A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  Another vague smile from the man. ‘That may be, I’d never thought of graduates in history and philosophy doing it. And frankly, graduates in history and philosophy who supplement their incomes with this kind of work make me suspicious.’

  His tone, however polite, was very threatening. Livia shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to do about that,’ she said. ‘If you’ve finished your interrogation, I’d like to do those photographs and leave.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Luigi, switch on the floodlights and start.’ He turned to her again. ‘Signorina, where did you put your handbag?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when I have my suspicions, I like to check.’

  ‘You can’t look in my handbag,’ she burst out, but only because she had to burst out, it was part of the play-acting.

  ‘Oh, but I think I can,’ he replied, getting to his feet. ‘Where’s that bag?’

  ‘It’s in the bathroom, go on, look in it, take the money if you want, I should have known I was dealing with crooks.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, you should have told yourself we didn’t come from a church youth club. But if you pose for the photographs, I won’t take your money. Luigi, start,’ and he went into the bathroom. The red canvas handbag was in full sight on the little shelf over the washbasin, he took out the money, there was the fifty thousand she had been given by the man called Luigi, plus a couple of thousand-lire notes and about a dozen five-hundred-lire coins. There was the usual lipstick, the usual mirror, the usual key ring with just two keys, the driving licence, a tiny, spotless handkerchief, folded into a triangle, and finally there was a really tiny address book, a woman’s, filled neatly, in a microscopic but very clear handwriting. It was the only slightly battered object, the cover was a bit worn, it must be a few years old.

  And nothing else. He put his head out of the door of the bathroom that gave on the room adapted as a studio. He could see the photographer moving around behind his Minox—‘Move, there, stop, six, move, there, stop, seven, move, there, stop, eight’—but he couldn’t see Livia. There was still time before they got to fifty photographs. He put everything back in the handbag, except the address book, and from his breast pocket he took out a pair of very normal glasses with tortoiseshell frames, which made him look like the model of a young cool jazz lover and started to read. At first he leafed through, just to get an idea of what kind of addresses the graduate kept, then he thought that he would proceed more methodically and started to read from the letter A. None of the names meant anything to him, but under E he found the addresses of three publishing houses, Editions This and Editions That, so the girl really did translate. Under the letter I he found the address of an Institute of Italian-English culture, under the letter M that of a neoanarchist movement which gave him pause for thought, was the girl an anarchist? Then at the letter R he found that name.

  The photographer had been right to smell a rat. He went back in the room, sat down again, turning his back on Livia a little. They were on the thirty-ninth photograph, there were still a dozen to do, but he said to Luigi, ‘That’s enough now.’ And to her, ‘Come here, please, I have some more questions to ask you.’

  ‘I’d like to get dressed,’ she said. She was sure now that he had discovered something and that the battle was starting, she wasn’t afraid, she only wanted to know what he could possibly have discovered in the handbag. The answer wasn’t long in coming.

  ‘Come here now, you bitch, or I’ll break your legs, and tell me how you happen to know Alberta Radelli.’

  So that was what he had discovered, but how could she have remembered that Alberta’s name was still in her old address book? Things were turning difficult now, and she liked difficulty. She immediately obeyed and went and sat down in front of him, with the photographer watching her from behind, but she obeyed with the air of someone who’s dealing with a madman.

  ‘She was a friend of mine.’

  ‘What do you mean, “was”? Did you quarrel?’ He was setting a trap, trying to get her to lie.

  ‘No, the poor girl died, she killed herself.’ She didn’t rise to the bait. All her intelligence was lit up like an electronic calculator, ready to fight the enemy’s wiles.

  ‘When?’

  ‘A year ago.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She slit her wrists. It was in all the papers.’

  ‘Were you good friends?’

  ‘Quite good.’

  ‘Was she someone who went on the streets every now and again, like you?’

  He thought he was being clever, in his way he was, he was just waiting for her to tell a lie, in order to jump on her. ‘Yes. Maybe that’s why we became friends.’

  For a while the almost young man looked at her, he seemed more interested in her breasts then in her face, while he thought about his next move. Then he said to the photographer, ‘Give me a roll of film.’

  Luigi had a box of them in the pocket of his smock and immediately gave him one.

  ‘Have you ever seen a roll of film like this?’ And he again looked her in the eyes, his own eyes half closed, as if to focus better.

  ‘Yes, it’s a Minox cartridge.’

  ‘And where have you seen one before?’

  ‘It was at university, a friend of mine had a Minox.’

  ‘Could other people have also showed you a roll like this?

  ‘I don’t remember. It’s possible, maybe a photographer.’

  ‘What about your friend Alberta? Didn’t she ever show you one of these cartridges?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And didn’t your friend ever tell you that she’d been asked to pose for photographs like the ones you’ve just been doing?’

  The lie had to be ready instantaneously in order to seem convincing. ‘No.’

  ‘Let’s think about it: you and she are very good friends, you tell each other everything, even how much you earn from your streetwalking, and then she doesn’t tell you she posed for some artistic photographs, or that she’s about to. Strange.’

