Read Online Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions by Mario Giordano - Free Book Online

shakily and made herself some coffee. She ate two slices of toast, watered the plants in the courtyard, and ate another two slices of toast. The trembling and the aftermath of the nightmare were slow to subside. At around five, in the first pale light of dawn, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She got dressed and drove to Praiola to toss a pretty pebble into the sea in memory of Peppe and, perhaps, to have a little dip in the light of the rising sun.
    Her plan came to nothing.
    She caught sight of the figure as soon as she parked the car. Seemingly poured out like liquid on the rounded volcanic rocks, it was just a shadow in the half-light, just a dark patch forgotten by the sea, like jetsam. Not a sound to be heard but the buzzing of flies and the splash of wavelets on the shore as if the sea itself were not yet properly awake. Somehow, Poldi already guessed what had woken her.
    And what she would very soon see.
    Cautiously but resolutely, she made her way over the big, rounded boulders and approached the figure on the beach as if loath to wake its owner. He was so young, after all, and young men need plenty of sleep.
    â€œValentino?” Her voice sounded hoarse, like the mewing of a kitten.
    Valentino was lying stretched out on his back. Poldi recognized him at once by the trinacria tattooed on his left forearm, the Sicilian symbol consisting of a three-legged Gorgon’s head. She wouldn’t, however, have been able to recognize him by his handsome Arabo-Norman face because someone had blown that away at short range with a lupara, a sawn-off shotgun. When Poldi came nearer a cloud of flies rose from the remains of his head.
    With a groan, she knelt down beside him. Just crouched beside the corpse, whimpering softly as if that age-old song of grief could bring him back to life. The big pebbles hurt her knees, but she scarcely felt the pain. She grasped his left hand, which was as cold and hard and dry as the stones on the beach.
    â€œOh, Valentino, why did you never say a word?”
    She fondled his cold hand and stared at the sea and the rising sun, to avoid having to look at him. It wasn’t her first dead body and she wasn’t easily shocked, but the sight of that mangled face affected her deeply. She turned her head away and tried to concentrate on his hand, on his dirty fingernails and the familiar tattoo.
    At length, however, she forced herself to look.
    â€œThat was when I made Valentino a promise,” she told me later. “An almost automatic process was at work, that’s why. It was genetically conditioned.”
    â€œYou mean a kind of… criminalistic hereditary reflex?” I asked, remembering the psychology course I’d dropped out of.
    â€œBullshit. It was the hunting instinct.” She looked at me. “Either you’ve got it or you haven’t.”
    Valentino’s face looked really awful. The eyes, nose and mouth were scarcely distinguishable – just a gory mush of shredded flesh and bone fragments – but Poldi took a careful look in spite of the flies and her urge to vomit. The blood had already congealed. She carefully raised the head a little, then gently laid it down again. After hesitating for a moment – she drew a deep breath – Poldi bravely felt in his trouser pockets. The left-hand pocket yielded nothing but some reddish grains of sand, but in the other she found a few coins and, among them, a little piece of mosaic like the one she had purloined from his bedroom: a glazed, cobalt-blue ceramic fragment the size of a cent. After a moment’s thought she pocketed the tessera and stuffed the small change back in Valentino’s trouser pocket. She didn’t find his mobile phone.
    Poldi knew it was time to call the police, but first she examined the immediate vicinity of the corpse. Not until the sun had almost climbed above the skyline did she return on trembling legs to the car, where she’d left her mobile, and dial