Death in Rome Read Online Free PDF Page A

nothing special but comfortable enough. They went into a butcher's shop, saw the bodies hanging on cruel hooks, bled, fresh, cool, and saw the heads of sheep and oxen, dumb, quiet sacrificial victims, and from the clean and beautiful diagonally hewn marble slab of the butcher, they ordered tender matured steaks, once Kürenberg had poked and prodded them with his fingers to test their hanging; they bought fruit and vegetables at open-air stands; they purchased oil and wine in old cellars; and, after looking for some time, and testing it with his teeth, Kürenberg found a type of rice that promised not to turn soggy when cooked. They carried their parcels home and took the lift up to their large bright room, the hotel's best suite. They were tired, and they enjoyed their tiredness. They saw the wide bed and they enjoyed the prospect of the cool clean linen. It was broad afternoon. They didn't draw the curtains. They undressed in the light, and lay down between the sheets. They thought of the beautiful Venus and the leaping fauns. They enjoyed their thoughts, they enjoyed the memory, then they enjoyed one another, and fell into a deep sleep, that condition of anticipated death that takes up a third of our lives; but Ilse dreamed she was the Eumenide, the sleeping Eumenide, appeasingly called the Kindly One, the Goddess of Revenge.
    It was time, he ought to go, he had said he would go, it was the agreed hour, they were waiting for him, and he felt unwilling, reluctant, afraid. He, Judejahn, was afraid, and what was his favourite saying? 'I don't know the meaning of the word fear!' That saying had a lot to answer for, a lot of men had bitten the dust, always the others of course; he had issued the orders and they had fallen, on pointless assaults or holding doomed positions to satisfy an insane sense of honour, holding them to the last man, as Judejahn then reported to his Führer with swelled breast, and anyone who was chicken swung for it, dangled from trees and lamp-posts, swayed in the stiff breeze of the dead with his confession round his broken neck: 'I was too cowardly to defend my Fatherland.' But then whose Fatherland was it? Judejahn's? Judejahn's arm-twisting empire and marching club, hell take it. And there weren't just hangings, there were beheadings, torturings, shootings, deaths behind closed doors and up against walls. The enemy took aim, yes, of course the enemy was peppering away as well, but here it was your comrade who dispatched you with a bullet, you'll not find a better; it was your compatriot ranting, your greatly admired superior, and the young, condemned man didn't start thinking until it was too late about which was the enemy and which his comrade. Judejahn addressed them in fatherly fashion as 'my lads' and Judejahn said crudely, latrine-style, 'Kill the cunt,' he always had the popular touch, always a hell of a guy, great sense of humour, old Landsberg assassin, in bloody charge of the Black Reichswehr camps on the estates of Mecklenburg, death's head on his steel helmet, but even they, the old gods, had turned their coats, Ehrhardt the captain dining with writers and other such shitheads, and Rossbach with his troupe of pale-skinned boys, putting on mystery plays for the delectation of headmasters and clerics, but he, Judejahn, had taken the right road, unwavering and straight ahead, to Führer and Reich and full military honours.
    He strode through his room, the carpets were thick, the walls were silk, silk screened the streetlights, on the damask bed lay Benito the mangy cat, looking blinkingly, sardonically up at Judejahn, as if to purr, 'So you've survived,' and then looking in disgust at the fried liver on a silver dish by the foot of the bed. Why had he brought that animal in here? Was it some kind of magic charm? Judejahn didn't believe in ghosts. He was just a sentimental bastard, he couldn't stand to see it, it had infuriated him, a kingly animal like that being tormented. Benito! Those