Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

‘We have to go in there now,’ Davide said.

Yes, of course, they had to get going immediately: the man who had overpowered Alberta and slashed her wrists, who had taken Maurilia to Rome and drowned her in the Tiber, would also kill Livia Ussaro at the slightest suspicion.

‘We have to stay here,’ Duca said. He had the feeling he was also becoming green, at least the skin of his face felt as if it must be green.

‘But that’s the man who killed Alberta, he was following us the whole time.’

‘Yes, that’s him. But if we go in now, once we’ve knocked down the front door of the building and then the door of the apartment, he can kill Livia if he wants to, he has all the time in the world.’ It was a simple and unfortunate situation, he explained, the only hope was that the man didn’t suspect Livia, that he allowed her to pose for the photographs and then let her go, one of the many girls who must have passed that way. And there was no reason for him to suspect her: Livia hadn’t met anyone after seeing Signor A, she had done nothing suspicious, she had left home and had come here to pose for photographs. Livia was clever, she knew what to do. Besides, if these people had had the slightest suspicion, they wouldn’t even have got this far and stepped into a trap, they would have simply disappeared. They were on the lookout, but they didn’t suspect. If they went up there to save Livia, they would simply kill her, because they would be revealing who she was. The best way to save her was to stay here, and wait for her to come out.

‘And what if she doesn’t come out?’

Young Davide’s anxiety was making him nervous, he at least was hiding his own. ‘They can’t stay in there forever. Either they don’t suspect anything, they photograph her and then let her go, or else they discover something and they’ll try to escape.’

‘And Livia?’

Enough now, he was also thinking of Livia, or maybe he was praying, rather than thinking. He didn’t reply.

There are sixty minutes in an hour and they were passing one by one. The young man asleep in the little house from the kids’ magazine woke up at the sound of a tractor passing on the main road, looked at the world outside, the Giulietta and the two men who were part of that world, then must have remembered the five thousand lire and lit a cigarette and probably started to think about the way he would spend it. It was no later than 2:25, it was just a matter of knowing how long it took a photographer to expose a complete roll of Minox film. He had no idea, it depended partly on the model, but he assumed it couldn’t be less than half an hour.

Davide knew he shouldn’t speak, but there was a limit. ‘We can’t just stay here and wait.’

‘No,’ Duca said, looking at his watch, almost exactly half an hour had passed since Livia had got out of the taxi. ‘No, that’s exactly what we have to do.’

And then something happened. They saw two men come out of the Ulisse Apartments and one of the two was the man from the Mercedes, who now seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, he was nowhere near as relaxed as he had been before, and, for not more than a thousandth of a second, they waited to see Livia, too, come out of that Aztec temple, but the two men were alone and had almost reached the Mercedes, and it really looked as if they were making a quick getaway.

‘Try to cut them off,’ he said to Davide. They had the disadvantage that they were nearly three hundred metres from the building, but the advantage that their car was ready, with its doors open, and they didn’t have to do anything but start the engine. The other men were only now opening the doors of their car.

And in the time that took them, Davide set off, ate up the path, swallowed the two hundred metres of main road that separated them and aimed straight at the front of the Mercedes, practically determined to crash into it.

The Mercedes set off furiously: the road to Milan was near, and there they’d be able to lose themselves in the traffic. They rushed onto the main road towards Melzo, while Davide lost a few seconds reversing in order to point the car in the right direction. The man at the wheel of the Mercedes seemed to be very confident of the almost empty road, he still had three hundred metres advantage, he was moving straight ahead like a plane, and Duca then said something stupid to Davide: ‘Even if we don’t catch them, don’t worry, we’ll catch them later.’

‘I’ve already got them,’ Davide said. He was more than confident, he was blind with fury; as if the car ahead of them was a moped, he was suddenly on top of it, another second and he would overtake it.

‘Watch out, they may turn off,’ Duca said. He should also have said, watch out, they may open fire, but he didn’t: if they opened fire they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

The Mercedes did turn off, in fact, in order to avoid being boxed in on the main road, they must be intending to jump out and set off at a run across the fields, and if they did that it meant they weren’t armed, and if they weren’t armed they were dead, because the road they had been forced to turn onto was a mere hundred metres long and ended up in front of a big farmhouse.

Hens flew up into the air, a dog tied to a long chain howled and tried to fly, too, a countrywoman in shorts, bra, and straw hat stood there petrified with a kind of pitchfork in her hand when she saw the two cars explode in front of her, and they really did explode rather than just brake. The four doors of the two cars opened simultaneously, but Duca and Davide were faster on their feet, Duca grabbed the man, the sadist, before he had taken more than a few steps and before he realised that he had been caught, he gave him a kick in the stomach which laid him out flat in the dust in front of the farmhouse, howling and abject.

Davide had taken the other man and was holding him by one arm, without doing anything to him, because he was good, but the photographer was screaming hysterically, ‘Help, help!’ and it wasn’t as stupid as it might seem to cry for help: if he managed to create confusion, if he could make the people here believe, if only for a minute, that he was an honest citizen being attacked, he might be able to get away.

Then Duca left the sadist moaning on the ground, unable to get up-if he hadn’t smashed his stomach in it was pure chance, because that had been his intention-and passed on to the other man: he didn’t yet know that he was a homosexual, but the way he was screaming aroused his suspicions and when he saw him up close his suspicions were confirmed.

‘Look down, you bastard,’ he said.

This unexpected request made the photographer fall silent for a moment, then he raised his head a little more and screamed even more loudly, ‘Help!’ That was all Duca needed: he hit him on his Adam’s apple. Not even as a doctor had he ever been curious to know what happened to an Adam’s apple if you hit it like that, for a moment all that happened was that the photographer fell abruptly silent and collapsed against Davide.

‘Police,’ Duca said.

A robust old countryman had suddenly appeared. Duca flashed his medical registration card at him: he was a romantic, he still kept it in his wallet.

‘These two are murderers, they’ve killed two women, is there anywhere we can keep them locked up?’

Then a young man came out, then an old lady, then two boys. They weren’t quite sure what was going on, but they all recognised the word ‘police.’

‘The stable,’ the old man said.

‘The stable will be fine.’

There was only an old carthorse there, it really was a stable, not one of those gleaming air-conditioned hostels you saw on television. They threw the two men down in the mire, one of them was moaning with his hands on his stomach, conscious but powerless to do anything, the other had fainted, or had he choked to death? Duca didn’t think it was urgent to find out.