Read Online After the Fine Weather by Michael Gilbert - Free Book Online Page A

will give you my card. It has my telephone number on it.”
    “You’ve been very kind,” she said.
    “There was one other thing I wanted to say. You may find this strange. I think it would be wiser to forget all that you may have seen, or may not have seen, in the square. Eyes play strange tricks. I have seen that myself, on the mountains. Once I very clearly saw my friend, above me, reach down and cut the rope between us. I saw the knife, I saw the strands in the rope part, one by one. Then I blinked my eyes – and none of it had happened. It was an optical illusion, brought on by strain and sleeplessness. Auf Wiedersehen.”
    He gave an absurd little click with his heels, swung about, and was gone.
    Laura shut the lift door, and pressed the button which would take her up to her brother’s flat on the top floor. “But I wasn’t suffering from strain.” She said it aloud as if Helmut were in the lift with her. “Or sleeplessness. And I’ve got particularly good eyesight,” she added, as she fitted the key into the lock. “Frau Rosa!”
    There was no answer. Frau Rosa was evidently out, shopping or watching the parade. Laura went to look in the kitchen, and shouted once more to make sure. But the flat was empty.
    In the drawing-room there was a copy of the thin-paper edition of The Times that Charles got every day, twenty-four hours after publication. It carried on the editorial page an account of troubles in the South Tyrol headlined “When Neighbours Fall Out.” She read a few sentences of it, but the reasonable, cultivated phrases made no sense to her. She was seeing a fierce old man, with a white face and a nose like an eagle’s beak, falling forward onto his knees, as if in prayer, and then folding forward onto his face. She was watching a red hat cartwheeling down the steps.
    Bump, bump, bump. It was her own heart beating. She felt cold.
    One of the double windows was open, and when she went across to shut it she noticed that the blue sky of the morning had gone. It was as if an artist, tiring of a summer scene, had dipped his brush in grey and blocked out the sky with a few quick strokes.
    The telephone rang. Laura let it ring. She did not feel up to shaping German sentences. After a bit it got discouraged and stopped.
    The shutting of the window had made the room very quiet. She picked up the paper again. “It is to be hoped,” said the foreign correspondent of The Times, “that counsels of moderation will prevail, and that we shall not see, in these peaceful upland valleys, so loved of tourists, the incongruous incidents of terrorism and repressions.”
    Did journalists really hope that counsels of moderation would prevail? Or was it something they said while they sat by and hoped for exactly the opposite? She was pretty certain that counsels of moderation were the last thing Joe Keller wanted.
    The thought of Joe was still in her mind when a key clicked in the lock and, as she jumped to her feet, Charles came in, followed by a stout little man whom she remembered seeing seated next to him at the parade.
    “My colleague, Dr Pisoni, Italian Consul General,” said Charles.
    Dr Pisoni bowed from the area which, in a differently constructed man, would have been his waist. He looked badly worried.
    “Am I glad to see you!” said Laura to Charles. “Did you have any trouble getting back?”
    “No trouble at all. And I hope it stays that way. Schatzmann seems to have everything under control.”
    “What happened?”
    “The crowd tried to lynch Boschetto. The Colonel had half a dozen truckloads of gendarmerie in reserve, and he whistled them up. They got Boschetto away, but they had to shoot to do it.”
    “Who is Boschetto?”
    Dr Pisoni took this question. “He is an Italian from Bolzano. I understand that he has just been released, after a three-year prison sentence for assault and robbery.”
    “He must be mad,” said Charles.
    “No other explanation is possible,” agreed Dr Pisoni. It was