Dressed for Death (3 page)

‘Whores? Of course they have
pimps.’

‘Male whores, sir? Transvestite
whores? Assuming, of course, that he was a prostitute.’

‘Why would you expect me to know
a thing like that, Brunetti?’ asked Patta, suspicious with more than usual
irritation, again forcing Brunetti to remember that morning’s first news and
quickly to change the subject.

‘How long ago did the call come
in, sir?’ Brunetti asked.

‘A few hours ago. Why?’

‘I wondered if the body’s been
moved?’

‘In this heat?’ Patta asked.

‘Yes, there is that,’ Brunetti
agreed. ‘Where was it taken?’

‘I have no idea. One of the
hospitals. Umberto Primo, probably. I think that’s where they do the autopsies.
Why?’

‘I’d like to have a look,’
Brunetti said. ‘And at the place where it happened.’

Patta wasn’t a man to be
interested in details. ‘Since this is Mestre’s case, make sure you use their
drivers, not ours.’ Some details.

‘Was there anything else, sir?’

‘No. I’m sure this will be a
simple thing. You’ll have it wrapped up by the weekend and be free to go on
vacation.’ It was like Patta that he asked nothing about where Brunetti planned
to go or what sort of reservations he might have to cancel. More details.

Leaving Patta’s office, Brunetti
noticed that, while he was inside, furniture had suddenly appeared in the small
anteroom that stood directly outside Patta’s office. A large wooden desk stood
on one side, and a small table had been placed below the window. Ignoring this,
he went downstairs and into the office where the uniformed branch worked.
Sergeant Vianello looked up from some papers on his desk and smiled at
Brunetti. ‘Even before you ask, Commissario, yes, it’s true. Tito Burrasca.’

Hearing the confirmation,
Brunetti was no less astonished than he had been, hours before, when he first
heard the story. Burrasca was a legend, if that was the proper word, in Italy.
He had begun making films during the sixties, blood and guts horrors that were
so patently artificial that they became unconscious parodies of the genre.
Burrasca, not at all foolish, no matter how inept he might have been at making
horror films, answered the popular response to his films by making the films
even more false: vampires with wrist-watches that the actors seemed to have
forgotten to remove; telephones that brought the news of Dracula’s escape;
actors of the semaphore school of dramatic presentation. After a very short
time, he had become a cult figure and people flocked to his films, eager to
detect the artifice, to spot the howlers.

In the seventies, he gathered up
all those masters of semaphoric expression and turned them to the making of
pornographic films, at which they turned out to be no more adept. Costuming no
problem, he soon realized that plot, similarly, presented no obstacle to the
creative mind: he merely dusted off the plots of his old horror films and
turned the ghouls, vampires, and werewolves into rapists and sex maniacs, and
he filled the theatres, though smaller theatres this time, with a different
audience, one that seemed not at all interested in the spotting of anachronism.

The eighties presented Italy with
scores of new private television stations, and Burrasca presented those
stations with his latest films, somewhat toned down in deference to the
supposed sensibilities of the TV audience. And then he discovered the video
cassette. His name quickly became part of the small change of Italian daily
life: he was the butt of jokes on TV game shows, a figure in newspaper
cartoons, but close consideration of his success had caused him to move to
Monaco and become a citizen of that sensibly taxed principality. The
twelve-room apartment he maintained in Milano, he told the Italian tax
authorities, was used only for entertaining business guests. And now, it would
appear, Maria Lucrezia Patta.

‘Tito Burrasca, in fact,’
Sergeant Vianello repeated, keeping himself, Brunetti knew not with what force,
from smiling. ‘Perhaps you’re lucky to be spending the next few days in Mestre.’

Brunetti couldn’t keep himself
from asking, ‘Didn’t anyone know about it before?’

Vianello shook his head. ‘No. No
one. Not a whisper.’

‘Not even Anita’s uncle?’
Brunetti asked, revealing that even the higher orders knew the source of this
one.

Vianello began to answer but was
interrupted by the buzzer on his desk. He picked up the phone, pressed a
button, and asked, ‘Yes, Vice-Questore?’

He listened for a moment, said, ‘Certainly,
Vice-Questore,’ and hung up.

Brunetti gave him an inquisitive
glance.

‘The immigration people. He wants
to know how long Burrasca can stay in the country, now that he’s changed his
citizenship.’

Brunetti shook his head. ‘I
suppose you have to feel sorry for the poor devil.’

Vianello’s head shot up. He
couldn’t disguise his astonishment, or wouldn’t. ‘Sorry? For him?’ With evident
effort, he stopped himself from saying more and turned his attention back to
the folder on his desk.

Brunetti left him and went back
to his own office. From there he called the Questura in Mestre, identified
himself, and asked to be put through to whoever was in charge of the case of
the murdered transvestite. Within minutes, he was speaking to a Sergeant Gallo,
who explained that he was handling the case until a person of higher rank took
over from him. Brunetti identified himself and said that he was that person,
then asked Gallo to send a car to pick him up at Piazzale Roma in a half an
hour.

