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Diabolic pot-making

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Perhaps the reason all those pots have no lids is because the kids took them to "batter San Martin" and forgot to bring them back. Or maybe not.
Perhaps the reason all those pots have no lids is because the kids took them to “batter San Martin” and forgot to bring them back. Or maybe not.

As I have noted in various other circumstances, the following is one of my most favorite expressions, and I’m sorry to say that nearly every day something happens to illustrate its profound truth.

El diavolo fa e tece ma no i coverci (el dee-AH-volo fa eh TEH-cheh ma no ee co-VER-chee).  The Devil makes the pots, but he doesn’t make the lids.  Sooner or later, the flaws in whatever fantastic and usually highly sketchy project or idea you’re involved in are going to be discovered.  The jig will be up.

Small-, medium- and big-time criminals are astonishingly prone to cook their schemes in lidless pots.  Perhaps nobody has explained the importance of keeping them thoroughly sealed, like a pressure-cooker.  Perhaps they don’t believe the Devil would ever play a dirty trick on them, seeing that they’re so busy at it themselves. Here are some recent illustrations of how this works.

The bicycle-racing champion.  With apologies to Sir Walter Scott, I have to ask: Breathes there a man (or woman) with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, “I’m going to call in sick today and go get my hair highlighted”?  If such there be, he is not Marshal Roberto Ambrosi of the Air Force, because instead of asking for sick leave and then going to the salon, or the Casino, or some other place of amusement, he decided to enter the World Championship of Mountain Biking.

So far, so possibly anonymous.  Except that he won the race and the gold medal, and the published image of him crossing the finish line with arms upraised all combine to make one heck of a kitchen utensil to leave uncovered, because he had requested eight days of sick leave which he spent training, and not lying on the sofa consuming hot liquids and taking his temperature.

Sick leave is usually linked to some ailment, as I understand it, so the bike training is awkward.  The court in Verona, which has jurisdiction, maintains that either an ailment didn’t exist, or wasn’t sufficiently severe to warrant sick leave. If he indeed was ailing, and if it netted him a gold medal in a fairly strenuous sport, we’d all like to know how to catch whatever it is.

His defense maintains that he never claimed to have an ailment.  Seeing that this ought to be a point which would be phenomenally simple to determine — look at the request form, which somebody must have signed? — there must be something more going on here.  His lawyer attempts to gain ground by also pointing out that the race was held on a Sunday (time off, by definition), though I myself see no link between eight misidentified days of leave and whatever the accused did on Sunday. It all makes nit for the legal experts to pick.

I should mention that the race was held last year, so I’d give Marshal Ambrosi five extra points for succeeding in not being discovered for a fairly long time.  Points which I am compelled to withdraw for the fact that any of this ever happened in the first place.

The get-in-line thieves:  Three men go out to rob a bar in Martellago, just up the road (this is not the beginning of a joke.  Or maybe it is).  It’s 4:00 AM, which as we all know is the perfect time for robbing bars.  This trio had demonstrated this fact on a number of other occasions. So it was understandable that they were a little peevish when, just as two of them were cutting open the security shutters on the door, some other guys showed up.

Maybe pots without lids seem more efficient somehow. There's less to wash, that's true.
Maybe pots without lids seem more efficient somehow. There’s less to wash, that’s true.

The third thief, who had been stationed as a lookout for the police, was quick to cut them short. “Hey,” he snapped — “We got here first.”  Beat it, in other words, leave us in peace and go rob some other bar.

Except that the “other guys” were Carabinieri in plainclothes.  The three bandits figured this out as the handcuffs snapped around their wrists.  Good going, lookout!  We need to take you with us again!

This would be a too-perfect example of another of my favorite sayings: No xe da portarte a rubar (no zeh dah por-TAR-teh ah roo-BAR). Roughly: “You’re not someone I’d take with me to steal something.”  This phrase is useful for any moment in which a person spontaneously does or says something which ruins whatever project you had going in another direction. For example: Your boss calls you at home and your wife answers and says, “Oh, he’s not home right now.  He’s out all day training on his mountain bike for the world championship.”  The husband would be justified in telling her that she’s just the perfect person to take along for the heist.

