A Venetian Reckoning (2 page)

On the Tuesday before the feast of La
Madonna delta Salute in late November, Avvocato Trevisan spent the afternoon in
Padua, asked there by Francesco Urbani, a client of his who had recently
decided to ask his wife of twenty-seven years for a separation. During the two
hours the men spent together, Trevisan suggested that Urbani move certain
monies out of the country, perhaps to Luxemburg, and that he immediately sell
his share of the two factories in Verona which he held in silent partnership
with another man. The proceeds from those transactions, Trevisan suggested,
might well follow the others quickly out of the country.

After the meeting, which he had
arranged to coincide with his next appointment, Trevisan met for a weekly
dinner with a business associate. They had met in Venice the previous week, so
tonigjht they met in Padua. Like all of their meetings, this one was marked by
the cordiality that results from success and prosperity. Good food, good wine,
and good news.

Trevisan’s partner drove him to the
railway station where, as he did every week, he caught the Intercity for
Trieste, which would get him to Venice by 10.15. Though he held a ticket for
the fust-class section, which was at the back of the train, Trevisan walked
through the almost empty carriages and took a seat in a second-class
compartment: like all Venetians, he sat at the front of the train so as not to
have to walk the length of the long platform when the train finally pulled into
the Santa Lucia station.

He opened the calfskin briefcase on
the seat opposite him and pulled from it a prospectus recently sent to him by
the National Bank of Luxemburg, one offering interests as high as 18 per cent,
though not for accounts in Italian lira. He slid a small calculator from its
slot in the upper lid of the briefcase, uncapped his Montblanc, and began to
make rough calculations on a sheet of paper.

The door of his compartment rolled
back, and Trevisan turned away to take his ticket from his overcoat pocket and
hand it to the conductor. But the person who stood there had come to collect
something other than his ticket from Avvocato Carlo Trevisan.

The body was discovered by the
conductor, Cristina Merli, while the train was crossing the
laguna
that separates Venice from Mestre. As she walked
past the compartment in which the well-dressed gentleman lay slumped against
the window, she first decided not to bother him by waking him to check his
ticket, but then she remembered how often ticketless passengers, even
well-dressed ones, would feign sleep on this short trip across the
laguna,
hoping this way not to be disturbed as they
stole their 1000-lira ride. Besides, if he had a ticket, he'd be glad to be
awakened before the train pulled in, especially if he had to catch the No. 1
boat to Rialto, which left the
embarcadero
in
front of the station exactly three minutes after the train arrived.

She rolled the door open and stepped
into the small compartment.
'Buona sera,
signore. Suo biglietto, per favore!

Later, when she talked about it, she
thought she remembered the smell, remembered noticing it as soon as she sfid
back the door of the overheated compartment. She took two steps towards the
sleeping man and raised her voice to repeat,
'Suo
biglietto, per favore!
So deeply
asleep, he didn't hear her? Not possible: he must be without a ticket and now
trying to avoid the inevitable fine. Over the course of her years on the trains,
Cristina Merli had come almost to enjoy this moment: asking them for
identification and then writing out the ticket, collecting the fine. So, too,
did she delight in the variety of the excuses that were offered to her, all by
now grown so familiar that she could recite them in her sleep: I must have lost
it; the train was just pulling out, and I didn't want to miss it; my wife's in
another compartment and she has the tickets.

Conscious of all of this, knowing she
would now be delayed, right at the end of the long trip from Torino, she was
sudden in her gestures, perhaps even harsh.

'Please, signore, wake up and show me
your ticket,' she said, leaning down over him and shaking his shoulder. At the
first touch of her hand, the man in the seat leaned slowly away from the
window, toppled over on to the seat, and slid to the floor. As he fell, his
jacket slid open and she saw the red stains that covered the front of his
shirt. The smell of urine and excrement rose up unmistakably from his body.

'Maria Vergine,' she gasped and
backed very slowly out of the compartment, to her left, she saw two men coming
towards her, passengers moving towards the door at the front of the train. I'm
sorry, gentlemen, but that door at the front is blocked: you'll have to use the
one behind you.' Used to this, they turned and walked back towards the rear of
the carriage. She glanced out of the window and saw that the train was almost
at the end of the causeway. Three, perhaps four minutes remained until the
train drew to a stop in the station. When it did, the doors would open and the
passengers would get out, taking with them whatever memories they might have
of the trip and of people they had seen in the corridors of the long train. She
heard the familiar clicks and bangs as the train was shunted to the proper
track and the nose of the train slid under the roof of the station.

She had worked for the railway for
fifteen years and had never known it to happen, but she did the only thing she
could think of doing: she stepped into the next compartment and reached up to
the handle of the emergency brake. She pulled at it and heard the tiny 'pop' as
the tattered string broke apart, and then she waited, not without a distant,
almost academic curiosity, to see what would happen.

4

The wheels locked and the train slid
to a halt; passengers were knocked to the floor of the corridors and into the
laps of strangers sitting opposite them. Within seconds, windows were yanked
down and heads popped out, searching up and down the track for whatever it was
that had caused the train to grind to a stop. Cristina Merli lowered the window
in the corridor, glad of the biting winter air, and stuck her head out, waiting
to see who would come towards the train. It turned out to be two of the uniformed
polizia ferrovia
who
came running up the platform. She leaned out from the window and waved at them.
'Here, over here.’ Because she didn't want anyone except the police to hear
what she had to tell them, she said nothing more until they were directly underneath
her window.