When Brunetti stepped outside the
dim entryway of the Questura, the sun hit him like a blow. Momentarily blinded
by the light and the reflection from the canal, he reached into the breast
pocket of his jacket and pulled out his sun-glasses. Before he had taken five
steps, he could feel the sweat seeping into his shirt, crawling down his back.
He turned right, deciding in that instant to go up to San Zaccaria and get the
No. 82, though it would mean walking in the sun a good part of the way to get
there. Though the
calli
that led to Rialto were all shaded from the sun
by high houses, it would take him twice as long to get there, and he dreaded
even so little as an extra minute spent outside.

When he emerged at Riva degli
Schiavoni, he looked off to the left and saw that the vaporetto was tied to the
landing stage, people streaming from it. He was confronted with one of those
peculiarly Venetian decisions: run and try to get the boat or let it go and
then spend ten minutes in the trapped heat of the bobbing
embarcadero,
waiting for the next one. He ran. As he pounded across the wooden boards of the
landing stage, he was presented with another decision: pause a moment to stamp
his ticket in the yellow machine at the entrance and thus perhaps lose the
boat, or run on to the boat and pay the five hundred lire supplement for
failing to stamp the ticket. But then he remembered that he was on police
business and, consequently, could ride at the expense of the city.

Even the short run had flooded
his face and chest with sweat, and so he chose to remain on deck, body catching
what little breeze was created by the boat’s stately progress up the Grand
Canal. He glanced around him and saw the half-naked tourists, the men and women
with their bathing suits, shorts, and scoop necked T-shirts, and for a moment
he envied them, even though he knew the impossibility of his appearing like
that any place other than a beach.

As his body dried, the envy fled,
and he returned to his normal state of irritation at seeing them dressed like
this. If they had perfect bodies and perfect clothing, perhaps he would find
them less annoying. As it was, the shabby materials of the clothing and the even
shabbier state of too many of the bodies left him thinking longingly of the
compulsory modesty of Islamic societies. He was not what Paola called a ‘beauty
snob’, but he did believe that it was better to look good than bad. He turned
his attention from the people on the boat to the
palazzi
that lined the
canal, and immediately he felt his irritation evaporate. Many of them, too,
were shabby, but it was the shabbiness of centuries of wear, not that of
laziness and cheap clothing. The city had grown old, but Brunetti loved the
sorrows of her changing face.

Though he hadn’t specified where
the car was to meet him, he walked to the Carabinieri station at Piazzale Roma
and saw, parked in front of it, motor running, one of the blue and white sedans
of the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. He tapped on the driver’s window. The young
man inside rolled it down, and a wave of cold air flowed across the front of
Brunetti’s shirt.

‘Commissario?’ the young man
asked. At Brunetti’s nod, the young man got out, saying, ‘Sergeant Gallo sent
me,’ and held open the rear door for him. Brunetti got into the car and rested
his head for a moment against the back of the seat. The sweat on his chest and
shoulders grew cold, but Brunetti couldn’t tell if its evaporation brought him
pleasure or pain.

‘Where would you like to go, sir?’
the young officer asked as he slipped the car into gear.

On vacation. On Saturday, he
said, but only in his mind and only to himself. And to Patta. ‘Take me to where
you found him,’ Brunetti directed.

At the other end of the causeway
that led from Venice to the mainland, the young man pulled off in the direction
of Marghera. The
laguna
disappeared, and soon they were riding down a
straight road blocked with traffic and with a light at every intersection. Progress
was slow. ‘Were you there this morning?’ The young man turned and glanced back
at Brunetti, then looked again at the road. The back of his collar was crisp
and clean. Perhaps he spent his entire day in this air-conditioned car.

‘No, sir. That was Buffo and
Rubelli.’

‘The report I got says he’s a
prostitute. Did someone identify him?’

‘I don’t know about that, sir.
But it makes sense, doesn’t it?’

‘Why is that?’

‘Well, sir, that’s where the
whores are, at least the cut-rate ones. Out there by the factories. There’s
always a dozen or so of them, on the side of the road, in case anyone wants a
quickie on the way home from work.’

‘Even men?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir? Who else
would use a whore?’

‘I mean even a male whore. Would
they be likely to be out there, where the men who use them could be seen
stopping on the way home from work? It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing too
many men would want their friends to know about.’

The driver thought about that for
a while.

‘Where do they usually work?’
Brunetti asked.

‘Who?’ the young man asked
cautiously. He didn’t want to be caught again by another trick question.

‘The male whores.’

‘They’re usually along Via
Cappuccina, sir. Sometimes at the train station, but we try to stop that sort
of thing during the summer when so many tourists pass through the station.’

‘Was this one a regular?’

‘I don’t know about that, sir.’

The car pulled off to the left,
cut down a narrow road, then turned right on to a broad road lined with low
buildings on either side. Brunetti glanced down at his watch. Almost five.

The buildings on either side of
them were further and further apart from one another now, the spaces between
them filled with low grass and the occasional bush. A few abandoned cars stood
at crazy angles, their windows shattered and their seats ripped out and flung
beside them. Each building appeared to have once been surrounded by a fence,
but most of these now hung drunkenly from the posts that had forgotten about
holding them up.

A few women stood at the side of
the road; two of them stood in the shade created by a beach umbrella sunk into
the dirt at their feet.

‘Do they know what happened here
today?’ Brunetti asked.