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    Death and Judgment
    Death and Judgment
    Death and Judgment
    Ebook374 pages6 hours

    Death and Judgment

    By Donna Leon

    4/5

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    Venice’s Commissario Brunetti takes on his “most difficult and politically sensitive case to date” in the gripping New York Times–bestselling series (Booklist).
     
    In Death and Judgment, a truck crashes and spills its dangerous cargo on a treacherous road in the Italian Dolomite mountains. Meanwhile, in Santa Lucia, a prominent international lawyer is found dead aboard an intercity train. Suspecting a connection between the two tragedies, Brunetti digs deep for an answer, stumbling upon a seedy Venetian bar that holds the key to a crime network that reaches far beyond the laguna. But it will take another violent death in Venice before Brunetti and his colleagues begin to understand what is really going on.
     
    “No one is more graceful and accomplished than Leon.” —The Washington Post
     
    “The sophisticated but still moral Brunetti, with his love of food and his loving family, proves a worthy custodian of timeless values and verities.” —The Wall Street Journal
     
    “[Brunetti’s] humane police work is disarming, and his ambles through the city are a delight.” —The New York Times Book Review
     
    “The heady atmosphere of Venice and a galaxy of fully realized characters enrich this intriguing and finally horrifying tale.” —Publishers Weekly
     
    “The first of Leon’s books to knit together all her strengths: endearing detective, jaundiced social pathology, and a paranoid eye for plotting on a grand scale.” —Kirkus Reviews
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 14, 2014
    ISBN9781555848972
    Death and Judgment

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    Reviews for Death and Judgment

