Donna Leon - Beastly Things

Few remarks could have as effectively steeled Brunetti’s intention to see what went on here.

‘We do,’ he said and got to his feet.

FOR ALL THE care they had taken in dressing, Vianello and Brunetti might as well have worn tuxedos to the slaughterhouse. The first thing Signorina Borelli did, in the face of Brunetti’s adamant insistence that they be taken to see where Dottor Nava had worked, was to phone the chief knacker, Leonardo Bianchi, and ask him to meet them in the changing room. Then she led them from her office, down a cement-floored corridor, up a double flight of stairs and into a spartan room that reminded Brunetti of the ones he had seen in American films of high schools: metal lockers lined the walls, a table in the centre was chipped and scarred with cigarette burns and spills of thick, dried liquid. Benches held crumpled copies of La Gazzetta dello Sport as well as discarded socks and empty paper cups.

She led them silently across the room to a locker, took a key ring from her pocket and used a small key to open the padlock on the door. She reached in and pulled out a folded white paper jumpsuit of the sort worn by the men on the crime squad, shook it open and handed it to Brunetti, another to Vianello. ‘Take your shoes off to put it on,’ she said.

Brunetti and Vianello obeyed the instructions. By the time they had their shoes on again, she had found two sets of transparent plastic shoe covers. Silently she handed them to Brunetti. He and Vianello slipped them on. Next came transparent plastic caps that looked like the ones Paola wore in the shower. They pulled them over their hair.

Signorina Borelli looked them up and down, saying nothing. The door opposite the one they had used opened, and a tall bearded man came into the room. He wore a long smock that had once been white but was now grey: there were broad red smears across the front and sides. Brunetti looked at his feet and was glad she had given them the plastic covers.

The man, whom Brunetti understood must be the chief knacker, nodded to Signorina Borelli and looked at the two men indifferently. She made no attempt to introduce them. The man said, ‘Come with me, gentlemen.’ Brunetti and Vianello followed Bianchi towards the door. When he opened it, cries and howls were newly audible, and heavy thumps and clangs came from beyond it.

He led them down a narrow corridor towards a door about five metres ahead of them. Brunetti was intensely aware of the ruffling noise made by his protective suit and the slippery feel under his feet as his shoes slid around inside their plastic covers. He looked down to see what the surface of the floor was, the better to calculate the sort of purchase his feet would have. His step faltered for the briefest instant when he saw a bloody sole-print on the floor, heading their way. He moved his right foot quickly to the side and came down heavily in order to avoid stepping on the other print, too late realizing that it wouldn’t make any difference, not really; at least not beyond the level of superstition.

Brunetti shot a quick glance behind him and caught sight of Vianello’s strained face; he quickly returned his attention to Bianchi’s back. Brunetti shivered: the increasing noise had obliterated other sensitivities, and he had not noticed the cold until now. Vianello made a humming noise that was barely audible. Noise and cold intensified as they got closer to the door. Bianchi stopped in front of it and put his hand on the metal bar that stretched across it. Push down, and the door would open.

He stared at Brunetti, looked beyond him to Vianello, saying nothing, his question in his eyes. Brunetti had a moment’s uncertainty about the wisdom of all of this, but Nava’s wife had said that the veterinarian was troubled by something taking place here.

Brunetti lifted his chin in a signal that could have been command or encouragement. Bianchi turned away from him and pushed down on the bar, swinging open the door. Sound, cold, and light spilled over them. The cries and howls, whimpers and thuds mingled in a modern cacophony that assaulted more than their sense of hearing. Most sounds are neutral. Footsteps all sound the same, really: the menace comes from the setting in which they are heard. Running water, too, is no more than that. Bathtub overfilling, mountain stream: context is all. Unweave a symphony and the air is filled with odd, unrelated noises that no longer follow one another. A howl of pain, however, is always that, whether it comes from a beast with two or four legs, and a human voice raised in anger causes the same reaction regardless of the language in which the anger is expressed or whom it is directed at.

The stimuli given to the other senses did not permit of pretty word or thought games: Brunetti’s stomach contracted away from a smell that was as strong as a blow, and his eyes attempted to flee from red in all its varieties and all its striations. His mind intervened, forcing him to think and in thought to find some escape from what surrounded him. He thought it was William James: yes, William James, the brother of the man his wife loved, a half-memory of something he’d written more than a hundred years ago, that the human eye was always pulled to ‘things that move, things that something else, blood’.

Brunetti attempted to hold those words up in front of him, like a shield from behind which he could look at what was happening. He saw that they were on a grated catwalk protected on both sides by handrails and raised at least three metres from the work area beneath them. Seeing and not seeing, perceiving and failing to perceive, he guessed, from the sight of so much empty space beneath them, that the work was nearing its end. Six or seven yellow-booted men in white rubber coats and yellow hard-hats moved below them in the cement-floored cubicles and did things with knives and pointed instruments to pigs and sheep; hence the noise. Animals fell at the feet of the men, but some managed to flee, crashing into the walls before slipping and falling. Others, wounded and bleeding and unable to get to their feet, continued to flail about with their legs, feet scrambling against floors and walls, while the men dodged their hooves to deliver another blow.

Some of the sheep, Brunetti noticed, were protected from the knives by their thick coats and had to be struck repeatedly on the head by what looked like metal rods that ended in hooks. Occasionally the hooks were used for other purposes, but Brunetti looked away before he could be sure of that, though the wail that always followed the desertion of his eyes left no doubt about what went on.

The sheep made low, animal noises – grunts and bleats – while the pigs struck him as sounding not unlike what he, or Vianello, would sound like, were they down there and not up here. The calves bleated.

The smell bored into his nose: it was not only the iron-sharp tang of blood but the invasive stench of offal and excrement. Just as Brunetti realized that, he heard the water and gave unconscious, unknowing thanks for the sound. He looked to the source and saw one of the white-coated men below them spray an empty cubicle with what seemed to be a fire hose. The worker stood, legs widespread, the better to brace his body against the force of the jet of water that he sprayed across the floor of the cubicle, waving the stream back and forth so as to wash everything down an open grille in the cement.

The walls of the cubicles were made of wire fencing, so water coursed into the adjacent one, swirling away the blood that ran from the nose and mouth of a pig that lay against a wall, feet scraping across the floor in a vain attempt to push himself farther from the man who stood above him. The man there used his metal pole, and when Brunetti looked back, the pig appeared to have taken flight and was ascending towards them, perhaps to leave this place behind and continue – who knew where? Brunetti turned away as the pig’s twitching body appeared beside him, joined to a metal chain by a hook through its neck. Brunetti looked for and found Vianello, but before either could speak, a rash of sudden red spots splashed across the Inspector’s chest. Vianello, stunned, glanced down and raised a hand to try to wipe the red away, but he never completed the gesture: the hand fell to his side, and he looked at Brunetti, face blank.