The jangle of church bells penetrated deep inside the police station, as they competed with each other to strike the correct time and to summon the non-existent faithful to prayer; non-existent, because in Venice there remained only corpses and the shades of future corpses. It was a brazen prayer of thanks that celebrated the retreat of the water and welcomed the advent of a morning during which the sun might succeed in breaking through like a dirty copper coin between the drifts of snow. Every time a new bell joined in the jubilation my head throbbed, as if pierced by a splinter of metal. Inspector Nicolussi was probably quite as tired as I was, but either his respect for the letter of the law, or loyalty to his masochistic principles, prevented him from halting the interrogation. He was a man worn down by late nights, with a villainous beard that grew thickly over his cheeks, his chin, and down his throat. The contrast with his head was remarkable because he was bald, except for some hair over his temples and the back of his neck. His lips were dry and cracked and with no other lustre than that provided by his cigarette (he had got through a full packet in just three hours). By contrast, his eyes were bright and moist because of a persistent discharge from the tear ducts. His face, and the rest of his anatomy, seemed to have been shaped by the tensions between opposing forces. Inspector Nicolussi was both thin and pudgy, possibly because his work gave him frequent sleepless nights, combined with a sedentary lifestyle.
‘Valenzin died at about twelve o’clock,’ he said.
His glance encompassed both Dina and me; besides being bright, his eyes crossed, and seemed to function independently of each other.
‘Now do you believe I’m not lying? I’ve been telling you that for hours.’
In Nicolussi’s office, apart from the subordinate who had typed out our statements, there was an interpreter whose interventions were futile because I understood Nicolussi’s Italian – he spoke an exuberant, southern dialect – and I suspect that he also understood my Spanish. Dina’s lips shaped a weary smile; like me she had been up all night answering routine questions, and her version of events was exactly the same as mine. It was she who had notified the police of Valenzin’s murder, and had attended the removal of the corpse with greater fortitude than I. The impulsive desire I had felt for her when I first arrived at the hotel had diminished as the hours went by, and had changed to a vague sentiment combining admiration, gratitude, complicity, and also fear.
Once the police launches arrived they cordoned off the little square, took the first photographs of Valenzin, and the forensic surgeon examined the mess the bullet had made of him, while Dina and I were made to remain in the lobby of the hotel under the eye of a youthful policeman who must have mistaken us for a pair of adulterers, judging by the severe way he looked us over, keeping one hand on the butt of his pistol. As if with the reverberations of a nightmare, I was assailed by images of a crime that did not concern me, but of which I had been the sole witness: Valenzin’s steely gaze, the figure glimpsed inside the building, and the shiny round object which had fallen into the canal and now lay at the bottom, waiting for someone to reclaim it from the mud. Dina had wrapped me in a blanket, had moved the heater near my feet, and had placed a sympathetic hand on my knee to help calm my agitation. I should have liked to reciprocate her gesture but my hands were coated in Valenzin’s blood which was drying to a sticky crust, and they gave off a cloying, sour smell, like badly-aired bedclothes. In the little square outside, Inspector Nicolussi was giving out orders and sending messages to his subordinates. Although they all wore gum boots quite a few slipped over, and in different circumstances this would have been amusing. ‘I must look terrible,’ said Dina, and she was right. Her hair was in rats’ tails and she wore a garish dressing-gown which hid her legs and just revealed her shabby, well-worn slippers, her small toes protruding through the broken seams. She put them so close to the heater – ‘to help the circulation,’ she explained – that the rubber soles were in danger of catching fire. I gazed with unashamed deliberation at the way her toes twitched, threatening to burst completely through the seams. I also looked at her fragile ankles, and her heels which had lost their curvature, flattened by too much walking. ‘Now comes the worst of it,’ she warned me. ‘They’re going to torture us with a thousand and one questions – and our answers had better be convincing.’ I tried to defuse this menace. ‘As long as they limit their tortures to questions we’re sitting pretty.’ I remember I used this homely expression although it was obviously incomprehensible to her, so I changed it to: ‘What I mean is, we shall be all right provided they don’t use more forceful methods.’ Dina bit her lip, and for a moment or two I could see the marks of her teeth, which faded as she spoke again. I have already mentioned that her lips were severe – possibly because they were bereft of other lips to relieve their loneliness. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘the police here aren’t violent; at the worst they’ll be a bit rude.’ The young policeman who had been put in charge of us gave a snort to express either self-importance or irritation, because we seemed to be ignoring his presence. I felt slightly uncomfortable and tried to divert the conversation to more inconsequential matters, but I soon realised that it was too late: Dina had started off down the path that leads to the easing of a burden of guilt. I should have preferred not to be the repository of her confessions (how many sins of other people was I going to be saddled with in one night!), but there was no stopping her, and she spoke without self-pity: ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve had dealings with the police. I had to put up with them when I killed my husband.’ The heater was drying my socks and toasting my toes that were still numb with cold. I attempted a response which would combine self-possession and sympathy in equal proportions, but was unable to hide either my astonishment, or the dread I felt at having landed in a city in which murder was an everyday affair. Dina again placed her hand on my knee, as if to forgive my weakness: ‘Don’t be upset, I had no regrets about killing him. In fact I shouldn’t have left it so long. The very first day after our wedding I knew I’d made a mistake. But when you are young you do lots of foolish things.’ I nodded to show that I understood, although, in fact, my youth had been devoid of foolishness, and I gave her a glance, to warn her that she ought to be cautious about what she said, to avoid creating any further suspicion in the mind of the policeman who was watching us carefully from the shadows, where he stood like a statue, or a mannequin. ‘Oh, I’m sure he knows the whole story. He was probably there with a bunch of his cronies when they got drunk one night, and sang filthy songs outside the door of the hotel.’ She spoke with weary resignation, as if such outrages were run-of-the-mill affairs, not worth making a fuss about. ‘Here in Venice everybody knows everything about everybody: as neighbours, we are models of malice, and we’re all as bad as each other. They call me the Black Widow, and avoid me like the plague.’ A shadow crossed her face, and deepened the little wrinkles that had kindled my devotion; her eyelids drooped, and I wondered what memories were flickering at that moment across those Byzantine eyes that I should have loved to anoint with my kisses, if only to defend them against the past. ‘I was just twenty when I married. At that age we are all rebels with a cause, we want to run away without knowing exactly what we are running away from – possibly, from the fate that others have mapped out for us. My parents worked in a flour mill on Giudecca island. The mill went bankrupt, and they saw nothing wrong in my marrying the lawyer who was negotiating the terms of their dismissal. If he was going to be their saviour, he might as well become their son-in-law. In the end, the compensation granted by the judge wasn’t enough for them to live on, and as for my marriage, well, that was a disaster. My husband, Carlo, had an office in Mestre at the other end of the Ponte della Libertá, on dry land, three kilometres north of this city which has always been my prison. So there was no good reason not to marry him. But as I said, I knew the very next day I had made a mistake. Our engagement was short. It was just a charade in which both of us were on our best behaviour. Carlo was a boorish, ill-mannered individual, but when it suited him he could hide his bad manners behind the sort of lively good humour that makes men popular, and this won him a lot of clients. But at home his behaviour was appalling, and he behaved in the same way with anyone who dared to cross him.’ She paused and frowned, with an expression of reluctant exasperation. ‘No, I can’t complain that he ill-treated me, he never actually hit me – it’s easy to get used to physical violence. It is much worse having to learn how to live with failure, waking up each morning knowing there is someone there beside you who hates you unremittingly, and for no reason – or for reasons which you can’t begin to guess. There was a time when I did all I could to find ways of putting up with his hatred; I even thought that having a baby might give me some semblance of happiness.’
I had no difficulty imagining her, fifteen or twenty years younger, having to submit to that silent and disdainful man’s breath on her face, her cheeks scratched by a badly shaven beard, her body smeared and besmirched by his sweat and saliva. I had no difficulty either in imagining her feelings of alienation, the unconquerable disgust that churned in her stomach every day that hostile body penetrated and thrust inside her with the loathsome depravity of a rapist, depositing its barren seed in a recess of her body, before withdrawing with an oath or a reproach. I had no difficulty imagining her stretched out across the bed, the dampness between her legs caused by the viscous substance that had soiled her most intimate parts, like a noxious flow of lava which continues to do its damage even after it has cooled. I had no difficulty imagining her eyes swollen through lack of sleep – the closed lids would have hidden the full extent of the horror – as she recalled the sordid touch of hands squeezing her breasts, the pain of his teeth biting her nipples, and the slimy feel of a phallus retracting after having injected its poison. ‘I smothered him with the pillow,’ she said, with deep solemnity. ‘I pressed his head down with the pillow, and then pressed the pillow down with my whole body – just as he had oppressed me with his hatred. I did it without premeditation; but even today I’m frightened to think I had the strength to overcome his resistance.’
