A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  ‘She may have given them to someone,’ Carrua said, ‘or someone may have taken them, that’s what you’re trying to say.’

  They didn’t understand. Not even your closest and dearest friends always understand you. ‘I’m not trying to say anything. Apart from one thing: that I can’t deal with this young man. I don’t like problems any more, and this is one big problem. Don’t tell me you found me a good job and I don’t want to do it, you have to realise that I can’t afford to get mixed up in anything like this, it’d ruin me. After already being sentenced for homicide with extenuating circumstances, all I need is to be suspected of having links with the world of call girls and orgies and I’d really be messed up.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Carrua said gently.

  ‘I just wanted to show you that it isn’t bad will,’ Duca said. ‘This business is for you now.’

  ‘I’ll get right on it.’ Carrua picked up the phone. ‘Send me Mascaranti.’

  ‘I’m going to look for another job,’ Duca said. ‘Please get hold of Engineer Auseri, tell him whatever you want and give him back his son. Tell him he’s not to be left alone.’ He looked towards the window. ‘I’m so sorry, Davide.’

  Davide got up slowly, laboriously, even the small amount of air coming in through the window seemed to make him sway, and came towards them. ‘Signor Lamberti,’ he said.

  They waited for what was coming next, they had to wait almost a minute.

  ‘Don’t leave me.’

  They waited some more, he seemed still to have a lot of things to say.

  ‘Don’t leave me.’

  He took another short step forward. ‘Signor Lamberti.’ He was an intelligent young man, he paid attention, he didn’t need to be told things twice, he had grasped that Duca didn’t like being called Dr. Lamberti.

  There was nothing else to do but wait for him to speak, and they waited. They both knew now what he would say. And in fact he did.

  ‘Don’t leave me.’

  He was repeating, without realising it, the scene the girl had played with him that day in the car. ‘No, no, no, take me away with you, take me away.’ He had even tried to cut his wrists, like her, and he would try again, as soon as he was alone. It was a kind of unconscious identification, a way of expiating his guilt.

  Duca stood up, took him by the arm to support him, even though Davide was not drunk, walked him back towards the window, and made him sit down. ‘You’ll be all right, Davide.’

  ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Where’s Mascaranti?’ Carrua was screaming into the phone. ‘Can I have the honour, or am I asking too much?’

  ‘It’s all right, I’m not leaving you.’

  ‘If you leave me, it’s over, I know what I’ll do.’

  Duca also knew what he would do, just as he had known when Signora Maldrigati told him she couldn’t bear to live like that any more.

  ‘I won’t leave you.’

  ‘Is he coming up?’ Carrua yelled. ‘Is my office on K2 or what? Why isn’t he here yet?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ He couldn’t leave him. He was a specialist in socially redeeming work: euthanasia, saving troubled young people. He went back to Carrua’s desk just as Mascaranti came in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mascaranti said, ‘I just finished my shift and went to have a beer.’

  Even though he was short and dark, even though he still had his Sicilian accent, he didn’t look like a policeman, more like a sportsman, a boxer, a racing cyclist, because of his athletic chest and huge hairy hands, and his trousers, even though they were not narrow, adhered to his legs almost like socks.

  ‘We’re not in the FBI here,’ Carrua shouted, ‘we’re in Milan police Headquarters: when you’ve finished your shift you stay here.’ He handed him the yellow file. ‘See if you remember this case, that’s your seal on the reports.’

  In those hands, the sheets of paper were like butterflies in a dragon’s paws. Mascaranti studied them for a while, without saying anything.

  ‘He’s forgotten how to read,’ Carrua said nervously.

  ‘Yes, I remember it,’ Mascaranti said. ‘The girl who slit her wrists in Metanopoli. I checked the reports from the Metanopoli police, I even showed them to you. Is something wrong?’

