Read Online Traitors to All by Giorgio Scerbanenco - Free Book Online

maddened by the discharge of bullets, gave a great roar and jerked forward, trying to get out of the ray of light, but there were only two ways for it to go, on the right was the wall of a house, and on the left the canal, and the car first smashed against the wall, then bounced, headed for the canal, and fell in. The lights of the car in front, the car from which the volley had come, now lit up the Alfa Romeo, but the Alfa Romeo was empty and the men, despite the deluge, were sheltering it. Suddenly the other car came straight towards them, as if intending to ram them, and Morini fired, but there was nothing they could do: the other car came within a centimetre of the Alfa Romeo, passed it, accelerated with a roar that seemed louder than the thunder and disappeared before they could do anything but fire a few futile shots into the storm-swept darkness.
    Now soaking and dripping, unafraid of the rain, Morini ran towards the canal where the Giulietta had fallen. ‘Bring the car closer and put on the headlights,’ he ordered the driver.
    But it was pointless. For several minutes the headlights illumined the rain-swept waters of the Naviglio Grande atthis point close to Ronchetto sul Naviglio, but there was nothing to be done, the girl in the red dress coat with the long, youthful legs and her elegant companion in the grey suit had been ferried into another universe, a universe of unknown and mysterious dimensions.

8
    As soon as the wind came up, Duca Lamberti went and closed all the windows in the apartment, then came back to the study and together with Mascaranti took another look at the suitcase the girl had left. It wasn’t really a case, it was more like a crate or a small trunk, it wasn’t leather and the metal corners looked very solid, too solid for such a small trunk.
    ‘I’d like to open it,’ he said to Mascaranti.
    ‘It won’t be easy,’ Mascaranti said.
    Duca stood up and fished in the glass bowl containing the instruments he had used on the girl, took two of them and tried them in the small lock of the case. ‘I thought it’d be harder,’ he said, standing up again and looking for another instrument in the bowl. ‘This should do it.’ He inserted it in the lock and slowly pushed.
    ‘But those are surgical instruments,’ Mascaranti said, regretfully.
    Not Duca: he wasn’t regretful as he pushed the thin little instrument that looked like a bradawl into the lock, because he had already decided that all this – the instruments, the bottle of coloured or colourless Citrosil, the whole pharmacological Tower of Babel from which to choose the right medicine – just wasn’t his world any more. He didn’t hate it, but he was leaving it, saying farewell to it, and these instruments could just as well be used to force a lock, or even to open a tin of sardines.
    And while the thunder rolled terribly and the rain beat against the shutters, he forced that lock and lifted the lid and they saw a layer of dark wood shavings.
    ‘How did you do it?’ Mascaranti said, admiringly.
    He didn’t reply. He threw the shavings onto the floor. Beneath it was greaseproof paper, the colour of iodine, folded the way it was in big boxes of chocolates. He unfolded it, beneath it were more shavings. Then he stopped and lit a cigarette. He was making a mistake again, he couldn’t afford to make a mistake, and yet he was still making them. Why didn’t he keep out of things like this, why didn’t he become a pharmaceuticals salesman? Why didn’t he go and see his sister and Livia 4 and his niece in Inverigo?
    ‘What do you think is inside?’ he said to Mascaranti.
    ‘Something fragile, I suppose, with all these shavings.’
    Why not crystal glasses for pink champagne? But he didn’t say anything and took away the shavings and threw them on the floor again. Beneath, there was a dark cloth, as he had expected. It looked like the kind of cloth used to wash floors, but it was sticky to the touch, because it was soaked in