A Venetian Reckoning

Praise for Donna Leon's Commissario
Brunetti Mysteries

"In this stunning novel, the
fourteenth to feature the dogged, intuitive Venetian police detective Guido
Brunetti, Leon combines an engrossing, complex plot with an indictment of the
corruption endemic to Italian society. . . . Many of Leon's favorite characters
appear.... They balance this dark, cynical tale of widespread secrecy, violence
and corruption."

—Publishers Weekly
(starred
review)

"Commissario Guido Brunetti's
fourteenth case may be his best yet—not that he'd see it that way himself. . .
. Leon's most adroit balance of teasing mystery, Brunetti's droll battles with
his coworkers and higher-ups, and intimations of something far deeper and
darker behind the curtain."

—Kirkus Reviews
(starred
review)

"The appeal of Guido Brunetti,
the hero of Donna Leon's long-running Venetian crime series, comes not from his
shrewdness, though he is plenty shrewd, nor from his quick wit. It comes,
instead, from his role as an everyman
...
Not so different from our own days at the office or nights around the dinner
table. Crime fiction for those willing to grapple with, rather than escape, the
uncertainties of daily life."

—Bill Ott,
Booklist
(starred review)

"The evocative Venetian setting
and the warmth and humanity of the Brunetti family add considerable pleasure to
this nu-anced, intelligent mystery; another winner from the Venice-based Leon.
Highly recommended."

—Michele Laber,
Library
Journal
(starred review)

"Another of her fabulous Italian
mysteries . . . She has her finger on the pulse."               —
Bookseller

"Gives the reader a feel for
life in Venice.... The story is filled
with the average citizen's cynicism, knowledge of corruption,
and deep distrust and fear of government and police. Characters are brilliantly
portrayed. Even bit players become real and
individual and Brunetti and his family are multifaceted and
layered."                —Sally Fellows,
Mystery
News

"In her classy, literate,
atmospheric Commissario Guido
Brunetti series, Donna Leon takes readers
...
to a Venice that
tourists rarely see."            —
BookPage

"Brunetti
...
is the most humane sleuth since Georges
Simenon's Inspector Maigret.
...
He
is a decent man [who
achieves] a quiet heroism."              —
Philadelphia
Inquirer

"If you're heading to Venice,
take along a few of [Leon's] books to use for both entertainment and travel directions."

—Tlte Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A beautifully cadenced mystery
...
no one is more graceful
and accomplished than Leon."         —
The
Washington Post

"Smuggling, sexual betrayal,
high-class fakery and, of course, Mafia money make for a rich brew. . . . Exacdy
the right cop for the right city. Long may he walk, or wade, through it"

—Sarah Dunant, author of
The
Birth of Venus

"Leon's books shimmer in the
grace of their setting and are warmed by the charm of their characters."

—The New York Times Book Review

"Superb
...
An outstanding book, deserving of the widest audience
possible, a chance for American readers to again experience a master
practitioner's art."

—Publishers Weekly
(starred
review)

"Richly atmospheric, Leon
introduces you to the Venice insid-
ers know."             —Ellen Hale,
USA Today

"A new Donna Leon book about.
..
Brunetti is ready for our immediate
pleasure. She uses the relatively small and crime-free canvas of Venice for
riffs about Italian life, sexual styles, and— best of all—the kind of ingrown
business and political corruption that seem to lurk just below the
surface."

—Dick Adler,
Chicago
Tribune

"Uniform Justice
is
a neat balancing act. Its silken prose and considerable charm almost conceal
its underlying anger; it is an
unlovely story set in the loveliest of cities    Donna Leon is in-
deed sophisticated."   —Patrick Anderson,
The
Washington Post

"There's atmosphere aplenty in
Uniform
Justice.
...
Brunetti is a compelling character, a good man trying to stay on the honest
path in a devious and twisted world."       —
The
Baltimore Sun

"Venice provides a beautifully
rendered backdrop for this oper-
atic story of fathers and sons, and Leon's writing trembles with
true feeling."        —
The
Star-Tribune
(Minneapolis)

"One of the best international
crime writers is Donna Leon, and her Commissario Guido Brunetti tales set in
Venice are at the apex of continental thrillers. . . . The author has written a
pitch-perfect tale where all the characters are three-dimensional, breathing
entities, and the lives they live, while by turns sweet and horrific, are
always believable. Let Leon be your travel agent and tour guide to Venice. It's
an unforgettable trip."