  ‘Yes, something’s wrong, even though I saw them and you saw them and the secretary general of the United Nations probably saw them.’ Carrua did occasionally lower his voice, but it never lasted for long. ‘What’s wrong is that we don’t know what the girl used to slit her wrists. Plus, she should have had more than fifty thousand lire in her purse and there was just over ten thousand when she was found.’

  Duca rose to Mascaranti’s defence. ‘Nobody could have known that, apart from Davide who gave her the money.’

  ‘And then there are these photos, which have just been developed after a year,’ Carrua said. ‘The brunette is the dead girl. Given the kind of photographs these are, there seems to be food for thought here.’

  ‘There’s also something else,’ Duca said, his eyes still on Davide, ‘anybody who wants to kill themselves by slitting their wrists does it at home, or in a hotel room, either in the bath, or in bed. It’s a little unusual to hide in a field to do something like that, especially when you have a home to go to.’

  ‘Didn’t you think about these things when you signed the report?’ Carrua screamed.

  Mascaranti had long been immune to Carrua’s shouting and screaming. ‘Yes,’ he said calmly, ‘I thought about them, I even asked the pathologist if he thought it was worth doing a post-mortem. He told me he could do one if I wanted, but that his certificate was clear enough.’ He read some phrases: ‘ “… Loss of blood … No other wounds, contusions or marks on the body.” ’

  ‘Yes, I read that, too,’ Carrua said, ‘but I think we have to start again from the beginning. Take the file, and tomorrow morning go back to Metanopoli, question again everyone who was questioned before. And above all look into these pornographic pictures. I’ll give you all the details tomorrow morning.’

  ‘How did we get hold of these photos?’ Mascaranti asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow morning!’ Carrua exploded. He didn’t want to talk about Davide now. ‘All right,’ he said to Duca. ‘Take our friend home. Tomorrow I’ll contact Auseri and he’ll come and collect his son, and you’ll be free.’ Duca said nothing, he was looking at the hard-faced Mascaranti, who had taken the yellow file and was clutching it to his chest.

  ‘I’m talking to you,’ Carrua said.

  ‘Sorry.’ Duca looked at him. ‘I may have changed my mind.’ It wasn’t a real change of mind, he was just making yet another of his mistakes.

  Carrua put the two empty bottles of Coca-Cola down on the floor. ‘Go now,’ he said to Mascaranti, ‘and I’ll see you tomorrow morning at ten.’ He had already understood.

  ‘I’m staying with Davide,’ Duca said to Carrua, as soon as Mascaranti had gone out.

  ‘If you want to,’ Carrua said nervously: when his sensitivity was touched he became nervous.

  ‘I do want to. Plus, I’d like to ask a favour.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I want to be with Mascaranti on the investigation.’

  Carrua was looking at the bottle of whisky. ‘Give me a drop of that stuff.’ He barely moistened his lips, just stared into the glass. ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right, Duca, you want to investigate alongside Mascaranti.’ It wasn’t even a question.

  ‘Something like that. I won’t take an active part, but I’ll be with Mascaranti.’

  ‘First you wanted to drop everything, now you want to play cops and robbers.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Why?’

  He didn’t reply, and Carrua didn’t insist, because he knew why. Davide was still there next to the window, straight, statuesque, devastated.

  ‘All right. Tomorrow I’ll send you Mascaranti.’ Carrua covered the two lots of photographs, putting one photograph face down on each pile. It
felt strange, looking at naked photographs of a dead woman. ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘I think it’s best if we stay at the Hotel Cavour, that way we’ll be nearby.’

  ‘Yes, it’s practical.’ Carrua looked at his watch. ‘I don’t know how good you are as a policeman, so let me give you a test. Where would you start?’

