Table Of ContentAnonymous Venetian
[Commissario Brunetti 03]
By Dona Leon
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
Ah forse adesso
Sul morir mio delusa
Priva d’ogni speranza, e di consiglio
Lagrime di dolor versa dal ciglio.
Ah, perhaps already
Deceived by my death
Deprived of every hope and counsel
Tears of pain flow from her eyes.
Mozart, Lucio Silla
Chapter One
The shoe was red, the red of London phone booths, New York
fire engines, although these were not images that came to the
man who first saw the shoe. He thought of the red of the Ferrari
Testarossa on the calendar in the butchers’ showers, the one
with the naked blonde draped across it, seeming to make
fevered love to the left headlight. He saw the shoe lying
drunkenly on its side, its toe barely touching the edge of one of
the pools of oil that lay like a spotted curse upon the land
beyond the abattoir. He saw it there and, of course, he also
thought of blood.
Somehow, years before, permission had been given to put
the slaughterhouse there, long before Marghera had blossomed,
though that is perhaps an inopportune choice of verb, into one
of the leading industrial centres of Italy, before the petroleum
refineries and the chemical plants had spread themselves
across the acres of swampy land that lay on the other side of
the laguna from Venice, pearl of the Adriatic. The cement
building lay, low and feral, within the enclosure of a high mesh
fence. Had the fence been built in the early days, when sheep
and cattle could still be herded down dusty roads towards the
building? Was its original purpose to keep them from escaping
before they were led, pushed, beaten up the ramp towards their
fate? The animals arrived in trucks now, trucks which backed
directly to the high-sided ramps, and so there was no chance
that they could escape. And surely no one would want to come
near that building; hence the fence was hardly necessary to
keep them away. Perhaps because of this, the long gaps in it
went unmended, and stray dogs, drawn by the stench of what
went on inside, sometimes came through the fence at night and
howled with longing for what they knew was there.
The fields around the slaughterhouse stood empty; as if
obeying a taboo as deep as blood itself, the factories stood far
off from the low cement building. The buildings maintained their
distance, but their ooze and their runoff and those deadly fluids
that were piped into the ground knew nothing of taboo and
seeped each year closer to the slaughterhouse. Black slime
bubbled up around the stems of marsh grass, and a peacock-
bright sheen of oil floated on the surface of the puddles that
never disappeared, however dry the season. Nature had been
poisoned here, outside, yet it was the work that went on inside
that filled people with horror.
The shoe, the red shoe, lay on its side about a hundred
metres to the rear of the slaughterhouse, just outside the fence,
just to the left of a large clump of tall seagrass that seemed to
thrive on the poisons that percolated around its roots. At
eleven-thirty on a hot Monday morning in August, a thickset
man in a blood-soaked leather apron flung back the metal door
at the rear of the slaughterhouse and emerged into the
pounding sun. From behind him swept waves of heat, stench,
and howls. The sun made it difficult to feel that it was cooler
here, but at least the stench of offal was less foul, and the
sounds came from the hum of traffic, a kilometre away, as the
tourists poured into Venice for Ferragosto, not from the shrieks
and squeals that filled the air behind him.
He wiped a bloody hand on his apron, stooping to find a dry
spot down by the hem, then reached into his shirt pocket and
pulled out a package of Nazionale. With a plastic lighter, he lit
the cigarette and pulled at it greedily, glad of the smell and
acrid taste of the cheap tobacco. A deep-throated howl came
from the door behind him, pushing him away from the building,
over towards the fence and the shade that was to be found
under the stunted leaves of an acacia that had managed to
grow to a height of four metres.
Standing there, he turned his back on the building and
looked out across the forest of smokestacks and industrial
chimneys that swept off towards Mestre. Flames spurted up
from some of them; grey, greenish clouds spilled out of others.
A light breeze, too weak to be felt on his skin, brought the
clouds back towards him. He pulled at his cigarette and looked
down at his feet, always careful, here in the fields, where he
stepped. He looked down and saw the shoe, lying on its side
beyond the fence.
