And surely no one would want to come near that building; hence the fence was hardly necessary to keep them away. Perhaps because of this, the long gaps in it went unmended, and stray dogs, drawn by the stench of what went on inside, sometimes came through the fence at night and howled with longing for what they knew was there.

The fields around the slaughterhouse stood empty; as if obeying a taboo as deep as blood itself, the factories stood far off from the low cement building. The buildings maintained their distance, but their ooze and their runoff and those deadly fluids that were piped into the ground knew nothing of taboo and seeped each year closer to the slaughterhouse. Black slime bubbled up around the stems of marsh grass, and a peacock-bright sheen of oil floated on the surface of the puddles that never disappeared, however dry the season. Nature had been poisoned here, outside, yet it was the work that went on inside that filled people with horror.

The shoe, the red shoe, lay on its side about a hundred metres to the rear of the slaughterhouse, just outside the fence, just to the left of a large clump of tall seagrass that seemed to thrive on the poisons that percolated around its roots. At eleven-thirty on a hot Monday morning in August, a thickset man in a blood-soaked leather apron flung back the metal door at the rear of the slaughterhouse and emerged into the pounding sun. From behind him swept waves of heat, stench, and howls. The sun made it difficult to feel that it was cooler here, but at least the stench of offal was less foul, and the sounds came from the hum of traffic, a kilometre away, as the tourists poured into Venice for Ferragosto, not from the shrieks and squeals that filled the air behind him.

He wiped a bloody hand on his apron, stooping to find a dry spot down by the hem, then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a package of Nazionale.