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Venice, Italy, murder, murder-investigation, political-corruption, family-dynamics, friendship, trafficking*****This time Brunetti not only has to work on murders but also fraud, trafficking, his own family, and overweening superiors. A disturbing tale with a similar attitude to Commissario Montalbano of Sicily.Narrator David Colacci has the trick of using American standard Italian and Sicilian accents to differentiate the multiple male characters down to a science. Bravissimo!
    • 5/5
      An exploration of Darkness. Brunetti’s investigation of a series of merders draws him into the world of prostitution and darkness surrounding it. The city of Venice remains a character but is more in the background, while Brunetti’s family plays a more central role. Italian government is shown in a dark light. The working out of the mystery is a surprise with a dark twist.
    • 4/5
      Dark and sad....Brunetti's daughter figures into this story in a very sad way, shows the evil of some humans.
    • 4/5
      Donna Leon starts the roller coaster ride right from the beginning in this novel. This is the first book I've read in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series, but it won't be my last. The action carried through most of the book. There were very few parts that dragged and even those moved quickly. The content of this novel is tough to read, so be aware if you have triggers.my thoughts: Donna Leon starts the roller coaster ride right from the beginning in this novel. This is the first book I've read in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series, but it won't be my last. The action carried through most of the book. There were very few parts that dragged and even those moved quickly. The content of this novel is tough to read, so be aware if you have triggers.
    • 3/5
      Venice's Commissario Brunetti's investigation of the murder of a wealthy lawyer on a train leads him into the dark underworld of human trafficking. His teenage daughter Chiara knows the victims daughter from school, so she decides to help her father by doing some investigating of her own. Although this book was first published nearly 25 years ago, unfortunately its theme is still timely. I was disappointed with the book's ending because it relies on a lengthy confession by the murderer.
    • 4/5
      Death and Judgement is Donna Leon's fourth book in the Commissario Brunetti series. When a prominent Venetian lawyer is found dead on a train, murdered execution-style, Guido Brunetti is assigned to the case. At first there are no leads, but Brunetti's daughter, Chiara, knows the murdered man's daughter and discovers a bit about the family - including that the parents always warned her to be careful so that she wasn't kidnapped. This immediately leads Brunetti into thinking that perhaps the Mafia is involved. Then a second man, an accountant, is found dead of what looks like a suicide but turns out to be a murder. The two murdered men are connected, however tenuously, by calling the same seedy bar in a town outside of Venice. When the lawyer's brother-in-law is found murdered - he a prominent lawyer - Brunetti knows that he is dealing with something that could touch even the highest levels of Venetian society.Death and Judgement is a dark book, and certainly the most cynical of the series thus far. In Leon's Venice, corruption runs rampant and the "best" citizens are often involved in the worst crimes. At one point in the book, Brunetti's wife, Paola, asks Guido why he is still with the police. I believe Brunetti's answer is something to effect that "someone has to do it," but this reader wonders how crushingly difficult it would be to know that power and money will protect even the worst criminals. At the same time, though, this is an excellent book. Eventually, the motives become clear and the crimes are solved, but the guilty parties do not pay the price for their crimes. The morally ambiguous ending seems right for our times.
    • 4/5
      Another wry and cynical pas d'armes between Commissario Brunetti and the corruption of Italian society. Once again, what starts off looking like a simple crime gradually extends tendrils into the world of the powerful and wealthy of Italy, the individuals who not only view themselves as above the law but, to a certain extent, are above it.Brunetti gave another small smile, "...we need...a list of Signor Trevisan's clients...""I want you to bear in mind that these are not the sort of people who are usually subject to a police investigation."Under ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would have remarked that, except for the last few years, the police had been investigating little except "people like these,"...Brunetti must work against the criminals, his sycophantic superior and corrupt fellow officers to try to unravel the mystery of a series of murders. In the end, he succeeds in understanding what happened and curtailing some portion of the larger problem. However, unlike the previous three books, this one does not provide a neat and satisfying ending; Leon's disenchantment with the crumbling world of her detective is felt much more strongly in this volume. Don't take this as a negative; I think the atmosphere of this story is deeper for it and I'm looking forward to reading the fifth volume.
    • 3/5
      The same formula as the other books about commissario Brunetti. But it works. Nice reading for a day by the sea (Port Alcudia, Mallorca in my case)
    • 4/5
      Death and JudgementDonna Leon4th in the Commisario Brunetti series set in Venice, Italy.A prominent lawyer is murdered, executio-style, on the train coming home to Venice from Padova. In the midst of the ever-growing corruption scandals in the Italian government, a very successful accountant from Padova, connectedted with teh Ministry of Health, appears to have committed suicide; everyone assumes that this is in connection with the scandals involving the Ministry but the Padova police have evidence that it was really murder. Finally the lawyer’s brother-in-law is murdered. though Brunetti is convinced that all three deaths are related, but the only connection he has is a phone number of a sleazy bar in Mestre, a town just outside of Venice on the mainland.Leon has described this book as her angriest, and it is easy to see why. She nearly always illuminates some social injustice or ugly facet of Italian or Venetian life in her books, and this one involves the world-wide trade in women for the purposes of prostitution. to go further would be to give away the plot; in itself, it’s a very good police procedural, but leon uses the story to bring out truly horrifying facts about the extent of this slave trade. Yet, she is so skillful a writer that it never sounds preachy, but unfolds from Brunetti’s investigation.As is typical of Leon’s books, her characterizations are the best part, especially true in this book of the one-timers. Brunetti and his family--especially his 14 year old daughter Chiara in this book--continue to deepen and therefore continue to engage the reader’s interest in this very real (and very Italian) family. Leon’s love for Venice, always shining out through Brunetti, is obvious, no matter how grim the political or social picture is; the city enchants.Another excellent member of the series. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      I wasn't as enthralled with this story as I had been with previous stories in the series - there was no single character that really grabbed my attention. Perhaps the resolution left me feeling cynical and queasy. However, the charms of the setting and of Brunetti and his family, make it an enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      The story of the death of several prominent people, and the pressure to close the case with an acceptable finding. Then another case starts the story of the casual (truck accident) and deliberate killings (snuff film) of women smuggled in for sex work, and then held as slaves. As always there is a wonderful sense of Venice, modern Italians, and their fight with the corrupt bureaucracy of the state. The characters are like old friends, Guido, his family and co-workers. The writing is good, and the ending, much like real life isn't neatly wrapped up.
    • 4/5
      In this fourth Commissario Brunetti murder mystery we see the detective get emotionally wrought with suspects for the first time. I like this series and am trying to read it in sequence. The ending to this one was a little odd with the Commissario going for a long ride in the suspect's car in the middle of the night with the suspect driving....poor judgment anyone?
    • 2/5
      In this fourth outing for Commissario Brunetti, he gets to investigate the death of a prominent Venetian lawyer who has been shot in the Padua to Venice train, and soon finds himself dealing with a nasty web of organised crime and political corruption.These are entertaining novels: Leon is very good at keeping the Venetian background at the right level so that we feel almost like insiders, not tourists, and she is clever at characterising Brunetti through the way his relationship with his wife and teenage daughter works, but unfortunately she doesn't seem to be very interested in devising inventive mystery plots, possibly because she is so preoccupied with (usually well-justified) ranting about the evils of Italian society. Brunetti has to make do with endless variations on the three investigative tactics Leon allows him - having lunch/coffee/dinner with attractive, well-dressed women; making off-the-record phone calls to other policemen he believes not to be corrupt; and putting himself into danger late at night in shady parts of Mestre. He goes through the motions, and after 250 pages or so the author relents and tells him who did it. But, of course, Italian society being what it is (in Leon's world, at least), the real villains are rarely if ever brought to justice, and Brunetti might well ask himself why he bothers.
    • 4/5
      A prominent Venetian lawyer is murdered on a train. The case is assigned to Commissario Brunetti. Soon a well-known person in Padua dies of a bullet-wound in his own car. Although the Padua police officially call it a suicide after altering official records, one detective there knows better, confiding in Brunetti. The brother-in-law of the Venetian lawyer who served as his accountant ends up dead too. Meanwhile the phone records of the Venetian and Paduan men points to a connection with bars where foreign prostitutes work. I'm a bit uncomfortable reading about prostitutes and sex crimes of the nature featured in this novel, but it does show the corruption in Italian law enforcement and government. We get to meet Guido's daughter more in this novel. She attends school with the lawyer's daughter and begins her own investigation and with unfortunate consequences. I listened to the audiobook read by David Colacci who did an excellent job.
    • 4/5
      Great series. I like the ambiguous ending and the title certainly fits the story. Leon shines light on a very disturbing yet real undercurrent of evil. I don't know another word for what is revealed to be the criminal act. She also drives home the impotence of those trying to stem the tide when those in power partake in the trade.
    • 5/5
      Commissario Brunetti, a regular readers of Rarebits, will remember, is the creation of Donna Leon. He's stubbornly honest in an Italian society that is portrayed as rife with criminal behavior, a country so overwhelmed by new laws that are enacted one day only to be repealed the next, that the distinction between what is wrong and what is criminal is often nebulous.