  ‘We were good friends but we didn’t see each other often, sometimes a month or two went by without our meeting.’ She was starting to feel cold, but only because of the air conditioning on her naked skin, not because of anything else.

  For a while the man remained silent, with his head down, he was looking at her feet, counting the toes, almost as if he was anxious to know how many there were altogether, to help himself to think. Then, still with his head down, he said, ‘You’re not telling us the truth. I think you know something. Maybe you know a lot.’

  ‘But I don’t even know what it is you want from me, I only know I’ve ended up in a den of thieves. Let me get dressed and go, you can keep the money if you like, but I want to leave.’ She was playing her part almost perfectly.

  ‘Luigi,’ the man said, ‘bring me the cotton wool and the alcohol, and also the peroxide.’

  ‘I don’t know if I have any peroxide.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s just to stop the bleeding.’ The man took out his glasses and put them on. At last he looked at her. ‘If you tell me the whole truth, I won’t do anything to you.’ He also took out a penknife from one of his pockets, a modest, old-fashioned penknife, the kind that not even primary schoolchildren used any more.

  ‘You’re crazy! What do you want me to tell you? Try to touch me and you’ll see what I can do.’ She was playing the ingénue, maybe successfully.

  ‘I’m not curious to know what you can do, but try to tell the truth and you’ll see you won’t have to do anything.’

  Luigi reappeared with some small bottles in his hand. ‘I found peroxide after all.’

  The man took the bottles and put them on the floor by his feet. ‘You still have time to tell me everything you know.’

  She had never studied acting, but she tried to do the best she could, to scream at the top of her voice, a scream was the natural reaction of a terrified woman who didn�
��t know anything. In reality, she knew everything the man wanted to know, and wasn’t terrified. Her contempt for the man was overwhelming: she would never lower herself to be afraid of a piece of dirt like him.

  Or rather, she tried to scream, but before she could scream she found her mouth filled with cotton wool, then the photographer forced her to sit down and held her firmly to the chair from behind.

  ‘You still have time to tell the truth.’ The man had sat down on her knees to stop her from kicking. At last she understood what that short-sighted look meant: he was a sadist, in the most technical sense of the word. ‘I could hit you and knock you out, then while you’re out I could slash your wrists. That would be amusing for the police: Oh look, we keep finding women with their wrists slashed, what on earth does it mean?’ His voice had become soft and unctuous, but it didn’t scare her, only disgusted her. ‘But I need you alive, I need you to talk. I’m telling you for the last time, if you want to tell me the truth I’ll take the cotton wool out.’

  She shrugged, and told him with her eyes that he was mad, that she had told him everything she knew.

  ‘Then I’ll start with an incision on your forehead, I’m generous and I’ll do it high up, that way you’ll easily be able to hide it with your hair.’ He rubbed her forehead with the alcohol, like an attentive nurse. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, I only want to disfigure you, at least if you don’t talk.’

  She almost didn’t feel the cut, nor did any blood run down her face, because he scrupulously dabbed the wound with the peroxide while the photographer left her head free for a moment.

  ‘If you have anything new to tell me, nod your head and I’ll take out the cotton wool, but if you’re going to tell me again that you don’t know anything, then forget it, I’ll only get angry.’

  Maybe that noise was only in her mind, an auditory hallucination which she heard because of her hope that the noise was real, but she instinctively turned her head towards the door because she had heard the sound of the bell.

  ‘Did someone just ring?’ the man asked.

  ‘No,’ the photographer said. ‘She must be waiting for somebody, and she thought they rang.’

  The man reflected, with the penknife in his hand, so close to her face that she could see it was a promotional object and read on the handle the name of a famous brand of liqueurs. ‘If she was expecting someone, they’d be here by now, so try to keep calm. This girl knows where the film from last year is, maybe she even has it, and she’ll tell us eventually.’ He rubbed her left cheek with the alcohol. ‘If you talk,’ he said to her, ‘you’ll avoid a cut on your cheek which no amount of plastic surgery will put right.’ He looked at her and waited, then made the incision, his eyes almost closed behind his glasses, staring at her cheek like a diligent schoolboy at the page of an exercise book on which he’s carefully writing a beautiful sentence. ‘Whatever you know, you can’t use it against us anyway. Tell your friends, if you have any, but if you talk I’ll stop here.’ He started dabbing the cut with the peroxide, but it wasn’t enough, rivulets of blood started falling onto her neck, her chest, all the way to her stomach. ‘Will you talk or shall I continue?’

  4

  First they saw Livia’s taxi pull up. Even without the little telescope he had a good view of his Livia getting out in front of the stark, imposing temple of construction, but he used the telescope anyway to look at her more closely. He very much liked the dark red cotton dress she was wearing, she had good taste in clothes, her simplicity was so calculated, it was almost irritating. Then Livia was swallowed up by that deity of concrete and the taxi driver angrily headed back towards the heedless, sleeping metropolis. It was a few minutes after two, her punctuality was also irritating.

