by Donna Leon
The news had arrived at eight on Monday morning; Patta followed it into the Questura at eleven. At one-thirty, the call came in about the transvestite, but by then most of the staff had already left for lunch, during which meal some employees of the Questura engaged in quite wild speculation about Signora Patta’s future film career. An indication of the Vice-Questore’s popularity was the bet that was made at one table, offering a hundred thousand lire to the first person who dared to enquire of the Vice-Questore as to his wife’s health.
Guido Brunetti first heard about the murdered transvestite from Vice-Questore Patta himself, who called Brunetti into his office at two-thirty.
‘I’ve just had a call from Mestre,’ Patta said after telling Brunetti to take a seat.
‘Mestre, sir?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, that city at the end of the Ponte della Liberta,’ Patta snapped. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of it.’
Brunetti thought of what he had learned about Patta that morning and decided to ignore his remark. ‘Why did they call you, sir?’
‘They’ve got a murder over there and no one to investigate.’
‘But they’ve got more staff than we have, sir,’ Brunetti said, never quite certain just how much Patta knew about the workings of the police force in either city.
‘I know that, Brunetti. But two of their commissarios are on vacation. Another broke his leg in an automobile accident this weekend, so that leaves only one, and she’ – Patta managed to give a snort of disgust at such a possibility – ‘leaves for maternity leave on Saturday and won’t be back until the end of February.’
‘What about the two who are on vacation? Surely they can be called back.’
‘One of them is in Brazil, and no one seems able to find the other one.’
Brunetti started to say that a commissario had to leave word where he could be reached, no matter where he went on vacation, but then he looked at Patta’s face and decided, instead, to ask, ‘What did they tell you about the murder, sir?’
‘It’s a whore. A transvestite. Someone beat his head in and left his body in a field out in Marghera.’ Before Brunetti could object, Patta said, ‘Don’t even ask. The field is in Marghera, but the slaughterhouse that owns it is in Mestre, just by a few metres, so Mestre gets it.’
Brunetti had no desire to waste time on the details of property rights or city boundaries, so he asked, ‘How do they know it’s a prostitute, sir?’
‘I don’t know how they know it’s a prostitute, Brunetti,’ Patta said, his voice going up a few notes. ‘I’m telling you what they told me. A transvestite prostitute, in a dress, with his head and face beaten in.’
‘When was he found, sir?’
It was not Patta’s habit to take notes, so he had not bothered to make any record of the call he had received. The facts hadn’t interested him – one whore more, one whore less – but he was bothered by the fact that it would be his staff doing Mestre’s work. That meant any success they met with would go to Mestre. But then he thought of recent events in his personal life and came to the decision that this might well be the sort of case he should let Mestre take any and all credit for – and publicity.
‘I had a call from their Questore, asking if we could handle it. What are you three doing?’
‘Mariani is on vacation and Rossi’s still going through the papers on the Bortolozzi case,’ Brunetti explained.
‘And you?’
‘I’m scheduled to begin my vacation this weekend, Vice-Questore.’
‘That can wait,’ Patta said with a certainty that soared above things like hotel reservations or plane tickets. ‘Besides, this has got to be a simple thing. Find the pimp, get a list of customers. It’s bound to be one of them.’
‘Do they have pimps, sir?’
‘Whores? Of course they have pimps.’
‘Male whores, sir? Transvestite whores? Assuming, of course, that he was a prostitute.’
‘Why would you expect me to know a thing like that, Brunetti?’ asked Patta, suspicious with more than usual irritation, again forcing Brunetti to remember that morning’s first news and quickly to change the subject.
‘How long ago did the call come in, sir?’ Brunetti asked.
‘A few hours ago. Why?’
‘I wondered if the body’s been moved?’
‘In this heat?’ Patta asked.
‘Yes, there is that,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘Where was it taken?’
‘I have no idea. One of the hospitals. Umberto Primo, probably. I think that’s where they do the autopsies. Why?’