It all flooded back into her mind with the same lucidity she must have possessed when she decided to squeeze the breath out of the man, and to listen for the signs of suffocation beneath the pillow stifling his cries for help. Nor did I find it difficult to visualise her in the very act, sitting astride the man who had been her husband and her bane, curbing, with all the strength in her thighs, the flailing of his arms in the final throes of death. ‘It was a ten minute battle …’ She told the story as if she had not been personally involved, or as if remorse, and perhaps the satisfaction of having gained her revenge, had both wasted away, leaving only indifference. ‘His body was already pale and stiff, but his limbs were still twitching. He had stopped breathing, but his fingers still clawed at the sheets with the same fury with which they had clawed at me.’ She spoke as if trying to shake off a remote but confused sensation. After her trial, a number of psychiatrists agreed she had suffered a temporary fit of insanity, and in consequence her sentence was reduced. ‘I got twelve years, but I was only in prison for three,’ she quickly summed up, because Inspector Nicolussi pushed open the door of the hotel at that moment – the bell announced his arrival – and he entered, preceded by the lighted tip of his cigarette. The young policeman sprang dutifully to attention, and a cold blast of icy air stabbed through the lobby like an open knife.
‘We meet again, Dina,’ said the Inspector, with that mixture of surprise and acerbity which we feel when we bump into a dissolute relation who we thought had turned over a new leaf.
‘Yes, once again, Inspector. What are we going to do about it?’ replied Dina, her face expressing mock contrition.
Now, Dina lit the cigarette offered her by Inspector Nicolussi, and gave a jaded smile caused by exhaustion, or by the thought of having to go through the same tedious formalities all over again. She had swathed herself once more in the black sweater which a few hours before I had registered as a sign of mourning but which now was explicable simply as a mark of indifference. The early morning light and lack of make-up accentuated the vicissitudes of her life apparent in her face, but revealed a frailty more attributable to fatigue than to age. Nicolussi’s office combined that anonymous, aseptic air of deserted dwelling-places and efficient hospitals, which greatly increased my feeling of helplessness, and of having got myself involved in a nightmare from which there was no escape. A fluorescent tube hummed above our heads.
‘So, you are a lecturer in the history of art,’ Nicolussi muttered, after glancing cursorily through my personal documents.
His desk was becoming littered with badly-typed reports covered in handwritten comments.
‘I’m a specialist in Renaissance painting. Gilberto Gabetti, the Director of the Accademia, will be able to confirm this.’
‘Gabetti has been informed. He’s on his way.’ Nicolussi stifled a yawn between his dry, cracked lips, which puckered oddly; his eyes were becoming encrusted as the involuntary secretions from the tear ducts began to harden. ‘So, as a specialist in art history—’ he repeated, sarcastically ‘—you would have known Fabio Valenzin.’
This time I jumped in before the interpreter, with a promptness that probably betrayed my sudden anger.
‘Just a minute – what are you insinuating? I hadn’t seen the man before in all my bloody life.’
I recalled Valenzin’s face, haggard, the colour of parchment, like that of a cardsharp who for many years has hidden away from the sun; I also recalled his unwavering and compelling gaze that seemed to harbour a terror which dared not speak its name.
‘I’m not insinuating anything. Valenzin’s business was trafficking in works of art and in fake copies. His name is registered with Interpol, so don’t talk rubbish.’
Irritation led him to puff even more heavily at his cigarette, with long drags which made the end glow red. The smoke became so dense round his face that I could not read the expression on his lips. This time, I was grateful for the intervention of the interpreter.
‘I hadn’t the slightest idea.’
My dismay came through clearly in my tone. I should have preferred to have been well out of it, and not to have known what I was just beginning to learn; I should have preferred to have had a dispensation absolving me from matters which were no concern of mine, but it was too late to back out. Dina cut in on my behalf, although I was not sure that her intervention was to my advantage, given what I knew of her past history.
‘The young man’s telling the truth. What’s the point in trying to muddle him?’
I should have liked to protest at the improperly maternal tone in which she referred to me, but Nicolussi jumped in first.