Or how about this, a true story from Lino’s past as an airplane mechanic at Marco Polo airport.  He was working aboard a plane with a group of guys and they decided to kick back and take a break.  So they picked one man and told him to stand at the doorway of the plane and tell them if the boss was coming.  The boss does indeed come; he walks up the steps and asks the lookout, “What are you doing?”  And the lookout says, “I’m standing here watching to see if you’re coming so I can tell the guys inside.”  Not made up.

To return to our trio: The fact that the investigators then went to the culprits’ homes and recovered all sorts of stolen stuff from other jobs is just the proverbial cherry on the cake, as they say here.

What will live in history is the blinding flash of brilliance of the indignant lookout invoking “honor among thieves” —  First come, first served.  Don’t jump the line.  Take a number. —  to the Carabinieri.

The jealous, potentially flammable, ex-husband.  This anecdote will not inspire mirth (I hope), though it certainly made me move my lips in a smile-like way as I paused to dwell on the inscrutable workings of Providence.

One evening not long ago, here in the most beautiful city in the world, a Romanian man was out stalking his wife.  She had endured far too much abuse, from physical attacks to the loss of all their money due to his gambling addiction, and in 2011 they separated, then reconciled. They left the children with the grandparents in Romania and came to Italy to start over.  Before long, the only operative word for them was “over.”

She left him, and moved from Padova to an undisclosed address in Venice.  She got a job as a waitress at a bar-disco called Il Piccolo Teatro in Campo San Lorenzo.

It might be a good idea to keep an extra lid with you at all times. You never know.
It might be a good idea to keep an extra lid with you at all times. You never know.

But none of this spelled “Forget her, she never wants to breathe the same air as you” to the rejected husband. He began to cultivate the conviction that she was having an affair with her boss, and also that her boss was making her work as a prostitute.  Having not had much success with the stalker’s usual barrage of phone calls, messages, and threats, he found out where she worked (I never understand how stalkers discover these details), and decided to settle the matter in person.

He filled a bottle with gasoline, took the train from Padova to Venice, and waited near the entrance to the bar for her to show up for work.  Which she did, shortly before opening time at 10:30 PM, along with her boss and another employee.

The ex-husband then splattered gasoline over her, her boss, and himself, cried “You’re going to burn with me,” and took out a lighter. Screams and confused phrases ensued, during which time he would flick the lighter on, then close it.

Now we get to the good part.  It just so happened that at that very moment the chief of police, Vincenzo Roca, was walking home, close enough to the scene to smell the gasoline and hear the hysterical screams of the woman.  He instantly intervened, managed to convince the man to give him the lighter, then called the mobile squad to come take him away.

The police chief lives in the palatial police headquarters which are literally just across the canal from Campo San Lorenzo ((cue Inscrutable Providence!).  What are the odds of all this?  Set aside the amazing fact that it was the chief himself who witnessed the scene in time to avoid horror — what sort of deranged ex-husband decides to try to kill his wife directly in front of the police station?

During the two hours of interrogation which followed, he maintained that he never intended to kill anyone, that his wild scenario was merely to get his wife’s attention and, having accomplished that, to convince her to quit working and come back to him.  If I were soaked with gasoline, the only thing a lighter-wielding man could convince me of would be that he is criminally insane.  But that’s just me.

He is now in prison, accused of attempted homicide, and for stalking.  The judge for the preliminary hearing wasn’t convinced that he needed to be kept locked up for the first count (you don’t think he would try again?  Really?), but did leave him in the clink for the stalking.  Whatever works.

Gold stars to police chief Roca!  And kudos also to Inscrutable Providence, whose message to the man by now must be extremely scrutable: (A) Do not attack anyone in front of the police station, (B) Do not attack anyone, period, and (C) Go somewhere far away and start your life over.  Ideally in a magical realm where all the pots have lids.

Though this model is undoubtedly the best investment you can make, when you get to simmering your future. Not just a lid -- the Ur-lid.
This model is undoubtedly the best investment you can make, when you get to simmering your future. Not just a lid — the Ur-lid.
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The last of Mahtab

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IMG_3909 mahtab

The newspaper hasn’t reported anything further about when Mahtab Ahad Savoji’s remains will be released so that her aunt can take her home.  Evidently she’s still in the morgue.

It has reported, however, that the “atypical strangulation” was caused by a forearm; the most likely scenario for this type of injury, according to the coroner, was that she would have been seized from behind and the assailant’s forearm squeezed against her neck.

