A Private Venus (25 page)

‘It’s over,’ Duca said to Davide.

They walked back to the Giulietta. It was all over, all had been explained, it was so nastily simple. ‘Let’s go back to the Cavour, at least to pay the bill.’

From the furnace of the streets they entered the spring-like mountain air of the Cavour. They asked for the bill and two bottles of beer. In the room, he took off his jacket, but didn’t invite Davide to take off his, because he always kept it on. He sat down on the bed and phoned the Fatebenefratelli Hospital. The switchboard operator put him through to the ward, the ward sister told him to wait, then he heard his colleague’s voice.

‘Lamberti here.’

Hearty greetings from his colleague: he was a veteran, with a protective tone.

‘Nearly two hours ago they brought in a girl with her face cut up.’

Yes, his colleague said, replying to his questions, they had just finished dressing her wounds, no, she wasn’t in a state of shock, no, her general condition was fine, and she was in good spirits, she was an incredible girl, he said, she had tried to smile, and then he told him all the technical details of the scars, which was what he really wanted to know.

‘I’ll be over to see her in an hour, will you still be there?’

Yes, his colleague would still be there and would be happy to see him. Good. ‘I’ve finished with you too, Davide,’ he
said, putting down the receiver. ‘You don’t need me any more.’ He wouldn’t drink again, even though he would never be a teetotaller. Davide said nothing.

‘Listen, I need two favours,’ he said at the front door of the hotel. ‘Firstly, can you be my driver for another couple of errands?’

Davide nodded.

‘Secondly, if your father’s in Milan, I need to see him as soon as possible.’

Davide nodded.

‘Now take me to the Via Plinio.’ He also nodded. ‘That’s right, to Livia’s apartment.’

Davide drove slowly. ‘How is Livia?’

‘They told me she’s fine.’ It wasn’t much of an answer, but there wasn’t much to say.

In the Via Plinio he got out. ‘Wait for me,’ he told Davide. He went in through the front door and came out nearly half an hour later. ‘Let’s go to the Fatebenefratelli.’ Then it really would be over. When Davide stopped the car outside the hospital, he put a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t come in to see Livia, you’ve already seen her enough.’

Duca went into the hospital. A male nurse recognised him and greeted him impulsively, saying he was really pleased to see him. He got to the ward and met the colleague he had spoken to on the phone, who was about to leave and wasn’t wearing his white coat. The veteran embraced him, he was discreet and sensible, he didn’t ask any questions, just replied to Duca’s, which were technical, purely technical, and then he took him to Livia’s room.

‘Bye for now, anything you need, I’m here,’ his colleague said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. He closed the door behind him and looked at the screen, beyond the screen was the bed with Livia in it. Before going around the screen he said, ‘It’s me, Livia.’

He went around the screen and stopped for a moment at the foot of the bed, looking at her. Then he moved a chair close to her and sat down. ‘First of all, I wanted to say one thing: I’ve just been to see your father. I told him you’ve been given a very confidential task by the police and will be away for a while. He was surprised, of course, but I managed to convince him, though I’ll get Mascaranti to talk to him, too, I’m sure he can convince him better than I could. You mustn’t worry about your family.’

To stop her moving her eyelids, because of the cuts at the corners, they had bandaged her eyes, which was why Livia Ussaro—it wasn’t in any way a pseudonym, it was the name of a real, aching, wounded but undefeated human being—lifted her hand, which lay on top of the sheet, and searched for his hand, which she found immediately and squeezed a little, once, twice: it was her way of saying thank you, given that she could not speak. It was clear that, for her, there was nothing personal, let alone affectionate, in that touch of hands, it was just a means of communication, a way of telling him that she was listening and understood what he was saying.

