Dressed for Death
Donna Leon
Praise for Donna Leon’s Commisario Brunetti Mysteries
“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
“Leon’s books shimmer in the grace of their setting and are warmed by the charm of their characters.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Superb . . . An outstanding book, deserving of the widest audience possible, a chance for American readers to again experience a master practitioner’s art.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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
“Uniform Justice is a neat balancing act. Its silken prose and considerable charm almost conceal its underlying anger; it is an unlovely story set in the loveliest of cities. . . . Donna Leon is indeed sophisticated.”
—Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post
“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.”
—Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)
“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 Oregonian (Portland)
“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
A PENGUIN/GROVE PRESS BOOK
DRESSED FOR DEATH
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; AcquaAlta; 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.
Dressed for Death
Donna Leon
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in the United States of America by HarperCollins Publishers 1994
First published in Great Britain as The Anonymous Venetian by Macmillan Publishers 1994
Published in Penguin Books 2005
Reprinted by arrangement with Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
This edition published 2008
1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Donna Leon, 1994
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either 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.
ISBN 978-0-14-311589-2
CIP data available
Printed in the United States of America
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 of the author’s rights is appreciated.
To the memory of Arleen Auger a perished sun
Ah forse adesso
Sul morir mio delusa
Priva d’ogni speranza, e di consiglio
Lagrime di dolor versa dal ciglio.
Ah, perhaps already
Deceived by my death
Deprived of every hope and counsel
Tears of pain flow from her eyes.
Mozart, Lucio Silla
1
The shoe was red, the red of London phone booths, New York fire engines, although these were not images that came to the man who first saw the shoe. He thought of the red of the Ferrari Testarossa on the calendar in the room where the butchers changed their clothes, the one with the naked blonde draped across it, seeming to make fevered love to the left head-light. He saw the shoe lying drunkenly on its side, its toe barely touching the edge of one of the pools of oil that lay like a spotted curse upon the land beyond the abattoir. He saw it there and, of course, he also thought of blood.
Somehow, years before, permission had been given to put the slaughterhouse there, long before Marghera had blossomed (although that is perhaps an inopportune choice of verb) into one of the leading industrial centers of Italy, before the petroleum refineries and the chemical plants had spread themselves across the acres of swampy land that lay on the other side of the laguna from Venice, pearl of the Adriatic. The cement building lay, low and feral, within the enclosure of a high mesh fence. Had the fence been built in the early days, when sheep and cattle could still be herded down dusty roads toward the building? Was its original purpose to ke
ep them from escaping before they were led, pushed, beaten up the ramp toward their fate? The animals arrived in trucks now, trucks which backed directly up to the high-sided ramps, and so there was no chance that the animals could escape. And surely no one would want to come near that building; hence the fence was hardly necessary to keep anyone away. Perhaps because of this, the long gaps in it went unmended, and stray dogs, drawn by the stench of what went on inside, sometimes came through the fence at night and howled with longing for what they knew was there.
The fields around the slaughterhouse stood empty; as if obeying a taboo as deep as blood itself, the factories stood far off from the low cement building. The buildings maintained their distance, but their ooze and their runoff and those deadly fluids that were piped into the ground knew nothing of taboo and seeped each year closer to the slaughterhouse. Black slime bubbled up around the stems of marsh grass, and a peacock-bright sheen of oil floated on the surface of the puddles that never disappeared, no matter how dry the season. Nature had been poisoned here, outside, yet it was the work that went on inside that filled people with horror.
The shoe, the red shoe, lay on its side about a hundred meters to the rear of the slaughterhouse, just outside the fence, just to the left of a large clump of tall sea grass that seemed to thrive on the poisons percolating around its roots. At eleven-thirty on a hot Monday morning in August, a thickset man in a blood-soaked leather apron flung back the metal door at the rear of the slaughterhouse and emerged into the pounding sun. From behind him swept waves of heat, stench, and howls. The sun made it difficult to feel that it was cooler here, but at least the stench of offal was less foul, and the sounds came not from the shrieks and squeals that filled the air behind him but from the hum of traffic, a kilometer away, as the tourists poured into Venice for the Ferragosto holiday.
He wiped a bloody hand on his apron, stooping to find a dry spot down by the hem, then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a package of Nazionale. With a plastic lighter, he lit a cigarette and pulled at it greedily, glad of the smell and acrid taste of the cheap tobacco. A deep-throated howl came from the door behind him, pushing him away from the building, over toward the fence and the shade that was to be found under the stunted leaves of an acacia that had struggled to a height of four meters.
Standing there, he turned his back on the building and looked out across the forest of smokestacks and industrial chimneys that swept off toward Mestre. Flames spurted up from some of them; grey, greenish clouds spilled out of others. A light breeze, too weak to be felt on his skin, brought the clouds back toward him. He pulled at his cigarette and looked down at his feet, always careful, here in the fields, where he stepped. He looked down and saw the shoe, lying on its side beyond the fence.
It was made out of some sort of cloth, that shoe, not out of leather. Silk? Satin? Bettino Cola didn’t know that sort of thing, but he did know that his wife had a pair made out of the same sort of stuff, and she had spent more than a hundred thousand lire on them. He’d have to kill fifty sheep or twenty calves to earn that much money, yet she’d spend it on a pair of shoes, wear them once, then stuff them in the back of the closet and never look at them again.
