Death and Judgement (2 page)

2

It took
the
polizia strada
le
more than half an hour to respond to
the
call and, when they finally arrived at
the
scene of
the
accident, they were forced to set out flares and deal with
the
kilometre-long rows of traffic that had backed up on both sides of the accident as drivers, already made cautious by road conditions, slowed even more to gape down through the wide hole in the metal railing, down to where the body of the truck lay. Among
the
other bodies.

As soon as the first officer, unable to understand what the truck drivers shouted to him, saw
the
broken forms around the wreckage of the truck, he climbed back up the hill and put in a radio call to
the
carabinieri station in Tarvisio. His call was answered quickly, and soon
the
traffic was worsened by
the
arrival of two cars carrying six black-uniformed cara
b
inieri. They left their cars parked on the shoulder of the highway and lurched down
the
slope towards the truck. When they found that
the
woman whose legs were pinned under the boards inside the truck was still alive,
the
carabinieri abandoned any interest they might have had in the traffic.

There followed a scene so confused that it might
have been comic, had it not been so grotesque. The piles of lumber pinning the woman's legs to the bottom of the truck were at least two metres high: they could easily be moved with a crane, but no crane could get down
the
slope. Men could shift them, surely, but to do so they would have to climb up and walk over them, adding to the weight.

The youngest of the officers crouched at the back of the truck, shivering in the bitter cold of the descending Alpine night. His regulation down parka lay tucked around the visible portion of the body of the woman pinned to the floor of the truck. Her legs disappeared at the thighs, straight into a solid pile of wood, as though the subject of a particularly whimsical Magritte.

He could see that she was young and blonde, but he could also see that she had grown visibly paler since his arrival. She lay on her side, cheek pressed down on the corrugated floor of the truck. Her eyes were closed, but she seemed still to breathe.

From behind him, he heard the sharp sound of something heavy falling on to the floor of the truck. The other five, ant-like, crawled up the sides of the pile, pulling, shoving at the neat packages of wooden beams, working them loose from the top. Each time they tossed one to
the
floor of the truck, they jumped down after it, picked it up, and heaved it out of the open back, passing the girl and young Monelli as they did.

Each time they walked past Monelli, they could see that the puddle of blood seeping out from under the boards was closer to his knees. Still they tore at the beams, ripping their hands open on
them
, gone temporarily mad with the need to break the girl free. Even after Monelli pulled his jacket over the girl's face and got to his feet, two of them continued to
rip boards from the pile and hurl
them out into the growing darkness. They did this until their sergeant went to each of them in turn and placed his hands on their shoulders, telling their bodies that they could stop now. They grew calm then and returned to the routine investigation of the scene. By the time they finished that and called back down to Tarvisio for ambulances to carry
the
dead away, more snow had fallen, full night had come, and traffic was effectively tied up all the way back to the Austrian border.

Nothing more could be done until the following day, but the carabinieri were careful to post two guards, knowing the fascination the locus of death exerts over many people and afraid that evidence would be destroyed or stolen if the wreck were left unattended through the night.

As so often happens at that time of year,
the
next morning dawned rosy-fingered, and by ten the snow was no more than a memory. But the wrecked truck remained, as did the deep scars leading down to it During the day, it was emptied, the wood stacked in low piles in an area well clear of the wreckage. As the carabinieri worked, grumbling at the weight, the splinters, and the mud that churned under their boots, a forensics team began a careful investigation of the truck's cab, dusting surfaces and supping all papers and objects into clearly labelled and numbered plastic bags.

The driver's seat had been ripped from its frame by the force of the final impact; the two men working in the cab loosened it further and then peeled back its plastic and cloth cover, looking for something they did not find. Nor did they find anything in any way suspicious behind the plastic panelling of the cabin.

It was only in the back of the truck that anything at all unusual was found: eight plastic bags, the sort given by supermarkets, each holding a change of women's clothing and, in one case, a small prayer book printed in what one of the technicians identified as Romanian. All of the labels had been removed from the clothing in the bags, as turned out to be true of the clothing worn by the eight women killed in the crash.

The papers found in the truck were no more than what should have been there: the driver's passport and licence, insurance forms, customs papers, bills of lading, and an invoice giving the name of the lumberyard to which the wood was to be delivered. The driver's papers were Romanian, the customs papers were in order, and the shipment was on its way to a woodmill in Sacile, a small city about a hundred kilometres to the south.

Nothing more was to be learned from the wreckage of the truck, which was finally, with great difficulty and with enormous disruption of traffic, hauled up to the roadside by winches attached to three tow-trucks. There, it was lifted on to a flatbed truck and sent back to its owner in Romania. The wood was eventually delivered to the woodmill in Sacile, which refused to pay the extra charges imposed.

The strange death of the women was picked up by the Austrian and Italian press, where stories about
them
appeared in articles variously entided,
‘
Der lodeslaster
’
and
‘
Camion della Morte'. Somehow, the Austrians had managed to get hold of three photos of the bodies lying in
the
snow and printed them with the story. Speculation was rife: economic refugees? illegal workers? The collapse of Communism had removed what would once have been the almost certain conclusion: spies. In
the
end, the mystery was never resolved, and
the
investigation died somewhere amidst the failure of the Romanian authorities to answer questions or return papers and the Italians
’
fading interest The women's bodies, as well as that of the driver, were returned by plane to Bucharest, where they were buried under the earth of their native land and under
the
even greater weight of its bureaucracy.

Their story quickly disappeared from the press, driven off by the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Milan and the murder of yet another judge. It did not disappear, however, before it was read by Professoressa Paola Falier, Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Ca'
Pesaro in Venice and, not incidentally to this story, wife of Guido Brunetti, Commissario of Police in that city.

3

Carlo Trevisan, Avv
ocato Carlo Trevisan, to give him the title he preferred to hear used when people spoke of him, was a man of very ordinary past, which in no way impinged upon the fact that he was a man of limitless future. A native of Trento, a city near the Italian border with Austria, he had gone to Padua to study law, which he did brilliantly, graduating with the highest honours and the united praise of his professors. From there, he accepted a position in a law office in Venice, where he soon became an expert on international law, one of the few men in the city to interest himself in such matters. After only five years, he left that firm and set up his own office, specializing in corporate and international law.

Italy is a country where many laws are passed one day, only to be repealed the next Nor is it strange that, in a country where the point of even
the
simplest newspaper story is often impossible to decipher, there sometimes exists a measure of confusion as to the exact meaning of the law. The resulting fluidity of interpretation creates a climate most propitious to lawyers, who claim the ability to understan
d the law. Among these, then, Avv
ocato Carlo Trevisan.

Because he was born
industrious and ambitious,
Avvocato
Trevisan prospered. Because he married well,
the
daughter of a banker, he was put in familial and familiar contact with many of the most successful and powerful industrialists and bankers of the Veneto. His practi
ce expanded along with his waistl
ine, until,
the
year he turned fifty,
Avvocato
Trevisan had seven lawyers working in his office, none of
them
a partner in
the
firm. He attended weekly Mass at Santa Maria del Giglio, had twice served with distinction on the City Council of Venice, and had two children, a boy and a girl, bom bright and both beautiful.

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
M
ontblanc, 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 ticketl
ess 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 gl
ad to be awakened before the train pulled in, especially if he had to catch the No. 1 boat to Rialto, which left the
embarc
adero
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 s
lowly 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.