‘Let the young man speak for himself,’ he said, adding in a curt and depressed voice: ‘We have to go over your statement, Ballesteros.’
The clerk, whose job it had been to transcribe what I had said during my preliminary questioning, had interpolated so many non sequiturs and errors of syntax that he had turned my statement into a gibberish which baffled even Nicolussi, who lost himself completely in the muddle of subordinate clauses, intermediate phrases, and those which simply ended nowhere.
‘God alone knows what all this means,’ he said bitterly to the clerk, before starting to question me. ‘You were talking to Gilberto Gabetti on the phone when you heard the shot. What made you think it came from the palace opposite the hotel?’
The church bells had begun to ring again with an even more exuberant series of peals which reverberated painfully through my head. The sky over Venice was heavy and menacing, like a sewer which has had no fresh air through it for months.
‘Because it frightened a number of pigeons. They were sleeping there, and the shot woke them up.’
From sheer perversity, I shied away from making any mention of that shiny object – almost certainly Valenzin’s ring – which an unknown hand had thrown into the canal. I knew I was committing an offence by omission, but I also knew that the unlikely story would only serve to tangle the investigation further, and would also prejudice my innocence; but what prevailed with me was the avarice of one who possesses something precious he wants to keep for himself.
‘Nothing else? Couldn’t you see the murderer?’
I was unhappy about indulging in guesswork.
‘Later, while I was trying to help Valenzin I thought I got a glimpse of someone. It was human … or vaguely human. It was utterly monstrous … utterly … protervous—’ I hesitated over the choice of this unusual adjective which was bound to make the interpreter’s task difficult. ‘But I can’t be really certain of my own evidence: I was jumpy, and this could have led me to believe I saw something that wasn’t there. I also thought I heard somebody running away in the distance, but my impressions are confused, so don’t take all this too seriously.’
The interpreter superimposed his version over mine like a feeble echo, adding a further level of obfuscation to what was already unclear. Nicolussi expelled a mouthful of smoke which settled round the top of his head like a saintly halo; his eyes battled their way through the jumbled text of my statement.
‘And then?’
‘Then Valenzin died. I didn’t manage to get anything out of him.’
I did not mention that Valenzin, before expiring, had raised his right hand in front of my eyes so that I could see the well-defined mark of the ring which he had been wearing on the second finger until just a few minutes before – a gesture more eloquent than words.
‘It’s not surprising,’ observed Nicolussi, scratching his rampant beard. ‘The bullet had gone through the trachea.’
Another police officer came in after receiving permission; prim but eloquent, he was clearly practised in the use of officialese.
‘As we feared, there’s nobody in the palace,’ he said. ‘The Department of Artistic and Historic Properties sold it at a bargain price to a millionaire from Illinois, subject to the condition that he would restore it and live in it for at least two months a year. The American has failed to comply with that undertaking, but he did instal a caretaker, one Vittorio Tedeschi, to look after it.’ The officer hesitated, and blinked, as he tried to gauge whether or not to introduce matters of a moral nature into his report. ‘This Tedeschi is an individual who leads a dissolute life, sir. He often abandons his post at night and frequents the brothels in Mestre.’ To make matters quite clear, either from prudery or malice, he added: ‘Very sordid brothels indeed, sir.’
Nicolussi licked his lips to disguise his impatience.
‘So what are you waiting for? Pick him up!’
‘We’re working on that, sir.’ The officer lowered his voice to little more than a whisper, as if he were in a confessional. ‘At the same time, we don’t want to make too much of a fuss – you know how furious those whores get when we raid their houses.’
This little speech, midway between that of a pettifogging lawyer and a pious bigot, seemed to get on Nicolussi’s nerves, and he dismissed the officer with a wave of his hand, which could have been interpreted as a benediction. The big windows behind him began to vibrate as if a tidal wave were imminent, but it was a minor one, caused by the propellers of a police launch. Nicolussi sat back in his chair. ‘That’s Gabetti at last.’ He spoke into his interphone. ‘Gabetti’s arriving. Prepare the body for identification.’ Before stubbing his cigarette out in the ash-tray, he finished it off with a powerful drag which scorched the filter. ‘Come with me, Ballesteros.’
