Yet Another Death in Venice (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  “He was shot in the back on his way to the airport in a motorboat. Someone was dressed in a costume. It was Carnival time so many people wore masks. Your colleague in Venice told me this, but it was not needed. Everyone in the city knew this. It was in the newspapers. On the radio and television. I was wearing a mask myself. I was driving the gondolier with the pole. It was impossible for me to kill Mr. Silverburger. Besides he was a customer. He paid much money and he made no complaint. I said this to your colleague in Venice.”

  “Of course,” said Bognor. “You would hardly confess to the crime even if you had committed it. Not the same as saying you’re innocent.”

  Nor was it, Sir Simon thought. He sometimes wondered if interrogations were worth it. Certainly, orthodox Q and A sessions were suspect. If only lie detectors were reliable. It was like Hawkeye, the electronic device that was supposed to be infallible and that the Indians said was not able to make reliable decisions with regard to leg before wicket. Bognor thought that the Indians might have a point. However it was more than his life was worth to say so in public. There would be a chorus of dissent from the depths of armchairs. The chorus would be muffled by a combination of sleep and Daily Telegraph, but it would be nonetheless real.

  “I did not kill Mr. Silverburger. He was my good friend.”

  “You would say that,” countered the head of SIDBOT. “That doesn’t make either statement true or false. Just predictable.”

  The gondolier, turned taxi driver–male tart, who was incapable of changing his spots, had the grace and self-knowledge to hang his head. Bognor hoped it was shame that made him do it.

  “I would like to help,” said Benito. “How can I help? I would enjoy assisting you to find the person who killed Irving. It was not … how do you say it? It was not necessary.”

  “No,” he agreed. Privately, he thought that murder was always a bit of a waste, but he did not feel that this was the time for a philosophical discussion. Nor Benito the right person with whom to have one.

  “Were you named after Mussolini?” he asked, and was pleased to see the effect of this unusual form of questioning. At least there was some prospect of getting an honest response. It might even be revealing.

  “My parents were both Fascists,” Benito said without a moment’s hesitation. “I, too, admire Il Duce. Mr. Silverburger, also. We have talked often about him.”

  Interesting. So Silverburger had been a Tea-Party man. A Neocon. Right wing. A Fascist. Benito likewise.

  “My great-aunt was Rita Zucca. Great-Aunt Rita. Very fine lady. She lived to be very old. In an apartment in Mestre. Very old, but she had, how you say, spirit. She had a very fine spirit. My father, he drove a truck. He used to say that the fascisti built the autostrada and Il Duce made the trains punctual. In Britain, you need a good Fascist to build the new roads and organize the trains. You have not had such a person since Ernesto Marples. My father was a believer in Ernesto Marples.” Benito pronounced the name Marples with a heavily accented final syllable whereas in English, the name had in effect only a single syllable with a sort of guttural plural on the end. The way Benito pronounced it made Ernest sound like a torero or indeed a friend of the Italian dictator. Bognor found it strange to think of Ernest Marples inspiring a cult following among Italian truck drivers, but there you went. Marples had been a flamboyant transport minister in a Conservative government when Bognor was growing up. Had he been Italian, thought Bognor, little Marples might have been a Fascist. But he was as British as a half of warm bitter, which mean the had to settle for a diluted form of conservatism. Bognor thought Ernest’s prime minister was Harold Macmillan, who was many things but not a Fascist. Marples was responsible for introducing the seatbelt and Dr. Beeching, the scourge of the railways. He was also the founder of a construction company called Marples-Ridgway, which specialized in road building and represented a clear conflict of interest when Marples ran it while minister for transport. He spent the last few years of his life holed up in his chateau fleeing from the British tax authorities. He probably lacked the guts to be a fully fledged Fascist. He made, on Bognor’s reflection, an improbable but plausible patron saint for Benito’s truck-driving father and his great-aunt Rita who had, in her day, been a sort of Italian Lord Haw-Haw. She was in the habit of broadcasting anti-Allied propaganda during World War II, had been tried and sentenced to a prison term and subsequently vanished. Bognor occasionally and very idly wondered what had become of her. Now it transpired that she had lived to a ripe and spirited old age as well as being a fan of Ernest Marples.