      Paula, Brunetti's professor of English spouse and delightfully moral character, issues stern reminders to Brunetti of the difference and their conversations are priceless. Brunetti is a complex man who has an engaging wit, a rapiersharp mind, and strong love for his family. Constantly under pressure from his superiors to ignore crimes that involve the elite, in this case his metal is tested. A well-known lawyer, Carlo Trevisan, is discovered shot to death on the train from Padua to Venice. Initially written off as a robbery gone bad, Brunetti has his doubts and when an accountant from a respected firm is found dead, ostensibly of his own hand but with Trevisan's phone number in his book and substantial amounts of a barbiturate in his bloodstream, Brunetti's crap detector goes into overdrive. Soon the links to a bizarre truck accident in the mountains where many young women are found dead, crushed by a load of lumber, fall into place, and Brunetti discovers a large web of international prostitution involving highly influential citizens of Venice. As the investigation proceeds, Brunetti learns that more than prostitution is involved. He discovers that a series of tapes was being commissioned and sold by the dead men that had shown the rape and killing of women in Croatia by Serb soldiers. A pair of mislaid and forgotten expensive reading glasses leads Brunetti to a travel agent, a former prostitute who had been in league with the men in supplying girls from other countries. She was the murderer, she admits to Brunetti, disgusted by her colleagues enjoyment in watching the rapes and brutal murders of the women, not because of the deaths -- after all the women would have died eventually anyway. She reveals that other very important men were involved in the extremely profitable business and knows that she will be killed. Brunetti arrests her, insists she be guarded, but is horrified to learn the next morning that she had been taken to Padua by order of the Ministry of Justice and special branch police. How had they learned so quickly of the arrest when Brunetti had made ever effort to keep it secret? This is an outstanding novel.