Dina gave me a nod to express acquiescence. It was her ritual, or superstitious way of imbuing me with the confidence that comes only from personal experience. I followed Nicolussi down corridors which echoed with the clatter of a typewriter, the sound of our footsteps, and the dripping of water that penetrated and stained the ceiling. Nicolussi had a way of walking sideways as if he offered less resistance to the air that way, and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye as if hoping to discover in my demeanour some sign of irresolution.
We received Gilberto Gabetti in the forecourt of the police station under the shelter of an arch which gave a solemn echo to our greetings. He was a man getting on for seventy, but was well preserved. His hair was white, as if dusted with snow, and cut very short; his face was blotched by vitiligo, although the features themselves had a refined elegance – slightly Jewish-looking – and were unimpaired by age. He disembarked from the launch before any of the police officers who accompanied him, taking for granted his right of precedence. His manner, as he walked, was arrogant, and he did not even notice the snow which absorbed his footsteps, just as earlier it had absorbed the blood of Valenzin.
‘This is an honour, Mr Gabetti,’ I said, extending a limp hand which he grasped warmly.
‘Don’t exaggerate, my dear friend, don’t exaggerate. There’s nothing very honourable about me!’
He was both formal and austere. I noticed that his hands, although blotched with vitiligo like his face, looked as if they would excel at sensual caresses, but might also be adroit where theft was concerned; they were bony and emaciated as if by a lifetime of mysticism such as El Greco might have painted. There was also something in his look that combined the affectionate and the criminal, as if behind those blue eyes there co-existed kindness and cruelty, dark depths and a deep calm.
‘Follow me, please,’ said Nicolussi, who would undoubtedly have overlooked these subtleties.
Amongst its other facilities, the police station held a small morgue, its walls clad with tiles. The gaps between them were thick with dirt. Face up on a stretcher, his arms hanging over the sides like strips of meat, lay the dead body of Fabio Valenzin. There was no sheet to hide his wound, and nothing to cover his penis, its veins the colour of tar; and his testicles hung like empty pouches, suggesting a not very potent virility. Valenzin (I mean his corpse) still retained the frozen and compelling stare of his death throes, and his cheeks, which I remembered having been clean-shaven, were turning blue with a post-mortem growth of beard. His nostrils were blocked with congealed blood, and a row of stitches stretched from his chest to his navel.
‘They had to carry out an autopsy, as you can imagine.’ Nicolussi spoke apologetically to Gabetti.
Valenzin’s stomach had collapsed as if they had removed the viscera, and the projection of the chest cage jutted out, the ribs resembling the strings of a harp. The monotonous drone of a cooling unit smothered the sound of our breathing.
‘I always knew you’d finish badly, Fabio,’ Gabetti said at last, his words directed at no one in particular. ‘Remember, I warned you.’
He extended a hand to blot out the fixed stare of the dead man; the eyelids fell unresistingly, just as they do when drooping with sleep. Having done this, he took a handkerchief from a pocket of his jacket and spread it over the genitals.
‘Were you friendly with Valenzin?’ asked Nicolussi, with more ambivalence than malice in his tone.
‘Let’s say we had known each other for a long time.’ He allowed no concession to nostalgia to colour this reply. ‘When Fabio began his career I was working as an auctioneer’s valuer. He was only twenty, or twenty-two or so, but his fakes were already creating problems for the experts. Later, he became a virtuoso swindler, but eventually he tired of his own virtuosity. As you no doubt know, getting away with crime can become boring, so the criminal always leaves some clue or other so that he can gloat over the frustration he is causing, and play hide-and-seek with his pursuers. Quite apart from the fact that the quality of his work was irreproachable, he was very prolific. It has been reckoned that he managed to fake more than a thousand works by Picasso and Modigliani, Matisse and Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne, always going for the artist with the highest prices who happened to be most fashionable at the time. Nowadays, these paintings of his are scattered throughout the private collections of half the world. But what he most enjoyed was imitating the Surrealists, because there is nothing more gratifying than faking the fakers.’ He spoke with sardonic nonchalance. ‘Did you know I once had some business dealings with him?’
He gave the sort of forced smile that might have expressed either candour or bad faith, like a child caught in a mischievous prank. Nicolussi and I both shook our heads with growing curiosity. It was inappropriate to carry on a conversation of this nature in a mortuary, but Gabetti held us enthralled with his smooth, beguiling voice.
