Liar Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

passing judgement. I’m just doing Colonel Habermehl’s bidding, remember?” Seconds later, Bora, turned elsewhere, was telling him, “Don’t move. Stay seated, Guidi, don’t move.”
    Guidi obeyed, but wondered why Bora should leave the table in such haste, and going where. Turning in his chair, he caught sight of the sallow young man walking toward the exit, and of Bora quickly catching up with him. The German held the cloth bag left behind, and now with imperious courtesy was forcing it upon him.
    “You forgot this.”
    Confusion ensued when the young man attempted to get away and Bora prevented him, shoving him against a table full of fine, empty glasses. The fine glasses flew. Guidi got to his feet to avoid an incident and keep Bora from using his gun. But before he could intervene,
out of the blue the plain-clothes man joined in from across the street and, unasked, floored the youth with his fist. Customers and waiters stood around, dumbstruck. “Police. No one move,” Guidi said. Stepping on broken glass he reached for the bag, and looked inside. Two silver watches emerged and came to rest on the closest table, along with a packet of currency and a kilo of coffee at least. “We have enough here for an arrest.”
    Within minutes Bora and Guidi were the sole clients in the café, a space of abandoned tables which suddenly seemed much wider. “Thank God black market is all it was, Major.”
    “Well, I could hardly wait for the bag to be picked up by an accomplice.”
    Guidi felt the grudging looks of the waiters on them. “It was even more imprudent for you to touch it. Why didn’t you just tell me the man was up to something?”
    “I only had his suspicious features to go by.” Bora levelled his dispassionate eyes on the policeman. “And you don’t believe in those.”
    “What if it’d been explosives instead of black-market goods?”
    “I’d have blown myself up, wouldn’t I.”
    “There’s no question about that. And then what?”
    Bora laughed, with a bland gesture of the right hand summoning the head waiter to pay for the broken glasses. “And then you’d never have convinced Lieutenant Wenzel to lend you the dogs.”
    They left the café to the clicking noise of shards being swept from under the tables. Guidi couldn’t imagine why Bora didn’t want to take credit for his courage, or
why he seemed amused. He said, “How can you take it so lightly?”
    “God knows I don’t mean to laugh. And if I had any sense at all, I wouldn’t be here chasing murderous young widows either.”

2
    Clara Lisi, also known as Claretta, had magazines – Eleganze e Novità , Per Voi Signora – strewn all across her parlour. Fashion plates showed a wealth of heart-shaped mouths, cork soles, absurd little hats, padded shoulders; elsewhere in the room, a profusion of cushions, rugs, knick-knacks, fresh flowers. The feminine space reminded Bora of the summers at his godmother’s in Rome (hot afternoons, day trips, reading forbidden books, the first sins against innocence). He stayed serious, but could have smiled. A drooling, cross-eyed Pomeranian quit chewing on a magazine to snarl against him.
    Claretta was a high-breasted, slim girl with an “interesting taste in perfumes”, as Bora was amusedly to remark later. Her bleached hair piled up into a nest of ringlets above her forehead, while polished nails and toenails closely matched the pink shades of dressing gown, heeled slippers and wallpaper.
    She had been informed of the visit, so liqueur and candies were daintily arranged on a low table by the sofa, as if the circumstances justified sociability. Guidi, who hadn’t seen a full bottle of Vecchia Romagna in a year, stared at the jolly Bacchus on the label as if it were a sign that cognac production was alive and well somewhere.

    When the visitors introduced themselves, she said with a dramatic little wave of her hand, “I hope you gentlemen have come to listen. Please, please. Make yourselves