  Their observation point was under the arbour, which rested against the roof of a tiny ramshackle house, like those you found in magazines for little children. Around the house and the arbour there were trees with bright, tiny leaves that created an ideal barrier, because from the outside you couldn’t see anything and from inside you could see everything. Inside the house there was a fat young man sleeping with his head propped on the table. They had given him five thousand lire and this had relaxed him completely and had removed any curiosity he might have had. There was a side road, about a hundred metres long, joining the little house to the main road, the Giulietta was parked with its front towards the main road, in the shelter of the trees, and they were leaning on the trunk of the Giulietta in the relatively cool shade, watching.

  ‘Has she gone in?’ Davide asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Duca handed him the telescope. But now there was nothing to be seen except the sky-grey tower in the green sea of fields and, in the background, Milan in the summer haze. It would have made a nice picture postcard, photographed from here, they could have offered it to the owners of the Ulisse Apartments.

  A lorry passed, a moped passed, then nothing: the desert. Then Davide said, ‘I think someone is about to stop outside the building.’

  ‘What?’ But he had already seen it: a Mercedes 230 had appeared from the end of the street and was now slowing down in front of the building then entering the scorching concrete parking area and very slowly parking between the white lines.

  Davide was still looking through the telescope. ‘I’ve seen that car before, the same model, the same colour, it must be the same, there aren’t many Mercedes 230s around and it’s unusual for two of them to have the same colour.’

  ‘Where did you see it?’ Now a man was slowly getting out, he looked young, though rather large, and seemed to be in absolutely no hurry.

  Davide’s voice was anxious. ‘Last year, that day with Alberta.’

  ‘Give me the telescope.’ He looked through it at the young man, and saw him as if he was only about five metres away. To many he might have seemed the model of the good son, but to Duca, a doctor and psychologist despite everything, he didn’t. That was the worst kind of criminal face there was, the kind that didn’t arouse suspicion.

  ‘On the autostrada, I saw it a couple of times before we got to Somaglia, then when I came back towards Milan and Alberta was crying, it was still behind us. At Metanopoli I overtook it and it seemed as if it was going to stop.’ Even after a year, the memory was still vivid, everything connected with Alberta was vivid in his mind. He now realised what that car had meant, a year earlier, and what it meant now.

  Duca, too, had understood. ‘He really looks like a killer,’ he said, putting the telescope down on the trunk of the Giulietta. There was nothing else to see, the killer had entered the building, the Mercedes was baking in the sun.

  ‘What should we do?’ Davide asked, he seemed to have turned green, but it wasn’t because of the reflection of the leaves in the arbour.

  There was almost nothing they could do. Everything was clear. The distinguished-looking gentleman with the grey moustache seduced restless girls from the city, someone professional photographed them, and this man in the Mercedes kept an eye on them and punished those who rebelled or tried to get away or had the idea of betraying them. In addition, the photographs were hot. For a photograph, these people were prepared to kill one, two, ten women.

  ‘We have to go in there now,’ Davide said.

  Yes, of course, they had to get going immediately: the man who had overpowered Alberta and slashed her wrists, who had taken Maurilia to Rome and drowned her in the Tiber, would also kill Livia Ussaro at the slightest suspicion.

  ‘We have to stay here,’ Duca said. He had the feeling he was also becoming green, at least the skin of his face felt as if it must be green.

  ‘But that’s the man who killed Alberta, he was following us the whole time.’

  ‘Yes, that’s him. But if we go in now, once we’ve knocked down the front door of the building and then the door of the apartment, he can kill Livia if he wants to, he has all the time in the world.’ It was a simple and unfortunate situation, he explained, the only hope was that the man didn’t suspect Livia, that he allowed her to
pose for the photographs and then let her go, one of the many girls who must have passed that way. And there was no reason for him to suspect her: Livia hadn’t met anyone after seeing Signor A, she had done nothing suspicious, she had left home and had come here to pose for photographs. Livia was clever, she knew what to do. Besides, if these people had had the slightest suspicion, they wouldn’t even have got this far and stepped into a trap, they would have simply disappeared. They were on the lookout, but they didn’t suspect. If they went up there to save Livia, they would simply kill her, because they would be revealing who she was. The best way to save her was to stay here, and wait for her to come out.

  ‘And what if she doesn’t come out?’

  Young Davide’s anxiety was making him nervous, he at least was hiding his own. ‘They can’t stay in there forever. Either they don’t suspect anything, they photograph her and then let her go, or else they discover something and they’ll try to escape.’

  ‘And Livia?’

  Enough now, he was also thinking of Livia, or maybe he was praying, rather than thinking. He didn’t reply.

  There are sixty minutes in an hour and they were passing one by one. The young man asleep in the little house from the kids’ magazine woke up at the sound of a tractor passing on the main road, looked at the world outside, the Giulietta and the two men who were part of that world, then must have remembered the five thousand lire and lit a cigarette and probably started to think about the way he would spend it. It was no later than 2:25, it was just a matter of knowing how long it took a photographer to expose a complete roll of Minox film. He had no idea, it depended partly on the model, but he assumed it couldn’t be less than half an hour.

  Davide knew he shouldn’t speak, but there was a limit. ‘We can’t just stay here and wait.’

  ‘No,’ Duca said, looking at his watch, almost exactly half an hour had passed since Livia had got out of the taxi. ‘No, that’s exactly what we have to do.’