‘It happened in the spring of 1962. I remember it clearly because an auction house in Rome had just fired me – or had decided to dispense with my further services – because Fabio Valenzin had foisted on me a consignment of fake Modiglianis. I wanted to meet the author of my misfortune so I went up to Milan where he was living at that time. I was staggered by how young he was, by his self-assurance, and by his intolerable intelligence. To compensate for having made me lose my job, he invited me out to dinner, and we made a night of it in a most luxurious brothel, of the sort which exists mainly for government ministers and fashion tycoons, if you follow me. The girls in the brothel served us whisky in a pretty little garden with stucco columns artistically placed between shrubs of ivy and acanthus. As the girls were aloof and unfriendly – I believe the speciality of the house was masochism – and they wandered around amongst the columns like sleepwalkers, wearing only their bras and panties, Fabio mentioned the paintings of the Belgian artist, Paul Delvaux. I was drunk and in a reminiscent mood, and I recalled the fact that in my late childhood, or early adolescence, I had known Delvaux and had even worked for him during his short stay in Venice, mixing his colours and carrying his easel. In 1939, Delvaux travelled all round Italy studying classical architecture which he would later use as background in his paintings. “In his early years, Delvaux’s work was much more salacious – his women didn’t just wander around like sleepwalkers, he had them masturbating in bizarre ways, and being sodomised by statues. But all the paintings of that period were lost during the upheavals of the war,” I told Fabio, who could not contain his delight. “In other words, they were pretty hot stuff,” he said, his eyes shining with lust. “Yes, pretty hot,” I smiled. “At least, those first sketches that I saw were. Delvaux made his models try out the most revealing contortions.” Fabio became thoughtful, as if he was already assessing the enormity of the swindle that was taking shape in his mind. “What would you say if we put together an exhibition of those paintings? All you would have to do would be to lend it your professional authority by writing a pretentious article for the catalogue,” he suggested.’
It is possible that Gabetti was embroidering the truth with details and anecdotes to make it a better story, but Valenzin was in no position to speak out and contradict him.
‘And you agreed? Come off it!’ declared Nicolussi, with that secret veneration that the police profess for the perfect criminal.
‘Well, at first I refused; but I hadn’t a lira to my name. I was destitute.’ He gave a spiteful laugh. ‘In the space of a couple of months, Fabio perpetrated thirty fake Delvaux pictures, both sketches and finished canvases. Every one of them surpassed in pornographic audacity the originals, or at least the dim memory I had of them. There were lesbian scenes with the genitals openly displayed, and I believe there was even a scene of coprophilia. We announced the exhibition with heavy publicity which was enough to draw the attention of the most pathological collectors – all collectors, in other words. But, what happened? Suddenly, on the very opening day, the newspapers announced that Delvaux himself was coming to Milan.’
‘So you were caught,’ interrupted Nicolussi, privately disappointed, although he feigned relief.
‘Wait, wait, don’t jump ahead.’ Gabetti was revelling in these preliminaries. ‘It was too late to cancel the exhibition, so Fabio, who was a most resourceful fellow, suggested we visit Delvaux in his hotel. I can still see him today, calm, but quite unscrupulous, as he faced that old wreck of a Surrealist. “Look, sir, we are on the point of inaugurating an exhibition of some of your work produced many years ago, but we have heard rumours to the effect that there could be one or two fakes among them. We wonder whether you would be so kind as to come with us to the gallery and examine the paintings? There is no more reliable judgement than that of the artist himself.” Delvaux, who, between ourselves, was a long-haired, conceited ass, came to the gallery, examined the pictures with the rapture of a true narcissist, and after going round three or four times, put aside a pair of canvases and one drawing that was particularly obscene – possibly it reflected his own fantasies rather too closely. All the others seemed to him authentic, and he congratulated us most warmly on having recovered works which he had believed to be lost for ever.’
He gave a long and affectionate look at the corpse of Valenzin, and sighed. ‘That was Fabio, the rogue, he could have hoodwinked the devil himself.’
There was an awkward silence broken only by the cooling unit which continued to emit its funereal drone, a mechanical death rattle, suggesting that it was time to pension it off, or scrap it. The body of Fabio Valenzin seemed quite unperturbed in the face of Gabetti’s encomium, and was slowly beginning to take on the coarse appearance that precedes decay. Inspector Nicolussi felt in the pockets of his overcoat, ready to break the rules and to cloud the clean air of the morgue with his cigarette smoke. It was hardly fifteen minutes since his last one, but he could not stand being deprived for so long.
