hair.
Signorina Borelli looked them up and down, saying nothing. The door opposite the one they had used opened, and a tall bearded man came into the room. He wore a long smock that had once been white but was now grey: there were broad red smears across the front and sides. Brunetti looked at his feet and was glad she had given them the plastic covers.
The man, whom Brunetti understood must be the chief knacker, nodded to Signorina Borelli and looked at the two men indifferently. She made no attempt to introduce them. The man said, ‘Come with me, gentlemen.’ Brunetti and Vianello followed Bianchi towards the door. When he opened it, cries and howls were newly audible, and heavy thumps and clangs came from beyond it.
He led them down a narrow corridor towards a door about five metres ahead of them. Brunetti was intensely aware of the ruffling noise made by his protective suit and the slippery feel under his feet as his shoes slid around inside their plastic covers. He looked down to see what the surface of the floor was, the better to calculate the sort of purchase his feet would have. His step faltered for the briefest instant when he saw a bloody sole-print on the floor, heading their way. He moved his right foot quickly to the side and came down heavily in order to avoid stepping on the other print, too late realizing that it wouldn’t make any difference, not really; at least not beyond the level of superstition.
Brunetti shot a quick glance behind him and caught sight of Vianello’s strained face; he quickly returned his attention to Bianchi’s back. Brunetti shivered: the increasing noise had obliterated other sensitivities, and he had not noticed the cold until now. Vianello made a humming noise that was barely audible. Noise and cold intensified as they got closer to the door. Bianchi stopped in front of it and put his hand on the metal bar that stretched across it. Push down, and the door would open.
He stared at Brunetti, looked beyond him to Vianello, saying nothing, his question in his eyes. Brunetti had a moment’s uncertainty about the wisdom of all of this, but Nava’s wife had said that the veterinarian was troubled by something taking place here.
Brunetti lifted his chin in a signal that could have been command or encouragement. Bianchi turned away from him and pushed down on the bar, swinging open the door. Sound, cold, and light spilled over them. The cries and howls, whimpers and thuds mingled in a modern cacophony that assaulted more than their sense of hearing. Most sounds are neutral. Footsteps all sound the same, really: the menace comes from the setting in which they are heard. Running water, too, is no more than that. Bathtub overfilling, mountain stream: context is all. Unweave a symphony and the air is filled with odd, unrelated noises that no longer follow one another. A howl of pain, however, is always that, whether it comes from a beast with two or four legs, and a human voice raised in anger causes the same reaction regardless of the language in which the anger is expressed or whom it is directed at.
The stimuli given to the other senses did not permit of pretty word or thought games: Brunetti’s stomach contracted away from a smell that was as strong as a blow, and his eyes attempted to flee from red in all its varieties and all its striations. His mind intervened, forcing him to think and in thought to find some escape from what surrounded him. He thought it was William James: yes, William James, the brother of the man his wife loved, a half-memory of something he’d written more than a hundred years ago, that the human eye was always pulled to ‘things that move, things that something else, blood’.
Brunetti attempted to hold those words up in front of him, like a shield from behind which he could look at what was happening. He saw that they were on a grated catwalk protected on both sides by handrails and raised at least three metres from the work area beneath them. Seeing and not seeing, perceiving and failing to perceive, he guessed, from the sight of so much empty space beneath them, that the work was nearing its end. Six or seven yellow-booted men in white rubber coats and yellow hard-hats moved below them in the cement-floored cubicles and did things with knives and pointed instruments to pigs and sheep; hence the noise. Animals fell at the feet of the men, but some managed to flee, crashing into the walls before slipping and falling. Others, wounded and bleeding and unable to get to their feet, continued to flail about with their legs, feet scrambling against floors and walls, while the men dodged their hooves to deliver another blow.
Some of the sheep, Brunetti noticed, were protected from the knives by their thick coats and had to be struck repeatedly on the head by what looked like metal rods that ended in hooks. Occasionally the hooks were used for other purposes, but Brunetti looked away before he could be sure of that, though the wail that always followed the desertion of his eyes left no doubt about what went on.