‘They’ve all been arrested, all the ones from here in Milan,’ he said. To any other woman, he might have said
something else, hoped that she would get better soon, told her that these days plastic surgery can do wonders, that in a few weeks … and so on and so forth, but not to Livia Ussaro: she was either thinking and hoping these things for herself and didn’t need anyone to tell her, or else she wasn’t thinking or hoping them and if anyone had told her she would have been annoyed. ‘We have the names of lots of other bosses, from all over Europe. Now Interpol will get to work. They were organised and taught by the Mafia to do a top-class job for a top-class clientele. Every woman was selected among the thousands of likely ones in a big city. Even prostitution has been declining for years, above all, so Signor A told me, because of the low quality of the merchandise. Under the guidance of the Mafia, a few big wheels on the business decided to set up a deluxe prostitution ring. The same women, once exploited in this way, could then be moved into the lower categories … Am I tiring you?’ It was a pointless scruple that had occurred to him abruptly—after all, a few hours earlier Livia had been at the mercy of a sadist—but the pressure of Livia’s hand on his told him that he had made a blunder. He had to continue: the best cure for Livia was for him to talk.

‘The search for this select merchandise was the most delicate part of the operation. They weren’t dealing with corrupted young girls any more, who were easy to persuade and to keep in line with a few slaps. They had to find new girls, or almost new, like Alberta, girls from decent families who agreed to it at first and then regretted it after they’d learned too much about the organisation and sometimes rebelled.
If they hadn’t been harsh with them, the business wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks, that was why every group had a man like the one you met today.’

The young man made the reluctant ones think again and punished the rebels. Apart from that, he had the task of taking the girls to their various places of employment.

‘The Minox photographs had two purposes,’ he continued, looking everywhere as he talked except at the white bandages concealing her face. ‘One was to compile a kind of catalogue of rare editions, so to speak, which circulated all over Europe, constantly updated, among connoisseurs and people in the trade. The other was to blackmail the women who had been photographed. Most of the reluctant ones yielded when they were threatened with the photographs being shown to their fathers, their boyfriends, their workmates. With Alberta it was different, she did more than just rebel, she actually took the Minox film after it was exposed.’

That had been serious, he told her, continuing to keep his hand open on the bed, with her hand on his, ready to press his fingers, to respond, to ask. It had probably never happened before that anyone had stolen a roll of film. The whole elegance of the mechanism was based on the secrecy of those films, and in order to maintain that secrecy photographic studios that seemed above board had been set up in the cities. The photographer shot models of cars, tractors, and tankers for serious companies against a landscape background, publicity photographs and industrial photographs that wouldn’t arouse the suspicion of the police. Doing the photographs in a private house might have been dangerous,
with different girls coming and going constantly, they needed a name plate with Something-or-other Photographic written on it, and in fact the system had been functioning perfectly for nearly two years all over Europe on this side of the curtain, because on the other side they were organised differently, and now here was Alberta taking that Minox cartridge, risking the whole system crashing down because even the most stolid of police officers would realise what a roll of film like that was as soon as he saw it.

‘That was when the man you met today went into action. He couldn’t scare Alberta and she managed to get away, so he got hold of the other girl, Maurilia, and threatened to kill her if Alberta didn’t hand over the cartridge.’ It was quite dark in the room, even darker now because the sun, even though it was not setting yet, had become only a dusty source of heat more than of light, but it was a merciful darkness because this way even though he was looking at the bed, the deep shadows were hiding the details of her bandaged face and gradually even the very shape of her face.

Alberta had then realised—he explained lucidly, without anything anxious in his voice—that even if she handed over the cartridge, they would kill her poor friend and then her, and in fact she was right, because Maurilia had already been taken to Rome and drowned and they were only waiting for the moment to get her, too.

Alberta had had a shock, suddenly she realised what a pit of vice and violence she had fallen into. She was an inflexible woman, even with herself: she would hand over the cartridge to the police and tell them everything, then kill herself. That
was why she had that letter for her sister in her handbag. Before killing herself, though, she had to get her sister the fifty thousand lire to pay the expenses on her rented apartment—she was inflexible even in small things—and she got it for her in the only way she could at that moment, by looking for a man. And she found Davide.

