Blood Rain - 7 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Corinna thought that a pack of invasive rats provided a more accurate analogy: if you blocked up one entrance, they would find or make another.
    Despite the élite status of the AntiMafia pool, or perhaps because of the widespread resentment which this exclusive club attracted from colleagues in other branches of the police and judiciary who had not been invited to join, Corinna Nunziatella had as yet been unable to obtain an office more suited to her requirements than the dingy, dark cubicle at the northeast corner of the building which she had originally been assigned. The pointless and oppressive height of its ceiling merely served to emphasize the meagre proportions of the floor space dictated by the newly installed wall panels: 3.5 square metres, to be exact.
    Since she could not expand laterally, Corinna had followed the Manhattan model, stacking files in precarious piles propped up one against the other like exhausted drunks. Retrieving any given file was a work of considerable dexterity, requiring the skills of those conjurors who can remove a tablecloth while leaving the dinner setting intact. Relief was promised shortly in the form of a computer network linking all members of the Catania DIA pool both to each other and to their colleagues in the other provincial capitals, but despite a month of installation work, it was still not up and running. In the meantime, the massive terminal squatted idly on her desk, taking up yet more precious space.
    ‘E se tutto ciò non bastasse …’ she murmured under her breath.
    Yes, indeed. As if all this were not enough, Corinna Nunziatella was beginning to suspect that she was falling in love.
    She was not left long to brood on these incidental problems, for within a few minutes the phone rang, summoning her to the director’s office for a ‘progress report’. Corinna hastily grabbed an impressive-looking dossier of papers, some of which were actually related to her current cases, checked that her appearance was at once professional and uninviting, and proceeded up to the fifth floor.
    The arrival of Sergio Tondo, the recently appointed director of the AntiMafia pool, had proved a source of much mirth to his subordinates, since in appearance he resembled the classic, slightly racist stereotype of the typical mafioso: short, broad, sallow and intense, with a moustache of which he was excessively proud, black voided eyes, and an air of undefined but potentially threatening distinction. The punchline of the joke was that, far from being Sicilian, or even a southerner, Tondo — originally, no doubt, Tondeau — was in fact a native of the Valle d’Aosta, the French-speaking mountain region in the extreme north-west corner of the country, well over a thousand kilometres from Catania as the crow flew, had there been any crows ambitious enough to attempt such a trip.
    As though to confirm the initial impression he had created, Sergio Tondo seemed to go out of his way to act as well as look like a caricature Sicilian, to the extent of having made explicit sexual advances to all the female magistrates on his team. Corinna Nunziatella had already been obliged to remove one or other of his hands from her hip, her knee, her shoulder and just below her left breast, and to do so in such a way as to make it seem that she hadn’t really been aware that it had been there in the first place.
    It was a delicate operation, calling for exquisite timing, adroitness and tact. Corinna would have been the first to admit that she was ambitious, and it was hard to overemphasize the importance of her promotion to the AntiMafia pool at the age of only thirty-four. To be eased out now would not just mean a return to her previous, uninspiring postings; it would mean being marked for the rest of her life as someone who had been given a rare chance to succeed at the highest level, but who had failed. No one would ever know why, still less bother to find out. And if she started retailing stories about