It was made out of some sort of cloth, that shoe, not out of
leather. Silk? Satin? Bettino Cola didn’t know that sort of thing,
but he did know that his wife had a pair made out of the same
sort of stuff, and she had spent more than a hundred thousand
lire on them. He’d have to kill fifty sheep or twenty calves to
earn that much money, yet she’d spend it on a pair of shoes,
wear them once, then stuff them in the back of the closet and
never look at them again.
Nothing else in the blasted landscape deserved his
attention, so he studied the shoe, pulling at his cigarette. He
moved to the left and looked at it from another angle. Though it
lay close to a large pool of oil, it appeared to rest on a patch of
dry land. Cola took another step to the left, one that drew him
out into the full violence of the sun, and studied the area around
the shoe, looking for its mate. There, under the clump of grass,
he saw an oblong shape that seemed to be the sole of the other
one, it too lying on one side.
He dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the soft earth
with his toe, walked down the fence a few metres, then bent low
and crept through a large hole, careful of the jagged, rusty
barbs of metal that encircled him. Straightening up, he walked
back towards the shoe, now a pair of them and perhaps
salvageable because of that.
‘Roba di puttana,’ he muttered under his breath, seeing the
heel on the first shoe, taller than the pack of cigarettes in his
pocket: only a whore would wear such things. He reached down
and picked up the first shoe, careful to keep from touching the
outside. As he had hoped, it was clean, had not fallen into the
oily puddle. He took a few steps to the right, reached down and
wrapped two fingers around the heel of its mate, but it
appeared to be caught on a tuft of grass. He lowered himself to
one knee, careful to see where he knelt, and gave the shoe a
sharp tug. It came loose, but when Bettino Cola saw that what
he had pulled it loose from was a human foot, he leaped back
from the bush and dropped the first shoe into the black puddle
from which it had survived the night.
Chapter Two
The police arrived on the scene twenty minutes later, two blue
and white sedans from the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. By then,
the field at the back of the slaughterhouse was filled with men
from inside the building, brought out into the sun by curiosity
about this different kind of slaughter. Cola had run drunkenly
back inside as soon as he saw the foot and the leg to which it
was attached and gone into the foreman’s office to tell him
there was a dead woman in the field beyond the fence.
Cola was a good worker, a serious man, and so the
foreman believed him and called the police immediately without
going outside himself to check and see that Cola was telling the
truth. But others had seen Cola come into the building and
came to ask what it was, what had he seen? The foreman
snarled at them to get back to work: the refrigerated trucks
were waiting at the loading docks, and they didn’t have time to
stand around all day and gabble about some whore who got her
throat cut.
He didn’t mean this literally, of course, for Cola had told
him only about the shoe and the foot, but the fields between the
factories were well-known territory to the men who worked in
the factories - and to the women who worked in those fields. If
she’d got herself killed there, then she was probably one of
those painted wrecks who spent the late afternoon standing at
the side of the road that led from the industrial zone back into
Mestre. Quitting time, time to go home, but why not a quick
stop at the side of the road and a short walk back to a blanket
spread beside a clump of grass? It was quick, they expected
nothing of you except ten thousand lire, and they were, more
and more often now, blondes come in from Eastern Europe, so
poor that they couldn’t make you use anything, not like the
Italian girls on Via Cappuccina, and since when did a whore tell
a man what to do or where to put it? She probably did that, got
pushy, and the man had pushed back. Plenty more of them and
plenty more coming across the border every month.
The police cars pulled up and a uniformed officer got out of
each. They walked towards the front of the building, but the
foreman reached them before they got to the door. Behind him
stood Cola, feeling important to be the centre of all this
attention, but still faintly sick from the sight of that foot.
‘Is it you who called?’ the first policeman asked. His face
was round, glistening with sweat, and he stared at the foreman
from behind dark glasses.
‘Yes,’ the foreman answered. ‘There’s a dead woman in the
field behind the building.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No,’ the foreman answered, stepping aside and motioning
Cola to step forward. ‘He did.’
After a nod from the first one, the policeman from the
second car pulled a blue notebook out of his jacket pocket,
flipped it open, uncapped his pen, and stood with the pen
poised over the page.
‘Your name?’ asked the first policeman, the dark focus of
his glance now directed at the butcher.
‘Cola, Bettino.’
‘Address?’
‘What’s the use of asking his address?’ interrupted the
foreman. ‘There’s a dead woman out there.’
