city of Mestre. Clelia looked out of the window. The Bora, the northeast wind with its erratic, ill-mannered gusts, was tormenting the tops of the maritime pines. As a little girl, her father would light a fire during the long winter nights. They would all sit together around the fireplace, and he would tell her that the wind could steal the souls of careless passersby. “When the Bora blows, you have to stay at home, safe. Anyone who braves the wind risks losing their soul, as well as their hat,” he would say to her in his deep voice. And the little Clelia would open her eyes wide and beg him to tell her the story of Grandpa Domenico, who had rescued Isabella’s hat one windy night and had made her fall in love with him. In the glass, Clelia could see the reflection of her round face with its soft features framed by short black hair; her large brown eyes stood out clearly. The roofs of the houses reflected the leaden light of the streetlamps. Smoke escaped from a few chimney pots, suggesting a domestic warmth that hadn’t been felt in her own home for a while. Clelia thought how nice it would be to go back to her childhood and hear once again that incredible, romantic story, narrated in her father’s voice. But he had been dead a long time, and she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She could stay at home to escape the wind, but she couldn’t escape her anxieties. Not since Giovanni had left her, to start a new life with another woman. “It’s too hard living with a policewoman,” he had said to her, not looking her in the eye. They had been having problems for some time, and the love they shared for their daughter Laura wasn’t enough to keep them together. In the last two years Clelia had struggled to ensure that her daughter didn’t suffer because of the absence of a man in the house, trying to create a cozy home environment and attempting to limit her overtime as much as possible. Sometimes, after supper, she even found the energy to take a look at her daughter’s homework. The most difficult moments were the weekends that Laura spent with Giovanni’s new family. Laura would come home thrilled; she would chatter about the two little twins, the children Giovanni had had with Giorgia, his new partner. She was so beautiful, as well as being such a good cook—a full-time housewife. For Clelia, Giorgia was the template of the perfect woman: a nice, straightforward mother and wife. The partner that Giovanni would have liked her to become. But he had never succeeded with her. Clelia loved her work too much. When, at just twentythree, she had passed the exams to go into the police force (before she had even finished her law studies), she had known that it would be a difficult environment, especially for a woman. And male competition had made itself felt right from the start. Giovanni, who was then her fiancé, had raised the first objections. “Couldn’t you do a normal job?” he had asked her one evening. They had just made love. They were still in each other’s arms, their skin burning and their hands clasping their bodies tightly together.

  “What do you mean, normal?” she had asked with a smile.

  “I don’t know … working in an office, or a shop in town. I could even see you as a lawyer. But being a policewoman is dangerous. You’ll be walking around armed. You might see people die. And I’d be worried all the time knowing you were out there.”

  “But I’d be out there to protect honest people. People like you, darling.” Clelia had run her finger over his nose and then his lips. An affectionate gesture that had been lost during the first years of marriage, after too many fights and after reconciliations that became less and less satisfying.

  “Mommy?” Laura’s small voice called her back to reality. The little girl, from under the covers, was waiting for her usual goodnight kiss and chat before going to sleep.

  Clelia sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair.

  “I don’t like the wind,” Laura confided, looking in the direction of the window.

  “But the wind brings stories from all over the world, sweetheart. If you learn how to listen to it, you’ll never feel alone,” said Clelia, continuing to stroke her hair.

  “Will you tell me a story?”

  “I’m very tired, but I promise that if you’re good and close your eyes the wind will bring you a lovely story. It’s traveled a long way, the Bora, to get here to us. It’s come through woods and forests. Through its eyes you can see fabulous animals …”

  “And maybe a fairy?” asked Laura.

  Clelia was lost in thought again. That weekend her daughter was due to go ice-skating with Giovanni and Giorgia. For weeks she had talked of nothing else. Giorgia had been the local skating champion, but then, according to Giovanni, she realized that she had to give up an adolescent passion in order to focus on real life. That was the truth of the situation: for him, Clelia’s desire to pursue a career in the police was a childish dream. A way of following in the footsteps of her father, her hero, killed in an ambush while working as a bodyguard for Judge Di Gennaro.

  “Mommy, why don’t you come skating with us too?” asked Laura in an attempt to reclaim her mother’s attention. “I know you’re sad when you stay at home on your own.”

  Clelia forced a smile. “I can’t skate. I’d end up breaking my leg,” she replied, her voice tinged with a note of melancholy.