‘I imagine you know that apart from all that jiggery-pokery, he is believed to have stolen many of our national treasures and sold them abroad,’ he said.
‘I have already told you that Fabio was unwilling to believe he would get away with his crimes.’ With these words, Gabetti abandoned his frivolous tone, but a certain worldly sophistication prevented him from being wholly serious. ‘He got tired of contriving elaborate swindles, and began to loot churches. It is just possible he was responsible for one or two spectacular thefts from foreign art galleries, none of which has been cleared up. But there was never any conclusive proof against him. He was meticulous, he never bungled, and he left no clues. I always warned him: “so long as you don’t touch the Accademia – for me that would be like attacking the Louvre.”’
He referred to the Accademia in a highly possessive way, like a sultan who forbids anyone to enter his harem, although he tolerates and even approves of promiscuity and adultery between strangers. Nicolussi was about to reproach him for something he had said, but stopped short when he noticed Gabetti’s disarming smile which seemed to mask an Olympian disdain.
‘Has he any family?’ he asked instead, with a resentful gesture.
‘If he had, he must have disowned them because he never mentioned anybody. He spent his childhood in a wretched orphanage, like so many other children in the war. He lived for long periods in Venice, but was so incompetent where domestic matters were concerned that he rented hotel rooms for much of the time. He used to stay at the Danieli, regardless of the cost.’
‘Well, if nobody claims him he’ll have to be buried in the common grave,’ said Nicolussi brutally.
‘Fabio in a common grave?’ Gabetti was scandalised. ‘In his lifetime he was an aristocrat among artists. Although he may have used his talents in a perverse way, in the final analysis he was an aristocrat. I shall not permit his death to reduce him to the condition of a pauper.’
He struck an angry pose, reaching to his full height, and not without a disdainful sneer.
‘You take care of finding out who killed him,’ he said, turning to Nicolussi, with all the hauteur with which a marquis would treat a manservant. ‘And I shall take care of the costs.’
In the milky light of the fluorescent tube, the colour of Fabio Valenzin’s corpse was fading towards marble or granite; the network of veins was mottled and the bruises and abrasions were beginning to look like chalky encrustations on his skin.
The prim but eloquent police officer who had come into Nicolussi’s office earlier appeared in the doorway of the morgue.
‘Can I come in, sir?’
His face was radiant with a triumph which dispelled his habitual bureaucratic demeneanour. Nicolussi gave his assent with a snort, or a rasping sound, which came all the way up from the nicotine deposits in his lungs.
‘We have captured the aforementioned Tedeschi.’
Vittorio Tedeschi was dragged in by two youngsters who looked as if they had only recently joined the force: there was a clumsy synchronism in their manner and movements, characteristic of those who still respect the balletic rituals which have been drilled into them in their training school. Tedeschi could not have been over thirty-five, but he looked more like fifty. The slovenliness of his clothing – his corduroy trousers were worn at the knee, his fisherman’s boots were coated with mud, and his sheepskin jacket had acquired a dark sheen of dirt – was made worse by the filthy state of his face, and through his clenched and rapacious teeth he was spitting with rage. He had an angular skull, and his hair was greasy and flattened, as if it had been licked by a cow. He remonstrated in Venetian dialect, but with a harshness which rasped his throat and grated on the ear of all those present. His tongue was still thickly furred, the sign of a drunken binge.
‘Just as we thought, we caught him sleeping off a hangover—’ the officer, overjoyed that his prediction had turned out to be true, could not resist emphasising the fact ‘—in one of the more sordid brothels.’
Tedeschi squirmed with difficulty. Apart from the fact that the two novice policemen gripped his arms tightly, his hands were restrained by handcuffs which produced white pressure marks on his wrists. His captors almost lifted him off the floor, and he tried to break away by lashing out in the cold air, which very soon was thick with the stench of rancid sweat, the reek of wine-induced sexual excitement, and the sour smell of vomit and semen ejected during the past months. I cannot say I was sorry for him, but I did feel a slight twinge of conscience: they hadn’t yanked me out of somebody else’s bed, nor had they handcuffed me, nor had they dragged me all the way to the police station. Inspector Nicolussi was unable to resist any longer the need for smoke to leach his lungs with, and he took out another cigarette.
