Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence by Marco Vichi Page B

edge.
    They were continuing their climb up a tortuous little street, when suddenly they smelled some cooking in the air and exchanged a glance of understanding. They were hungry. It wasn’t a normal hunger they felt. It was the desire to taste something different from hard tack and tinned meat. They would have given their right hands for a boiled potato or a fried egg, an eye for a sausage. Molin was a born curser. Out of every three words he uttered, two were curses. At times it was hard to follow him, since the effort of removing the swearwords from his argument made you lose the thread. And on that day he was, indeed, hungry.
    ‘Jesus fuck, I just can’t stomach that Allied shit any more! What I wouldn’t do for some pork fat! I’d kiss the old pig Badoglio on the lips, I would! If I see a chicken anywhere, I’m gonna open fire, Blessed Fascist Virgin!’
    Bordelli gestured to him to pipe down, and Molin lowered his voice. There wasn’t so much as a dog about. The only sounds were those of the bolts and windows shutting as they passed.
    ‘Who are we fighting this war for anyway, Molin?’ Bordelli said, discouraged. The Venetian spat on the ground and wiped his lips with his hand. He remained silent for a minute, then started listing the different parts of the pig, spouting curses in between. And every part he named he translated into all the dialects he knew. When he got to the trotter he suddenly froze, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply.
    ‘Holy Fascist Virgin, can’t you smell it? That’s cooked meat, for the bleedin’ love of God. Pork …’
    Bordelli took him by the arm to make him keep walking, but the gorilla had dug himself in like a mule. He was sniffing the air noisily and deeply enough to make his lungs burst, as if that would suck the meat into his mouth. All at once he goggled his eyes and yelled:
    ‘Bleedin’ Nazi Virgin, I swear that’s pork I smell!’
    At that moment Bordelli noticed, some fifty paces ahead, a pair of shutters that were only pulled to, both on the first floor. Amid the thousands of other closed shutters, the two left ajar were cause for concern. He didn’t have time to say anything before the shutters flew open and the machine guns opened fire. A burst of bullets crashed in a cluster into the stones just over their heads. In a split second Bordelli was belly down on the ground. He fired a burst at the shutters on the right and the slats splintered apart. The shooting stopped. Turning towards Molin, Bordelli saw him still standing, sniffing the pork-imbued air.
    ‘Get down!’ he shouted.
    ‘That’s pork, Commander!’ The bursts of machine-gun fire resumed with redoubled fury from both windows. Bordelli returned fire, for longer than the first time. As soon as he stopped he jumped on Molin, dashing him to the ground a second before a cluster of bullets would have pierced the gorilla’s chest. They got back up and started running breathlessly downhill. The Germans’ bullets smashed into the stone houses like blows of a pickaxe, ricocheting everywhere, leaving a cloud of stone dust floating in the air.
    They reached the lower town with hearts thumping in their ears, and could hear the Nazis swearing, clear and sharp, above them. Once they were safely in the wood, Bordelli started touching himself all over. He felt a pain in his side, and his uniform was wet in that area. He ran his fingers over it and sniffed. It wasn’t blood. The Nazis’ attack had punctured his wine-filled canteen, but the bullet hadn’t passed through to the other side.
    ‘Molin, if you ever do that again I’ll shoot you myself, is that clear?’
    ‘It was pork, Commander! We have to go back there.’
    ‘The pork is in your brain,’ said Bordelli, clapping him on the shoulder.
    Molin made it through the war alive, but Bordelli had lost touch with him. Most likely he’d taken up the peasant’s life back in the Veneto. Who knew whether he too remembered that morning in Torricella Peligna,