Dressed for Death (6 page)

‘I’ve been assigned to a case in
Mestre.’ Before she could interrupt, he continued. ‘They’ve got two commissari
out on vacation, one in hospital with a broken leg, and another one on
maternity leave.’

‘So Patta’s given you away to
Mestre?’

‘There’s no one else.’

‘Guido, there’s always someone
else. For one, there’s Patta himself It wouldn’t hurt him to do something else
but sit around in his office and sign papers and fondle the secretaries.’

Brunetti found it difficult to
imagine anyone allowing Patta to fondle her, but he kept that opinion to
himself.

‘Well?’ she asked when he said
nothing.

‘He’s got problems,’ Brunetti
said.

‘Then it’s true?’ she asked. ‘I’ve
been dying to call you all day and ask you if it was. Tito Burrasca?’

When Brunetti nodded, she put her
head back and made an indelicate noise that might best be described as a hoot. ‘Tito
Burrasca,’ she repeated, turned back to the sink and grabbed another tomato. ‘Tito
Burrasca.’

‘Come on, Paola. It’s not all
that funny.’

She whipped around, knife still
held in front of her. ‘What do you mean, it’s not that funny? He’s a pompous,
sanctimonious, self-righteous bastard, and I can think of no one who deserves
something like this better than he does.’

Brunetti shrugged and poured more
wine into his glass. So long as she was fulminating against Patta, she might
forget Mestre, though he knew this was only a momentary deviation.

‘I don’t believe this,’ she said,
turning around and apparently addressing this remark to the single tomato
remaining in the sink. ‘He’s been hounding you for years, making a mess of any
work you do, and now you defend him.’

‘I’m not defending him, Paola.’

‘Sure sounds like it to me,’ she
said, this time to the ball of mozzarella she held in her left hand.

‘I’m just saying that no one
deserves this. Burrasca is a pig.’

‘And Patta’s not?’

‘Do you want me to call Chiara?’
he asked, seeing that the salad was almost ready.

‘Not before you tell me how long
this thing in Mestre is likely to take.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘What is it?’

‘A murder. A transvestite was
found in a field in Mestre. Someone beat in his face, probably with a pipe,
then carried him out there.’ Did other families, he wondered, have pre-dinner
conversations as uplifting as his own?

‘Why beat in the face?’ she
asked, centring on the question that had bothered him all afternoon.

‘Rage?’

‘Um,’ she said, slicing away at
the mozzarella and then interspersing the slices with the tomato. ‘But why in a
field?’

‘Because he wanted the body far
away from wherever he killed him.’

‘But you’re sure he wasn’t killed
there?’

‘Doesn’t seem so. There were
footprints going up to the place where the body was, then lighter ones going
away.’

‘A transvestite?’

‘That’s all I know. No one has
told me anything about age, but everyone seems sure he was a prostitute.’

‘Don’t you believe it?’

‘I have no reason not to believe
it. But I also have no reason to believe it.’

She took some basil leaves, ran
them under cold water for a moment, and chopped them into tiny pieces. She
sprinkled them on top of the tomato and mozzarella, added salt, then poured
olive oil generously over the top of everything.

‘I thought we’d eat on the
terrace,’ she said. ‘Chiara’s supposed to have set the table. Want to check?’
When he turned to leave the kitchen, he kept the bottle and glass with him.
Seeing that, Paola set the knife down in the sink. ‘It’s not going to be
finished by the weekend, is it?’

He shook his head. ‘Not likely.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘We’ve got the reservations at
the hotel. The kids are ready to go. They’ve been looking forward to it since
school got out.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ she
repeated. Once, about eight years ago, he had managed to evade her questions
about something; he couldn’t remember what it was. He’d got away with it for a
day.

‘I’d like you and the kids to go
to the mountains. If this finishes on time, I’ll come up and join you. I’ll try
to come up next weekend at any rate.’

‘I’d rather have you there,
Guido. I don’t want to spend my vacation alone.’

‘You’ll have the kids.’

Paola didn’t deign to grace this
with rational opposition. She picked up the salad and walked towards him. ‘Go
see if Chiara has set the table.’

* * * *

Chapter Five

He
read through the files that night before going to sleep and found in them
evidence of a world he had perhaps known existed but about which he had known
nothing either detailed or certain. To the best of his knowledge, there were no
transvestites in Venice who worked as prostitutes. There was, however, at least
one transsexual, and Brunetti knew of this person’s existence only because he
had once had to sign a letter attesting that Emilio Marcato had no criminal
record, this before Emilia could have the sex listed on her
carta d’identit
à
changed to accord with the
physical changes already made to her body. He had no idea of what urges or
passions could lead a person to make a choice so absolutely final; he
remembered, though, being disturbed and moved to an emotion he had chosen not
to analyse by that mere alteration of a single letter on an official document:
Emilio - Emilia.