‘I’d like to have a look,’ Brunetti said. ‘And at the place where it happened.’
Patta wasn’t a man to be interested in details. ‘Since this is Mestre’s case, make sure you use their drivers, not ours.’ Some details.
‘Was there anything else, sir?’
‘No. I’m sure this will be a simple thing. You’ll have it wrapped up by the weekend and be free to go on vacation.’ It was like Patta that he asked nothing about where Brunetti planned to go or what sort of reservations he might have to cancel. More details.
Leaving Patta’s office, Brunetti noticed that, while he was inside, furniture had suddenly appeared in the small anteroom that stood directly outside Patta’s office. A large wooden desk stood on one side, and a small table had been placed below the window. Ignoring this, he went downstairs and into the office where the uniformed branch worked. Sergeant Vianello looked up from some papers on his desk and smiled at Brunetti. ‘Even before you ask, Commissario, yes, it’s true. Tito Burrasca.’
Hearing the confirmation, Brunetti was no less astonished than he had been, hours before, when he first heard the story. Burrasca was a legend, if that was the proper word, in Italy. He had begun making films during the sixties, blood and guts horrors that were so patently artificial that they became unconscious parodies of the genre. Burrasca, not at all foolish, no matter how inept he might have been at making horror films, answered the popular response to his films by making the films even more false: vampires with wrist-watches that the actors seemed to have forgotten to remove; telephones that brought the news of Dracula’s escape; actors of the semaphore school of dramatic presentation. After a very short time, he had become a cult figure and people flocked to his films, eager to detect the artifice, to spot the howlers.
In the seventies, he gathered up all those masters of semaphoric expression and turned them to the making of pornographic films, at which they turned out to be no more adept. Costuming no problem, he soon realized that plot, similarly, presented no obstacle to the creative mind: he merely dusted off the plots of his old horror films and turned the ghouls, vampires, and werewolves into rapists and sex maniacs, and he filled the theatres, though smaller theatres this time, with a different audience, one that seemed not at all interested in the spotting of anachronism.
The eighties presented Italy with scores of new private television stations, and Burrasca presented those stations with his latest films, somewhat toned down in deference to the supposed sensibilities of the TV audience. And then he discovered the video cassette. His name quickly became part of the small change of Italian daily life: he was the butt of jokes on TV game shows, a figure in newspaper cartoons, but close consideration of his success had caused him to move to Monaco and become a citizen of that sensibly taxed principality. The twelve-room apartment he maintained in Milano, he told the Italian tax authorities, was used only for entertaining business guests. And now, it would appear, Maria Lucrezia Patta.
‘Tito Burrasca, in fact,’ Sergeant Vianello repeated, keeping himself, Brunetti knew not with what force, from smiling. ‘Perhaps you’re lucky to be spending the next few days in Mestre.’
Brunetti couldn’t keep himself from asking, ‘Didn’t anyone know about it before?’
Vianello shook his head. ‘No. No one. Not a whisper.’
‘Not even Anita’s uncle?’ Brunetti asked, revealing that even the higher orders knew the source o
f this one.
Vianello began to answer but was interrupted by the buzzer on his desk. He picked up the phone, pressed a button, and asked, ‘Yes, Vice-Questore?’
He listened for a moment, said, ‘Certainly, Vice-Questore,’ and hung up.
Brunetti gave him an inquisitive glance.
‘The immigration people. He wants to know how long Burrasca can stay in the country, now that he’s changed his citizenship.’
Brunetti shook his head. ‘I suppose you have to feel sorry for the poor devil.’
Vianello’s head shot up. He couldn’t disguise his astonishment, or wouldn’t. ‘Sorry? For him?’ With evident effort, he stopped himself from saying more and turned his attention back to the folder on his desk.