      Leon, who has lived in Italy for many years (like Paula, a professor of English), provides a jaundiced view of daily Italian life where the only safe procedure for a patient in an Italian hospital is the autopsy, and train strikes are a regular occurrence, and corruption exists at every level of society. She clearly worries about the effects of corruption on the moral fiber of that society and what it does to its members
    • 4/5
      I've read 8 of the 19 (not in order) of this incredible detective series set in Venice. Everytime I read one, I want to jump on a plane and then get in a gondola and take Venice by storm. Leon really fleshes out Comissario Guido Brunetti in this one. The story is as much about his struggle to enlighten his 14 yr old daughter about the subtle but substantial difference between something that is a crime, and something that is wrong, but given the fuzziness of the Italian criminal system, not necessarily a crime. In this episode he is dealing with murder, a prostitution ring, and several other unsavory aspects of this way of life to which his daughter has been unnecessarily and brutally exposed.It is once again, well plotted, deeply respectful of the characters (even the criminals) and still has enough comic relief in several of the characters to keep the dark parts from becoming unbearable. If you haven't yet discovered Donna Leon.....Get thee to the library.
    • 4/5
      Death and Judgment is the fourth book in the Commissario Brunetti series. Commissario Guido Brunetti is assigned to the case when a well-known Venetian lawyer is found murdered on a train. Chiara, Brunetti's daughter, attended school with the murdered man's daughter and informs her father that the parents had warned Francesca to be careful so that she wasn't kidnapped making Brunetti think that the Mafia may have made a hit. When the murdered man's business partner is found dead, the connection is made to a sleazy bar outside of Venice. When the lawyer's brother-in-law, his accountant, is found murdered as well, Brunetti realizes that the connections must go far deeper. and may impact greater on Venetian culture.In this book, Leon reveals the corruption surrounding the members of high Venetian Society and how money paid to the right people will produce just about anything. The storyline was, at times, very depressing and, in areas, frightening but the solution, though somewhat expected, was not unsatisfying. The actual ending leads the reader with the idea that Brunetti feels that though he solved the murder, he was not successful. There were several bright spots in the book, where Guido is interact with his wife and daughter and these give the reader a feeling of normalcy in a frightening world.
    • 4/5
      Another good book, I like that the endings aren't necessarily smooth wrap ups to crimes, solved and happily ever after. They end as real life probably ends in solving crimes.
    • 3/5
      Not bad, but still not awesome. I suspect that, if it weren't for the fact that it takes place within that unique cosmos that is Venice, this would be a rather dull crime novel.
    • 4/5
      This is a black-hearted book despite the expected pleasures of Brunetti's home life, family relationships and long, boozy lunches, not to mention the crumbling charm of largely car-free Venice. Three very professional murders of rich and influential men lead into the real, and truly awful, crime at the centre of the story. On top of that is laid the author's recurring distaste for the pervasive corruption she perceives in the upper levels of the Italian establishment. The rich and influential can get away with anything but the uncertain ethics even rub off on the good guys as can be seen in the ease with which Brunetti gets confidential information from a doctor and detailed lists of suspects' phone calls from an unofficial source. In this context Signorina Elettra is an inspired creation, a deus ex machina who, with her wide circle of acquaintances and her computer, comes up with answers to questions, which would normally take days of dogged police work, over her lunch break.As with others of the series, thoroughly recommended.
    • 4/5
      A truck meets with a terrible accident in the snowy Dolomites, and spilling out of it's bowels among the cargo of wood are also strange mannequins... but the mannequins are bleeding, which must mean they are real women. The horror of this accident is only a small presage of more to come. Commissario Guido Brunetti is put on the case of the murder of a prominent lawyer, shot dead on an intercity train. Then an accountant and business associate of the lawyer also turns up dead, and Brunetti starts suspecting the connection might be an international prostitution ring. His 14-year-old daughter Chiara offers her help as an apprentice investigator; she's been to school with the murdered lawyer's daughter and may be able to unearth some clues. But no one is prepared for the extent of the horror she uncovers in the process, least of all Chiara herself, and Brunetti can't forgive himself for unwittingly exposing his beloved daughter to such monstrous crimes. I’ve read several novels in the series before and knew that Leon tends to combine an insider's view of Venice and the comforts of the inspector's home life with the vilest of crimes and conspiracies, but the nature of one of the crimes committed against women in this particular instance were so evil that I was quite shocked. But in the end, Brunetti is a man with a conscience and in comforting his daughter, he also comforts his reader; heinous crimes won't go away, but love and kindness are also here to stay. Recommended, but this ones necessitates a solid stomach.
    • 4/5
      The Brunetti books are always worth reading. Brunetti's struggle to balance the law, justice, morality and ethics raises important issues which are ably communicated through stylish and thoughtful narrative.
    • 4/5
      The novel starts with a tragedy - a truck driver loses control while coming down the mountains and it turns out that the truck has a few too many passengers - trafficked women from Eastern Europe end up dead on the mountain slopes. And then everyone forgets about them until they tie into the death of an important lawyer. In some ways this is one of the darker entries in the series - human trafficking and women abuse are never an easy topic and these lie at the heart of this novel. It is also a bit more explicit than the rest of the entries. The story ties with the Yugoslavian wars (in the worst possible ways). But the novel still has Venice as its main character - but even it is subdued under the horrors which people can inflict on other people.
    • 5/5
      For those of you who follow Donna Leon's Venetian detective, this is an older one in the series, but you can be sure it's full of the warmth and horror of all the others. If you aren't familiar with Guido Brunetti, his co-workers and his family, you'll love getting to know this series of mysteries set in Venice. It's always about the politics and it's always about the corruption, but somehow, Brunetti always figures it out.This is not a cozy mystery, the crimes are vicious and venal. Women are brought to Venice to ply their trade on the streets. Few of them knew what they were getting into. Guido is assigned to solve the murder of a prominent and 'clean' lawyer. By the time he's done, even he's shocked by what he's learned. I recommend this book, and the series to anyone who likes a little cynicism with their justice.

