Traitors to All by Giorgio Scerbanenco Page B

and mourn somewhere far from other people. But maybe Brambilla hadn’t run away for such a nice reason. You can also run away because you’re afraid. Afraid of someone.
    ‘Yes, do tell him,’ Duca said, still sitting, bolt upright,on the little dark green sofa, next to Mascaranti. ‘We’ll stay here, and when he phones tell him we need to talk to him, and that we have to hand that thing over to him.’
    She stood up. ‘This isn’t a station waiting room,’ she said. She spoke good Italian, with the barest touch of a local intonation, in fact, that was the extraordinary thing, she wasn’t an intellectual, most definitely not, but she was something better, she was intelligent. Her eyes were tired, they suggested liver problems and a difficult menopause, but there was an intelligent look to them. And as she was a woman, her intelligence drove her to be domineering. ‘Get out,’ she said with sudden anger. ‘If you have something to tell Signor Brambilla, write to him.’
    Why not? We can write him a postcard. Duca didn’t like either what the woman said or the way she said it, and he stood up and moved around the table until he stood facing her. ‘All right, we’ll go,’ he said, looking straight at her, his eyes saying,
All right, if that’s the way you want it, it’s your funeral.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to Mascaranti.
    But when they got to the door, she stopped them, remorsefully. ‘If you want to wait …’ Despite her sallow complexion, her face turned slightly pink. ‘I only said that because you might have a long wait, I don’t know when he’s going to phone.’
    He did not even look at her. ‘Too bad for him,’ he said. He asked Mascaranti for a piece of paper and a pen, wrote down his name and address and telephone number as clearly as he could and gave it to the woman. ‘If he’s interested, he can write to me or come and see me.’ They left the house, aware that she was watching them through the half-open door and was making a note of the car, might even be taking down the licence number. Let her. In fact, it was what they wanted.
    ‘Let’s go home.’
    That meant crossing the city again, but everything has an end, even a journey from Romano Banco to the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci. And the case was still in his apartment, still dark green, still with the metal corners that made it look like a trunk. As soon as they got inside they opened it, they didn’t trust anything any more, they were on the scent of a big gang and they didn’t want to lose the opportunity to meet them, to have a sitdown, wasn’t that what they called it? Eye to eye. And an eye for an eye, and seventy-seven scars for seventy-seven scars.
    ‘It’s like a rose,’ he said to Mascaranti, crouching by the case as it lay open on the floor. ‘Sooner or later a bee will come buzzing around it.’ He wiped his hands on the wood filings. ‘And while we wait, let’s go back to the beginning and take out all the files.’

PART TWO
    The principle of the bone saw is very simple: it is a serrated steel band wound around two spools, almost like a film projector. Part of the band remains exposed for a length of thirty or forty centimetres, and when a bone is pushed against the serrated edge of the band as it rotates at high speed, the bone is neatly severed. It is also used to carve the bones of large Florentine chops, which are then cut further with a little hatchet, or in any situation where a butcher needs to divide a bone into two or three pieces.

1
    There were four files, and files can be dull and even repulsive things, especially after you’ve looked through them, document by document, three or four times, or five, especially on a spring day like today, a day when Milan had never been so beautiful, soft blades of sunlight cutting gently and incredibly through all the rooms in the apartment, showing up the dust, the dirty windowpanes, the lost sheen of the brass door handles. But Duca and Mascaranti kept their heads