‘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,
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.
‘Almost as if the person who did it didn’t want the face to be recognizable,’ Brunetti added.
Gallo shot him a quick glance from under thick eyebrows and nodded again.
‘Do you have any friends in Rome who could speed things up for us?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’ve already tried that, sir, but he’s on vacation. You?’
Brunetti shook his head in quick negation. ‘The person I knew there has been transferred to Brussels to work with Interpol.’
‘Then we’ll have to wait, I suppose,’ Gallo said, making it clear from his tone that he was not at all pleased with this.
‘Where is he?’
The dead man? In the morgue at Umberto Primo. Why?’
’I’d like to see him.’
If Gallo thought this a strange request, he gave no indication of it. ‘I’m sure your driver could take you over there.’
‘It’s not very far, is it?’
‘No, only a few minutes,’ Gallo answered. ‘Might be a bit longer, with the morning traffic.’
Brunetti wondered if these people ever walked anywhere, but then he remembered the blanket of tropical heat that lay like a shroud across the whole Veneto area. Perhaps it was wiser to travel in air-conditioned cars to and from air-conditioned buildings, but he doubted that it was a method with which he would ever feel comfortable. He said nothing about this, however, but went downstairs and had his driver – he seemed to rate his own driver and his own car – take him to the Hospital of Umberto Primo, the major of the many hospitals of Mestre.
At the morgue, he found the attendant at a low desk, with a copy of the
The attendant, a short man with a substantial paunch and bowed legs, folded his paper closed and got to his feet. ‘Ah, him, I’ve got him over on the other side, sir. No one’s been to see him except that artist, and all he wanted to do was see the hair and eyes. Too much flash on the pictures, so he couldn’t get them right. He just took a look at him, peeled back the lid and had a look at the eye. Didn’t like looking at him, I’d say, but, Jesus, he should have seen him before the autopsy, with all that make-up on him, mixed in with the blood. It took forever to clean him up. Looked like a clown before we did, I’ll tell you. He had that eye stuff all over his face. Well, over what was left of his face. It’s funny how some of that stuff is so hard to wash oft Must take women the devil’s own time to clean themselves up, don’t you think?’
During all of this, he led Brunetti across the chilly room, stopping occasionally to address Brunetti directly. He finally stopped in front of one of the many metal doors that formed the walls of the room, bent down and turned a metal handle, then pulled out the low drawer in which the body lay. ‘Is he good enough for you here, sir, or would you like me to raise him up for you? Nothing to it. Just take a minute.’
‘No, this is good enough,’ Brunetti said, looking down. Unasked, the attendant pulled back the white sheet that covered the face, then looked up at Brunetti to see if he should continue. Brunetti nodded, and the attendant pulled the sheet from the body and folded it quickly into a neat rectangle.
Though Brunetti had seen the photos, nothing had prepared him for the wreckage in front of him. The pathologist had been interested only in exploration and cared nothing for restoration; if a family were ever found, they could pay someone to attend to that.
No attempt had been made to restore the man’s nose, and so Brunetti looked down at a concave surface with four shallow indentations, as if a retarded child had made a human face with clay but instead of a nose had simply punched a hole. Without the nose, recognizable humanity had fled.
He looked at the body, seeing if it could give him an idea of age or physical condition. Brunetti heard his own intake of breath when he realized that the body looked frighteningly like his own: the same general build, a slight
