A Private Venus (24 page)

‘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.