‘Do you know him?’ he asked, without looking at Tedeschi, who was suddenly quelled by the sight of the naked body on the stretcher.
‘Of course I know him. It’s Fabio Valenzin. Is there anybody in Venice who doesn’t know him? But I could never have done that.’ Tedeschi made a vague gesture with his manacled hands; it was not clear whether he was referring to the death of the other man, his nakedness barely concealed by Gabetti’s handkerchief, or the mutilation of his body by the autopsy. ‘In any case, I’ve got an alibi. I can tell you what I’ve been doing every minute of my time.’
He stopped at this point as he realised that his consumption of alcohol combined with the ecstasies of commercial copulation created blanks in the scenario of a night during which delirium might have led him unconsciously to an act of folly.
‘To start with, you were doing what you’re not supposed to do,’ Nicolussi cautioned him. ‘You’re paid to look after that palace, and not to slope off and go chasing whores.’
‘They pay me a pittance, believe me,’ Tedeschi spat out, in a sudden fit of class consciousness.
‘And you made up your income with the tips that Valenzin gave you on the side, isn’t that right?’
Tedeschi’s face went white, and then bilious, as he was thrown off balance. I too was surprised by the police inspector’s shrewdness.
‘I promise you that nothing you say in this room will appear in any indictment.’
Nicolussi’s men meekly took in their superior’s unorthodox methods, and Gabetti cleared his throat, pretending not to have heard.
‘I did a few jobs for him, I don’t deny,’ Tedeschi admitted in a contrite, almost sepulchral voice. ‘Climbing up the front of a church doesn’t scare me.’
‘And making off with a painting from inside it? That doesn’t scare you either?’ Nicolussi set his traps without tempering his sarcasm. ‘I warn you that a robbery committed on holy ground is not only a crime, it’s a mortal sin. What’s it called? Sacrilege?’
The prim but eloquent young officer, who was obviously knowledgeable in the field of religious canons, nodded vigorously. The dead body of Fabio Valenzin was beginning to turn my stomach with its resemblance to a hibernating reptile, and my sense of smell was offended by its odour of cold meat. Tedeschi had relapsed into a hopeless silence.
‘I think a couple of days in prison will make you more talkative, my friend,’ concluded Nicolussi. ‘And, by the way, it will also help you sort yourself out. You’re a mess.’
‘You can’t arrest me without a warrant,’ said Tedeschi, but he was begging, not insisting. ‘Anyway, I’m innocent.’
Inspector Nicolussi allowed the smoke to anaesthetise his throat and bronchial tubes; by the time he blew it out he seemed to have reached nirvana.
‘We’ve got seventy-two hours to decide whether you’re guilty or not. In the meantime, you’ll behave yourself in jail.’
They dragged Tedeschi out much as they had brought him in, and as they led him down the corridor towards the cells he let rip a whole arsenal of curses and profanities. I felt something approaching embarrassment (but also a shamefaced relief) that I had been given favourable treatment just because I was a foreigner in a city that worships money. Nicolussi bit pieces of skin off his dry lips.
‘And you, Ballesteros, you have to sign your statement before you go,’ he said. ‘The only condition I make is that you don’t leave Venice.’
How could I leave a city in which everything was conspiring against me? How could I escape from Venice when winter had closed in on its canals and immured its streets and its inhabitants in a curse of oblivion? How could I break through the siege of a city which was sinking and dragging us all down in its ruin? Gabetti set himself up as my protector.
‘I shall answer for him, Nicolussi, don’t worry. He’ll stay with me and I’ll keep him under strict observation.’ Then he added, with malice: ‘And now I’m going to take him for a ride in a gondola down the Grand Canal, so that he has one pleasant memory of his stay here.’
We returned to the inspector’s office where Dina was still waiting for us, with that look of despair that girlfriends have as they wait alone on the platform of a railway station. She too was allowed to go, after signing her own statement. As she leaned over the desk, her breasts hung heavily inside the black sweater which squeezed and compressed them, just as once upon a time they had been squeezed and compressed by the hands of a husband who left them bruised and sweaty. I recall that when she heard I was moving into Gabetti’s house, she looked me over with that unconcealed anger which seizes us when we are about to be abandoned. I managed only to whisper – cowardice prevented me from saying more – that I would return to the hotel to pick up my luggage.