Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

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.