Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

hand.

Was it a criminal act for a prostitute with AIDS to have sex? Unprotected sex? It was so long since policemen had treated prostitution as a crime that Brunetti found it difficult to consider it as such. But surely, for anyone with AIDS knowingly to have unprotected sex, surely that was a crime, though it was entirely possible that the law lagged behind the truth in this, and it was not illegal. Seeing the moral quicksand that distinction created ahead of him, he ordered a third glass of mineral water and looked at the next name on the list.

Francesco Crespo lived only four blocks from Feltrinelli, but it might as well have been a world away. The building was sleek, a tall glass-fronted rectangle which must have seemed, when it was built ten years ago, right on the cutting edge of urban design. But Italy is a country where new ideas in design are never prized for much longer than it takes to put them into effect, by which time the ever-forward-looking have abandoned them and gone off in pursuit of gaudy new banners, like those damned souls in the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno, who circle round for all eternity, seeking a banner they can neither identify nor name.

The decade that had elapsed since the construction of this building had carried fashion away with it, and now the building looked like nothing so much as an upended box of spaghettini. The glass in the windows gleamed, and a small patch of land between it and the street was manicured with precision, but none of that could save it from looking entirely out of place among the other lower, more modest buildings amidst which it had been erected with such futile confidence.

He had the apartment number and was quickly carried to the seventh floor by the air-conditioned elevator. When the door opened, Brunetti stepped out into a marble corridor, also air-conditioned. He walked to the right and rang the bell of apartment D.

He heard a sound inside; but no one came to the door. He rang again. The sound wasn’t repeated, but still no one came to the door. He rang the bell a third time, keeping his finger pressed to it. Even through the door he could hear the shrill whine of the bell and then a voice calling, ‘Basta. Vengo.’

He took his finger off the bell, and a moment later the door was yanked open by a tall, heavy-set man in linen slacks and what looked like a cashmere turtle neck. Brunetti glanced at the man for an instant, saw two dark eyes, angry eyes, and a nose that had been broken a number of times, but then his eyes fell again to the high neck of the sweater and found themselves imprisoned there. The middle of August, people collapsing on the street from the heat, and this man wore a cashmere turtle neck. He pulled his eyes back to the man’s face and asked, ‘Signor Crespo?’

‘Who wants him?’ the man asked, making no attempt to disguise both anger and menace.

‘Commissario Guido Brunetti,’ he answered, again showing his warrant card. This man, like Feltrinelli, needed only the slightest of glances to recognize it. He suddenly stepped a bit closer to Brunetti, perhaps hoping to force him back into the corridor with the offensive presence of his body. But Brunetti didn’t move, and the other man stepped back. ‘He’s not here.’

From another room, both of them heard the sound of something heavy falling to the floor.

This time it was Brunetti who took a step forward, backing the other man away from the door. Brunetti continued into the room and walked over to a thronelike leather chair beside a table on which stood an immense spray of gladioli in a crystal vase. He sat in the chair, crossed his legs, and said, ‘Then perhaps I’ll wait for Signor Crespo.’ He smiled. ‘If you have no objection, Signor…?’

The other man slammed the front door, wheeled towards a door that stood on the other side of the room, and said, ‘I’ll get him.’

He disappeared into the room beyond, closing the door behind him. His voice, deep and angry, resounded through it. Brunetti heard another voice, a tenor to the bass. But then he heard what seemed to be a third voice, another tenor, but a full tone higher than the last. Whatever conversation went on behind the door took a number of minutes, during which Brunetti looked around the room. It was all new, it was all visibly expensive, and Brunetti would have wanted none of it, neither the pearl grey leather sofa nor the sleek mahogany table that stood beside it.

The door to the other room opened, and the heavy-set man came out, followed closely by another man a decade younger and at least three sizes smaller than him.

‘That’s him,’ the one in the sweater said, pointing to Brunetti.

The younger man wore loose pale-blue slacks and an open-necked white silk shirt. He walked across the room towards Brunetti, who stood and asked, ‘Signor Francesco Crespo?’