—Rocky Mountain News

"Events are powered by Leon's
compelling portraits."

—The Oregonian
(Portland)

"The plot is silky and complex,
and the main appeal is the pro-
tagonist, Brunetti."            —
The
Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Leon, a wonderfully literate
writer, sets forth her plot clearly
and succinctly.
...
The ending of
Uniform
Justice
is not a neat
wrap-up of the case with justice prevailing. It is rather the end-
ing that one would expect in real life. Leon says that 'the murder mystery is a
craft, not an art,' but I say that murder mystery
in her hands is an art."      —
The Roanoke
Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donna Leon, who was born in New
Jersey, has lived in Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland,
Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her other
mysteries featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti include
A
Noble Radiance, Uniform Justice, Acqua Alto,.Death in a Strange Country, Blood from
a Stone,
and
Dressed
for Death,
all available from Penguin.

DONNA
LEON

DEATH AND JUDGMENT

A PENGUIN ‘ GROVE PRESS BOOK

penguin books

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario. Canada
M4P 2Y3 (a division of Penon Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Boob Ltd, 80 Strand,
London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Ireland. 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2.
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (AustraSa), 250
Camberwdl Road, CambcrweU, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson
Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Book India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre.
Panchsheel Park. New Delhi - 110 017. India Penguin Group (NZ), Airborne and
Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New
Zealand Ltd) Penguin Boob (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Book Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R ORL. England

First published in the United
Sum
of America by HarperCollins Publishers 1995
Reprinted by arrangement with Grove’Atlantic. Inc. Published in Penguin Boob
2006

13579
 
 
8642

Copyright
Donna Leon. 1995 AO rights reserved

ISBN 0 14 30.3582 7 CIPdata available

publisher's note

This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either arc the product of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental

Printed in the United States of
America

Except in the United States of
America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way
of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent m any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The scanning, uploading and
distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the
permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase
only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage
electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights
is appreciated.

Questo e il fin di chi fa mal!

E de' perfidi la morte

alia vita e sempre ugual.

This is the end of evildoers.

The death of the perfidious

Is always the same as their lives.

Don Giovanni
Mozart’DaPonte

1

On the last Tuesday in September,
snow fell for the first time in the mountains separating northern Italy from
Austria, more than a month before it could ordinarily be expected. The storm
arrived suddenly, carried by fat clouds that swept in from nowhere and with no
warning. Within a half-hour the roads of the pass above Tarvisio were slick and
deadly. No rain had fallen for a month, and so the first snow lay upon roads
already covered with a glistening layer of oil and grease.

The combination proved deadly to a
sixteen-wheeled truck bearing Romanian licence plates and carrying a cargo
manifest for 90 cubic metres of pine boards. Just north of Tarvisio, on a curve
that led down to the entrance to the autostrada and thus into the warmer, safer
roads of Italy, the driver braked too hard on a curve and lost control of the
immense vehicle, which plunged off the road moving at 50 kilometres an hour.
The wheels gouged out huge trenches in the not yet frozen earth, while the body
of the truck cannoned off trees, snapping them and hurling them about in a long
swath that led to the bottom of the gully, where the truck finally smacked into
the rock face of a mountain, smashing open and scattering its cargo in a wide
arc.

The first men on the scene, drivers
of other heavy transport trucks who stopped without thinking to help one of
their own, went first to the cabin of the truck, but there was no hope for the
driver, who hung in his seat-belt, half suspended from the cabin, one side of
his head battered in by the branch that had ripped off the driver's door as the
truck careered down the slope. The driver of a load of pigs being brought down
to Italy for slaughter climbed over what remained of the hood of the truck,
peering through the shattered windscreen to see if there was another driver.
The other seat was empty, and so the searchers who had by then gathered began
to look for the other driver, thrown free of the truck.

Four drivers of trucks of varying
sizes began to stumble down the hill, leaving a fifth up on the road to set out
warning flares and use his radio to summon the
polizia
stradale.
Snow still fell heavily, so it was
some time before one of them spotted the twisted body that could be seen a
third of the way down the slope. Two of them ran towards it, they too hoping
that at least one of the drivers had survived the accident.