She knew she was being followed and was in danger, but she still mingled with people and when Davide agreed to give her a lift she felt safer. But then Davide’s company brought on a crisis in her, she felt weak, she wanted to live, it struck her that if she could get away, a long way away, things would be different, but Davide had no idea of the reasons for this crisis and at the end of the autostrada he had made her get out. And that man was there, in his Mercedes 230.

‘You can imagine what happened. The man asked her for the cartridge, but she’d left it in Davide’s car, she hadn’t even realised and had no idea why she didn’t have it. He didn’t believe her, he searched in her handbag, found the letter addressed to her sister, the devil was offering him the perfect opportunity. He overpowered her, made his incisions, and left her in that field.’ He was a practical man when it came to using a knife. ‘And he also took forty thousand of the fifty thousand lire that Davide had given Alberta, he’s not the kind of man who can look indifferently at a bunch of ten-thousand-lire notes.’ Even though the police were still investigating those two not very convincing suicides, they wouldn’t get anywhere without the Minox film. But the cartridge, together with a little handkerchief once soaked in tears, had been in Davide’s suitcase for a whole year as he descended into psychosis and alcoholism.

Now he had to continue speaking because with every pause he made she pressed with her fingers on the palm of his hand. And luckily it was almost impossible to see anything now, and luckily again the nurse came in and said, ‘Are you Dr. Lamberti?’

He said yes, he was, although it was a heavy burden being Duca Lamberti at that moment.

‘There are two people here who want to speak to you.’

He squeezed Livia’s hand. ‘I’ll only be gone a moment, Livia, I’ll be right back.’ She pressed his palm, to tell him he could go.

In the corridor stood Davide and his father, still little, still an emperor, still supremely self-confident.

‘I’m sorry Davide made you come here, it wasn’t so urgent.’

‘Don’t bother to stand on ceremony, Davide told me you wanted to see me immediately.’

All right, Caesar, don’t get angry. ‘Before anything I wanted to hand your son back to you.’ A nun passing in the corridor recognised Duca and smiled. ‘He’s never been an alcoholic and will never be one. And he’s not a big lump either, as you told me.’

The little man looked at Davide. ‘I hope the doctor’s diagnosis is correct.’

‘Completely correct. Also, I need a favour.’ He asked him if, in a few weeks’ time, he could bring a girl who had been disfigured in an accident to his villa near Inverigo, where she would be able to stay in seclusion until she was a little better.

‘Davide told me it wasn’t a car accident,’ Caesar said, with
dismay. ‘Horrendous. I’ll do everything I can to help you and the girl. The villa is at your disposal as of now.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Can I come in, just for a moment?’ Davide ventured.

His tone was imploring, but Duca shook his head, it was better not. ‘Maybe tomorrow. But now you can do me a favour, too. Go and see my sister, she hasn’t heard from me in a while. Tell her a few things, and if you don’t have any other commitments, keep her company.’ Lorenza lived alone too much, he had to sort things out for her in some way. He also had to sort things out for himself.

He said goodbye to the two Auseris, went back into the room, and said, ‘It’s me.’ He sat down next to the bed, put his hand on the bed with the palm open, next to hers, and she immediately put her fingers on it and pressed. She wanted him to talk. His brain was seething, but he had to find something that Little Miss General Topics would like. Euthanasia, there it was, he had never talked to her about it, and yet she was an admirer of his, this was the moment to make her happy.

‘Three years ago, when I was sentenced …’ he began. He would explain the whole theory of euthanasia, and she would be happy, even in that hospital room, even disfigured and bandaged, because there were things in life that mattered more to her than the scars, there was thought with a capital T, there were theories, there was justice, and so on … ‘The thing about euthanasia …’ and he squeezed her fingers tenderly.

Montecatini: a major Italian chemicals company.

Princess Soraya: former wife of the Shah of Iran, who had a brief European film career in the 1960s.

Françoise Hardy: French pop singer, at the height of her fame in the 1960s.

Salò: Fascist republic set up by Mussolini in northern Italy in 1943 after the Allied landings in the south.

Idroscalo: a park with a large artificial lake and a range of recreational facilities, near Linate Airport.

Milva: popular Italian singer and actress.