Nothing else in the blasted landscape deserved his attention, so he studied the shoe, pulling at his cigarette. He moved to the left and looked at it from another angle. Although it lay close to a large pool of oil, it appeared to rest on a patch of dry land. Cola took another step to the left, one that drew him out into the full violence of the sun, and studied the area around the shoe, looking for its mate. There, under the clump of grass, he saw an oblong shape that seemed to be the sole of the other one, it too lying on one side.
He dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the soft earth with his toe, walked a few meters along the fence, then bent low and crept through a large hole, careful of the jagged, rusty barbs of metal that encircled him. Straightening up, he walked back toward the shoe, now a pair of them and perhaps salvageable because of that.
“Roba di puttana,” he muttered under his breath, seeing the heel on the first shoe, taller than the pack of cigarettes in his pocket: only a whore would wear such things. He reached down and picked up the first shoe, careful to keep from touching the outside. As he had hoped, it was clean, had not fallen into the oily puddle. He took a few steps to the right, reached down and wrapped two fingers around the heel of its mate, but it appeared to be caught on a tuft of grass. He lowered himself to one knee, careful to see where he knelt, and gave the shoe a sharp tug. It came loose, but when Bettino Cola saw that what he had pulled it loose from was a human foot, he leaped back from the bush and dropped the first shoe into the black puddle from which it had managed to survive the night.
2
The police arrived on the scene twenty minutes later, two blue and white sedans from the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. By then, the field in back of the slaughterhouse was filled with men from inside the building, brought out into the sun by curiosity about this different kind of slaughter. Cola had run drunkenly back inside as soon as he saw the foot and the leg to which it was attached and had gone into the foreman’s office to tell him there was a dead woman in the field beyond the fence.
Cola was a good worker, a serious man, and so the foreman believed him and called the police immediately without going outside to check and see whether Cola was telling the truth. But others had seen Cola come into the building and came to ask what it was, what he had seen. The foreman snarled at them to get back to work; the refrigerated trucks were waiting at the loading docks, and they didn’t have time to stand around all day and gabble about some whore who got her throat cut.
He didn’t mean this literally, of course, for Cola had told him only about the shoe and the foot, but the fields between the factories were well-known territory to the men who worked in the factories—and to the women who worked in those fields. If she’d gotten herself killed there, she was probably one of those painted wrecks who spent the late afternoon standing at the side of the road that led from the industrial zone back into Mestre. Quitting time, time to go home, but why not a quick stop at the side of the road and a short walk back to a blanket spread beside a clump of grass? It was quick, they expected nothing of you except ten thousand lire, and they were, more and more often now, blondes come in from Eastern Europe, so poor that they couldn’t make you use anything, not like the Italian girls on Via Cappuccina, and since when did a whore tell a man what to do or where to put it? She probably did that, got pushy, and the man had pushed back. Plenty more of them and plenty more coming across the border every month.
The police cars pulled up and a uniformed officer got out of each. They walked toward the front of the building, but the foreman reached them before they got to the door. Behind him stood Cola, feeling important to be the center of all this attention, but still faintly sick from the sight of that foot.
“Is it you who called?” the first policeman asked. His face was round, glistening with sweat, and he stared at the foreman from behind dark glasses.
“Yes,” the foreman answered. “There’s a dead woman in the field behind the building.”
“Did you see her?”
“No,” the foreman answered, stepping aside and motioning Cola to step forward. “He did.”
After a nod from the first one, the policeman from the second car pulled a blue notebook out of his jacket pocket, flipped it open, uncapped his pen, and stood with the pen poised over the page.
“Your name?” asked the first policeman, the dark focus of his glance now directed at the butcher.
“Cola, Bettino.”
“Address?”
“What’s the use of asking his address?” interrupted the foreman. “There’s a dead woman out there.”
The first officer turned away from Cola and tilted his head down a little, just enough to allow him to peer at the foreman over the tops of his sunglasses. “She’s not going anywhere.” Then, turning back to Cola, he repeated, “Address?”
<
br /> “Castello 3453.”
“How long have you worked here?” he asked, nodding at the building that stood behind Cola.
“Fifteen years.”
“What time did you get here this morning?”
“Seven-thirty. Same as always.”
“What were you doing in the field?” Somehow, the way he asked the questions and the way the other one wrote down the answers made Cola feel they suspected him of something.
“I went out to have a cigarette.”
“The middle of August, and you went out into the sun to have a cigarette?” the first officer asked, making it sound like lunacy. Or a lie.
“It was my break time,” Cola said with mounting resentment. “I always go outside. I like to get away from the smell.” The word made it real to the policemen, and they looked toward the building, the one with the notebook incapable of disguising the contraction of his nostrils at what they met.
“Where is she?”
“Just beyond the fence. She’s under a clump of bushes, so I didn’t see her at first.”
“Why did you go near her?”
“I saw a shoe.”
“You what?”
“I saw a shoe. Out in the field, and then I saw the second one. I thought they might be good, so I went through the fence to get them. I thought maybe my wife would want them.” That was a lie; he had thought he could sell them, but he didn’t want to tell this to the police. It was a small lie, and entirely innocent, but it was only the first of many lies that the police were going to be told about the shoe and the person who wore it.
“Then what?” the first policeman prompted when Cola added nothing to this.
“Then I came back here.”
“No, before that,” the first policeman said with an irritated shake of his head. “When you saw the shoe. When you saw her. What happened?”
Cola spoke quickly, hoping that would get him through and rid of it. “1 picked up one shoe, and then I saw the other one. I was under the bush. So I pulled on it. I thought it was stuck. So I pulled again, and it came off.” He swallowed once, twice. “It was on her foot. That’s why it wouldn’t come off.”
