Doctored Evidence (3 page)

The policemen and their shouts followed the running woman. She looked up, saw the approaching train, glanced back to calculate the distance between herself and the policemen, and decided to risk it. She ran forward a few more steps, staying close to the tracks, then suddenly veered and jumped to the left, just metres before the train would reach her. The policemen shouted, the whistle of the train blared at the same moment as the shriek of the brakes filled the air. Perhaps it was one of these noises that caused her to falter; perhaps she merely put her foot down on the rail instead of the gravel. Whatever the reason, she fell to one knee, then instantly pushed herself up and lunged forward. But, as the policemen had seen from the greater distance, it was too late, and the train was upon her.

Peppito never mentioned it again, what happened then, at least not after he described it in his report that afternoon. Nor did the officer with him, nor the men in the engine of the freight train, though one of them had seen it happen before, three years ago, just outside Budapest.

Later, the papers reported that seven hundred Euros had been found in the woman's purse. Signora Battestini's niece, who held power of attorney for her aunt, declared that she had, the previous day, collected her aunt's pension at the post office and taken it to her: seven hundred and twelve Euros.

Given the state of the Romanian woman's body, no attempt was made to check for traces of Signora Battestini's blood. One of the men who had been in the compartment with her said that she had seemed very disturbed when she got on to the train in Venice but had grown noticeably calmer the farther they got from the city, and the other one said she had been careful to take the plastic bag with her when she went down the corridor to the toilet.

In the absence of other suspects, it was declared that she was the likely murderer, and it was decided that police energies could be better employed than in continued investigation of the case. It was not closed, merely left unattended: in the normal course of things, it would disappear for lack of attention and, after the sensational headlines which greeted the murder and the Romanian's flight had been forgotten, it would join them in oblivion.

The authorities attempted to establish at least the bureaucratic evidence relating to the murder of Maria Grazia Battestini. Her niece said that the Romanian woman, whom she had known only as Flori, had been with her aunt for four months before the crime. No, the niece had not hired her: that was all in the hands of her aunt's lawyer, Roberta Marieschi. Dottoressa Marieschi, it turned out, served as lawyer for a number of elderly persons in the city, and for many of them she procured maids and domestic helpers, primarily from Romania, where she had contacts with various charitable organizations.

Dottoressa Marieschi knew nothing more about Florinda Ghiorghiu than what was contained in her passport, a copy of which Dottoressa Marieschi had in her possession. The original was found in a cloth bag tied to the waist of the woman who had fallen under the train and, when cleaned and examined, it turned out to be false, and not even a very good forgery. Dottoressa Marieschi, when questioned about this, replied that it was not her job to recertify the validity of passports which the Immigration Police had accepted as genuine, merely to find clients for whom the persons bearing those passports – and here she took the opportunity to repeat the phrase, ‘which the Immigration Police had accepted as genuine' – might be suitable.

She had met the Ghiorghiu woman only once, four months before, when she had taken her to Signora Battestini's home and introduced the two women. Since then, she had had no further contact with her. Yes, Signora Battestini had complained about the Romanian woman, but Signora Battestini was in the habit of complaining about the help that was sent to her.

Because the case remained in limbo, the niece could get no answer to her questions about the state of her aunt's apartment, whether it was still a protected crime scene or not. When she tired of the lack of response, she consulted with Dottoressa Marieschi, who assured her that the conditions of her aunt's will were sufficiently clear to guarantee her undisputed possession of
the entire building. A week after Signora Battestini's death the two women met and discussed at length the legal status of the dead woman's estate. Assured by the lawyer's words, the niece went into the apartment the day after their conversation and cleaned it. Whatever she judged to be of potential value or importance was placed into cardboard boxes and taken up to the attic. The remainder of her aunt's clothing and personal possessions were put into large plastic garbage bags and left outside the door of the apartment. The next day the painters went in, Dottoressa Marieschi having convinced the heiress that it would be best to buy some new furniture and rent the apartment to tourists by the week. She would see to the business of finding suitable tenants, and no, if the arrangements remained informal and payment was made in cash, she saw no reason why it would be necessary to declare this income to the authorities. After consulting once again with Dottoressa Marieschi, the heiress agreed to restore the apartments, with a view to charging high rents for them.

