Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

‘You’re crazy! What do you want me to tell you? Try to touch me and you’ll see what I can do.’ She was playing the ingénue, maybe successfully.

‘I’m not curious to know what you can do, but try to tell the truth and you’ll see you won’t have to do anything.’

Luigi reappeared with some small bottles in his hand. ‘I found peroxide after all.’

The man took the bottles and put them on the floor by his feet. ‘You still have time to tell me everything you know.’

She had never studied acting, but she tried to do the best she could, to scream at the top of her voice, a scream was the natural reaction of a terrified woman who didn’t know anything. In reality, she knew everything the man wanted to know, and wasn’t terrified. Her contempt for the man was overwhelming: she would never lower herself to be afraid of a piece of dirt like him.

Or rather, she tried to scream, but before she could scream she found her mouth filled with cotton wool, then the photographer forced her to sit down and held her firmly to the chair from behind.

‘You still have time to tell the truth.’ The man had sat down on her knees to stop her from kicking. At last she understood what that short-sighted look meant: he was a sadist, in the most technical sense of the word. ‘I could hit you and knock you out, then while you’re out I could slash your wrists. That would be amusing for the police: Oh look, we keep finding women with their wrists slashed, what on earth does it mean?’ His voice had become soft and unctuous, but it didn’t scare her, only disgusted her. ‘But I need you alive, I need you to talk. I’m telling you for the last time, if you want to tell me the truth I’ll take the cotton wool out.’

She shrugged, and told him with her eyes that he was mad, that she had told him everything she knew.

‘Then I’ll start with an incision on your forehead, I’m generous and I’ll do it high up, that way you’ll easily be able to hide it with your hair.’ He rubbed her forehead with the alcohol, like an attentive nurse. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, I only want to disfigure you, at least if you don’t talk.’

She almost didn’t feel the cut, nor did any blood run down her face, because he scrupulously dabbed the wound with the peroxide while the photographer left her head free for a moment.

‘If you have anything new to tell me, nod your head and I’ll take out the cotton wool, but if you’re going to tell me again that you don’t know anything, then forget it, I’ll only get angry.’

Maybe that noise was only in her mind, an auditory hallucination which she heard because of her hope that the noise was real, but she instinctively turned her head towards the door because she had heard the sound of the bell.

‘Did someone just ring?’ the man asked.

‘No,’ the photographer said. ‘She must be waiting for somebody, and she thought they rang.’

The man reflected, with the penknife in his hand, so close to her face that she could see it was a promotional object and read on the handle the name of a famous brand of liqueurs. ‘If she was expecting someone, they’d be here by now, so try to keep calm. This girl knows where the film from last year is, maybe she even has it, and she’ll tell us eventually.’ He rubbed her left cheek with the alcohol. ‘If you talk,’ he said to her, ‘you’ll avoid a cut on your cheek which no amount of plastic surgery will put right.’ He looked at her and waited, then made the incision, his eyes almost closed behind his glasses, staring at her cheek like a diligent schoolboy at the page of an exercise book on which he’s carefully writing a beautiful sentence. ‘Whatever you know, you can’t use it against us anyway. Tell your friends, if you have any, but if you talk I’ll stop here.’ He started dabbing the cut with the peroxide, but it wasn’t enough, rivulets of blood started falling onto her neck, her chest, all the way to her stomach. ‘Will you talk or shall I continue?’

First they saw Livia’s taxi pull up. Even without the little telescope he had a good view of his Livia getting out in front of the stark, imposing temple of construction, but he used the telescope anyway to look at her more closely. He very much liked the dark red cotton dress she was wearing, she had good taste in clothes, her simplicity was so calculated, it was almost irritating. Then Livia was swallowed up by that deity of concrete and the taxi driver angrily headed back towards the heedless, sleeping metropolis. It was a few minutes after two, her punctuality was also irritating.

Their observation point was under the arbour, which rested against the roof of a tiny ramshackle house, like those you found in magazines for little children. Around the house and the arbour there were trees with bright, tiny leaves that created an ideal barrier, because from the outside you couldn’t see anything and from inside you could see everything. Inside the house there was a fat young man sleeping with his head propped on the table. They had given him five thousand lire and this had relaxed him completely and had removed any curiosity he might have had. There was a side road, about a hundred metres long, joining the little house to the main road, the Giulietta was parked with its front towards the main road, in the shelter of the trees, and they were leaning on the trunk of the Giulietta in the relatively cool shade, watching.

‘Has she gone in?’ Davide asked.

‘Yes.’ Duca handed him the telescope. But now there was nothing to be seen except the sky-grey tower in the green sea of fields and, in the background, Milan in the summer haze. It would have made a nice picture postcard, photographed from here, they could have offered it to the owners of the Ulisse Apartments.

A lorry passed, a moped passed, then nothing: the desert. Then Davide said, ‘I think someone is about to stop outside the building.’

‘What?’ But he had already seen it: a Mercedes 230 had appeared from the end of the street and was now slowing down in front of the building then entering the scorching concrete parking area and very slowly parking between the white lines.

Davide was still looking through the telescope. ‘I’ve seen that car before, the same model, the same colour, it must be the same, there aren’t many Mercedes 230s around and it’s unusual for two of them to have the same colour.’

‘Where did you see it?’ Now a man was slowly getting out, he looked young, though rather large, and seemed to be in absolutely no hurry.

Davide’s voice was anxious. ‘Last year, that day with Alberta.’

‘Give me the telescope.’ He looked through it at the young man, and saw him as if he was only about five metres away. To many he might have seemed the model of the good son, but to Duca, a doctor and psychologist despite everything, he didn’t. That was the worst kind of criminal face there was, the kind that didn’t arouse suspicion.

‘On the autostrada, I saw it a couple of times before we got to Somaglia, then when I came back towards Milan and Alberta was crying, it was still behind us. At Metanopoli I overtook it and it seemed as if it was going to stop.’ Even after a year, the memory was still vivid, everything connected with Alberta was vivid in his mind. He now realised what that car had meant, a year earlier, and what it meant now.

Duca, too, had understood. ‘He really looks like a killer,’ he said, putting the telescope down on the trunk of the Giulietta. There was nothing else to see, the killer had entered the building, the Mercedes was baking in the sun.

‘What should we do?’ Davide asked, he seemed to have turned green, but it wasn’t because of the reflection of the leaves in the arbour.

There was almost nothing they could do. Everything was clear. The distinguished-looking gentleman with the grey moustache seduced restless girls from the city, someone professional photographed them, and this man in the Mercedes kept an eye on them and punished those who rebelled or tried to get away or had the idea of betraying them. In addition, the photographs were hot. For a photograph, these people were prepared to kill one, two, ten women.