Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

From the furnace of the streets they entered the spring-like mountain air of the Cavour. They asked for the bill and two bottles of beer. In the room, he took off his jacket, but didn’t invite Davide to take off his, because he always kept it on. He sat down on the bed and phoned the Fatebenefratelli Hospital. The switchboard operator put him through to the ward, the ward sister told him to wait, then he heard his colleague’s voice.

‘Lamberti here.’

Hearty greetings from his colleague: he was a veteran, with a protective tone.

‘Nearly two hours ago they brought in a girl with her face cut up.’

Yes, his colleague said, replying to his questions, they had just finished dressing her wounds, no, she wasn’t in a state of shock, no, her general condition was fine, and she was in good spirits, she was an incredible girl, he said, she had tried to smile, and then he told him all the technical details of the scars, which was what he really wanted to know.

‘I’ll be over to see her in an hour, will you still be there?’

Yes, his colleague would still be there and would be happy to see him. Good. ‘I’ve finished with you too, Davide,’ he said, putting down the receiver. ‘You don’t need me any more.’ He wouldn’t drink again, even though he would never be a teetotaller. Davide said nothing.

‘Listen, I need two favours,’ he said at the front door of the hotel. ‘Firstly, can you be my driver for another couple of errands?’

Davide nodded.

‘Secondly, if your father’s in Milan, I need to see him as soon as possible.’

Davide nodded.

‘Now take me to the Via Plinio.’ He also nodded. ‘That’s right, to Livia’s apartment.’

Davide drove slowly. ‘How is Livia?’

‘They told me she’s fine.’ It wasn’t much of an answer, but there wasn’t much to say.

In the Via Plinio he got out. ‘Wait for me,’ he told Davide. He went in through the front door and came out nearly half an hour later. ‘Let’s go to the Fatebenefratelli.’ Then it really would be over. When Davide stopped the car outside the hospital, he put a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t come in to see Livia, you’ve already seen her enough.’

Duca went into the hospital. A male nurse recognised him and greeted him impulsively, saying he was really pleased to see him. He got to the ward and met the colleague he had spoken to on the phone, who was about to leave and wasn’t wearing his white coat. The veteran embraced him, he was discreet and sensible, he didn’t ask any questions, just replied to Duca’s, which were technical, purely technical, and then he took him to Livia’s room.

‘Bye for now, anything you need, I’m here,’ his colleague said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. He closed the door behind him and looked at the screen, beyond the screen was the bed with Livia in it. Before going around the screen he said, ‘It’s me, Livia.’

He went around the screen and stopped for a moment at the foot of the bed, looking at her. Then he moved a chair close to her and sat down. ‘First of all, I wanted to say one thing: I’ve just been to see your father. I told him you’ve been given a very confidential task by the police and will be away for a while. He was surprised, of course, but I managed to convince him, though I’ll get Mascaranti to talk to him, too, I’m sure he can convince him better than I could. You mustn’t worry about your family.’

To stop her moving her eyelids, because of the cuts at the corners, they had bandaged her eyes, which was why Livia Ussaro-it wasn’t in any way a pseudonym, it was the name of a real, aching, wounded but undefeated human being-lifted her hand, which lay on top of the sheet, and searched for his hand, which she found immediately and squeezed a little, once, twice: it was her way of saying thank you, given that she could not speak. It was clear that, for her, there was nothing personal, let alone affectionate, in that touch of hands, it was just a means of communication, a way of telling him that she was listening and understood what he was saying.

‘They’ve all been arrested, all the ones from here in Milan,’ he said. To any other woman, he might have said something else, hoped that she would get better soon, told her that these days plastic surgery can do wonders, that in a few weeks … and so on and so forth, but not to Livia Ussaro: she was either thinking and hoping these things for herself and didn’t need anyone to tell her, or else she wasn’t thinking or hoping them and if anyone had told her she would have been annoyed. ‘We have the names of lots of other bosses, from all over Europe. Now Interpol will get to work. They were organised and taught by the Mafia to do a top-class job for a top-class clientele. Every woman was selected among the thousands of likely ones in a big city. Even prostitution has been declining for years, above all, so Signor A told me, because of the low quality of the merchandise. Under the guidance of the Mafia, a few big wheels on the business decided to set up a deluxe prostitution ring. The same women, once exploited in this way, could then be moved into the lower categories … Am I tiring you?’ It was a pointless scruple that had occurred to him abruptly-after all, a few hours earlier Livia had been at the mercy of a sadist-but the pressure of Livia’s hand on his told him that he had made a blunder. He had to continue: the best cure for Livia was for him to talk.

‘The search for this select merchandise was the most delicate part of the operation. They weren’t dealing with corrupted young girls any more, who were easy to persuade and to keep in line with a few slaps. They had to find new girls, or almost new, like Alberta, girls from decent families who agreed to it at first and then regretted it after they’d learned too much about the organisation and sometimes rebelled. If they hadn’t been harsh with them, the business wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks, that was why every group had a man like the one you met today.’

The young man made the reluctant ones think again and punished the rebels. Apart from that, he had the task of taking the girls to their various places of employment.

‘The Minox photographs had two purposes,’ he continued, looking everywhere as he talked except at the white bandages concealing her face. ‘One was to compile a kind of catalogue of rare editions, so to speak, which circulated all over Europe, constantly updated, among connoisseurs and people in the trade. The other was to blackmail the women who had been photographed. Most of the reluctant ones yielded when they were threatened with the photographs being shown to their fathers, their boyfriends, their workmates. With Alberta it was different, she did more than just rebel, she actually took the Minox film after it was exposed.’

That had been serious, he told her, continuing to keep his hand open on the bed, with her hand on his, ready to press his fingers, to respond, to ask. It had probably never happened before that anyone had stolen a roll of film. The whole elegance of the mechanism was based on the secrecy of those films, and in order to maintain that secrecy photographic studios that seemed above board had been set up in the cities. The photographer shot models of cars, tractors, and tankers for serious companies against a landscape background, publicity photographs and industrial photographs that wouldn’t arouse the suspicion of the police. Doing the photographs in a private house might have been dangerous, with different girls coming and going constantly, they needed a name plate with Something-or-other Photographic written on it, and in fact the system had been functioning perfectly for nearly two years all over Europe on this side of the curtain, because on the other side they were organised differently, and now here was Alberta taking that Minox cartridge, risking the whole system crashing down because even the most stolid of police officers would realise what a roll of film like that was as soon as he saw it.