    Book preview

    Death and Judgment - Donna Leon

    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 half an 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 license plates and carrying a cargo manifest for ninety cubic meters 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 fifty kilometers an hour. The wheels gouged out huge trenches in the not yet frozen earth, while the body of the truck caromed 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 careened 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 windshield to see if there was another driver. The 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 roadway 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 toward 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 that 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 meters to the left of the scar torn by the truck as it had 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 woman 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 gotten 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 kilometer-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 toward 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 meters 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 upon 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 blond, 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 onto the floor of the truck. The other five, antlike, 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 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 had pulled his jacket over the girl’s face and gotten 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 now stop. 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 slipping all papers and objects into clearly labeled 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 paneling 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 out 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 license, 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 wood mill in Sacile, a small city about a hundred kilometers 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 onto a flatbed truck and sent back to its owner in Romania. The wood was eventually delivered to the wood mill 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 The Truck of Death appeared in articles variously entitled "Der Todeslaster and II Camion della Morte." Somehow, the Austrians had managed to get hold of three photos of the bodies lying in the snow and had 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 amid 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 Cà Pesaro in Venice and, not incidental 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 honors 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 in which 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 both 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 region. His practice expanded along with his waistline until, the year he turned fifty, Avvocato Trevisan had seven lawyers working in his office, not one 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, both bright and both beautiful.

    On the Tuesday before the feast of La Madonna della Salute in late November, Avvocato Trevisan spent the afternoon in Padua, asked there by Francesco Urbani, a client of his who had recently decided to ask his wife of twenty-seven years for a separation. During the two hours the men spent together, Trevisan suggested that Urbani move certain moneys out of the country, perhaps to Luxembourg, and that he immediately sell his share of the two factories in Verona that he held in silent partnership with another man. The proceeds from those transactions, Trevisan suggested, might well follow the others quickly out of the country.

    After the meeting, which he had arranged to coincide with his next appointment, Trevisan met for a weekly dinner with a business associate. They had met in Venice the previous week, so tonight they met in Padua. Like all of their meetings, this one was marked by the cordiality that results from success and prosperity. Good food, good wine, and good news.

