A Private Venus (11 page)

Carrua looked through the papers in the file. ‘Here it is: “… complete list of what was found in the place where the body of the above-mentioned Alberta Radelli was discovered …” It seems they searched, but didn’t find anything sharp. If it was a small blade it might have got lost in a field.’

They exchanged glances. They knew each other well and couldn’t fool each other. ‘You can’t slander the Metanopoli police like that,’ Duca said. ‘If there’d been something sharp there, even within a radius of thirty metres they would have found it and put it on the list. You don’t have a very high opinion of your fellow officers.’

‘Your father always said that, it offended him.’

They both smiled, wickedly. And then Carrua said, ‘I think you have something else to say.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the contents of the purse.’ He looked towards the window. Davide was there, his back turned. ‘Davide, no need to get up, just tell me how much money you gave the girl that day. Think carefully. Tell us what denominations it was in.’

Davide turned. Compassionately, the whisky had put to sleep the vipers that were poisoning him from inside. ‘Let’s see … They were ten-thousand-lire notes …’

‘How many?’

‘Let’s see … I think two, yes, two, when we were in the Corso Lodi, because she didn’t want to come, she was afraid … Then, by the river, she said she needed fifty thousand lire, and so I gave her another three notes of ten thousand … In my wallet I only keep notes of …’ He suddenly broke off, and slowly turned back to the window.

‘So,’ Duca said to Carrua, ‘when Davide left the girl she had fifty thousand lire in her purse, at least fifty thousand. Now I’ll read you from the list how much there was by the time the police arrived: one ten-thousand-lire note, one thousand-lire note, three hundred-lire coins, two twenty-lire coins, four five-lire coins. If we assume the girl already had the small change before she met Davide, in other words, one thousand three hundred and sixty lire, and that the ten-thousand lire note was one of the five that Davide gave her, there are forty thousand lire missing.’

It was obvious, but Carrua checked the dog-eared sheet of paper all the same. ‘Give me the pathologist’s statement.’ He read it carefully. ‘It says here she can’t have slit her wrists before eight o’clock, but probably after eight thirty.’

Duca looked again towards the window, almost sadly. ‘Davide, don’t get up: What time was it when you left the girl that day?’ He saw immediately that the young man hadn’t understood, he was dazed, but not with whisky. In Metanopoli, when you told the girl to get out of the car, what time was it, more or less?’

Davide didn’t say, ‘Let’s see.’ He said, ‘The sun had set.’

‘Could you still see?’

‘Yes. The sun had only just set.’

‘Given the season, it must have been seven or a little later,’ Duca said to Carrua. ‘The girl walked around for more than an hour before making up her mind, and in the meantime she could have spent forty thousand lire. Where and how I can’t imagine, because Metanopoli isn’t bursting with shops like the Via Montenapoleone.’

‘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.

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.