The Abomination Page 13

  How do you burn a carabiniere’s ear? Phone him while he’s ironing.

  A motorist asks a carabiniere if the indicators on his car are working. “Yes they are,” comes the answer. “No they’re not. Yes they are. No they’re not. . .”

  To escape, Kat went and sat next to Nonna Renata, whom she liked. She’d long suspected that her grandmother wasn’t quite as keen on babies as her mother assumed, and she wasn’t surprised when Gabriele was quickly handed to her because he was “getting a bit heavy”. So she took over the feeding and the wiping of sticky fingers while they talked. Nonna Renata loved to tell stories of her days amongst the Garibaldini, the partisans who decamped to the mountains when the Germans occupied Italy, and for her part Kat never tired of hearing them.

  “We couldn’t get married, of course,” Nonna Renata said with a cackle. “There were no priests – they’d all run away. So we lived like people who were married, even those of us who weren’t. But no babies, not if we could help it. It was a time for fighting, not for wiping bottoms.”

  “And which did you like better,” Kat asked slyly, “the war, or wiping Mamma’s bottom?”

  Nonna Renata’s eyes darted to check her daughter wasn’t listening. “The war! It was the best time of my whole life. Afterwards, we thought everything was going to continue like that, but of course the priests and the other men wanted things the way they were before. So it was back to babies and baking after all.”

  “I think I’d have liked the war.”

  Nonna Renata nodded. “You take after me, I’ve always thought so. Now tell me, how’s your war going?”

  “I’m doing my first murder,” Kat confessed proudly.

  Just for a moment the old woman looked confused. “You’re going to kill someone? I didn’t think that was allowed any more.”

  “Sorry, Nonna – I meant, I’m on my first murder investigation. I’m under a really good colonel, someone who’s done at least a dozen homicide investigations—”

  Later, as she was helping carry the dirty dishes into the kitchen, her mother commented, “So, when will we get to meet this Aldo Piola?”

  “You were listening?”

  “I could hardly help it – you talked about nothing else for twenty minutes. He’s good-looking, I hope?”

  Kat groaned. “Mamma, he’s my boss.”

  “The two aren’t always mutually exclusive, are they?”

  “And he’s married.”

  “Married!” Her mother looked shocked, as if she’d caught out Piola in some terrible crime.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t he be?”

  Her mother didn’t answer directly. “I remember a time when the Carabinieri didn’t allow women officers,” she said tartly.

  “That was over ten years ago. And before you say anything, no, he’s a perfect gentleman. Not a lech, not a grabber. And very respectful of my work.” Even before the words had left her mouth she knew her mother would make that face, the face that said Kat was still twelve years old and knew nothing about the real world. She wanted to shout, I’m an officer of the Carabinieri, Mamma! I see dead bodies that have been shot and then dumped in canals! I deal with gangsters and criminals! I think I know how to look after myself!

  But instead she just sighed and said, “I’ll go and chat to Papà, shall I, before he falls asleep?”

  Twenty-six

  SHE’D MEANT TO go straight home from her parents’ apartment in Sant’Elena, but the conversation with her mother had left a residual irritation that Kat knew from experience couldn’t be fixed by an evening of TV and Facebook. So she took a detour.

  She told herself she was just going for a walk. It was true that she loved Venice on these winter afternoons, when the bora, the cold north wind, whisked tiny flakes of snow down from the mountains and the air seemed to sparkle as if filled with specks of gold. This was the empty month, the brief low season when the city’s sixty thousand residents were for a short time not hopelessly outnumbered by the six million tourists who filled its narrow pavements the rest of the year, and Kat took full advantage, striding purposefully towards Campo San Zaccaria without even realising at first that was where she was heading.

  She made her way up to the operations room, expecting to find it empty. She’d spend a couple of hours catching up on paperwork, she decided, writing up her reports from the previous week, so she’d be ready to face the new week unencumbered.