Alcohol was found in her blood, though not at the extreme level described by her roommates. Her blood alcohol level was reported at “twice the legal limit,” which here would mean it was 0.10%.  This level could result from her having drunk a bottle of wine, or five shots of whiskey, over the course of four hours, though if she was killed at 2:00 PM it’s unlikely she began drinking at 10:00 AM.  Even though this is Italy, where some people start their engines before dawn, it doesn’t match the personality described by her family and friends.

Still, if I were living with Rajeshwar and Gagandeep, a couple of shots might have been just what I needed.

I can’t think about this anymore, so I will close with  تسلیت می گویم یا تسلیت مرا بپذیرید. My condolences.

 

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Why her? Why here? Why any of it?

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The only way to make the Lido look beautiful is to add lots of sky. That is, something non-Lido. But it looked like the perfect place to settle their little evidence problem, even if they did have to travel 167 miles (269 km) to get there.
The only way to make the Lido look beautiful is to add lots of sky. That is, something non-Lido. But it looked like the perfect place to resolve their little evidence problem, even if they did have to travel 167 miles (269 km) to get there.

Let’s admit that “Death in Venice” is — I’m sorry to say — one of the greatest titles ever.  It’s better than “Catch-22” or “Atlas Shrugged,” and it’s probably better even than “Of  Human Bondage” or “Naked Lunch.”

You can see why. If sadness and Venice appear to be destined for each other, like Victorian lovers, death and Venice seem doomed to be linked forever, thanks to a genius title that connects two of the most emotion-laden words that exist. If the book had been called “Farewell, My Lovely” — which would have been kind of cool, though it would have put Raymond Chandler in a fix — at least Venice could have escaped the “death” search term.

Enough musing. A recent tragedy has shown that there’s nothing romantic about either death or Venice, even when you put them together.  And you don’t have to actually die here to benefit from the Venetian element.  It’s enough to be discovered to be dead here for the whole affair to seem even worse than it is. Whatever that means.

Here’s what happened. And I warn you that the tragic element, which is real, will play a relatively small part in a story which is made up of idiocy of a magnitude to dwarf even the ten most idiotic things that have ever happened here.

At about 1:40 AM on January 28, a water-taxi driver went home to the Lido and was tying up his boat at its usual place in the canal that flanks via Antonio Loredan. It was dark, obviously, and this street isn’t especially well-lighted. But he saw something floating in the water.

The “something” was the body of a woman, who was clad only in a single necklace.

But the necklace wasn’t the important clue.

It was the fact that a young Indian couple in Milan had reported her missing.

That turned out to be a huge technicolor clue, because they were the ones who killed her. This is the first indication of the level of intelligence at work here (idiocy, as mentioned).  If I had murdered someone, I don’t think I’d feel like trotting over to the police to say, “She’s disappeared and I don’t know anything about it” if, in fact, I knew all about it. I’d feel like getting on a plane back to India, which is what exactly what they’d had in mind, but they didn’t do it fast enough.

download mahtabHer name was Mahtab Ahad Savoji, and she was a 31-year-old Iranian student who had gone to Milan two years ago to study art. She moved into an apartment at #5 via Pericle with  Rajeshwar Singh (29), a hotel night porter, and his girlfriend, Gagandeep Kaur (30), a chambermaid.

Life was not tranquil.  Contrary to her supposition of sharing the apartment with only Gagandeep, she found herself living with her boyfriend too.  The place was so small that Mahtab slept on a cot next to the sofabed where the couple had no second thoughts about getting it on whenever they felt like it. She told her friends that Rajeshwar had begun hitting on her, that Gagandeep wanted to involve her in a menage. Strife escalated.

Fed up, Mahtab packed her bag and told them she was moving out.  Then she asked to be reimbursed for her part of the security deposit. As far as I can tell, this is when things went south, possibly aggravated by their feelings of rejection regarding the missed menage. In any case, they killed her.

It was 2:00 PM on January 27.  The autopsy revealed that she died of “atypical strangulation,” which has yet to be further elucidated.  However, her demise was not caused by a cord, as Gagandeep claimed, nor was it caused by drinking herself to death, as Rajeshwar maintained.

