A Private Venus

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.’

And then something happened. They saw two men come out of the Ulisse Apartments and one of the two was the man from the Mercedes, who now seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, he was nowhere near as relaxed as he had been before, and, for not more than a thousandth of a second, they waited to see Livia, too, come out of that Aztec temple, but the two men were alone and had almost reached the Mercedes, and it really looked as if they were making a quick getaway.

‘Try to cut them off,’ he said to Davide. They had the disadvantage that they were nearly three hundred metres from the building, but the advantage that their car was ready, with its doors open, and they didn’t have to do anything but start the engine. The other men were only now opening the doors of their car.

And in the time that took them, Davide set off, ate up the path, swallowed the two hundred metres of main road that separated them and aimed straight at the front of the Mercedes, practically determined to crash into it.

The Mercedes set off furiously: the road to Milan was near, and there they’d be able to lose themselves in the traffic. They rushed onto the main road towards Melzo, while Davide lost a few seconds reversing in order to point the car in the right direction. The man at the wheel of the Mercedes seemed to be very confident of the almost empty road, he still had three hundred metres advantage, he was moving straight ahead like a plane, and Duca then said something stupid to Davide: ‘Even if we don’t catch them, don’t worry, we’ll catch them later.’

‘I’ve already got them,’ Davide said. He was more than confident, he was blind with fury; as if the car ahead of them was a moped, he was suddenly on top of it, another second and he would overtake it.

‘Watch out, they may turn off,’ Duca said. He should also have said, watch out, they may open fire, but he didn’t: if they opened fire they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

The Mercedes did turn off, in fact, in order to avoid being boxed in on the main road, they must be intending to jump out and set off at a run across the fields, and if they did that it meant they weren’t armed, and if they weren’t armed they were dead, because the road they had been forced to turn onto was a mere hundred metres long and ended up in front of a big farmhouse.

Hens flew up into the air, a dog tied to a long chain howled and tried to fly, too, a countrywoman in shorts, bra, and straw hat stood there petrified with a kind of pitchfork in her hand when she saw the two cars explode in front of her, and they really did explode rather than just brake. The four doors of the two cars opened simultaneously, but Duca and Davide were faster on their feet, Duca grabbed the man, the sadist, before he had taken more than a few steps and before he realised that he had been caught, he gave him a kick in the stomach which laid him out flat in the dust in front of the farmhouse, howling and abject.

Davide had taken the other man and was holding him by one arm, without doing anything to him, because he was good, but the photographer was screaming hysterically, ‘Help, help!’ and it wasn’t as stupid as it might seem to cry for help: if he managed to create confusion, if he could make the people here believe, if only for a minute, that he was an honest citizen being attacked, he might be able to get away.

Then Duca left the sadist moaning on the ground, unable to get up-if he hadn’t smashed his stomach in it was pure chance, because that had been his intention-and passed on to the other man: he didn’t yet know that he was a homosexual, but the way he was screaming aroused his suspicions and when he saw him up close his suspicions were confirmed.

‘Look down, you bastard,’ he said.

This unexpected request made the photographer fall silent for a moment, then he raised his head a little more and screamed even more loudly, ‘Help!’ That was all Duca needed: he hit him on his Adam’s apple. Not even as a doctor had he ever been curious to know what happened to an Adam’s apple if you hit it like that, for a moment all that happened was that the photographer fell abruptly silent and collapsed against Davide.

‘Police,’ Duca said.

A robust old countryman had suddenly appeared. Duca flashed his medical registration card at him: he was a romantic, he still kept it in his wallet.

‘These two are murderers, they’ve killed two women, is there anywhere we can keep them locked up?’

Then a young man came out, then an old lady, then two boys. They weren’t quite sure what was going on, but they all recognised the word ‘police.’

‘The stable,’ the old man said.

‘The stable will be fine.’

There was only an old carthorse there, it really was a stable, not one of those gleaming air-conditioned hostels you saw on television. They threw the two men down in the mire, one of them was moaning with his hands on his stomach, conscious but powerless to do anything, the other had fainted, or had he choked to death? Duca didn’t think it was urgent to find out.