The sheep made low, animal noises – grunts and bleats – while the pigs struck him as sounding not unlike what he, or Vianello, would sound like, were they down there and not up here. The calves bleated.
The smell bored into his nose: it was not only the iron-sharp tang of blood but the invasive stench of offal and excrement. Just as Brunetti realized that, he heard the water and gave unconscious, unknowing thanks for the sound. He looked to the source and saw one of the white-coated men below them spray an empty cubicle with what seemed to be a fire hose. The worker stood, legs widespread, the better to brace his body against the force of the jet of water that he sprayed across the floor of the cubicle, waving the stream back and forth so as to wash everything down an open grille in the cement.
The walls of the cubicles were made of wire fencing, so water coursed into the adjacent one, swirling away the blood that ran from the nose and mouth of a pig that lay against a wall, feet scraping across the floor in a vain attempt to push himself farther from the man who stood above him. The man there used his metal pole, and when Brunetti looked back, the pig appeared to have taken flight and was ascending towards them, perhaps to leave this place behind and continue – who knew where? Brunetti turned away as the pig’s twitching body appeared beside him, joined to a metal chain by a hook through its neck. Brunetti looked for and found Vianello, but before either could speak, a rash of sudden red spots splashed across the Inspector’s chest. Vianello, stunned, glanced down and raised a hand to try to wipe the red away, but he never completed the gesture: the hand fell to his side, and he looked at Brunetti, face blank.
A cranking noise made them return their attention to the twitching pig, which was now moving away from them towards the double plastic flaps of a broad door at the other end of the room. When he saw the pig’s body push the door open and disappear, Brunetti abandoned his quaint idea of intervention or salvation for the doomed beast.
Brunetti cleared his throat and tapped Bianchi on the shoulder. ‘Where do they go from here?’ he asked above the clanks and cries.
The knacker pointed farther back in the building and started in that direction. Brunetti, careful to keep his eyes on the man’s back, followed, and a dazed Vianello trailed along behind them. At the end of the catwalk they came to a thick metal door with a horizontal metal handle. Bianchi appeared hardly to break his stride, so quickly did he push it open and pass through. The others followed, and Vianello pushed the door closed behind them.
At first, Brunetti wondered if they had managed to escape outside and had somehow walked directly into a forest, though he could recall having seen no growth of trees behind the building. It was dark, with light filtering down from above, as in a forest in the early morning. He saw a field of thick shapes just ahead of them, seeming to rise up from the earth. Bushes, perhaps, or young poplar trees in full leaf? Surely they were not tall enough to be full-grown trees, yet they were thick, and that brought his sense-assaulted mind back to the idea of bushes. The three men separated and began to walk about on their own.
If they were outside, however, the day had changed and it had grown terribly cold. Gradually Brunetti’s eyes adjusted to the diminished light, and the bushes or trees began to take on finer definition. His first thought was of autumnal leaves until he saw that the red was muscle and the yellow was streaks of fat. He and Vianello had become so dependent upon Bianchi’s guidance that they had followed him unthinkingly into the midst of the hanging sides of beef and pig and sheep, the headless beasts distinguishable only by their size, and who could differentiate between a large sheep and a small calf? Red and yellow and the frequent streak of white fat.
Vianello broke first. He pushed past Brunetti, no longer concerned with Bianchi and his opinion, or any opinion at all, and staggered drunkenly to the door. He pushed at it uselessly, then pounded it twice and gave it a kick. The knacker materialized from the thicket of bodies, pulled at some handle Vianello could not make out in the dimness, and the door opened. Looking into the greater light of the other room, Brunetti could see Vianello walking away from them, one hand raised to shoulder height beside him, as if to keep it there, ready to grab on to the wire wall of the walkway should he not be able to continue.
Forcing himself to move slowly and keeping his eyes on Vianello’s retreating back, Brunetti went through the door but did not wait for Bianchi to join him. He walked towards the other end of the catwalk, making the same