  “But the twins can’t skate either! They’re too little. They’ll just stand and watch us and Daddy and Giorgia will take turns skating with me.”

  “Thank you for the lovely thought. I’m sure you’ll be really good, a real ice princess. I’ll come another time, I promise.”

  Laura’s eyes darkened. She knew that kind of promise. It was a way of softening a no.

  The ringing of the phone shattered the moment of intimacy between mother and daughter. At that time of night it couldn’t mean anything good.

  “Sorry,” Clelia muttered. She had no choice but to run into the corridor and rummage for her phone in her bag. “Where did I put the damn thing? Ah … here we are!”

  The voice at the other end sounded frantic. “Clelia, it’s Franco. I wouldn’t have disturbed you this late if it wasn’t something really urgent.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just over an hour ago someone called HQ to report a noise that sounded like a shot. Officers found a body—it’s Luciano Restivo, the owner of an ad agency on the Lido. You must’ve heard of him—he made a name for himself with those campaigns for the Venice Film Festival.”

  “Yes, I know the name. Is it murder?”

  “That’s the thing. Everything suggests suicide, but my sixth sense says it isn’t. You know when my alarm bell goes off?”

  “I know it well, your alarm bell. It usually means trouble.”

  “Judge Carmine Mezzogiorno is here already. I’d feel better if you’d come over here and share your opinion.”

  “Give me the address. I just need time to find a babysitter and then I’ll be there.”

  Clelia arrived at the Ad Work agency with an ominous feeling in her bones. The street was crowded with police vehicles. An ambulance was parked in front of the gate, surrounded by a small crowd of onlookers. Inspector Franco Armati came toward her with one of his crooked smiles. He was a good-looking man, Armati, and he knew it. Chestnutbrown hair, always tousled, aquiline nose, untidy beard, and blue eyes ringed with laughter lines that only added charm to his seemingly disheveled appearance.

  “I have to say that you’re even more attractive than usual this evening, Clelia.”

  “Spare me the sweet talk, Franco—you sound like a geriatric Latin lover. Where’s the body?”

  “Always in a hurry, eh? It’s one of the things I like about you most.”

  Clelia gave a snort, but she couldn’t help letting a smile play on her lips. In the beginning Franco’s one-liners had annoyed her. As the commissario, she was still his boss. Besides, she didn’t put up with sexist remarks. She was an officer in the police force, and the fact that she was a woman was irrelevant. Then, as time went on, she had discovered that Franco was the best collea
gue she could wish for, vigilant and thorough in investigations: he didn’t leave any stone unturned and his razor-sharp instinct helped him to solve complicated cases. In addition, he was the only person who ever noticed—with just one glance—if something was wrong in Clelia’s private life. “Everything okay, boss?” he would ask. “Sometimes a coffee’s all you need to feel better.” He always managed to get a smile out of her.

  “This way.” Franco led her along a narrow corridor lined with doors, all closed, to the office of the agency’s chief executive, Luciano Restivo. As she went in, she was struck by the sharp smell of blood. The body was sitting at the desk, its head bent backward. The wall behind was awash with blood and splattered with bits of brain. One hand was still resting on the desk, next to a piece of paper with writing on it. The other hung down near the floor, a few centimeters from an automatic pistol.

  “The gun?” Clelia asked her colleague.

  “It belonged to Restivo. It’s licensed.”

  Clelia moved toward the body to examine it close-up. It was a horrendous sight: the man had shot himself in the mouth. She managed to stifle a feeling of revulsion. From her jacket pocket she pulled out a pair of latex gloves, slipped them on, then picked up the sheet of paper; it looked like a goodbye note. She read it carefully.

  “Notice anything strange?” Franco asked her.

  “Yes, actually. Some letters are more pronounced than others.”

  “I knew you’d notice. And have a look at what they spell out if you put them together.”

  Clelia took a Post-it and a pen from the desk, and set to work on the highlighted letters. The first was an m, followed by a u. After a while, her eyes widened. “It says murder,” she whispered.

  “Perhaps Restivo was forced to write the note, and he tried to leave a final, desperate message. I’m sure it’s not suicide, even if someone wants to make us think it is,” concluded Inspector Armati.

  II

  Judge Carmine Mezzogiorno’s office was big and bright. The white marble floor reflected the light that filtered through the large windows. By the side of the desk were two luxuriant ferns, and, on the walls, framed photographs of the highest state appointees.