Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon
Nothing else in the blasted landscape deserved his attention, so he studied the shoe, pulling at his cigarette. He moved to the left and looked at it from another angle. Although it lay close to a large pool of oil, it appeared to rest on a patch of dry land. Cola took another step to the left, one that drew him out into the full violence of the sun, and studied the area around the shoe, looking for its mate. There, under the clump of grass, he saw an oblong shape that seemed to be the sole of the other one, it too lying on one side.
He dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the soft earth with his toe, walked a few meters along the fence, then bent low and crept through a large hole, careful of the jagged, rusty barbs of metal that encircled him. Straightening up, he walked back toward the shoe, now a pair of them and perhaps salvageable because of that.
“Roba di puttana,” he muttered under his breath, seeing the heel on the first shoe, taller than the pack of cigarettes in his pocket: only a whore would wear such things. He reached down and picked up the first shoe, careful to keep from touching the outside. As he had hoped, it was clean, had not fallen into the oily puddle. He took a few steps to the right, reached down and wrapped two fingers around the heel of its mate, but it appeared to be caught on a tuft of grass. He lowered himself to one knee, careful to see where he knelt, and gave the shoe a sharp tug. It came loose, but when Bettino Cola saw that what he had pulled it loose from was a human foot, he leaped back from the bush and dropped the first shoe into the black puddle from which it had managed to survive the night.
2
The police arrived on the scene twenty minutes later, two blue and white sedans from the Squadra Mobile of Mestre. By then, the field in back of the slaughterhouse was filled with men from inside the building, brought out into the sun by curiosity about this different kind of slaughter. Cola had run drunkenly back inside as soon as he saw the foot and the leg to which it was attached and had gone into the foreman’s office to tell him there was a dead woman in the field beyond the fence.
Cola was a good worker, a serious man, and so the foreman believed him and called the police immediately without going outside to check and see whether Cola was telling the truth. But others had seen Cola come into the building and came to ask what it was, what he had seen. The foreman snarled at them to get back to work; the refrigerated trucks were waiting at the loading docks, and they didn’t have time to stand around all day and gabble about some whore who got her throat cut.
He didn’t mean this literally, of course, for Cola had told him only about the shoe and the foot, but the fields between the factories were well-known territory to the men who worked in the factories—and to the women who worked in those fields. If she’d gotten herself killed there, she was probably one of those painted wrecks who spent the late afternoon standing at the side of the road that led from the industrial zone back into Mestre. Quitting time, time to go home, but why not a quick stop at the side of the road and a short walk back to a blanket spread beside a clump of grass? It was quick, they expected nothing of you except ten thousand lire, and they were, more and more often now, blondes come in from Eastern Europe, so poor that they couldn’t make you use anything, not like the Italian girls on Via Cappuccina, and since when did a whore tell a man what to do or where to put it? She probably did that, got pushy, and the man had pushed back. Plenty more of them and plenty more coming across the border every month.
The police cars pulled up and a uniformed officer got out of each. They walked toward the front of the building, but the foreman reached them before they got to the door. Behind him stood Cola, feeling important to be the center of all this attention, but still faintly sick from the sight of that foot.
“Is it you who called?” the first policeman asked. His face was round, glistening with sweat, and he stared at the foreman from behind dark glasses.
“Yes,” the foreman answered. “There’s a dead woman in the field behind the building.”
“Did you see her?”
“No,” the foreman answered, stepping aside and motioning Cola to step forward. “He did.”
After a nod from the first one, the policeman from the second car pulled a blue notebook out of his jacket pocket, flipped it open, uncapped his pen, and stood with the pen poised over the page.
“Your name?” asked the first policeman, the dark focus of his glance now directed at the butcher.
“Cola, Bettino.”
“Address?”
“What’s the use of asking his address?” interrupted the foreman. “There’s a dead woman out there.”
The first officer turned away from Cola and tilted his head down a little, just enough to allow him to peer at the foreman over the tops of his sunglasses. “She’s not going anywhere.” Then, turning back to Cola, he repeated, “Address?”
“Castello 3453.”
“How long have you worked here?” he asked, nodding at the building that stood behind Cola.
“Fifteen years.”
“What time did you get here this morning?”
“Seven-thirty. Same as always.”
“What were you doing in the field?” Somehow, the way he asked the questions and the way the other one wrote down the answers made Cola feel they suspected him of something.
