Death and Judgment

  Praise for Donna Leon’s

  Commissario Brunetti Mysteries

  “In this stunning novel, the fourteenth to feature the dogged, intuitive Venetian police detective Guido Brunetti, Leon combines an engrossing, complex plot with an indictment of the corruption endemic to Italian society. … Many of Leon’s favorite characters appear. … They balance this dark, cynical tale of widespread secrecy, violence and corruption.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Commissario Guido Brunetti’s fourteenth case may be his best yet—not that he’d see it that way himself. … Leon’s most adroit balance of teasing mystery, Brunetti’s droll battles with his coworkers and higher-ups, and intimations of something far deeper and darker behind the curtain.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The appeal of Guido Brunetti, the hero of Donna Leon’s long-running Venetian crime series, comes not from his shrewdness, though he is plenty shrewd, nor from his quick wit. It comes, instead, from his role as an everyman. … Not so different from our own days at the office or nights around the dinner table. Crime fiction for those willing to grapple with, rather than escape, the uncertainties of daily life.”—Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)

  “The evocative Venetian setting and the warmth and humanity of the Brunetti family add considerable pleasure to this nuanced, intelligent mystery, another winner from the Venice-based Leon. Highly recommended.” —Michele Laber, Library Journal (starred review)

  “Another of her fabulous Italian mysteries … She has her finger on the pulse.” —Bookseller

  “Gives the reader a feel for life in Venice … The story is filled with the average citizen’s cynicism, knowledge of corruption, and deep distrust and fear of government and police. Characters are brilliantly portrayed. Even bit players become real and individual, and Brunetti and his family are multifaceted and layered.”

  —Sally Fellows, Mystery News

  “In her classy, literate, atmospheric Commissario Guido Brunetti series, Donna Leon takes readers … to a Venice that tourists rarely see.” —BookPage

  “Brunetti … is the most humane sleuth since Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret … he is a decent man [who achieves] a quiet heroism.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “If you’re heading to Venice, take along a few of [Leon’s] books to use for both entertainment and travel directions.”

  —The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “A beautifully cadenced mystery … no one is more graceful and accomplished than Leon.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Smuggling, sexual betrayal, high-class fakery and, of course, Mafia money make for a rich brew … Exactly the right cop for the right city. Long may he walk, or wade, through it.”

  —Sarah Dunant, author of The Birth of Venus

  “Richly atmospheric, Leon introduces you to the Venice insiders know.” —Ellen Hale, USA Today

  “A new Donna Leon book about … Brunetti is ready for our immediate pleasure. She uses the relatively small and crime-free canvas of Venice for riffs about Italian life, sexual styles, and—best of all—the kind of ingrown business and political corruption that seems to lurk just below the surface.”—Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune “There’s atmosphere aplenty in Uniform Justice … Brunetti is a compelling character, a good man trying to stay on the honest path in a devious and twisted world.” —The Baltimore Sun

  “Venice provides a beautifully rendered backdrop for this operatic story of fathers and sons, and Leon’s writing trembles with true feeling.” —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “One of the best international crime writers is Donna Leon, and her Commissario Guido Brunetti tales set in Venice are at the apex of continental thrillers … The author has written a pitch-perfect tale where all the characters are three-dimensional, breathing entities, and the lives they live, while by turns sweet and horrific, are always believable. Let Leon be your travel agent and tour guide to Venice. It’s an unforgettable trip.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “Events are powered by Leon’s compelling portraits.” —The Portland Oregonian

  “The plot is silky and complex, and the main appeal is the protagonist, Brunetti.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Leon, a wonderfully literate writer, sets forth her plot clearly and succinctly. … The ending of Uniform Justice is not a neat wrap-up of the case with justice prevailing. It is rather the ending that one would expect in real life. Leon says that ‘the murder mystery is a craft, not an art,’ but I say that murder mystery in her hands is an art.” —The Roanoke Times

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Donna Leon, who was born in New Jersey, has lived in Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her mysteries featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti include Dressed for Death; Death in a Strange Country; Death and Judgment; Acqua Alta; Quietly in Their Sleep; A Noble Radiance; Fatal Remedies; Friends in High Places; Uniform Justice; Doctored Evidence; Blood from a Stone; Through a Glass, Darkly; Suffer the Little Children; and The Girl of His Dreams.