  To her surprise, there was a woman in Piola’s glassed-off office. As the woman stood up, nervously examining her surroundings, Kat saw she was wearing a low-cut top under her leather jacket.

  Piola re-entered with a bottle of wine and two plastic cups. He set them down on the table, and the woman touched his shoulder and said something. He smiled in acknowledgement. Although Kat tried not to leap to conclusions, there was no mistaking the intention with which the woman was arching her breasts towards his gaze.

  Just then he looked up and saw Kat. He waved for her to come and join them.

  “This is Spira,” he explained as she entered. “It seemed like a good day to bring her in for a chat. Spira’s a little shy.”

  Spira laughed dutifully. Her sly dark eyes darted across to Kat’s face, assessing her. Now that Kat was closer, she could see how much make-up the other woman was wearing, how cheap the leather jacket was. Of course. A prostitute.

  “On Sundays her boyfriend goes to church, followed by lunch with his mother, so Spira gets a few hours’ rest,” Piola went on. Spira nodded, apparently happy with this description of her pimp’s schedule. “I was curious about this,” he added, holding up the page torn from the back of La Nuova Venezia that had been found in the hotel room shared by Jelena Babić and Barbara Holton.

  “I know some of these girls,” Spira interjected, pointing at the small ads that had been crossed out. Her accent was thick – probably East European, Kat thought; like hotel chambermaids, the majority of the sex workers in Venice were also illegals from across the Adriatic.

  “Is there anything you can tell us about them?” Piola asked.

  “Da. This one’s blonde, this one’s brunette. This one, her pimp’s got her on smack—”

  “I meant, anything about this group of girls in particular. Anything they have in common.”

  Spira scrutinised the page more closely. “They’re all Croats,” she announced.

  “You’re sure?” Kat asked.

  Believe me or not, it’s all the same to me, Spira’s shrug implied.

  “What about these two women? Have you seen them before?” Piola asked, placing photos of Jelena Babić and Barbara Holton in front of her.

  “Da. This one.” Spira tapped Jelena’s picture.

  “When?”

  “She was looking for a girl. Round Santa Lucia.”

  “She tried to pick you up?”

  “Ne. I mean she had a picture of a girl. She wanted to know if we’d seen her.”

  “What was the girl like?”

  “Dark hair, dark eyes. Also Ustasha,” Spira said, using the Serbs’ derogatory term for a Croat.

  “Get someone to take a look through the possessions we bagged from the hotel room,” Piola suggested quietly to Kat. “See if the picture’s there.” To Spira he said, “And had you? Seen her, that is?”

  Spira regarded him as if he were an idiot. “It was on the street. You think I want to end up in a canal with my throat cut?”

  “But if you did see her again . . . Would you recognise her?”

  Spira shrugged. “People all look the same on the street. The dicks look the same. The money looks the same. After a while the faces look the same as well.”

  Piola sighed. “If you like, we could arrange for you to go from here to an organisation that rehabilitates girls like you. They’d help you get clean, arrange for you to go home. . .”

  “If I go home now, my family will throw me out. And the people who brought me here will find me. At least in Venice I’m working. I’m paying off my debt. And my pimp look
s after me.”

  Piola said nothing, giving her the chance to change her mind. Eventually she said, “Can I go now?”

  “Yes,” he replied, just as Kat said, “One more thing.”

  “What?”

  Kat went to her desk and found the sheet of symbols from Poveglia. “Do you recognise any of these?” she asked, putting them in front of the prostitute.

  “These, no,” Spira said, pointing at the symbols Father Uriel had already identified. Her finger moved along to the ones that matched the tattoos on Jelena Babić’s body. “But these are Ustasha.”

  “Croatian? You’re sure?”

  Spira nodded. “The old women have them. It’s a Catholic thing. You don’t see it so much now.”

  Kat and Piola exchanged a glance. “Thank you, Spira,” Piola said, getting to his feet. “You’ve been very helpful. I’ll show you out.”