The men in the file had not been
driven to go so far and had chosen to transform only their appearance: face,
clothing, make-up, walk, gesture. The photos attached to some of the files
attested to the skill with which some of them had done this. Half of them were
utterly unrecognizable as men, even though Brunetti knew that was what they
were. There was a general softness of cheek and fineness of bone that had
nothing of the masculine about them; even under the merciless lights and lens
of the police camera, many of them appeared beautiful, and Brunetti searched in
vain for a shadow, a jut of chin, for anything that would mark them as men and
not as women.

Sitting beside him in bed and
reading the pages as he handed them to her, Paola glanced through the photos,
read one of the arrest reports, this one for the sale of drugs, and handed the
pages back to him with no comment.

‘What do you think?’ Brunetti
asked.

‘About what?’

‘All of this.’ He raised the file
in his hand. ‘Don’t you find these men strange?’

Her look was a long one and, he
thought, replete with distaste. ‘I find the men who hire them much stranger.’

‘Why?’

Pointing to the file, Paola said,
‘At least these men don’t deceive themselves about what they’re doing. Unlike
the men who use them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, come on, Guido. Think about
it. These men are paid to be fucked or fuck, depending on the taste of the men
paying them. But they have to dress up as women before the other men will pay
them or use them. Just think about that for a minute. Think about the hypocrisy
there, the need for self deceit. So they can say, the next morning, “Oh,
Ges
ù
Bambino,
I didn’t know it was a man until
it was too late,” or, “Well, even if it turned out to be a man, I’m still the
one who stuck it in.” So they’re still real men, macho, and they don’t have to
confront the fact that they prefer to fuck other men because to do that would
compromise their masculinity.’ She gave him a long look. ‘I suspect sometimes
that you don’t really bother to think about a lot of things, Guido.’

That, loosely translated,
generally meant that he didn’t think in the same way she did. But this time
Paola was right: this was something he hadn’t ever thought about. Once he had
discovered them, women had conquered Brunetti, and he could never understand
the sexual appeal of any - well, there really was only one - other sex. Growing
up, he had assumed that all men were pretty much like him; when he had learned
that they were not, he was too convinced in his own delight to give anything
other than an intellectual acknowledgement to the existence of the alternative.

He remembered, then, something
Paola had told him soon after they met, something he had never noticed: that
Italian men were constantly touching, fondling, almost caressing their own
genitals. He remembered laughing in disbelief and scorn when she told him, but
the next day he had begun to pay attention, and, within a week, had realized
just how right she was. Within another week, he had become fascinated by it,
overwhelmed by the frequency with which men on the street brought that hand
down to give an inquisitive pat, a reassuring touch, as if afraid they had
fallen oft Once, walking with him, Paola had stopped and asked him what he was
thinking about, and the fact that she was the only person in the world he would
not be embarrassed to tell just what it was he had been thinking about at that moment
convinced him, though a thousand things had already done so, that this was the
woman he wanted to marry, had to marry, would marry.

To love and want a woman had
seemed absolutely natural to him then, as it continued to do now. But the men
in this file, for reasons he could read about and know, but which he could
never hope to understand, had turned from women and sought the bodies of other
men. They did so in return for money or drugs or, no doubt, sometimes in the
name of love. And one of them, in what wild embrace of hatred had he met his
violent end? And for what reason?

Paola slept peacefully beside
him, a curved lump in which rested his heart’s delight. He placed the file on
the table beside the bed, turned off the light, wrapped his arm around Paola’s
shoulder and kissed her neck. Still salty. He was soon asleep.

When Brunetti arrived at the
Mestre Questura the following morning, he found Sergeant Gallo at his desk,
another blue folder in his hand. As Brunetti sat, the policeman passed the folder
to him, and Brunetti saw for the first time the face of the murdered man. On
top lay the artist’s reconstruction of what he might have looked like, and,
below that, he saw the photos of the shattered reality from which the artist
had made his sketch.

There was no way of estimating
the number of blows the face had suffered. As Gallo had said the night before,
the nose was gone, driven into the skull by one especially ferocious blow. One
cheekbone was entirely crushed, leaving a shallow indentation on that side of
the face. The photos of the back of the head showed a similar violence, but
these would have been blows that killed rather than disfigured.

Brunetti closed the file and
handed it back to Gallo. ‘Have you had copies of the sketch made?’

‘Yes, sir, we’ve got a stack of
them, but we didn’t get it until about half an hour ago, so none of the men has
been out on the street with it.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘We took a perfect set and sent
them down to Rome and to Interpol in Geneva, but we haven’t had an answer yet.
You know what they’re like.’ Brunetti did know. Rome could take weeks; Interpol
was usually a bit faster.

Brunetti tapped on the cover of
the folder with the tip of his finger. ‘There’s an awful lot of damage to the
face, isn’t there?’

Gallo nodded but said nothing. In
the past, he had dealt with Vice-Questore Patta, if only telephonically, so he
was wary of whoever would come his way from Venice.