  Bognor shrugged and smiled. And now Benito. Ah, Benito.

  “So you did not kill Irving Silverburger?” Bognor smiled a smile that was supposed to be feline. The words were the exact opposite to those he had uttered a few minutes earlier yet the sense of them was not so very different. This was the effect of inflection, the nature of the grunt, the triumph of style over substance.

  “This is what I have said.”

  “You know Marshall McLuhan?” asked Bognor. “The medium, not the message. McLuhan is saying much the same as Wilde. It is not so much what purports to be said but the means of conveying it that makes the difference. Sometimes this affects the message itself. Do I make myself clear?” Benito shook his head vigorously. Meaning and clarity were emphatically not what he was getting. “I am sorry,” he said. “My English is not so good.”

  “I am sorry, also.”

  Pause. Not a long one, but sufficient for Bognor to use it to gather his thoughts. Eventually, he continued, “So on the one hand, you did shoot poor Silverburger, and on the other, you did not.”

  “No,” said Benito. “I did not kill Irving. Not. Not. No. No.

  I did not kill him.”

  “Next thing I know, you’ll be saying that I put words in your mouth. That’s what most people say, especially when, like you, they don’t speak much English. We have the same sort of problem with a great many natives. Just because you were born in England doesn’t mean that you speak English. Not a problem I often encounter, but some of my colleagues, particularly in uniform, say they come across it most of the time. Well, maybe not most, but it’s a worry, this Englishness of the non-practicing English person. We’re not allowed to articulate it for fear of sounding racist, but it is a problem all the same.”

  He sighed. “Your English is not very good and you’re not very bright, so I can get you to say what I like. Or could if I were so inclined. Luckily for you, however, I am not a bent copper and I don’t happen to believe you killed Silverburger.”

  “Sì,” said Benito, nodding vigorously. “I mean, yes.”

  “Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Finsbury Circus. It’s all the same thing. Bread for you, circuses for the punter. Same with airports—Heathrow, Gatwick, City, Southend, Stansted, Luton. They’re all airports. Pays your money and you take your choice.”

  “You want to go to airport?” Benito asked eagerly. “You want fly? Foreign country. Aeroplane. Many, many flap-flap?”

  Bognor sighed again.

  “So you took Mr. Silverburger in your gondola. You quoted him a price. He paid. You took him to your bed. You mentioned money; named a figure. He paid. No love; no sense of occasion or direction. But it was commercial all around, and after you’d moored your boat and zipped up your flies, you simply said good-bye and never saw him again.”

  “Yes,” said Benito. “Yes, yes. Irving Silverburger very nice man. He pay lot of money. Very correct. Not too much. Not too little. No rubber and bounce, bounce. Also please and thank you. Mr. Silverburger perfect gentleman. Perfect gentleman. You also?”

  Bognor sighed for a third time and found himself wondering if this was significant. They said bad news came in threesomes; maybe it was true of sighs. He realized he could get a conviction easily.

  Gondolier had sex with customer, then killed him. No questions asked. Lover’s tiff. Money and lust. Two perennial reasons for murder.

  “You like to take people for a ride?” he as
ked rhetorically. Benito smiled. “Of course,” he said. “You like?”

  “Not today, thanks,” said Sir Simon. “I like to know where I’m going, so no rides today. Thanks all the same.” He lied again. “You’ve been a great help,” he said.

  “No? No ride?” Benito seemed very disappointed. Crestfallen even. Though he wouldn’t have understood.

