Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

‘Davide, go back to the Ulisse Apartments, find Livia, see what’s happening, then phone Carrua, tell him everything and ask him to come here immediately.’ This was urgent, Livia was urgent. ‘In the meantime I’ll talk to these two. Go.’

It isn’t all that hot in a stable, in summer the smell is stronger than the heat. The light came from two round holes high in the walls, but it was sufficient. Once he had heard Davide drive off, he forbade himself to think about anything apart from the two men. He stood in front of the one who was holding his hands on his stomach and had stopped moaning: his fear was greater than his pain.

‘What did you do to the girl?’

‘What girl?’ He tried to pull himself up, because he could feel that muck which covered the floor of the stable like a Persian carpet seeping through his shirt.

With his foot, but without kicking him, only pressing, Duca forced him to lie down again in the mire. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘and I’m pleased to see that you’ve woken up, too,’ he said to the other man who had opened his eyes and was gasping, ‘that way you’ll both hear my proposition. I ask questions and you answer. If your answers are the right ones, you’ll just go to prison. If they’re wrong, you’ll go to the cemetery, I’ll pull you to pieces, bit by bit, bone by bone, the police will have to call an ambulance with a waterproof tarpaulin. Do we agree? Just now, I asked you what you did to the girl. You answered, what girl? That’s not the right answer. Now I’ll ask you again, and try to answer correctly, it’ll be in your best interests: What did you do to the girl?’

Silence. The horse didn’t even turn its head, it seemed to be made of wood.

‘I realised she’d been sent there by the police, I had my suspicions, so I had to make her talk.’

‘What did you do to her?’

The sadist retched a bit, his body contorted by the pain in his stomach, then he told Duca what he had done to her. And Duca did nothing, he stood there motionless, trying not to think about Livia.

‘And did she talk?’ he asked.

No, the sadist replied, she had continued to take those cuts on her face and continued to make it clear to him that she had nothing to say, and after a while he had almost been convinced that she hadn’t come there to spy on him, so he had let her go and they had left.

‘Why didn’t you kill her? She has a lot to say now.’

‘I’m not a murderer.’

‘That isn’t the right answer.’ He kicked him hard with the heel of his shoe, almost on the temple, where it joined the jaw. He heard a groan, but the man didn’t lose consciousness, which was just the way Duca wanted it: he would tear him apart, pull him to pieces, but wouldn’t knock him out. ‘You are a murderer, and if you didn’t kill her you must have had your reasons. It’ll be better for you if you tell me.’ The man thought he was being clever, he closed his eyes and pretended he had fainted, he didn’t know he was out of luck: his interrogator was a doctor. ‘You can’t fool me, I know you haven’t fainted. Answer, or I’ll continue.’

The man immediately opened his eyes again. ‘They told me to do it, it’s not up to me, I have to do what they tell me.’

‘Yes, I know what they told you. Sometimes you kill and sometimes you scar. It’s an old system. You’re not in the Mafia, but you’ve been trained by Mafiosi, you must have taken a crash course in how to scar someone’s face. Or am I wrong?’

The man said nothing.

‘Answer me.’

He looked at the heel of the shoe one centimetre from his nose. ‘In Turin I met two men from the south, but I was young, I did it almost as a game.’

‘Of course, they taught you the anatomy of the facial muscles, the place to make the incision and the type of incision to make, an M-shaped incision, for example, can’t be mended with plastic surgery.’ These were things his father had explained to him, when he had started wearing long trousers and his father had finally been able to talk to him about the Mafia. He wouldn’t have devoted a single minute to this whole business if he hadn’t sensed the ruthless, violent hand of the Mafia behind it. No, these two louts weren’t in the Mafia, nor was their local boss, or even their national boss, probably, but the theoretician, the mastermind of the whole system was certainly in the Mafia and took fifty per cent.

‘Leaving a woman who’s been scarred like that in circulation is good publicity, almost better than a woman who’s been murdered. The papers talk about it, the girls get scared, if they don’t behave the same thing will happen to them. When you have hundreds and hundreds of women who know a lot, and who’d like to go back to their previous lives, it isn’t easy keeping them in their place, but with the methods your instructors from the Mafia have taught you, you can deal with them. And now tell me about the man with the grey moustache who picked up the girl last night. Who is he?’

No answer.

‘Look, I know a lot, I know there are three of you, that man who’s the local boss, you and your friend here. You only know your boss, but he must know a lot of interesting people. Give me his name and address. You’re not a real Mafioso, the two of you are just pupils, you won’t be able to hold out.’ Delicately he placed his foot on the man’s stomach and started to press.

The man screamed that he’d had enough, he retched, then gave Duca the name and address, and some other things, too, some very interesting things.

‘Good, now if you want to keep your stomach, tell me, in detail, how you killed Alberta Radelli.’

With Duca’s foot on his stomach, the man told him immediately. He had understood. Duca listened to him, and as he listened he realised that his father had been right. ‘You have to speak their language. You can’t speak French to someone who only understands German.’ Of course it wasn’t right, of course a police force that acts correctly doesn’t use the language of violence, there are fingerprints, laboratory tests, well-conducted interrogations, psychological persuasion. But he wasn’t the police, he was a young loser who couldn’t hear the word Mafia without seeing his father with his arm stunted by a stab wound and reduced for ever, by that stab wound, to being a grey clerk in the Headquarters building, second floor, room 92, right at the back. Yes, he knew, it was just a common, ancestral thirst for revenge: he hadn’t been looking for justice, he hadn’t been trying to uphold the law, he had only wanted to see some of them face to face, and speak their language to them because that way you understood each other immediately.

‘And now tell me how you killed Maurilia. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the blonde girl you took to Rome.’

No, no, he remembered perfectly well, because the more he remembered the less Duca’s heel sank into his stomach, and he told the story with so many details it was almost like a novel. And then everything was clear, in every detail, and he was about to lift his foot from that stomach when the other man, the photographer, who had been so still on his bed of manure, had the bright idea of grabbing his leg. In his warped mind, it had occurred to him that Duca was there, his feet within reach of his hands, but he hadn’t thought it out. Duca, though, had already thought of it and was perfectly calm, he had one hand resting on the horse’s mane, and as soon as the photographer had grabbed his foot, he held on tight to the horse and with the same foot that the man was holding, kicked him in the face, twice, three times, until the man let go of his foot, moaning, and then he kicked him again, even harder, and the moaning immediately stopped.

The other man was sheltering his face with his hands. ‘No, no, no,’ he was saying.