He came and stood in front of Brunetti, but then instinct or professional training seemed to exert itself in the presence of a man of Brunetti’s age and general appearance. He took a small step closer, raised a hand in a delicate, splay-fingered gesture, and placed it at the base of his throat. ‘Yes, what would you like?’ It was the higher tenor voice Brunetti had heard through the door, but Crespo tried to make it deeper, as if that would make it more interesting or seductive.

Crespo was a bit shorter than Brunetti and must have weighed ten kilos less. Either through coincidence or design, his eyes were the same pale grey as the sofa; they stood out sharply in the deep tan of his face. Had his features appeared on the face of a woman, they would have been judged no more than conventionally pretty; the sharp angularity conveyed by his masculinity made them beautiful.

This time it was Brunetti who took a small step away from the other man. He heard the other one snort at this and turned to pick up the folder, which he had placed on the table beside him.

’Signor Crespo, I’d like you to look at a picture of someone and tell me if you recognize him.’

‘I’d be glad to look at anything you chose to show me,’ Crespo said, putting heavy emphasis on ‘you’ and moving his hand inside the collar of his shirt to caress his neck.

Brunetti opened the folder and handed Crespo the artist’s drawing of the dead man. Crespo glanced down at it for less than a second, looked up at Brunetti, smiled, and said, ‘I haven’t an idea of who he could be.’ He held the picture out to Brunetti, who refused to take it.

‘I’d like you to take a better look at the picture, Signor Crespo.’

‘He told you he didn’t know him,’ the other one said from across the room.

Brunetti ignored him. ‘The man was beaten to death, and we need to find out who he was, so I’d appreciate it if you’d take another look at him, Signor Crespo.’

Crespo closed his eyes for a moment and moved his hand to brush a wayward curl behind his left ear. ‘If you insist,’ he said, looking down at the picture again. He bowed his head down over the drawing and, this time, looked at the face pictured there. Brunetti couldn’t see his eyes, but he did watch his hand suddenly move away from his ear and move towards his neck again, this time with no attempt at flirtatiousness.

A second later, he looked up at Brunetti, smiled sweetly, and said, ‘I’ve never seen him before, officer.’

‘Are you satisfied?’ the other one asked and took a step towards the door.

Brunetti took the drawing that Crespo held out to him and slipped it back into the folder. ‘That’s only an artist’s guess of what he looked like, Signor Crespo. I’d like you to look at a photograph of him, if you don’t mind.’

Brunetti smiled his most seductive smile, and Crespo’s hand flew, with a swallow-like flutter, back to the soft hollow between his collar bones. ‘Of course, officer. Anything you suggest. Anything.’

Brunetti smiled and reached to the bottom of the thin pile of photos in the folder. He took one out and studied it for an instant. One would serve as well as the next. He looked at Crespo, who had again closed the distance between them. ‘There is a possibility that he was killed by a man who was paying for his services. That means men like him might be at risk from the same person.’ He offered the photo to Crespo.

The young man took the photo, managing to touch Brunetti’s fingers with his own as he did so. He held it in the air between them, gave Brunetti a long smile, and then bowed his smiling face over the photo. His hand left his neck and slid up to cover his gasping mouth. ‘No, no,’ he said, eyes still on the photo. ‘No, no,’ he repeated and looked up at Brunetti with eyes gone wide with horror. He thrust the picture away from him, jammed it into Brunetti’s chest, and backed away from him, as though Brunetti had carried pollution into the room with him. ‘They can’t do that to me. That won’t happen to me,’ he said, backing away from Brunetti. His voice rose with every word, teetered on the edge of hysteria, and then fell over into it. ‘No, that won’t happen to me. Nothing will ever happen to me.’ His voice rose up into a high-pitched challenge to the world he lived in. ‘Not to me, not to me,’ he shouted, backing further and further away from Brunetti. He bumped into a table in the middle of the room, panicked at finding himself blocked in his attempt to get away from the photo and the man who had shown it to him, and lashed out at it with his arm. A vase identical to the one near Brunetti crashed to the floor.

The door to the other room opened, and a fourth man came quickly into the room. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.