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

grease.
    ‘It can’t be,’ Mascaranti said, starting to understand.
    ‘It is,’ he replied, lifting the cloth the way a stripper throws off her last undergarment.
    Mascaranti stood up from his chair and knelt on the floor by the case, looking without touching. ‘It looks like a dismantled submachine gun.’
    ‘It
is
a submachine gun.’
    Mascaranti kept staring at it, as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘It isn’t a Browning, a Browning is bigger.’
    ‘No, it isn’t a Browning, a Browning weighs nearly nine kilos, this one isn’t even seven.’ He took out one part, the barrel. The second part was the central body with thechamber, the two parts fitting together like the pieces of a children’s game, and the third part was the breech, with a false grip, which also slotted in very smoothly, because of all the grease. And finally, under another layer of wood shavings, the magazines. He inserted one vertically into the chamber. ‘It can do thirty shots per magazine, ten more than a Browning, and two more than a Bren.’ The bottom of the case was full of magazines. The bullet was a calibre 7.8, a higher calibre than other submachine guns. He put the bullet back and looked carefully down the barrel: there seemed to be eight striations, which meant the speed of firing must be at least eight hundred metres a second. ‘This gem is a Skoda,’ he said. ‘Everybody thinks they only make cars these days but they must have kept some of their military sections, here it is, it’s a very small mark:
CSSR,
which means, if I remember correctly,
Ceskoslovenska Socialisticka Republika.
This is the best submachine gun in the world, it can be hidden under a coat, and it has the power of a small cannon. You hold it like a bicycle pump, like this, you pull back the false grip with your right hand and the weapon discharges a hundred shots a minute and more. Remember a Bren, which weighs ten and a half kilos, can’t do more than eighty shots a minute. You let go of the grip and the gun stops. It cools in the air, look.’
    ‘Don’t shoot, Dr Lamberti.’
    He would gladly have fired the gun, very gladly: there was never any lack of targets. Instead of which he carefully dismantled the gun and put it back in place, almost the way he had found it, but without trying to hide the fact that he had handled it, he didn’t see any point in hiding that. He looked at his greasy hands, and went into the little bathroom. ‘Mascaranti, get out the coffee and the percolator and make us a bit of coffee.’ Mascaranti liked coffee andwas good at making it. It took Duca some time to wash his hands clean, he had to use the bathroom tile detergent, and there were still marks on his fingers, then, with the thunder pealing convulsively outside, he went into the kitchen, sat down in the little corner where he had done the crosswords with Mascaranti while the girl had slept, and where Mascaranti was now grinding the coffee in a grinder that was not so much old as historic.
    ‘Which grocer did you get this coffee from?’ Mascaranti asked as he ground the coffee. ‘I’ll go and shut him down.’
    ‘From your boss Superintendent Carrua’s grocer.’ Another unpleasant aspect of his situation as a former doctor, currently unemployed: Carrua’s suppliers, from the grocer to the butcher, were also his. Lorenza, when she was in Milan, didn’t have to do anything except make a phone call and place an order. What should he call that? A loan, a gesture of friendship, charity? He and Lorenza were content to place their orders, without calling it anything.
    ‘Superintendent Carrua knows about police matters, and nothing about anything else,’ Mascaranti said didactically.
    For a while the thunder was muffled and distant, the hurricane was subsiding. In the near-silence the grinder rasped domestically, good-naturedly, reminiscent of the kitchens of long ago, the ones with fireplaces. Duca slumped onto the chair and stared at the percolator on the stove, the