    Trevisan’s partner drove him to the train station where, as he did every week, he caught the Intercity for Trieste, which would get him to Venice by ten-fifteen. Though he held a ticket for the first-class section, which was at the back of the train, Trevisan walked through the almost empty carriages and took a seat in a second-class compartment; like all Venetians, he sat at the front of the train so as not to have to walk the long platform when the train finally pulled into the Santa Lucia station.

    He opened the calfskin briefcase on the seat opposite him and pulled from it a prospectus recently sent to him by the National Bank of Luxembourg, one offering interest rates as high as 18 percent, though not for accounts in Italian lire. He slid a small calculator from its slot in the upper lid of the briefcase, uncapped his Mont Blanc, and began to make rough calculations on a sheet of paper.

    The door of his compartment rolled back, and Trevisan turned away to take his ticket from his overcoat pocket and hand it to the conductor. But the person who stood there had come to collect something other than his ticket from Avvocato Carlo Trevisan.

    The body was discovered by the conductor, Cristina Merli, while the train was crossing the laguna that separates Venice from Mestre. As she walked past the compartment in which the well-dressed gentleman lay slumped against the window, she first decided not to bother him by waking him to check his ticket, but then she remembered how often ticketless passengers, even well-dressed ones, would feign sleep on this short trip across the laguna, hoping this way not to be disturbed as they stole their thousand-lire ride. Besides, if he had a ticket, he’d be glad to be awakened before the train pulled in, especially if he had to catch the number one boat to Rialto, which left the embarcadero in front of the station exactly three minutes after the train arrived.

    She rolled the door open and stepped into the small compartment. "Buona sera, signore. Suo biglietto, per favore."

    Later, when she talked about it, she thought she remembered the smell, remembered noticing it as soon as she slid back the door of the overheated compartment. She took two steps toward the sleeping man and raised her voice to repeat, "Suo biglietto, per favore." So deeply asleep, he didn’t hear her? Not possible; he must be without a ticket and now trying to avoid the inevitable fine. Over the course of her years on the trains, Cristina Merli had come almost to enjoy this moment: asking them for identification and then writing out the ticket, then collecting the fine. So too did she delight in the variety of the excuses that were offered to her, all by now grown so familiar that she could recite them in her sleep: I must have lost it; the train was just pulling out, and I didn’t want to miss it; my wife’s in another compartment and she has the tickets.

    Conscious of all this, knowing she would now be delayed, right at the end of the long trip from Turin, she was sudden in her gestures, perhaps even harsh.

    Please, signore, wake up and show me your ticket, she said, leaning down over him and shaking his shoulder. At the first touch of her hand, the man in the seat leaned slowly away from the window, toppled over onto the seat, and slid to the floor. As he fell, his jacket slid open and she saw the red stains that covered the front of his shirt. The smell of urine and excrement rose up unmistakably from his body.

    "Maria Vergine, she gasped, and backed very slowly out of the compartment. To her left, she saw two men coming toward her, passengers moving toward the door at the front of the carriage. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but that door at the front is blocked; you’ll have to use the one behind you." Used to this, they turned and walked back toward the rear of the carriage. She glanced out the window and saw that the train was almost at the end of the causeway. Three, perhaps four minutes remained until the train drew to a stop in the station. When it did, the doors would open and the passengers would get out, taking with them whatever memories they might have of the trip and of the people they had seen in the corridors of the long train. She heard the familiar clicks and bangs as the train was shunted to the proper track and the nose of the train slid under the roof of the station.

    She had worked for the railway for fifteen years and had never known it to happen, but she did the only thing she could think of doing: she stepped into the next compartment and reached up to the handle of the emergency brake. She pulled at it and heard the tiny pop as the tattered string broke apart, and then she waited, not without a distant, almost academic curiosity, to see what would happen.

