Traitors to All by Giorgio Scerbanenco

thought. ‘Let’s take the right bank,’ he said to Mascaranti, meaning the right bank of the Alzaia Naviglio Grande, the one that couple had taken, the girl and Silvano, the late couple, just three days earlier, in the storm. Now there was sun, and mountain air. They immediately identified the spot where it had happened: the asphalt still showed the tracks of the breakdown lorry that had fished out the car, and Mascaranti, having got out, saw immediately on the wall of the house the chipped plaster from where the bullets had passed close to it. Duca looked at the water of the canal. Why had Silvano and the girl taken this narrow road? If they had taken the left bank, where the road was wider, they would have been able to escape that deadly machine-gun attack. And how on earth did the people who had fired at them know they would be goingalong the right bank? Whoever it was must have known the time, too. They seemed to have known a lot of things.
    He got back into the car and they continued on their way towards Romano Banco, driving slowly because he wanted to get there no earlier than half past one, when Ulrico Brambilla the butcher would probably have finished eating, he didn’t want to disturb him over lunch. When they got to Corsico, they crossed the bridge onto the other bank, then drove through Corsico. A sign at the end of the Via Dante said that Romano Banco was on the left. The broad tarred road went partly between fields and partly between houses, both small houses and attempts at skyscrapers, then another sign indicated that they were entering Romano Banco and that it was forbidden to sound motor horns.
    ‘The church, go to the church.’
    Mascaranti drove towards the little bell tower through broad streets of scattered houses.
    Yes, Duca thought, he must really have ordered a lorry full of carnations from Sanremo: next to the little church with its unremarkable little bell tower, so dull and dreary as to be quite touching, you could still smell the carnations, the sickly scent of carnations still seemed to hover over the old houses around the church. Without even getting out of the car, they turned onto the main street. After asking a couple of passers-by, they found the house of Signor Ulrico Brambilla, a small one-storey villa with a few centimetres of garden in front, which wasn’t really a garden, just a strip of ground with patches of green.
    ‘Signor Brambilla, please.’
    The thin, black-clad woman, who was not old – there was still a vestige of femininity in her sallow face, her blue-circled eyes with wrinkles at the corners – said in an anxious voice, ‘He isn’t here, he’s left.’
    Ah, so he had already left.
    ‘Where did he go? I’m a friend of Silvano’s.’ There were some people he didn’t like having as friends, but they had been friends in a way, hadn’t they? Between them they had money matters, girls to be ‘cured’, and even submachine guns: that was a kind of friendship.
    The name Silvano had the effect on the woman he had hoped it would, she turned pale and looked at him, then at Mascaranti, and moved aside to let them in. As soon as they entered, they saw it was a simple rustic house: with all his millions, Ulrico Brambilla had left the house as plain as it must have been when he had bought it, he who bought everything, who had bought half of Ca’ Tarino, both houses and land.
    ‘I don’t know where he went,’ she said. She looked scared: the name Silvano seemed to have scared her.
    The first room they came to was a combined living room and dining room, where they probably never ate, they almost certainly ate in the kitchen. There was a rectangular table in the middle, chairs on either side of the table, a hand-embroidered centrepiece in the middle of the table, and there was also a sideboard and a dresser and a wall clock and a floor of shiny red tiles and a stiff little sofa, a kind of long chair for three people, on which they sat without being invited, while the