Slipping, occasionally falling to
their knees in their haste, the men struggled in the snow the truck had crashed
through so effortlessly. The first man knelt beside the motionless form and
began to brush at the thin layer of white that covered the supine figure,
hoping to find him still breathing. But then his fingers caught in the long
hair, and when he brushed the snow away from the face, he exposed the
unmistakably delicate bones of a woman.

He heard another driver cry out from
below him. Turning in the still-falling snow, he looked back and saw the other
man kneeling over something that lay a few metres to the left of the scar torn
by the truck as it plunged down the hill.

'What is it?' he called, placing his
fingers softly against her neck to feel for life in the oddly positioned
figure.

'It's a woman,’ the second one cried.
And then, just as he felt the absolute stillness of the throat of the form
below him, the other called up to him, 'She's dead.'

Later, the first driver to explore
behind the truck said that he thought, when he first saw them, that the truck
must have been carrying a cargo of mannequins: you know, those plastic women
they dress up and put in the windows of shops. There they were, at least a
half-dozen of them, lying scattered over the snow behind the shattered rear
doors of the truck. One even seemed to have got caught in the lumber that had
been tossed about inside the truck and lay there, half hanging from the back
platform, legs pinned down by stacks of boards so securely wrapped that the
impact of the truck against the mountain had not been sufficient to break them
open. But why would mannequins be dressed in overcoats, he remembered
wondering. And why that red in the snow all around them?

2

It took the
polizia
stradale
more than half an hour to respond to the
call and, when they finally arrived at the scene of the accident, they were
forced to set out flares and deal with the kilometre-long rows of traffic that
had backed up on both sides of the accident as drivers, already made cautious
by road conditions, slowed even more to gape down through the wide hole in the
metal railing, down to where the body of the truck lay. Among the other bodies.

As soon as the first officer, unable
to understand what the truck drivers shouted to him, saw the broken forms
around the wreckage of the truck, he climbed back up the hill and put in a
radio call to the carabinieri station in Tarvisio. His call was answered
quickly, and soon the traffic was worsened by the arrival of two cars carrying
six black-uniformed carabinieri. They left their cars parked on the shoulder of
the highway and lurched down the slope towards the truck. When they found that the
woman whose legs were pinned under the boards inside the truck was still alive,
the carabinieri abandoned any interest they might have had in the traffic.

There followed a scene so confused
that it might have been comic, had it not been so grotesque. The piles of
lumber pinning the woman's legs to the bottom of the truck were at least two
metres high: they could easily be moved with a crane, but no crane could get
down the slope. Men could shift them, surely, but to do so they would have to
climb up and walk over them, adding to the weight.

The youngest of the officers crouched
at the back of the truck, shivering in the bitter cold of the descending Alpine
night. His regulation down parka lay tucked around the visible portion of the
body of the woman pinned to the floor of the truck. Her legs disappeared at the
thighs, straight into a solid pile of wood, as though the subject of a
particularly whimsical Magritte.

He could see that she was young and
blonde, but he could also see that she had grown visibly paler since his
arrival. She lay on her side, cheek pressed down on the corrugated floor of the
truck. Her eyes were closed, but she seemed still to breathe.

From behind him, he heard the sharp
sound of something heavy falling on to the floor of the truck. The other five,
ant-like, crawled up the sides of the pile, pulling, shoving at the neat
packages of wooden beams, working them loose from the top. Each time they
tossed one to the floor of the truck, they jumped down after it, picked it up,
and heaved it out of the open back, passing the girl and young Monelli as they
did.

Each time they walked past Monelli,
they could see that the puddle of blood seeping out from under the boards was
closer to his knees. Still they tore at the beams, ripping their hands open on them,
gone temporarily mad with the need to break the girl free. Even after Monelli
pulled his jacket over the girl's face and got to his feet, two of them
continued to rip boards from the pile and hurl them out into the growing
darkness. They did this until their sergeant went to each of them in turn and
placed his hands on their shoulders, telling their bodies that they could stop
now. They grew calm then and returned to the routine investigation of the
scene. By the time they finished that and called back down to Tarvisio for
ambulances to carry the dead away, more snow had fallen, full night had come,
and traffic was effectively tied up all the way back to the Austrian border.

Nothing more could be done until the
following day, but the carabinieri were careful to post two guards, knowing the
fascination the locus of death exerts over many people and afraid that evidence
would be destroyed or stolen if the wreck were left unattended through the
night.