It’s now about 2:30 and the two Indians have a dead body they need to get rid of. They strip her, fold her up, and put her in a big rolling suitcase.  Then they head to Lecco, a town 31 miles (50 km) away. The plan was to dump her body in beautiful Lake Como, but they decided against it because “there were too many people around.”

An aerial view of Lecco. Does this look like a place that would have too many people to make disposing of a body awkward?
An aerial view of Lecco. All that water would be perfect for disposing of a body, but there is that little problem about the thousands of people living there.  (Pawel Kierzkowski)

People? The town has 47,760 inhabitants, plus tourists, and  it was still daylight, too. Sharp.

So they dragged the big suitcase back to Milan (presumably by train — it’s less than an hour from Lecco), and took a train for Venice.

Why? you ask.  Why Venice?  The Po River is much closer to Milan than Venice, and I doubt that they were impelled by the well-known romantic connection between the Queen of the Seas and the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

They went to Venice simply because Rajeshwar had worked in a hotel on the Lido for a brief period, so apparently it came to his mind that all that water would be just the place to leave her remains. Or some sort of reasoning like that.  If he had worked in a hotel in Geneva, maybe he’d have lugged the girl’s corpse to Geneva.

They got off the vaporetto at 8:04 PM under a pounding rain; the video surveillance cameras filmed two people pulling a big suitcase.  They walked a third of a mile (595 meters) to the first canal to the left, and found a nice dark spot to unburden themselves of their naked former friend.

The pair left the Lido at 9:56 PM (I can’t understand how it took them two hours to accomplish their task, but the video doesn’t lie).  But when they got to the station, it was past 11:00 PM, and the last train for Milan was gone.  So too was the now-empty suitcase.

Undismayed, they walked over the Calatrava Bridge and asked a taxi driver how much he’d charge to drive them to Milan, because they had to be at work the next day. (First rule of escape: Be as inconspicuous as possible.)  (Second rule: Evaluate seriously how important it is to show up on time for work, when you are shortly going to be sought by the police.)

The driver said 650 euros, they said fine, and off they went.  The video cameras at Piazzale Roma filmed this also.

At 2:30 AM they were back in Milan. And by now the body had surfaced.

It didn’t take the police all that long to find their way to via Pericle to ask the couple a few questions about their former roommate, thanks to their having reported her missing.  At which point they began to just throw remarks every which way, like Eddie Izzard on lying: “I was on the moon.  With Steve.”

First, they told the police that they’d gone out for a walk at 10:30 on the day of her disappearance, and when they returned at 6:00 PM, she wasn’t there.

Then they said that they had awakened suddenly at 8:00 AM to find her naked and dead lying on the sofabed next to him; they assumed she had drunk herself to death the night before. (So then they went out for a walk?)

The autopsy hasn’t found any evidence of this yet. On the contrary — the Indians stated that Mahtab had been eating potato chips and chickpeas with her bottomless bottle of whiskey, forgetting that the autopsy would easily reveal what she had really consumed. For the record, it was rice and vegetables, her lunch on the day of her death.

Then Rajeshwar said they hadn’t killed her, they’d only disposed of her body.  (Don’t try to make sense of this. “Our friend is inexplicably dead!  Gosh, let’s take her clothes off, haul her body to Venice and throw her in the lagoon so nobody thinks we did it.”)

Then Gagandeep said “Rajeshwar killed her with a cord which he threw away.”  Then she said, “No, he didn’t kill her, I killed her.”

Then the police found that Rajeshwar had booked a direct flight to India for February 2, and that 5,500 euros were stashed in the sofabed.

Just think; Instead of going all the way back to Milan, they could have gotten on a plane at Marco Polo airport at 6:20 AM and been somewhere in India by 11:40 that night. I’m all for showing up for work, but I think they got their priorities slightly scrambled.

So Rajeshwar and Gagandeep are in jail in Milan, and Mahtab is in the morgue in Venice. Her aunt has come to identify her remains, and when the coroner has clarified all the remaining unclear points in the attempt to establish the definite cause of death, Mahtab will go back to Teheran.

And Rajeshwar and Gagandeep will be going back and forth from their cells to the court for quite a while.

And the good people of the Lido can go back to thinking of how to induce tourists to come to the beach and the golf course. God knows nobody wants the Golden Isle to start being known for a new kind of tourism.

 

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