‘Davide, go back to the Ulisse Apartments, find Livia, see what’s happening, then phone Carrua, tell him everything and ask him to come here immediately.’ This was urgent, Livia was urgent. ‘In the meantime I’ll talk to these two. Go.’

It isn’t all that hot in a stable, in summer the smell is stronger than the heat. The light came from two round holes high in the walls, but it was sufficient. Once he had heard Davide drive off, he forbade himself to think about anything apart from the two men. He stood in front of the one who was holding his hands on his stomach and had stopped moaning: his fear was greater than his pain.

‘What did you do to the girl?’

‘What girl?’ He tried to pull himself up, because he could feel that muck which covered the floor of the stable like a Persian carpet seeping through his shirt.

With his foot, but without kicking him, only pressing, Duca forced him to lie down again in the mire. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘and I’m pleased to see that you’ve woken up, too,’ he said to the other man who had opened his eyes and was gasping, ‘that way you’ll both hear my proposition. I ask questions and you answer. If your answers are the right ones, you’ll just go to prison. If they’re wrong, you’ll go to the cemetery, I’ll pull you to pieces, bit by bit, bone by bone, the police will have to call an ambulance with a waterproof tarpaulin. Do we agree? Just now, I asked you what you did to the girl. You answered, what girl? That’s not the right answer. Now I’ll ask you again, and try to answer correctly, it’ll be in your best interests: What did you do to the girl?’

Silence. The horse didn’t even turn its head, it seemed to be made of wood.

‘I realised she’d been sent there by the police, I had my suspicions, so I had to make her talk.’

‘What did you do to her?’

The sadist retched a bit, his body contorted by the pain in his stomach, then he told Duca what he had done to her. And Duca did nothing, he stood there motionless, trying not to think about Livia.

‘And did she talk?’ he asked.

No, the sadist replied, she had continued to take those cuts on her face and continued to make it clear to him that she had nothing to say, and after a while he had almost been convinced that she hadn’t come there to spy on him, so he had let her go and they had left.

‘Why didn’t you kill her? She has a lot to say now.’

‘I’m not a murderer.’

‘That isn’t the right answer.’ He kicked him hard with the heel of his shoe, almost on the temple, where it joined the jaw. He heard a groan, but the man didn’t lose consciousness, which was just the way Duca wanted it: he would tear him apart, pull him to pieces, but wouldn’t knock him out. ‘You are a murderer, and if you didn’t kill her you must have had your reasons. It’ll be better for you if you tell me.’ The man thought he was being clever, he closed his eyes and pretended he had fainted, he didn’t know he was out of luck: his interrogator was a doctor. ‘You can’t fool me, I know you haven’t fainted. Answer, or I’ll continue.’

The man immediately opened his eyes again. ‘They told me to do it, it’s not up to me, I have to do what they tell me.’

‘Yes, I know what they told you. Sometimes you kill and sometimes you scar. It’s an old system. You’re not in the Mafia, but you’ve been trained by Mafiosi, you must have taken a crash course in how to scar someone’s face. Or am I wrong?’

The man said nothing.

‘Answer me.’

He looked at the heel of the shoe one centimetre from his nose. ‘In Turin I met two men from the south, but I was young, I did it almost as a game.’

‘Of course, they taught you the anatomy of the facial muscles, the place to make the incision and the type of incision to make, an M-shaped incision, for example, can’t be mended with plastic surgery.’ These were things his father had explained to him, when he had started wearing long trousers and his father had finally been able to talk to him about the Mafia. He wouldn’t have devoted a single minute to this whole business if he hadn’t sensed the ruthless, violent hand of the Mafia behind it. No, these two louts weren’t in the Mafia, nor was their local boss, or even their national boss, probably, but the theoretician, the mastermind of the whole system was certainly in the Mafia and took fifty per cent.

‘Leaving a woman who’s been scarred like that in circulation is good publicity, almost better than a woman who’s been murdered. The papers talk about it, the girls get scared, if they don’t behave the same thing will happen to them. When you have hundreds and hundreds of women who know a lot, and who’d like to go back to their previous lives, it isn’t easy keeping them in their place, but with the methods your instructors from the Mafia have taught you, you can deal with them. And now tell me about the man with the grey moustache who picked up the girl last night. Who is he?’

No answer.