And so things rested, as little as three weeks after the death of Maria Grazia Battestini. Her worldly possessions sat in the attic, tossed carelessly into boxes by someone with no interest in them beyond the vague hope that some day, when she got around to taking a closer look at them, something in one of them might prove to be of value; and her apartment, newly painted, was already the subject of a very
serious inquiry from a Dutch cigar manufacturer, who was interested in renting it for the last week of August.

THUS THINGS STOOD,
contentment shared equally among them: the police, who had effectively closed, though they had not solved, the case; Signora Battestini's niece, Graziella Simionato, who anticipated a convenient and welcomed new income; and Roberta Marieschi, who applauded herself for having so successfully retained the Battestini family on her list of clients. No doubt things would so have remained had it not been for the dominant household god of Venice, indeed of all towns and cities: gossip.

Late in the afternoon of the third Sunday in August, the shutters were pushed open on the windows of a second-floor apartment just off the Canale della Misericordia, not far from the
Palazzo del Cammello. The owner of the apartment, Assunta Gismondi, was a graphic designer who had lived in Venice all her life, though she now worked primarily for an architect's studio in Milano. After pushing back the shutters to allow some air into the stifling apartment, Signora Gismondi, from the habit of years, looked across the canal at the windows directly opposite and was surprised to see the shutters of the second-floor apartment closed. She was surprised, though hardly disappointed.

She unpacked her suitcase, hung up some clothes and stuffed others in the washing machine. She looked through the post that had accumulated during the three weeks she had been in London, checked her faxes and read them, but because she had been in email contact with her lover, as well as with the employers who had sent her to London on the training course, she did not bother to turn on her computer to check for new messages. Instead, she took her shopping bag and went out to the Billa on Strada Nuova, the only place where she would be able to get enough food to prepare a meal for herself that evening. The idea of eating in another restaurant filled her with horror. She would rather stay home and eat pasta with
olio e peperoncino
than sit alone again and eat among strangers.

Billa on Strada Nuova was open, and Signora Gismondi was able to fill her bag with fresh tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, salad, and, for the first time in three weeks, find decent fruit and
cheese that did not require the payment of a week's salary for even the smallest of portions. Back in her apartment, she poured olive oil into a frying pan, chopped up two, then three, then four cloves of garlic and let them simmer slowly, breathing in the scent with a joy that was almost religious in its intensity, happy to be home, among the objects, the smells and the sights she loved.

Her lover called half an hour later and told her he was still in Argentina, where things were a mess and getting worse, but he planned to be back in a week or so, when he'd fly up from Rome for at least three days. No, he'd tell his wife he had to go to Torino for business; she wouldn't care, anyway. When she replaced the phone, Assunta sat in her kitchen and ate a plate of pasta with a sauce of tomatoes and grilled eggplant, then ate two peaches and finished a half-bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Glancing out the window at the house across the way, she whispered a silent prayer that the shutters would never open again, in which case she would never request another favour of life.

The next morning, on her way to her favourite bar for a coffee and a brioche, she stopped at the newsagent's for the paper.

‘Good morning, Signora,' the man behind the counter greeted her. ‘I haven't seen you for a while. Vacation?'

‘No. In London. For work.'

‘Did you enjoy it?' he asked, his tone making
it clear that he had serious doubts as to whether that were possible.

She picked up the
Gazzettino
and read bold headlines that foretold imminent political collapse, ecological disaster, and a crime of passion in Lombardia. How sweet to be home. She shrugged in belated response to his question, as if to suggest the unlikelihood of enjoying work, no matter in what city, no matter in what land.