When she told them; one of them broke
away and ran back towards the station; the other moved towards the engine to
tell the engineer what was going on. Slowly, with two false starts, the train
began to crawl into the station, inching its way up the track until it came to
a halt at its usual place on track 5. A few people stood on the platform,
waiting for passengers to get down from the train or to climb aboard themselves
for the late-night trip to Trieste. When the doors didn't open, they mulled
together, asking one another what was wrong. One woman, assuming that this was
yet another train strike, threw her hands into the air and her suitcase to the
ground. As the passengers stood there, talking and growing irritated at the
unexplained delay, yet another proof of the inefficiency of the railways, six
police officers, each carrying a machine-gun, appeared at the front of the
platform and walked along the train, positioning themselves at every second
car. More heads appeared at the windows, men shouted down angrily, but no one
listened to anything that was said. The doors of the train remained locked.

After long minutes of this, someone
told the sergeant in charge of the officers that the train had a public-address
system. The sergeant pulled himself up into the engine and began to explain to
the passengers that a crime had been committed on the train and they were being
held there in the station until the police could take their names and
addresses.

When he finished speaking, the
engineer unlocked the doors and the police swung themselves aboard.
Unfortunately, no one had thought to explain anything to the people waiting on
the platform, who consequently crowded on to the train, where they quickly
became confused with the original passengers. Two men in the second carriage
tried to push past the officer in the corridor, insisting that they had seen
nothing, knew nothing, and were already late. He stopped them by raising his
machine-gun across his chest in front of them, effectively blocking off the
corridor and forcing them into a compartment, where they grumbled about police
arrogance and their rights as citizens.

In the end, there proved to be only
thirty-four people on the train, excluding those who had crowded on behind the
police. After half an hour, the police got their names and addresses and asked
if they had seen anything strange on the train. Two people remembered a black
pedlar who got off at Vicenza; one said he'd seen a man with long hair and a
beard coming out of the toilet before they pulled into Verona, and someone had
seen a woman in a fur hat get off at Mestre, but aside from that, no one had
noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.

Just as it began to look as though the
train would be there all night and people were beginning to straggle off to
telephone relatives in Trieste to tell them not to expect their arrival, an
engine backed its way into the far end of the track and attached itself to the
rear of the train, suddenly converting it into the front. Three blue-uniformed
mechanics crawled under the train and detached the last carriage, the one in
which the body still lay, from the rest of the train. A conductor ran along the
platform, yelling '
In
partenza, in
partenza, siamo in partenza',
and passengers
scrambled back up into the train. The conduttore slammed a door, then another
one, and pulled himself up on to the train just as it started to move slowly
out of the station. And Cristina Merli stood in the office of the Station
Master, attempting to explain why she should not be subject to a fine of 1
million lire for having pulled the train's alarm.

5

Guido Brunetti did not learn of the
murder of Avvocato Carlo Trevisan until the following morning, and he learned
of it in a most unpolicemanlike manner, from the shouting headlines of
II
Gazzettino,
the same newspaper that had twice
applauded Avvocato Trevisan's tenure as city counsellor. 'Avvocato Assassinato
sul Treno,' the headline cried, while
La Nuova,
ever
drawn to melodrama, spoke of 'Il Treno della Morte'. Brunetti saw the headlines
while on his way to work, stopped and bought both papers, and stood in the Ruga
Orefici to read both articles while early-morning shoppers passed by him unnoticed.
The article gave the barest facts: shot to death on the train, body found as it
crossed the
laguna,
police
conducting the usual investigation.

Brunetti looked up and allowed his
eyes to wander sightlessly across the banked stalls of fruit and vegetables.
The 'usual investigation'? Who had been on duty last night? Why hadn't he been
called? And if he hadn't been called, which one of his colleagues had been?

He turned away from the news-stand
and continued walking toward the Questura, calling to mind the various cases
on which they were working at the moment, trying to calculate who would be
given this one. Brunetti was himself almost at the end of an investigation that
had to do, in Venice's minor way; with the enormous spider web of bribery and
corruption that had been radiating out from Milan for the last few years. Super
highways had been built on the mainland, one to connect the city with the
airport, and billions of fire had been spent to build dm It was not until after
construction was completed that anyone had troubled to consider that the
airport, one with fewer than a hundred daily flights, was already well served
by road, public buses, taxis, and boats. It was only then that anyone thought
to question the enormous expenditure of public monies on a road that no stretch
of the imagination could view as being in any way necessary. Hence Brunetti's
involvement and hence the warrants that had gone out for both - the arrest and
the freezing of the assets of the owner of the construction firm that had done
the major portion of the work on the road and of the three members of the City
Council who had fought most vociferously for his being awarded the contract.

Another commissario was busy with the
Casino where, yet once again, the croupiers had found a way to beat the system
and skim off a percentage. The other was involved with an on-going
investigation of Mafia-controlled businesses in Mestre, an mvestigation that
appeared to have no limits and, alas, no end.