  By the time he returned, Kat had already trawled through Google Images. Using the keywords “Croatian”, “Catholic” and “tattoo”, she’d found some pictures that confirmed what the prostitute had told them.

  “Look,” she said, spinning her screen to show Piola. “They’re called stećak symbols. According to this, Catholics in Bosnia originally tattooed their children with these markings in the hope that the Turks wouldn’t take them as slaves – they couldn’t be forcibly converted to Islam if they had Christian symbols on their skin. After the fall of the Ottomans, the tattoos remained as symbols of the underground Church in Croatia.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “I wonder what it means.”

  But she already knew. She felt a rush of exhilaration as everything slotted into place.

  “The reason those particular symbols were under the blood spray, unlike the others, was because Jelena Babić drew them on the hospital wall herself, before she celebrated Mass. They’re symbols of her faith. The killer couldn’t erase them, and he knew they might lead us to the truth, so he added the other designs himself, to throw us off the scent. Jelena was no Satanist. She was, or believed herself to be, the real deal – a woman, a Croatian, and a Catholic priest.” She shook her head. “The misdirection nearly worked, too. I assumed that Barbara Holton’s contact with the Americans at Caserma Ederle had no bearing on her death, because there was no connection with priests or the occult. But there was a link to Croatia. She was asking for information about a Croatian general called Dragan Korovik, who just happens to be facing trial at The Hague for war crimes. If the US Military thought he might reveal something they’d rather was kept hidden, it would explain why they’re trying to cover their tracks.”

  “But why was Jelena Babić on Poveglia in the first place?” Piola asked. “Why was she saying a Mass there? Why did the killer murder Barbara Holton when she didn’t even have the information she’d requested – and according to the officer you spoke to, didn’t have much chance of getting it, either? There are more questions than answers here, Capitano.”

  “I think we need to lean on the Americans at Caserma Ederle. We need to establish exactly what the answers to Barbara Holton’s questions would have been.”

  “OK.” Piola got to his feet. “But in that case, this may get political. We’d better talk to our prosecutor first.”

  “We’ve had one assigned?”

  “As of last Friday. Benito Marcello. Know him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Me neither. Meet me at the court offices at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, and we’ll see if he’s in agreement.”

  He took a coat from behind the door – Armani, she noticed, in lightweight dark blue cashmere, and hung on a proper hanger rather than just the coat hook. “And now it’s time to get out of here,” he added unnecessarily. “Coming?”

  There was a pause. She found herself hoping that he’d suggest getting a drink and perhaps some food before they went to their respective homes.

  Then she mentally kicked herself. It was Sunday, and the poor man had barely seen his family all week. “I’m going to catch up with some paperwork,” she said. “See you in the morning, sir.”

  Twenty-seven

  PROSECUTOR BENITO MARCELLO was young, good-looking, well dressed, and frankly incredulous.

  “You think this is some kind of American conspiracy?” he said disbelievingly. “You’re crazy.”

  “Many of the indications do point to a multi-national dimension, sir,” Piola said judiciously.

  “Oh, please,” Marcello scoffed. “You’ve failed to gather any hard evidence whatsoever, Colonel, so you’ve simply filled the gaps with ridiculous speculation. And now you want to subpoena the US Army!” He shook his head. “You Carabinieri. I don’t know how you do it.”

  The reference to the stereotype of institutional stupidity was subtle, but no less effective for that. Kat felt her cheeks burn.

  To his credit, her boss seemed unfazed. “We’re not advancing any one theory more than another at the moment, sir. But we think it’s important to follow every lead before the preliminary hearing.”

  Kat waited. She knew only too well that the prosecutor had the power to direct their investigations in whichever way he chose. Marcello would then lay the results of their investigations before a court; only if the court agreed with him that there was enough prima facie evidence to charge someone could she and Piola officially begin gathering evidence. Which meant that, in theory, any investigative work done before that point would then have to be repeated. It was a crazily complex system and didn’t inspire confidence: for one thing, many cases never resulted in prosecutions, even though they had already taken up a great deal of court time, and secondly, it was effectively up to the individual prosecutor which cases were pursued and which were not.