  16

  The matter of M. Strauss-Kahn, the French head of the International Monetary Fund, accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid but later released without trial, had dominated newspaper headlines for much of 2011. Newspapers had Mr. Murdoch and phone tapping, the Arab Spring, and much else to occupy themselves, but the affaire Strauss-Khan involved an allegedly libidinous Frog with presidential aspirations and a colored, relatively nubile female and was therefore grist to a particular old-fashioned hack and his equally old-fashioned mill. The fact that the story seemed to be all smoke and no fire was no bar to its headline quality, and the world thrilled accordingly. French financiers of a certain age already enjoyed a dodgy reputation, but their attractive feminist wives came in for a bit of flak and the affaire did nothing for the already flaky reputation of female workers in the hotel industry. The fact that Irving Silverburger had enjoyed a commercially tainted fling with an employee of a Venetian hotel was in comparison a matter of little consequence.

  American film producers, particularly of such quintessentially unintellectual appeal as The Coffee Grinders, were well known to drop their pants at anything that moved. Girls who worked in the hotel business were popularly supposed to be no better than they should be and would sell themselves short to anyone connected with film, even if the film were as ghastly as The Coffee Grinders.

  “So,” said Bognor, not beating about the bush, “you had sex with Mr. Silverburger and then shot him in the back with a crossbow. Bit extreme? Not up to much, was he?”

  Sophia pouted. When she pouted, she looked sexy and Italian, which, for men such as Bognor, was the same, and meant Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and Monica Vitti. Loren shared a Christian name with the hotel maid and had once enjoyed similarly pulchritudinous appeal. The three actresses were old maids or matrons now, even if still alive, but when Bognor and the world were young, they had been alluring, sexy, and inviting. The modern Sophia had a similar appeal, but Bognor was sort of past succumbing to it. Well, he was not, but he did not wish to appear ridiculous. Well, up to a point. The modern Sophia spoke. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

  Bognor considered this and eventually said that yes, on balance, he did.

  “I have a degree in comparative biology from the University of Padua and an MBA from Harvard.”

  Inwardly, Bognor groaned. Outwardly, however, he smiled as if he had been expecting as much all along.

  “So?” he said, showing his teeth.

  “I am a graduate of a respectable university, and I have a master’s in business administration from arguably the world’s best.”

  “Even graduates from quite good universities are quite stupid,” Bognor said drily. “Besides, I have never rated Harvard and, come to think of it, the same goes for courses in business studies.”

  “It is because I am a woman.”

  “On the contrary. Some of my best friends are women.” He was thinking of Monica, aka Lady Bognor.

  “Then why?”

  “Even Apocrypha men can be stupid,” Bognor said with feeling. “I don’t think Oxford had anything to do with business until that ridiculous school with the foreign name. And that university you mention is just a Cambridge upstart on the wrong side of the Atlantic.”

  “I am an international courtesan,” said Sophia, sounding fierce. “I charge in guineas and I accept plastic, especially pink.”

  “With respect,” said Bognor, not giving any, “you’re an employee of a hotel. Quite a long way down the food chain, too. You clean and make beds.”

  “That is just a cover,” she protested. “I am une grande horizontale. My credit score is fantastic. Better than yours.”

  “That’s perfectly possible,” agreed Bognor, who was not proud of his credit score on the grounds that he kept forgetting his password, did not appreciate the significance of his mother’s maiden name, and was not much interested in finance in any case.

  “My books are in order. In fact, they are matters of great beauty.”

  Bognor did not believe these sorts of books had the capacity for beauty. He had no respect for money, regarding it as a regrettable necessity and believing that there was much more to life.

  “None of this has any relevance to the death of Silverburger,” he said.

  “I take American Express and Diners,” said Sophia, eyes flashing. “I am not merely a common garden maid. I am a professional and I am a graduate.”

  “Yes, well,” said Bognor, having his doubts about the universities in question and about Sophia’s presence there. She had probably made beds in both places, and in more senses than one. She may or may not have been clever or well qualified, but she was certainly sexy.

  “So Mr. Silverburger paid you for sex?”