Brunetti left him and went back to his own office. From there he called the Questura in Mestre, identified himself, and asked to be put through to whoever was in charge of the case of the murdered transvestite. Within minutes, he was speaking to a Sergeant Gallo, who explained that he was handling the case until a person of higher rank took over from him. Brunetti identified himself and said that he was that person, then asked Gallo to send a car to pick him up at Piazzale Roma in a half an hour.
When Brunetti stepped outside the dim entryway of the Questura, the sun hit him like a blow. Momentarily blinded by the light and the reflection from the canal, he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out his sun-glasses. Before he had taken five steps, he could feel the sweat seeping into his shirt, crawling down his back. He turned right, deciding in that instant to go up to San Zaccaria and get the No. 82, though it would mean walking in the sun a good part of the way to get there. Though the calli that led to Rialto were all shaded from the sun by high houses, it would take him twice as long to get there, and he dreaded even so little as an extra minute spent outside.
When he emerged at Riva degli Schiavoni, he looked off to the left and saw that the vaporetto was tied to the landing stage, people streaming from it. He was confronted with one of those peculiarly Venetian decisions: run and try to get the boat or let it go and then spend ten minutes in the trapped heat of the bobbing embarcadero, waiting for the next one. He ran. As he pounded across the wooden boards of the landing stage, he was presented with another decision: pause a moment to stamp his ticket in the yellow machine at the entrance and thus perhaps lose the boat, or run on to the boat and pay the five hundred lire supplement for failing to stamp the ticket. But then he remembered that he was on police business and, consequently, could ride at the expense of the city.
Even the short run had flooded his face and chest with sweat, and so he chose to remain on deck, body catching what little breeze was created by the boat’s stately progress up the Grand Canal. He glanced around him and saw the half-naked tourists, the men and women with their bathing suits, shorts, and scoop necked T-shirts, and for a moment he envied them, even though he knew the impossibility of his appearing like that any place other than a beach.
As his body dried, the envy fled, and he returned to his normal state of irritation at seeing them dressed like this. If they had perfect bodies and perfect clothing, perhaps he would find them less annoying. As it was, the shabby materials of the clothing and the even shabbier state of too many of the bodies left him thinking longingly of the compulsory modesty of Islamic societies. He was not what Paola called a ‘beauty snob’, but he did believe that it was better to look good than bad. He turned his attention from the people on the boat to the palazzi that lined the canal, and immediately he felt his irritation evaporate. Many of them, too, were shabby, but it was the shabbiness of centuries of wear, not that of laziness and cheap clothing. The city had grown old, but Brunetti loved the sorrows of her changing face.
Though he hadn’t specified where the car was to meet him, he walked to the Carabinieri station at Piazzale Roma and saw, parked in front of it, motor running, one of the blue and white sedans of the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. He tapped on the driver’s window. The young man inside rolled it down, and a wave of cold air flowed across the front of Brunetti’s shirt.
‘Commissario?’ the young man asked. At Brunetti’s nod, the young man got out, saying, ‘Sergeant Gallo sent me,’ and held open the rear door for him. Brunetti got into the car and rested his head for a moment against the back of the seat. The sweat on his chest and shoulders grew cold, but Brunetti couldn’t tell if its evaporation brought him pleasure or pain.
‘Where would you like to go, sir?’ the young officer asked as he slipped the car into gear.
On vacation. On Saturday, he said, but only in his mind and only to himself. And to Patta. ‘Take me to where you found him,’ Brunetti directed.
At the other end of the causeway that led from Venice to the mainland, the young man pulled off in the direction of Marghera. The laguna disappeared, and soon they were riding down a straight road blocked with traffic and with a light at every intersection. Progress was slow. ‘Were you there this morning?’ The young man turned and glanced back at Brunetti, then looked again at the road. The back of his collar was crisp and clean. Perhaps he spent his entire day in this air-conditioned car.
‘No, sir. That was Buffo and Rubelli.’
‘The report I got says he’s a prostitute. Did someone identify him?’