‘Look, I know a lot, I know there are three of you, that man who’s the local boss, you and your friend here. You only know your boss, but he must know a lot of interesting people. Give me his name and address. You’re not a real Mafioso, the two of you are just pupils, you won’t be able to hold out.’ Delicately he placed his foot on the man’s stomach and started to press.

The man screamed that he’d had enough, he retched, then gave Duca the name and address, and some other things, too, some very interesting things.

‘Good, now if you want to keep your stomach, tell me, in detail, how you killed Alberta Radelli.’

With Duca’s foot on his stomach, the man told him immediately. He had understood. Duca listened to him, and as he listened he realised that his father had been right. ‘You have to speak their language. You can’t speak French to someone who only understands German.’ Of course it wasn’t right, of course a police force that acts correctly doesn’t use the language of violence, there are fingerprints, laboratory tests, well-conducted interrogations, psychological persuasion. But he wasn’t the police, he was a young loser who couldn’t hear the word Mafia without seeing his father with his arm stunted by a stab wound and reduced for ever, by that stab wound, to being a grey clerk in the Headquarters building, second floor, room 92, right at the back. Yes, he knew, it was just a common, ancestral thirst for revenge: he hadn’t been looking for justice, he hadn’t been trying to uphold the law, he had only wanted to see some of them face to face, and speak their language to them because that way you understood each other immediately.

‘And now tell me how you killed Maurilia. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the blonde girl you took to Rome.’

No, no, he remembered perfectly well, because the more he remembered the less Duca’s heel sank into his stomach, and he told the story with so many details it was almost like a novel. And then everything was clear, in every detail, and he was about to lift his foot from that stomach when the other man, the photographer, who had been so still on his bed of manure, had the bright idea of grabbing his leg. In his warped mind, it had occurred to him that Duca was there, his feet within reach of his hands, but he hadn’t thought it out. Duca, though, had already thought of it and was perfectly calm, he had one hand resting on the horse’s mane, and as soon as the photographer had grabbed his foot, he held on tight to the horse and with the same foot that the man was holding, kicked him in the face, twice, three times, until the man let go of his foot, moaning, and then he kicked him again, even harder, and the moaning immediately stopped.

The other man was sheltering his face with his hands. ‘No, no, no,’ he was saying.

But he had to be kept quiet, too, otherwise he might try to escape and that wasn’t good. ‘No, no, don’t worry.’ He didn’t even kick him so hard, just enough to knock him unconscious for a while. Then he left the stable and lit a cigarette.

They arrived two minutes later. Davide in front in the Giulietta, followed by Carrua in the police Alfa Romeo, then the van for transporting prisoners.

‘I told you not to get mixed up in this,’ Carrua screamed as he got out, very angry, as if it weren’t just a formality: he had known everything about the investigation from the start, through Mascaranti.

‘They’re in the stable,’ Duca said. ‘I can come over tonight and give you a report, they’ve already told me a lot of things. Be careful, there’s a horse in the stable, it’s very nervous, it keeps kicking, it must have kicked those fellows a few times.’

Carrua turned red. ‘If you laid one finger on them I’ll put you inside. Where are you going?’

He didn’t reply, he’d stopped listening to Carrua’s yelling. He took Davide by the arm and led him towards the Giulietta. ‘Take me straight to the centre of town.’ He didn’t ask him anything until they were near the Via Porpora, queuing like robot sheep in the traffic that had resumed in all its fury. Then all he said was: ‘Did you see her?’

He nodded, yes, he had seen her. That meant that he had gone to the Ulisse Apartments, rushed up to the second floor and seen Livia Ussaro.

‘Was she conscious?’

‘Yes.’

That meant that she hadn’t fainted, that she was sitting on a chair, naked, with all the chess pieces lying on the floor around her, and she was dabbing her face with a towel, there wasn’t much blood, no, there really wasn’t much blood, but she had been about to faint when he had seen her face, when she had lowered the towel for a moment to let herself be dressed, because he had had to dress her, but she didn’t faint, she hadn’t fainted once, not even when he had taken her down to the car, she had even tried to walk by herself, barely supported.

‘Where did you take her?’

‘To the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, Carrua told me to do that on the telephone.’

‘Let’s go there now.’

‘We can’t.’