‘It was all right,' she finally equivocated. ‘But it's good to be home. And you? Anything new?'

‘You haven't heard, then?' he said, face suddenly alight at the pleasure of being the first to pass on bad news.

‘No. What?'

‘The Battestini woman, the one across from you. You haven't heard?'

She thought of the shutters, suppressing the hope that sprang up inside her. ‘No. Nothing. What?' She placed the newspaper on the counter and leaned towards him.

‘She's dead. Murdered,' he said, caressing the word.

Signora Gismondi gasped her surprise, then demanded, ‘No. What happened? When?'

‘About three weeks ago. The doctor found her; you know, that one who goes in to see the old people. Someone'd beaten in her head.' He paused to see the effect of his news, judged her to be satisfactorily stunned, so went on, ‘My cousin knows one of the cops who found her, and he said whoever did it must really have
hated her. At least that's what my cousin said he said.'

He looked at his audience. ‘But I guess she did, huh? Hate her, I mean.'

‘What?' Gismondi said, confused by the unexpected news and then by this inexplicable remark. ‘Who? I don't know who you're talking about.'

‘The Romanian woman. That's who killed her.' He saw her surprise and launched himself into the second, and better, act of his drama. ‘Yeah, she tried to get out of the country, but they found her on the train, the one that goes to Romania.'

Signora Gismondi looked suddenly pale, but that only increased his relish. ‘They stopped her up there at the border. Villa Opicina, I think. On the train, just sitting there cool as ice, after killing that old woman. She hit one of the policemen and tried to push him under a train, but he got away, and it was her who got hit.' He saw the Signora's mounting confusion and, out of respect for his sources, if for nothing else, he added, ‘Well, that's what the papers say and what I've heard from people.'

‘Who got hit? Flori?'

‘The Romanian? Was that her name?' he asked, suspicious that she should know it.

‘Yes,' Signora Gismondi said. ‘What happened to her?'

He seemed puzzled by her question. What else could happen to a person who got hit by a train? ‘I told you, Signora,' he said with strained
patience. ‘The train hit her. Up there. In Villa Opicina or wherever it was.' He was not an intelligent man and lacked imagination, so these words meant next to nothing to him. That is, in saying them, he conjured up no image of the steel wheels, the rolling point of contact they made with the metal rails under them, was incapable of summoning up the image of what would happen to something, anything, caught inexorably between those two things.

She placed a hand on the newspapers as if to steady herself. ‘She's dead?' she asked, as if the man had not spoken.

‘Of course,' he answered, impatient at her slowness in understanding things. ‘But so's that poor old woman.' His indignation was audible, and the sound of it seeped into Assunta Gismondi's mind.

‘Of course,' she said softly. ‘Terrible, terrible.' She took out some money and set it on the counter, forgot to pick up her paper, and left the shop, vowing never to go there again. Poor old woman. Poor old woman.

She went back to her apartment and, doing something she'd never done and wasn't even sure could be done, she went on to the Internet and called up the
Gazzettino
from the day after she had left for London. She regretted her decision to immerse herself in English during the time she had been there: no papers and no news from home, no seeking out of other Italians. It was as though the last three weeks had never taken place. Though, the
Gazzettino
rapidly informed her, they surely had.

She read only the stories that had to do with Signora Battestini's murder, and as the days and the editions passed, she followed the tale as it had evolved. The substance was much as the newsagent had said: old woman found dead by her doctor, Romanian servant missing, train stopped at the border, attempt to flee, death. False papers, no woman of that name, family devastated by murder of favourite aunt, quiet funeral of victim.

Assunta Gismondi switched off the computer and stared at the blank screen. When she tired of that, she turned her attention to the books that lined one wall of her studio and read through the names of the authors on the top shelf: Aristotle, Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plutarch, Homer. Then she looked out the window, across the canal at the closed shutters.