Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

Exactly: without knowing it, that morning he had put young Auseri in a position to unblock his complex, and now, in order to unblock that other, more dangerous, complex-guilt-he had managed to scare him into thinking he might be mad, and poor Michelangelo-esque Davide was trying to demonstrate to him that he wasn’t: thinking you’re mad is more painful than thinking you’re guilty of murder. But it was too unpleasant a job: selling pharmaceuticals would have been less lucrative but also less disagreeable.

‘That handkerchief and that other object she left in the car,’ Davide resumed, ‘I didn’t want to see them, they made me feel bad, but I couldn’t resist, I’d take them out, I’d think about when she wiped her lips and instead of taking her with me I threw her out …’

He was a pitiful spectacle, so athletic and yet so morbidly sensitive, but at least he wasn’t closed up in himself as if inside a ball of concrete, the way he had been before.

‘All right, I’d like to see those things for myself. Where are they?’ Just to allow him to let off steam as much as possible, to get him to free himself, at least a little. Davide didn’t want to tell him at first, but he insisted.

They were in his beautiful soft suitcase, in an internal pocket with a zip.

‘I’d have liked to throw them away and never see them again, but even thinking about where I’d throw that made me feel bad.’

Of course, the morbid psychology of memories. On the glass surface of the little table, he now had the famous handkerchief which, in Davide’s mind, was the handkerchief of the girl he’d killed, and that little object, which looked like a tiny telephone receiver for a doll, two little wheels joined on one side by a strip of metal, no more than three centimetres in length. He barely looked at the handkerchief, but picked up this other object and held it in the palm of his hand. In a tone very different from his previous sharp, harsh one, he asked, ‘This object fell out of the girl’s handbag that day, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘No. I thought it might be a sample of some kind of beauty product, but I don’t know.’

‘Have you tried to open it?’

‘I never even thought it could be opened.’

‘But you just said you thought it was a sample. A sample can be opened.’

‘I never thought too much about it. Just looking at it makes me feel bad.’

He understood. ‘I’ll tell you what it is: it’s a Minox cartridge.’ He saw that Davide didn’t know what a Minox cartridge was, so he explained it to him. ‘Inside here is a strip of film about fifty centimetres long and less than a centimetre wide, on which you can take more than fifty photographs with a miniature camera called a Minox.’ And having finished the explanation he forgot him, as if he no longer had him there in front of him, as if Davide didn’t exist and he was alone, in the air sickly with heat, in the soft, antiquated light of that lamp, a professional’s lamp, as the shop assistant had said to his father when he bought it for him. Only him and that cartridge.

A Minox wasn’t exactly a camera for amateurs. Little larger than a cigarette lighter, it had been used by spies during the war to photograph documents, as any reader of espionage novels knew. It could take photographs in fog and through smoke, which was why it had also been used a lot by war correspondents. But it required practice to take photographs with such a small camera, it wasn’t easy to frame the shots or keep the camera still. For an amateur, taking fifty photos with a single cartridge was too much, but for a professional it was ideal. And being so small, the film could easily be sent by post, and equally easily be hidden. He had once read a novel in which a spy had kept a Minox cartridge in his mouth when crossing a border and still managed to speak, though that could, of course, have been an exaggeration on the part of the writer-or maybe the character had a larger than average mouth.

He still felt nervous. He didn’t like pointless, infantile fantasies, but this cartridge came from a woman’s handbag and there weren’t many women so keen on photography that they’d use a Minox. Besides, the girl wasn’t exactly a normal, home-loving individual: every now and again she went out, let herself be picked up by a man and went with him, for financial reward. Superintendent Carrua would have defined such behaviour as prostitution, which might not have been very chivalrous, but was certainly accurate. In addition, this girl, for reasons she had not wanted to reveal, had intended to kill herself, and in fact had killed herself. He didn’t want to speculate, but he would have liked to know if this film had been exposed completely or partly-it must have been through a camera because there wasn’t a strip of film between the two spools, as there would have been if it hadn’t been used-if after a year it could still provide a sufficiently clear negative and, above all, what had been photographed. Of one thing he was sure: that these wouldn’t be holiday snaps, an old lady under a beach umbrella, a woman bathing on the rocks, a group of friends on a beach playing with a large ball.

And all these things he wanted to know immediately, he wouldn’t sleep or eat or think about anything else until he did.

He wrapped the cartridge in the handkerchief and put it in his pocket. ‘Excuse me a moment, I’ll be right back.’ The telephone was in the hall. The kitchen door was ajar and through it he could see Lorenza knitting a winter outfit for Sara and listening to the radio. He smiled at her and gestured to her to remain seated, he didn’t need anything. He looked at his watch: nine o’clock.

‘Superintendent Carrua, please.’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘Duca Lamberti.’

A long wait, a few clicks, then Carrua’s voice, a little distorted. ‘Sorry, I’m yawning.’

‘I’m sorry, too, but I needed to talk to you urgently.’

‘You could have come here without phoning, I’m always ready to see you.’

‘I wanted to know if the photographic lab was open.’

‘The lab? Obviously it’s closed. They’re still doing a short week.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow morning.’ He couldn’t, he’d rather go and rouse some photographer from his bed.

‘If it’s urgent, I could have it opened and get hold of the technicians.’

‘It is urgent. I’ll explain when I get there.’

‘All right, I’ll be waiting.’

‘I’ll be bringing Auseri’s son with me.’

Ten minutes later, he and Davide were in the Via Fatebenefratelli, and by 11:4 °Carrua’s large desk was covered in photographs in 18×24 format: the enlargements from the Minox film. There were also two large bottles of Coca-Cola on the desk. Only Davide had not taken his jacket off: they had sat him down at the far end of the room, in front of the table where the typewriter was, and there he had stayed and there he was even now, while they looked at the photographs.

‘What are you thinking, Duca?’

‘I’m sorting the photographs.’

From a puritan point of view, they were obscene images. They were extremely clear, in spite of being enlarged, and technically excellent. Against a vague background of clouds, the kind you found in old photographic studios, stood the subject, a naked woman.

‘There isn’t much to sort: half are of the brunette and half of the blonde.’

That was true: there were about twenty-five photographs of the same dark-haired girl, and twenty-five or twenty-six of the blonde. It could have been claimed that these were artistic images, however daring, in fact the poses seemed to have a modicum of aspiration towards artistry, but that would have been splitting hairs. The poses of the two girls were openly alluring, it wasn’t just their nakedness, it was also the gestures of the arms, the position of the legs. In most of the photographs the girls were hiding their faces, but not in all of them. They couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old.