Then Duca noticed that Davide’s body was moving convulsively, like children who have cried too much, at first it seemed like a kind of sobbing, but then he understood. And he also understood why they couldn’t see her: she was being put back together. The worst thing, apart from the scars, was the vertical cuts at the corners of her lips-his father had once described to him in detail a full facial scarring-that would make it difficult for her to speak or eat for several weeks. Until she had been mended a little, they wouldn’t be able to see her.

‘Then let’s go straight to the Piazza Castello.’ He told Davide where they were going, who they were going to see, and what they were going to do, and how he, Davide, could help him. ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t get out the back way,’ he said.

They left the car in the Piazza Castello and went the rest of the way on foot. After a while they reached the characteristically narrow old lane, where there was a shop for stamp collectors that seemed out of place here, with two pocket-sized windows on either side of the entrance displaying lots of beautiful stamps that probably nobody had ever looked at, not even the owner. They went in and walked down two steps into a little room, not much larger than a toilet, which functioned, with a certain claim to elegance, as the kingdom of philately.

There was nobody there, and it was very dark. Display cases hanging on the wall, stuffed full of stamps, gleamed dimly. Lying open on the counter was a very large album, then there was a small armchair, and a big red glass ashtray, which not only didn’t have any cigarette ends in it but was also veiled with dust: Signor A must have followed his doctor’s advice and stopped smoking some time ago. But above all there was silence, and when they had opened the door no bell had rung.

‘Is there anybody here?’ he asked politely, staring politely at the half-open door at the back, and then he understood the reason for the sense of unease he had been feeling: somebody he couldn’t see was looking at him from one of those display cases hanging on the wall, one of the stamps wasn’t a stamp, but a hole in the wall that you could look through from the other side. With really childish curiosity, he would have liked to know which stamp it was.

The little door at the back finally opened completely and an elegant gentleman appeared, smiling. He had a grey moustache, he was exactly as Livia had described him: Signor A.

‘I’m so sorry …’ Signor A’s intention was to apologise for keeping them waiting, but from across the counter the two of them grabbed him, dragged him over the counter and wedged him into the armchair, and Duca stunned him with a slap while Davide searched him.

‘Yes, here it is.’

It was a woman’s revolver: Signor A probably didn’t always carry it, he must have stuffed it in his pocket when he heard them come in.

‘Look for the light switch,’ he said to Davide, ‘then lower the shutter, go in the back, block the door and phone Carrua, tell him he can come and get another one.’

The slap-although the word wasn’t entirely accurate, more like an understatement-had turned one of Signor A’s eyes red with blood, but he hadn’t emitted a moan or said a word.

Duca now said something very specific. ‘Your friend the photographer and the other man have already told me a lot,’ he said. ‘Now it’s your turn to tell me all you know. There must be little shops like this in other cities in Italy, and you must also be in contact with people abroad. I need names, addresses, and details. Davide, find some paper and come here and write,’ he said to Davide, then turned back to the silent Signor A, who was not only silent but had the stony look on his face of someone who would never talk. ‘You’re over fifty, I give you my word as a doctor that you won’t be able to stand more than three blows to the liver, at the third everything will burst inside you. This is number one.’

At the same time, he covered the man’s mouth with his hand, but Signor A did not even have the strength to moan, his eyes looked as if they were coming out of their sockets, they lost that stony I’ll never talk look, and Duca asked him the first question.

‘Please answer at once.’

Breathing heavily, his nose now as white as his lips, he answered. Then he answered the second question, and the third, and the fourth, he answered all the questions.

‘Names and addresses.’

He gave names and addresses, but was starting to moan and to bend double.

‘Tell me everything, or I’ll hit you again.’ He might not survive even a second blow, whatever the doctors did to save his liver, but Duca would hit him all the same, and Signor A understood that and gave him the last name, the last address, the one he had promised over and over again never to reveal.

‘Yes, I think you’ve told me everything.’ He looked at him and thanked him. ‘Thank you, you’ve been very good.’

Davide had covered almost three large sheets of paper. Then they pulled up the shutter, switched off the light, and waited in the gloom, while the little boss moaned. They would get the big guys soon enough.

Then Mascaranti arrived with two officers and took away Signor A and the three written sheets, and Duca and Davide were free.