  He didn’t reply this time either. Nor did Carrua insist this time, because he knew perfectly well where he needed to start: with Davide Auseri. Homicide disguised as suicide was something lots of people tried, almost always in vain, but even if the girl really had killed herself, Davide Auseri had been the last person to see her alive, and his story was just his story, and it might not necessarily be the truth, or at least not the whole truth. But neither of them had the stomach to pump him at the moment, neither he nor Carrua. They were even afraid of what might come out if they pumped him, or maybe not afraid, they felt pity, they felt sorry for him, both of them, he and Carrua. One day, before too long, they would have to ask Davide where he had been that evening, from seven until ten, and if he could tell them the name of someone who had seen him during those hours, and if he couldn’t be clear about that, and if they suspected that the suicide of Alberta Radelli wasn’t a suicide but that she had been murdered, then they needed him, Davide, to explain, as best he could, what was behind the girl’s death, and what was behind those photographs, because whatever it was it wasn’t anything good.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Carrua said. ‘I remember somebody doing that in 1959. A man whose wife always took sleeping pills at night. One night he gave her one more than usual, then slit her wrists and came to us in the morning to say he’d found her dead.’

  ‘And how did you find him out?’

  ‘We beat it out of him. It was Mascaranti who questioned him. When you think up a trick like that, you never think you might be beaten. There’s no need of any Chinese torture, after the fifth or sixth slap from Mascaranti, a person has to decide before his brain explodes.’

  ‘I didn’t say she was murdered,’ Duca said, standing up. He hoped, with all his heart, with all the last spark of trust in his fellow men, with all his anger, that it wasn’t anything as nasty as that. He went to Davide. ‘Come on, let’s pitch our tents at the Cavour.’ He put his hand on his shoulder and gave it a little fraternal squeeze.

  PART TWO

  Every time we find a pimp we have to crush him … But what exactly do you want to crush, my darling? The more of them you crush, the more there are. And that’s all right, but maybe you have to crush them all the same.

  1

  No, not everything was so nasty.

  Davide had stayed in the car, behind the wheel. Mascaranti and Duca climbed to the third floor; as usual in this kind of building the lift was out of order, and on every landing you could hear at least one TV set with Milva singing on the Milva Club, and often even two. Milva was singing on the third floor, too, but the volume faded almost to nothing after they had rung the bell, then the door opened and the sister of the suicide or murder victim or whatever she was, the sister of Alberta Radelli, smiled shyly at Mascaranti.

  ‘Police. We need to talk to you.’

  She made the usual face that honest Italians make when they see a policeman, a pensive face that gradually turns increasingly anxious. She must have done something wrong, she couldn’t remember what, but they had already found her out. The police had already been there, the year before, about poor Alberta, so what could have happened now? If she had been an American she would have replied, ‘How can I help you?’ in a polite, concerned tone, but she was an Italian from the South who the year before had been on the verge of losing her job with the phone company because her sister had killed herself and had been in the newspapers, so she didn’t say anything, not even ‘Yes,’ just let them in, ran awkwardly across the little room to switch off the television set, blotting out Milva completely, and turned to look at them: one rather tall, rather thin, rather unpleasant-looking—that was him, Duca—the other short and stocky, and even more unpleasant-looking, and she didn’t even ask them to sit down, just as she didn’t tell them that it was illegal for the police to enter a citizen’s home after sunset, because she didn’t know the law, not that anyone did know it, and even if she had known it she still wouldn’t have said anything.

  ‘Is this your sister?’ From a small leather briefcase Duca had taken out an 18×24 photograph and held it up to her, in the little room illuminated now only by a lamp with a plastic shade, bought at Upim or La Standa, and placed next to the TV set.

  Every now and again his father had talked to him about his work and each time he did he told him, talking about his days in Sicily with the Mafia, that the only method which had proved effective over the years, with both criminals and honest people, with good and bad people, was a fist in the face. These people are crafty, don’t waste your time on them. Forensics is one thing and that’s fine, but a police force using nice words, persuasion, psychological games, only makes new criminals. First give them a punch in the face, and then ask the question, you’ll see, a person who’s taken a punch responds better because he’s realised that when the need arises you can talk his language. And if the person who’s taken the punch is an honest man, don’t worry, even honest men can have accidents.