    4

    The wheels locked, and the train slid to a halt; passengers were knocked to the floor of the corridors and into the laps of strangers sitting opposite them. Within seconds, windows were yanked down and heads popped out, searching up and down the track for whatever it was that had caused the train to grind to a stop. Cristina Merli lowered the window in the corridor, glad of the biting winter air, and stuck her head out, waiting to see who would come toward the train. It turned out to be two of the uniformed polizia ferrovia who came running up the platform. She leaned out the window and waved at them. Here, over here. Because she didn’t want anyone except the police to hear what she had to tell them, she said nothing more until they were directly underneath her window.

    When she told them, one of them broke away and ran back toward the station; the other moved toward the engine to tell the engineer what was going on. Slowly, with two false starts, the train began to crawl into the station, inching its way up the track until it came to a halt at its usual place on track five. A few people stood on the platform, waiting for passengers to get down from the train or to climb aboard themselves for the late-night trip to Trieste. When the doors didn’t open, they mulled together, asking one another what was wrong. One woman, assuming that this was yet another train strike, threw her hands into the air and her suitcase to the ground. As the passengers stood there, talking and growing irritated at the unexplained delay, yet another proof of the inefficiency of the railways, six police officers, each carrying a machine gun, appeared at the front of the platform and walked along the train, positioning themselves at every second car. More heads appeared at the windows, men shouted down angrily, but no one listened to anything that was said. The doors of the train remained locked.

    After long minutes of this, someone told the sergeant in charge of the officers that the train had a public address system. The sergeant pulled himself up into the engine and began to explain to the passengers that a crime had been committed on the train and that they were being held there in the station until the police could take their names and addresses.

    When he finished speaking, the engineer unlocked the doors and the police swung themselves aboard. Unfortunately, no one had thought to explain anything to the people waiting on the platform, who consequently crowded onto the train, where they quickly became confused with the original passengers. Two men in the second carriage tried to push past the officer in the corridor, insisting that they had seen nothing, knew nothing, and were already late. He stopped them by raising his machine gun across his chest in front of them, effectively blocking off the corridor and forcing them into a compartment, where they grumbled about police arrogance and their rights as citizens.

    In the end, there proved to be only thirty-four people on the train, excluding those who had crowded on behind the police. After half an hour, the police got their names and addresses and asked if they had seen anything strange on the train. Two people remembered a black peddler who got off at Vicenza, one said he’d seen a man with long hair and a beard coming out of the toilet before they pulled into Verona, and someone had seen a woman in a fur hat get off at Mestre, but aside from that, no one had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.

    Just as it began to look as though the train would be there all night, and people were beginning to straggle off to telephone relatives in Trieste to tell them not to expect their arrival, an engine backed its way into the far end of the track and attached itself to the rear of the train, suddenly converting it into the front. Three blue-uniformed mechanics crawled under the train and detached the last carriage, the one in which the body still lay, from the rest of the train. A conductor ran along the platform, yelling, "In partenza, in partenza, siamo in partenza," and passengers scrambled back up into the train. The conductor slammed a door, then another one, and pulled himself up onto the train just as it started to move slowly out of the station. And Cristina Merli stood in the office of the stationmaster, attempting to explain why she should not be subject to a fine of one million lire for having pulled the train’s alarm.

    5

    Guido Brunetti did not learn of the murder of Avvocato Carlo Trevisan until the following morning, and he learned of it in a most unpolicemanlike manner, from the shouting headlines of II Gazzettino, the same newspaper which had twice applauded Avvocato Trevisan’s tenure as city counsellor. "Avvocato Assassinato sul Treno," the headline cried, while La Nuova, ever drawn to melodrama, spoke of "Il Treno della Morte." Brunetti saw the headlines while on his way to work, stopped and bought both papers, and stood in the Ruga Orefici to read both articles while early-morning shoppers pushed past him unnoticed. The article gave the barest facts: shot to death on the train, body found as it crossed the laguna, police conducting the usual investigation.

    Brunetti looked up and allowed his eyes to wander sightlessly across the banked stalls of fruit and vegetables. The usual investigation? Who had been on duty last night? Why hadn’t he been called? And if he hadn’t been called, which one of his colleagues had?

    He turned away from the newsstand and continued walking toward the Questura, calling to mind the various cases upon which they were working at the moment, trying to calculate who would be given this one. Brunetti was himself almost at

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