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

livid, motionless little flame, a substitute for the brilliant, burning, reddish, dancing flames of a fireplace.
    ‘Let’s assume a small part of what the girl told us is true,’ he said, still staring at his imaginary fireplace, the silence growing around them, because the storm, the hurricane, was almost over.
    Mascaranti stood up with the grinder in his hand. ‘I’vegone mad. I put the percolator on without any coffee in it.’ He shook his head, turned off the gas, and waited for the percolator to cool down a bit.
    ‘Let’s assume a small part of what the girl told us is true,’ Duca repeated.
    ‘Yes,’ Mascaranti said.
    ‘She said, if she was telling the truth, that one of her fiancé’s two shops in Milan is near here, in the Via Plinio, and she walked here tonight.’
    Mascaranti emptied the percolator, unscrewed it, put the coffee in the filter, screwed it up again, relit the gas and put the percolator over the little flame. ‘That may well be true.’
    ‘Let’s assume it is. She arrived here with the case. Which means she had the case with her when she finished work, she left the shop with it and came here.’
    ‘That’s possible,’ Mascaranti said, ‘but she could also have left the shop without the case and gone to pick it up from somewhere where it had been left.’
    No, he thought, we have to use Occam’s razor, 5 we have to be economical with our hypotheses, and the right hypothesis was the most economical. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely. First of all, this other place where she may have left the case would have to have been somewhere between the shop and here. Then it would have had to be a place she could trust, you don’t leave a case like this in a bar or in the apartment of some casual acquaintance. And it’d be odd if she found a place like that halfway between the butcher’s shop and here.’
    Mascaranti nodded, his eyes still on the percolator. ‘But if she had the case with her in the shop, then her fiancé, the butcher, must know what it is, because it’s unlikely she’d be able to keep a case like that hidden from her fiancé.’
    ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Duca said. ‘It isn’t certain but it’s very likely. A woman is quite capable of hiding her lover’s photograph in her husband’s wallet if she has to, but if she can she’d rather avoid it. So let’s assume she has the case with her in the shop, and that her fiancé knows it’s there.’ He opened the window because the storm was over, it was only raining now. He breathed in the damp air of concrete and rubbish from the courtyard, then sat down again. ‘And let’s also assume that her fiancé, the butcher, knows what’s in the case.’ He looked at the gas flame, half closed his eyes, thinking of the sparks rising, long ago, through the hoods of fireplaces, and imagining that those sparks were rising now from the little gas flame. ‘In fact, let’s assume that he was the one who gave the girl the case, in other words, that the butcher gave his fiancée a submachine gun to bring here. Nobody would ever think a girl like that was carrying a submachine gun. Then the case is deposited here, in the apartment of an honest if censured professional, and at a suitable time someone comes to pick it up.’
    Mascaranti continued to nod, then stopped in order to flip over the percolator. Then he started nodding again as he went to fetch the cups and the sugar bowl.
    Then Duca said, ‘Mascaranti, you heard what the girl said before?’
    ‘Yes, I heard, but I didn’t see,’ Mascaranti said, smiling ambiguously.
    ‘The girl said her fiancé made lots of money, hundreds of millions even, with the meat he brought in to his shop in Milan without paying duty.’ Sadly, the gas had been switched off, and the flame was gone. ‘I don’t think you can make hundreds of millions cheating on duty,’ he continued patiently. ‘Do you?’
    ‘Not really,’ Mascaranti said, pouring the coffee.
    ‘But do you