‘I don’t know about that, sir. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, sir, that’s where the whores are, at least the cut-rate ones. Out there by the factories. There’s always a dozen or so of them, on the side of the road, in case anyone wants a quickie on the way home from work.’
‘Even men?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir? Who else would use a whore?’
‘I mean even a male whore. Would they be likely to be out there, where the men who use them could be seen stopping on the way home from work? It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing too many men would want their friends to know about.’
The driver thought about that for a while.
‘Where do they usually work?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Who?’ the young man asked cautiously. He didn’t want to be caught again by another trick question.
‘The male whores.’
‘They’re usually along Via Cappuccina, sir. Sometimes at the train station, but we try to stop that sort of thing during the summer when so many tourists pass through the station.’
‘Was this one a regular?’
‘I don’t know about that, sir.’
The car pulled off to the left, cut down a narrow road, then turned right on to a broad road lined with low buildings on either side. Brunetti glanced down at his watch. Almost five.
The buildings on either side of them were further and further apart from one another now, the spaces between them filled with low grass and the occasional bush. A few abandoned cars stood at crazy angles, their windows shattered and their seats ripped out and flung beside them. Each building appeared to have once been surrounded by a fence, but most of these now hung drunkenly from the posts that had forgotten about holding them up.
A few women stood at the side of the road; two of them stood in the shade created by a beach umbrella sunk into the dirt at their feet.
‘Do they know what happened here today?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’m sure they do, sir. Word about something like that spreads quickly.’
‘And they’re still here?’ Brunetti asked, unable to conceal his surprise.
‘They’ve got to five, haven’t they, sir? Besides, if it was a man who got killed, then there’s no risk to them, or I suppose that’s the way they’d look at it.’ The driver slowed and pulled to the side of the road. ‘This is it, sir.’
Brunetti opened his door and got out. Heat and humidity slid up and embraced him. Before him stood a long low building; on one side, four steep cement ramps led up to double metal doors. A blue and white police sedan was parked at the bottom of one of the ramps. No name was visible on the building, and no sign of any sort i
dentified it. The smell that surged towards them made that unnecessary.
‘I think it was at the back, sir,’ the driver volunteered.
Brunetti walked to the right of the building, towards the open fields that he could see stretching out behind it. When he came around to the back of the building, he saw yet another lethargic fence, an acacia tree that had survived only by a miracle, and, in its shade, a policeman asleep in a wooden chair, head nodding forward on his chest.
‘Scarpa,’ the driver called out before Brunetti could say anything. ‘Here’s a commissario.’
The policeman’s head shot up and he was instantly awake, then as quickly on his feet. He looked at Brunetti and saluted. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
Brunetti saw that the man’s jacket was draped over the back of the chair and that his shirt, plastered to his body with sweat, seemed to be a faint pink, no longer white. ‘How long have you been out here, Officer Scarpa?’ Brunetti asked when he approached the man.
‘Since the lab people left, sir.’
‘When was that?’
‘About three, sir.’
‘Why are you still here?’
‘The sergeant in charge told me to stay here until a team came out to talk to the workers.’
‘What are you doing out here in the sun?’
The man made no attempt to avoid the question or to embellish his answer. ‘I couldn’t stand it inside, sir. The smell. I came out here and was sick, and then I knew I couldn’t go back inside. I tried standing for the first hour, but there’s only this little place where there’s any shade, so I went back and got a chair.’
Instinctively, Brunetti and the driver had crowded into that small patch of shade while the other man spoke. ‘Do you know if the team has come out to question them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, sir. They got here about an hour ago.’
‘Then what are you still doing out here?’ Brunetti asked.
The officer gave Brunetti a stony look. ‘I asked the sergeant if I could go back to town, but he wanted me to help with the questioning. I told him I couldn’t, not unless the workers came outside to talk to me. He didn’t like that, but I couldn’t go back inside.’