Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

father was a policeman, so someone pulled strings for her, and she got the job. Do you know what she really wanted to do, Commissario?’

‘I don’t want to talk about this, Lorenzo.’

‘Do you know what she really wanted to do?’

‘Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said in a low voice, warning him.

‘She wanted to be an elementary schoolteacher, but she knew there were no jobs, so she joined the police.’

All this time, they had been walking slowly down the steps and now walked across the lobby towards the double doors. The uniformed officer on guard, seeing Brunetti, saluted. The two men stepped outside, and from across the canal, from the trees in Campo San Lorenzo, came the almost deafening chorus of birds as they courted the dawn. It was no longer the full dark of night, but the light was so far only a suggestion, one that turned the world of thick impenetrability into one of infinite possibility.

They stood on the edge of the canal, looking over towards the trees, their eyes drawn by what their ears perceived. Both had their hands in their pockets and both felt the sudden chill that lay in the air before dawn.

‘This shouldn’t happen,’ Vianello said. Then, turning off to the right and his way home, he said, ’Arrivederci, Commissario,’ and walked away.

Brunetti turned the other way and started back towards Rialto and the streets that would take him home. They’d killed her as though she were a fly; they had stretched out their hands to crush him and, instead, had snapped off her life. Just like that. One minute, she was a young woman, leaning forward to say something to a friend, hand placed lightly, confidently, affectionately on his arm, mouth poised to speak. What had she wanted to say? Was it a joke? Did she want to tell Vianello she had been kidding back there, when she got into the car? Or had it been something about Franco, some final word of longing? No one would ever know. The fleeting thought had died with her.

He would call Franco, but not yet. Let the young man sleep now, before great pain. Brunetti knew that he couldn’t, not now, tell the young man of Maria’s last hour in the car with Vianello; he couldn’t bear to say it. Later, Brunetti would tell him, for it was then that the young man would be able to hear it, only then, after great pain.

When he got to Rialto, he looked off to the left and saw that a vaporetto was approaching the stop, and it was that coincidence that decided him. He hurried to the stop and got on to the boat, took it to the station, and caught the morning’s first train across the causeway. Gallo, he knew, would not be at the Questura, so he took a taxi from the Mestre station, giving the driver Crespo’s address.

The daylight had come when he wasn’t paying attention, and with it had come the heat, perhaps worse here in this city of pavement and cement, roads and high-rise buildings. Brunetti almost welcomed the mounting discomfort of the temperature and humidity; it distracted him from what he had seen that night and from what he was beginning to fear he would see at Crespo’s apartment.

As it had been the last time, the elevator was air-conditioned, already necessary even at this hour. He pushed the button and rose quickly and silently to the seventh floor. He rang Crespo’s doorbell, but this time there was no response from beyond it. He rang again and then again, holding his finger on the bell for long seconds. No footsteps, no voices, no sound of life.

He took out his wallet and removed from it a small sliver of metal. Vianello had once spent an entire afternoon teaching him how to do this, and, even though he hadn’t been an especially good pupil, it took him less than ten seconds to open Crespo’s door. He stepped across the threshold, saying, ‘Signor Crespo? Your door is open. Are you in here?’ Caution never hurt.

No one was in the living-room. The kitchen glistened, fastidiously clean. He found Crespo in the bedroom, on the bed, dressed in yellow silk pyjamas. A piece of telephone wire was knotted around his neck, his face a horrible, stuffed parody of its former beauty.

Brunetti didn’t bother to look around or examine the room; he went to the apartment next door and knocked on the door until a sleepy, angry man opened it, shouting at him. By the time the laboratory crew arrived from the Mestre Questura, Brunetti had also had time to call Maria Nardi’s husband in Milano and tell him what had happened. Unlike the man at the door, Franco Nardi didn’t shout; Brunetti had no idea if this was better or worse.

Back at the Questura in Mestre, Brunetti told a just-arrived Gallo what had happened and turned the examination of Crespo’s apartment and body over to him, explaining that he had to go back to Venice that morning. He did not tell Gallo that he was returning in order to attend Mascari’s funeral; already the atmosphere swirled with too much death.

Even though he came back to the city from a place of violent death, came back in order to be present at the consequences of another, he could not stop his heart from contracting at the sight of the bell towers and pastel facades that swept into view as the police car crossed the causeway. Beauty changed nothing, he knew, and perhaps the comfort it offered was no more than illusion, but still he welcomed that illusion.

The funeral was a miserable thing: empty words were spoken by people who were clearly too shocked by the circumstances of Mascari’s death to pretend to mean what they said. The widow sat through it all rigid and dry- eyed and left the church immediately behind the coffin, silent and solitary.

* * * *

The newspapers, as was only to be expected, went wild at the scent of Crespo’s death. The first story appeared in the evening edition of La Notte, a paper much given to red headlines and the use of the present tense. Francesco Crespo was described as ‘a transvestite courtesan’. His biography was given, and much attention was paid to the fact that he had worked as a dancer in a gay discoteca in Vicenza, even though his tenure there had lasted less than a week. The writer of this article drew the inevitable link to the murder of Leonardo Mascari, less than a week ago, and suggested that the similarity in victim indicated a person who was exacting a deadly vengeance against transvestites. The writer did not seem to believe it necessary to explain why this might be.

The morning papers picked up this idea. The Gazzettino made reference to the more than ten prostitutes who had been killed just in the province of Pordenone in recent years and attempted to draw a line between those crimes and the murders of the two transvestites. Il Manifesto gave the crime two full columns on page four, the writer using the opportunity to refer to Crespo as ‘yet another of the parasites who cling to the rotting body of Italian bourgeois society’.

In its magisterial discussion of the crime, II Corriere della Sera veered quickly from the murder of a relatively insignificant prostitute to that of a well-known Venetian banker. The article made reference to ‘local sources’ who reported that Mascari’s ‘double life’ had been an item of common knowledge in certain quarters. His death, therefore, was simply the inevitable result of the ‘spiral of vice’ into which his weakness had transformed his life.

Interested by this revelation of ‘sources’, Brunetti put a call through to the Rome office of that newspaper and asked to speak to the writer of the article. That person, when contacted and learning that Brunetti was a commissario of police wanting to know to whom he had spoken when writing the article, said that he was not at liberty to reveal the source of his information, that the trust that must exist between a journalist and those who both speak to and read him must be both implicit and absolute. Further, to reveal his source would go against the highest principles of his profession. It took Brunetti at least three full minutes to realize that the man was serious, that he actually believed what he was saying.

‘How long have you worked for the newspaper?’ Brunetti interrupted.

Surprised to be cut off in the full flood of his exposition of his principles, goals, and ideals, the reporter paused a moment and then answered, ‘Four months. Why?’

‘Can you transfer this call back to the switchboard, or do I have to dial again?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I can transfer you. But why?’

‘I’d like to speak to your editor.’

The man’s voice grew uncertain, then suspicious, at this, the first real sign of the duplicity and underhanded dealings of the powers of the state. ‘Commissario, I want to warn you that any attempt to suppress or call into question the facts I have revealed in my story will quickly be revealed to my readers. I’m not sure if you realize that