  “He paid for my companionship. Anything more was private.” For the first time, she dimpled. Prettily. Bognor was intrigued. He would never have followed the deceased as far as Benito was concerned, but the courtesan was another matter.

  He remembered how on one occasion after the two men had had a drink at some conference, Parkinson had asked what Bognor “did” about sex, adding the implausible but very British rider that it’s hardly the sort of thing that one can discuss with one’s wife. Bognor reflected that one’s wife was precisely the sort of person with whom one had to discuss sexual matters, but then, he supposed, not for the first time, that he was different. Monica even more so.

  “I don’t see that your academic qualifications or your financial probity have anything to do with the deceased’s demise,” he said pompously.

  “You think that because I’m a girl and work in hotels and enjoy men and sex that makes me automatically stupid. And also you think that a stupid, sexy woman who works in a hotel is easy meat. You may think I killed Silverburger, but that is really immaterial. You could pin it on me because most people, especially male, think I’m a low form of life. As such, they reckon I could have killed Mr. Silverburger. The only real reservation is that it’s unlikely that a woman could shoot straight.”

  “Well, you said it,” agreed Sir Simon. “I don’t believe women can drive cars. And, certainly, they can’t park or read a map the right way up. Or shoot straight. They are only any good cooking or making love. That’s what men think. According to the stereotype. If you believe that all men behave in a certain way and all women in another, then that’s what you’ll believe. I happen to think life is more complicated than that; but then, I’m old-fashioned.”

  Sophia seemed reassured by this. She relaxed. Or gave the impression of doing so.

  “You seem to conform to a type,” she said, “but something about you suggests otherwise. Are you a Pisces?”

  “I’m flattered,” said Bognor, who was. “And I haven’t the foggiest notion if I am a Pisces or not. I don’t believe in signs. I’m resolutely opposed to such things.” He really did not and he really was. Queer fellow, Bognor. Very.

  “This doesn’t help me resolve the question of who killed Irving Silverburger,” he said. “Was it you?”

  She pouted and said pouf, or words to that effect. She would, wouldn’t she? But Bognor was inclined to believe her. He recognized that he was a victim of prejudice. He could see that he was prejudiced against women in a general, and therefore sexist, way. He was prejudiced against the hotel industry, particularly those who worked in a menial capacity. This was, presumably snobbery. And was prejudiced against those who sold sex for money. This had presumably been dinned into him as a form of puritanism having its origins in a particular sort of regimented religion. This, too, was prejudice. On the one hand, recognition was one thing, doing anything about it quite a
nother. He was a creature of prejudice and he knew it. However, he accepted it. It was the way he was made. Possibly, this was regrettable, but it was also necessary. Perhaps this was why the regrettable necessity had entered the language and become a cliché.

  In any event, he conceded that he suspected Sophia for a number of reasons, most of them reprehensible. There was no reason for believing that she had killed Silverburger any more than his accountant, his catamite, or his confessor. Bognor had been taught to cherchez la femme and if she was a hotel maid and a bit of a trollop, then she deserved everything she got. She did not, of course, but only Germaine Greer would have proclaimed her innocence. Well, young Germaine; old Germaine would have led the stone throwers. But that, too, was prejudice. It wasn’t Greer’s fault that she had once written that book and appeared to change sides in old age. She was Australian. Oh God, he must stop making up his mind prematurely and on no evidence. Some of his best friends …

  Out loud, he said, “You must admit, though …”

  “I’m admitting nothing.”

  Bognor began to suspect that the girl was right about university even if Harvard was a claim too far. But did academic qualifications, real or imaginary, make Sophia a murderer? Did being a hotel maid? Or a prostitute? Or just female? He sighed.

  “Very droll,” he said. “In some countries, your behavior would be criminal.”

  “Not where I come from.”

  “Which is?” he asked nonchalantly.

  “Let’s just say that I am a citizen of the world. I mean a girl has to live and I enjoy my job. I like men. I enjoy giving pleasure. Sometimes I take a little myself.” She smiled.