‘She was a friend of mine.’
‘What do you mean, “was”? Did you quarrel?’ He was setting a trap, trying to get her to lie.
‘No, the poor girl died, she killed herself.’ She didn’t rise to the bait. All her intelligence was lit up like an electronic calculator, ready to fight the enemy’s wiles.
‘When?’
‘A year ago.’
‘How?’
‘She slit her wrists. It was in all the papers.’
‘Were you good friends?’
‘Quite good.’
‘Was she someone who went on the streets every now and again, like you?’
He thought he was being clever, in his way he was, he was just waiting for her to tell a lie, in order to jump on her. ‘Yes. Maybe that’s why we became friends.’
For a while the almost young man looked at her, he seemed more interested in her breasts then in her face, while he thought about his next move. Then he said to the photographer, ‘Give me a roll of film.’
Luigi had a box of them in the pocket of his smock and immediately gave him one.
‘Have you ever seen a roll of film like this?’ And he again looked her in the eyes, his own eyes half closed, as if to focus better.
‘Yes, it’s a Minox cartridge.’
‘And where have you seen one before?’
‘It was at university, a friend of mine had a Minox.’
‘Could other people have also showed you a roll like this?
‘I don’t remember. It’s possible, maybe a photographer.’
‘What about your friend Alberta? Didn’t she ever show you one of these cartridges?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?
‘Yes.’
‘And didn’t your friend ever tell you that she’d been asked to pose for photographs like the ones you’ve just been doing?’
The lie had to be ready instantaneously in order to seem convincing. ‘No.’
‘Let’s think about it: you and she are very good friends, you tell each other everything, even how much you earn from your streetwalking, and then she doesn’t tell you she posed for some artistic photographs, or that she’s about to. Strange.’
‘We were good friends but we didn’t see each other often, sometimes a month or two went by without our meeting.’ She was starting to feel cold, but only because of the air conditioning on her naked skin, not because of anything else.
For a while the man remained silent, with his head down, he was looking at her feet, counting the toes, almost as if he was anxious to know how many there were altogether, to help himself to think. Then, still with his head down, he said, ‘You’re not telling us the truth. I think you know something. Maybe you know a lot.’
‘But I don’t even know what it is you want from me, I only know I’ve ended up in a den of thieves. Let me get dressed and go, you can keep the money if you like, but I want to leave.’ She was playing her part almost perfectly.
‘Luigi,’ the man said, ‘bring me the cotton wool and the alcohol, and also the peroxide.’
‘I don’t know if I have any peroxide.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s just to stop the bleeding.’ The man took out his glasses and put them on. At last he looked at her. ‘If you tell me the whole truth, I won’t do anything to you.’ He also took out a penknife from one of his pockets, a modest, old-fashioned penknife, the kind that not even primary schoolchildren used any more.
‘You’re crazy! What do you want me to tell you? Try to touch me and you’ll see what I can do.’ She was playing the ingénue, maybe successfully.
‘I’m not curious to know what you can do, but try to tell the truth and you’ll see you won’t have to do anything.’
Luigi reappeared with some small bottles in his hand. ‘I found peroxide after all.’
The man took the bottles and put them on the floor by his feet. ‘You still have time to tell me everything you know.’
She had never studied acting, but she tried to do the best she could, to scream at the top of her voice, a scream was the natural reaction of a terrified woman who didn’t know anything. In reality, she knew everything the man wanted to know, and wasn’t terrified. Her contempt for the man was overwhelming: she would never lower herself to be afraid of a piece of dirt like him.
Or rather, she tried to scream, but before she could scream she found her mouth filled with cotton wool, then the photographer forced her to sit down and held her firmly to the chair from behind.
‘You still have time to tell the truth.’ The man had sat down on her knees to stop her from kicking. At last she understood what that short-sighted look meant: he was a sadist, in the most technical sense of the word. ‘I could hit you and knock you out, then while you’re out I could slash your wrists. That would be amusing for the police: Oh look, we keep finding women with their wrists slashed, what on earth does it mean?’ His voice had become soft and unctuous, but it didn’t scare her, only disgusted her. ‘But I need you alive, I need you to talk. I’m telling you for the last time, if you want to tell me the truth I’ll take the cotton wool out.’
She shrugged, and told him with her eyes that he was mad, that she had told him everything she knew.
‘Then I’ll start with an incision on your forehead, I’m generous and I’ll do it high up, that way you’ll easily be able to hide it with your hair.’ He rubbed her forehead with the alcohol, like an attentive nurse. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, I only want to disfigure you, at least if you don’t talk.’
She almost didn’t feel the cut, nor did any blood run down her face, because he scrupulously dabbed the wound with the peroxide while the photographer left her head free for a moment.
‘If you have anything new to tell me, nod your head and I’ll take out the cotton wool, but if you’re going to tell me again that you don’t know anything, then forget it, I’ll only get angry.’
Maybe that noise was only in her mind, an auditory hallucination which she heard because of her hope that the noise was real, but she instinctively turned her head towards the door because she had heard the sound of the bell.
‘Did someone just ring?’ the man asked.
‘No,’ the photographer said. ‘She must be waiting for somebody, and she thought they rang.’
The man reflected, with the penknife in his hand, so close to her face that she could see it was a promotional object and read on the handle the name of a famous brand of liqueurs. ‘If she was expecting someone, they’d be here by now, so try to keep calm. This girl knows where the film from last year is, maybe she even has it, and she’ll tell us eventually.’ He rubbed her left cheek with the alcohol. ‘If you talk,’ he said to her, ‘you’ll avoid a cut on your cheek which no amount of plastic surgery will put right.’ He looked at her and waited, then made the incision, his eyes almost closed behind his glasses, staring at her cheek like a diligent schoolboy at the page of an exercise book on which he’s carefully writing a beautiful sentence. ‘Whatever you know, you can’t use it against us anyway. Tell your friends, if you have any, but if you talk I’ll stop here.’ He started dabbing the cut with the peroxide, but it wasn’t enough, rivulets of blood started falling onto her neck, her chest, all the way to her stomach. ‘Will you talk or shall I continue?’
4
First they saw Livia’s taxi pull up. Even without the little telescope he had a good view of his Livia getting out in front of the stark, imposing temple of construction, but he used the telescope anyway to look at her more closely. He very much liked the dark red cotton dress she was wearing, she had good taste in clothes, her simplicity was so calculated, it was almost irritating. Then Livia was swallowed up by that deity of concrete and the taxi driver angrily headed back towards the heedless, sleeping metropolis. It was a few minutes after two, her punctuality was also irritating.