  He had never liked the theory, and was even convinced that it was wrong, but now he had applied it. The photograph he had chosen to show the woman was one of the most indecent shots of her dead sister. It was just like a punch in the face.

  Apart from looking at the photo, Alessandra Radelli did nothing, she didn’t turn red, didn’t turn white, didn’t start to cry, didn’t even say ‘oh.’ Nothing. But her face seemed to become smaller.

  ‘Is this your sister?’ he asked again, more loudly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Sit down, signorina.’ He already knew everything about her, from the phone company where she worked, from the landlord—she paid her rent regularly—and from the caretaker—she never received men, nor had she received them when her sister was still there.

  ‘Do you know anything about these photographs?’

  She shook her head, she was starting to breathe heavily, it was probably the heat, the room was small, even more hot air came in from the window that looked out on the courtyard. Mascaranti had found the light switch and lit the thing which hung from the ceiling of the room and which revealed itself to be an attempt at a chandelier.

  ‘What did your sister live on? Did she have a job?’

  She knew perfectly well what they meant, and she started speaking. She seemed almost calm, but her face remained, inexplicably, smaller than when they had arrived. Of course, of course, Alberta had found work immediately, as soon as she had arrived from Naples: she had become a shop assistant.

  ‘Where?’

  She told them where, a shop, although the term was a little vulgar: better to say a ‘men’s boutique’ in the Via Croce Rossa, where a young man enters, climbs a small carpeted staircase, and in a softly furnished little room his measurements are taken for a shirt by two young female shop assistants, or if he needs gloves for the car, French ties from Carven, original American pants, or anything else, the two shop assistants, guided by another lady, are always there, and one of the two assistants had been Alberta Radelli.

  ‘How long did she work there?’

  ‘Two or three months,’ she wasn’t sure.

  Mascaranti was writing everything down.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘She left.’

  ‘Why?’

  She couldn’t remember, maybe Alberta had quarrelled with the manageress.

  ‘And after that?’

  One by one, she told them all the places where her sister had worked, those that she knew, including the phone company. Mascaranti wrote them all down and then counted them up: in the year and a half she had been in Milan, Alberta Radelli had worked a total of almost eleven months, most of the time as a shop assistant. Mor
e than they had expected. The remaining seven months were taken up with intervals of unemployment.

  ‘But she also gave lessons, I got a lot of lessons for her.’ The famous arithmetic, history, and geography lessons to schoolboys.

  ‘How much did she charge per lesson?’

  ‘Six hundred lire.’

  As much as an hourly cleaner but, apart from the social injustice and the debasement of cultural values, Alberta Radelli didn’t have much to play with from these lessons. Cruelly, he turned over the photograph, which for a while he had kept face down, and showed it to her again. ‘You realise your sister was doing something that wasn’t very nice’—look at the photo, he seemed to be saying—‘and I can’t believe you didn’t know anything about it, given that you lived together.’

  She nodded, as if to say, yes, she knew something, and Mascaranti was getting ready to write it down, but all she said was that she had occasionally had her suspicions, because sometimes, even when she wasn’t working, her sister gave her twenty or thirty thousand lire to help her with her monthly bills.

  ‘And where did she say the money came from?’

  ‘Once she told me she was translating a book from French and that she had been given an advance.’

  ‘And did you believe her?’

  Pitifully, she shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Did you tell her you didn’t believe her?’

  She hadn’t really told her she didn’t believe her: she had tried to find out if she had someone, she thought in fact that she did have someone, a man who might not have been very young, quite a generous man, but she hadn’t tried to find out more, otherwise she wouldn’t have accepted the money. In her clumsy way, she was sincere.

  ‘So you didn’t know,’ he had to be even more brutal, ‘that she earned that money by picking up men, or being picked up by them, different ones each time.’

  No, she didn’t know, and finally she began to tremble a little, but without crying, her whole face was visibly trembling, and yet she wasn’t crying. ‘What’s happened? She’s been dead for a year, we’ve already suffered so much, my father and I, what are you looking for now?’