“I went out to have a cigarette.”
“The middle of August, and you went out into the sun to have a cigarette?” the first officer asked, making it sound like lunacy. Or a lie.
“It was my break time,” Cola said with mounting resentment. “I always go outside. I like to get away from the smell.” The word made it real to the policemen, and they looked toward the building, the one with the notebook incapable of disguising the contraction of his nostrils at what they met.
“Where is she?”
“Just beyond the fence. She’s under a clump of bushes, so I didn’t see her at first.”
“Why did you go near her?”
“I saw a shoe.”
“You what?”
“I saw a shoe. Out in the field, and then I saw the second one. I thought they might be good, so I went through the fence to get them. I thought maybe my wife would want them.” That was a lie; he had thought he could sell them, but he didn’t want to tell this to the police. It was a small lie, and entirely innocent, but it was only the first of many lies that the police were going to be told about the shoe and the person who wore it.
“Then what?” the first policeman prompted when Cola added nothing to this.
“Then I came back here.”
“No, before that,” the first policeman said with an irritated shake of his head. “When you saw the shoe. When you saw her. What happened?”
Cola spoke quickly, hoping that would get him through and rid of it. “1 picked up one shoe, and then I saw the other one. I was under the bush. So I pulled on it. I thought it was stuck. So I pulled again, and it came off.” He swallowed once, twice. “It was on her foot. That’s why it wouldn’t come off.”
“Did you stay there long?”
This time it was Cola who suspected lunacy. “No, no. No, I came back into the building’and told Banditelli, and he called you.”
The foreman nodded to confirm this.
“Did you walk around back there?” the first policeman asked Cola.
“Walk around?”
“Stand around? Smoke? Drop anything near her?”
Cola shook his head in a strong negative.
The second one flipped the pages of his notebook and the first said, “I asked you a question.”
“No. Nothing. I saw her and I dropped the shoe, and I went into the building.”
“Did you touch her?” the first one asked.
Cola looked at him with eyes wide with amazement. “She’s dead. Of course I didn’t touch her.”
“You touched her foot,” the second policeman said, looking down at his notes.
“I didn’t touch her foot,” Cola said, although he couldn’t remember now if he had or not. “1 touched the
Neither policeman answered this. The first one turned and nodded to the second, who flipped his notebook closed. “All right, show us where she is.”
Cola stood rooted to the spot and shook his head from side to side. The sun had dried the blood that spattered down the front of his apron, and flies buzzed around him. He didn’t look at the policemen. “She’s in back, out beyond the big hole in the fence.”
“I want you to show us where she is,” the first policeman said.
“I just told you where she is,” Cola snapped, his voice rising sharply.
The two policemen exchanged a glance that somehow managed to suggest that Cola’s reluctance was significant, worth remembering. But, saying nothing, they turned away from him and from the foreman and walked around the side of the building.
It was noon and the sun beat down on the flat tops of the officers’ uniform caps. Beneath them, their hair was sopping, their necks running with sweat. In back of the building, they saw the large hole in the fence and made toward it. Behind them, filtering through the death squeals that still came from the building, they heard human sounds and turned toward them. Clustered around the back entrance of the building, their aprons as red with gore as Cola’s, five or six men huddled in a tight ball. Used to this curiosity, the policemen turned back toward the fence and headed toward the hole. Stooping low, they went through it single file and then off to the left, toward a large, spiky clump of bush that stood beyond the fence.
The officers stopped a few meters from it. Knowing to look for the foot, they easily found it, saw its sole peering out from beneath the low branches. Both shoes lay just in front of it.
The two of them approached the foot, walking slowly and looking at the ground where they walked, as careful to avoid the malevolent puddles as to keep from stepping in anything that might be another footprint. Just beside the shoes, the first one knelt down and pushed the waist-high grass aside with his hand.
The body lay on its back, the outer side of the ankles pressed into the earth. The policeman reached forward and pushed at the grass, exposing a length of hairless calf. He removed his sun-glasses and peered into the shadows, following with his eye the legs, long and muscular, following across the bony knee, up to the lacy red underpants that showed under the bright red dress pulled up over the face. He stared a moment longer.
“Cazzo” he exclaimed and let the grass spring back into place.
“What’s the matter?” the other one asked.
“It’s a man.”
Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country