  “Let me propose an alternative scenario,” Marcello said crisply. “We have two female foreigners, one American and one Croatian, sharing a hotel room in our beautiful city. We have an obscene ceremony in a remote location, decorated with sacrilegious and occult symbols. We have the ultimate desecration of the Mass by one of them, wearing a priest’s robes. All thoroughly unsavoury, but no doubt a thrill to those of a certain disposition – and when we ask what kind of disposition these two women had, we learn that they were the sort of people who pursue elaborate conspiracy theories. We learn that they frequent dubious websites and choose to lurk in dark corners of the internet, where such things grow unfettered. And then we discover, too, that they were seen looking for a prostitute – a very specific prostitute; no doubt one who shares their particular tastes.”

  He paused, and with a sinking feeling Kat realised where he was heading with this.

  “Perhaps they have a row, these two women, between lovers. Perhaps one of them decides she isn’t keen on sharing their bed with a prostitute after all. There was a ceremony, sexual in nature; exciting and illicit, yes, but perhaps the participants were not equally willing . . . The American, let’s say, kills the Croatian. Later, filled with remorse, she kills herself in the room they shared, toppling out of the window as she does so. This, it seems to me, is far more plausible than the conspiracy story that you have dreamt up, and leaves far fewer loose ends.” Marcello knitted his fingers together and placed his hands on his desk, nodding with the satisfaction of a man who is rather impressed – not for the first time – by his own brilliance.

  “Two beds,” Kat said.

  Marcello looked surprised that she’d had the temerity to speak. “I beg your pardon, Capitano?”

  “You said ‘their bed’. But these women didn’t share a bed. There were twin beds in the hotel room, and both of them had been used. There was nothing at all, in fact, to suggest that they were lesbians.”

  The prosecutor made a dismissive gesture. “Beds can be pushed together.”

  Another criticism sometimes levelled at the Italian legal system is that it encourages prosecutors to devise preposterously lurid theories, since at the time of devising them they are not required to back them up with hard evidence – indeed, the more lurid the better, si
nce it helps to ensure that they can proceed to the next stage. The prosecutors at the trial of the American student Amanda Knox, whom they alleged had forced her flatmate Meredith Kercher into a violent and deadly sex game, had attracted just such criticisms from the international media.

  “Besides,” Marcello added, “even if they hadn’t been intending to share a bed, they may have done so in a mood of experimentation. Women are more fluid about such things than men, I believe. Perhaps being in Venice persuaded them to try something out, possibly for the first time. . .”

  Kat stared at him, unable to believe what she was hearing. Fury flushed her cheeks. She was, she knew, about to blow her own career before it had barely begun, by telling Avvocato Marcello just what she thought of his theory.

  “If it happened as you say, she managed to shoot herself in the shower, then walk to the window and shoot herself again,” Piola said quickly. “Using a pillow as a silencer. And weighing her own body down with her laptop in the process, to make sure it didn’t float.”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Indeed. So I take it, Avvocato, that you would like us to re-dredge the canal to see if we can find the gun, the presence of which below the hotel window is essential to your theory?”

  Marcello paused. “Not essential, Colonel. It is perfectly possible that the acqua alta has swept the gun along the canal bed and out to sea. But yes, you should certainly concentrate your efforts on looking for the weapon. And not, repeat not, on any supposed internet aspects, conspiracy theories, or – heaven forbid – unauthorised approaches to the US Military.”

  Piola nodded. “Indeed, that’s very clear. Thank you for your time, Avvocato.”

  Twenty-eight

  THE VENETIAN DIALECT is rich in words of scatological abuse, and Kat managed to employ about four of them even before they’d reached the street.