As so often happens at that time of
year, the next morning dawned rosy-fingered, and by ten the snow was no more
than a memory. But the wrecked truck remained, as did the deep scars leading
down to it During the day, it was emptied, the wood stacked in low piles in an
area well clear of the wreckage. As the carabinieri worked, grumbling at the
weight, the splinters, and the mud that churned under their boots, a forensics
team began a careful investigation of the truck's cab, dusting surfaces and
supping all papers and objects into clearly labelled and numbered plastic bags.

The driver's seat had been ripped
from its frame by the force of the final impact; the two men working in the cab
loosened it further and then peeled back its plastic and cloth cover, looking
for something they did not find. Nor did they find anything in any way suspicious
behind the plastic panelling of the cabin.

It was only in the back of the truck
that anything at all unusual was found: eight plastic bags, the sort given by
supermarkets, each holding a change of women's clothing and, in one case, a
small prayer book printed in what one of the technicians identified as
Romanian. All of the labels had been removed from the clothing in the bags, as
turned out to be true of the clothing worn by the eight women killed in the
crash.

The papers found in the truck were no
more than what should have been there: the driver's passport and licence,
insurance forms, customs papers, bills of lading, and an invoice giving the
name of the lumberyard to which the wood was to be delivered. The driver's
papers were Romanian, the customs papers were in order, and the shipment was on
its way to a woodmill in Sacile, a small city about a hundred kilometres to the
south.

Nothing more was to be learned from
the wreckage of the truck, which was finally, with great difficulty and with
enormous disruption of traffic, hauled up to the roadside by winches attached
to three tow-trucks. There, it was lifted on to a flatbed truck and sent back
to its owner in Romania. The wood was eventually delivered to the woodmill in
Sacile, which refused to pay the extra charges imposed.

The strange death of the women was
picked up by the Austrian and Italian press, where stories about them appeared
in articles variously entided, ‘Der lodeslaster’ and ‘Camion della Morte'.
Somehow, the Austrians had managed to get hold of three photos of the bodies
lying in the snow and printed them with the story. Speculation was rife:
economic refugees? illegal workers? The collapse of Communism had removed what
would once have been the almost certain conclusion: spies. In the end, the
mystery was never resolved, and the investigation died somewhere amidst the
failure of the Romanian authorities to answer questions or return papers and
the Italians’ fading interest The women's bodies, as well as that of the
driver, were returned by plane to Bucharest, where they were buried under the
earth of their native land and under the even greater weight of its
bureaucracy.

Their story quickly disappeared from
the press, driven off by the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Milan and the
murder of yet another judge. It did not disappear, however, before it was read
by Professoressa Paola Falier, Assistant Professor of English Literature at the
University of Ca' Pesaro in Venice and, not incidentally to this story, wife
of Guido Brunetti, Commissario of Police in that city.

3

Carlo Trevisan, Avvocato Carlo
Trevisan, to give him the title he preferred to hear used when people spoke of
him, was a man of very ordinary past, which in no way impinged upon the fact
that he was a man of limitless future. A native of Trento, a city near the
Italian border with Austria, he had gone to Padua to study law, which he did
brilliantly, graduating with the highest honours and the united praise of his
professors. From there, he accepted a position in a law office in Venice, where
he soon became an expert on international law, one of the few men in the city
to interest himself in such matters. After only five years, he left that firm
and set up his own office, specializing in corporate and international law.

Italy is a country where many laws
are passed one day, only to be repealed the next Nor is it strange that, in a
country where the point of even the simplest newspaper story is often
impossible to decipher, there sometimes exists a measure of confusion as to the
exact meaning of the law. The resulting fluidity of interpretation creates a
climate most propitious to lawyers, who claim the ability to understand the
law. Among these, then, Avvocato Carlo Trevisan.

Because he was born industrious and
ambitious, Avvocato Trevisan prospered. Because he married well, the daughter
of a banker, he was put in familial and familiar contact with many of the most
successful and powerful industrialists and bankers of the Veneto. His practice
expanded along with his waistline, until, the year he turned fifty, Avvocato
Trevisan had seven lawyers working in his office, none of them a partner in the
firm. He attended weekly Mass at Santa Maria del Giglio, had twice served with
distinction on the City Council of Venice, and had two children, a boy and a
girl, bom bright and both beautiful.