Ah, perhaps already Deceived by my death Deprived of every hope and counsel Tears of pain flow from her eyes. Mozart, Lucio Silla * * * * Chapter One The shoe was red, the red of London phone booths, New York fire engines, although these were not images that came to the man who first saw the shoe. He thought of the red of the Ferrari Testarossa on the calendar in the butchers’ showers, the one with the naked blonde draped across it, seeming to make fevered love to the left headlight. He saw the shoe lying drunkenly on its side, its toe barely touching the edge of one of the pools of oil that lay like a spotted curse upon the land beyond the abattoir. He saw it there and, of course, he also thought of blood. Somehow, years before, permission had been given to put the slaughterhouse there, long before Marghera had blossomed, though that is perhaps an inopportune choice of verb, into one of the leading industrial centres of Italy, before the petroleum refineries and the chemical plants had spread themselves across the acres of swampy land that lay on the other side of the laguna from Venice, pearl of the Adriatic.