  Death and Judgment

  Donna Leon

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by HarperCollins Publishers 1995

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Reprinted by arrangement with Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  This edition published 2009

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Donna Leon, 1995

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-0-14-311591-5

  CIP data available

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Alma Hochhauser Orenstein

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support o
f the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For Toni Sepeda and Craig Manley

  Questo è il fin de chi fa mal!

  E de’ perfidi la morte

  Alla vita è sempre ugual.

  This is the end of evildoers.

  The death of the perfidious

  Is always the same as their lives.

  Don Giovanni

  Mozart/DaPonte

  Death

  and

  Judgment

  1

  On the last Tuesday in September, snow fell for the first time in the mountains separating northern Italy from Austria, more than a month before it could ordinarily be expected. The storm arrived suddenly, carried by fat clouds that swept in from nowhere and with no warning. Within half an hour, the roads of the pass above Tarvisio were slick and deadly. No rain had fallen for a month, and so the first snow lay upon roads already covered with a glistening layer of oil and grease.

  The combination proved deadly to a sixteen-wheeled truck bearing Romanian license plates and carrying a cargo manifest for ninety cubic meters of pine boards. Just north of Tarvisio, on a curve that led down to the entrance to the autostrada and thus into the warmer, safer roads of Italy, the driver braked too hard on a curve and lost control of the immense vehicle, which plunged off the road moving at fifty kilometers an hour. The wheels gouged out huge trenches in the not yet frozen earth, while the body of the truck caromed off trees, snapping them and hurling them about in a long swath that led to the bottom of the gully, where the truck finally smacked into the rock face of a mountain, smashing open and scattering its cargo in a wide arc.

  The first men on the scene, drivers of other heavy-transport trucks who stopped without thinking to help one of their own, went first to the cabin of the truck; but there was no hope for the driver, who hung in his seat belt, half-suspended from the cabin, one side of his head battered in by the branch that had ripped off the driver’s door as the truck careened down the slope. The driver of a load of pigs being brought down to Italy for slaughter climbed over what remained of the hood of the truck, peering through the shattered windshield to see if there was another driver. The seat was empty, and so the searchers, who had by then gathered, began to look for the other driver, thrown free of the truck.

  Four drivers of trucks of varying sizes began to stumble down the hill, leaving a fifth up on the roadway to set out warning flares and use his radio to summon the polizia stradale. Snow still fell heavily, so it was some time before one of them spotted the twisted body that could be seen a third of the way down the slope. Two of them ran toward it, they too hoping that at least one of the drivers had survived the accident.

  Slipping, occasionally falling to their knees in their haste, the men struggled in the snow that the truck had crashed through so effortlessly. The first man knelt beside the motionless form and began to brush at the thin layer of white that covered the supine figure, hoping to find him still breathing. But then his fingers caught in the long hair, and when he brushed the snow away from the face, he exposed the unmistakably delicate bones of a woman.

  He heard another driver cry out from below him. Turning in the still falling snow, he looked back and saw the other man kneeling over something that lay a few meters to the left of the scar torn by the truck as it had plunged down the hill.

  “What is it?” he called, placing his fingers softly against her neck to feel for life in the oddly positioned figure.

  “It’s a woman,” the second one cried. And then, just as he felt the absolute stillness of the throat of the woman below him, the other called up to him, “She’s dead.”

  Later, the first driver to explore behind the truck said that he thought, when he first saw them, that the truck must have been carrying a cargo of mannequins, you know, those plastic women they dress up and put in the windows of shops. There they were, at least a half dozen of them, lying scattered over the snow behind the shattered rear doors of the truck. One even seemed to have gotten caught in the lumber that had been tossed about inside the truck and lay there, half-hanging from the back platform, legs pinned down by stacks of boards so securely wrapped that the impact of the truck against the mountain had not been sufficient to break them open. But why would mannequins be dressed in overcoats, he remembered wondering. And why that red in the snow all around them?

  2

  It took the polizia stradale 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 kilometer-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 carabinieri. They left their cars parked on the shoulder of the highway and lurched down the slope toward 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 meters 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 upon 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 blond, 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 onto the floor of the truck. The other five, antlike, 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 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 had pulled his jacket over the girl’s face and gotten 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 now stop. 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 slipping all papers and objects into clearly labeled 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 paneling 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 out 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 license, 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 wood mill in Sacile, a small city about a hundred kilometers 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 onto a flatbed truck and sent back to its owner in Romania. The wood was eventually delivered to the wood mill in Sacile, which refused to pay the extra charges imposed.