My Mother-in-Law Drinks Read Online Free PDF Page A

delicacies from the hands of Chef Gianfranco Vissani.
    And now I knew that the police would be coming. At least, that’s what I’d been told. Perhaps Matrix was a wanted criminal and Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo was an undercover policeman staking out the supermarket on a hunch that sooner or later his man would come in so that he could arrest him? That would explain the sketchy lesson on the operation of the video security system, to say nothing of the farcical move with his finger on the remote control: truly pathetic.
    So was this a long-planned police operation about to be set in motion? From one minute to the next, would the supermarket suddenly be filled with cops, pouring in through the side doors with bulletproof vests and submachine guns, and would they haul off Matrix as he smiled, the way notorious wanted criminals always seem to do at the moment of their capture, at the photographers and television crews who promptly materialized?
    It was a plausible hypothesis, but I didn’t believe in it past a certain point. A policeman with that kind of priority on his mind is unlikely to waste a lot of time chatting with people about his dead friends—at the risk of involving them in the operation, for that matter.
    At that point I started taking under consideration competing possibilities, such as, for instance, that this was not a police operation at all. That it might be about an old settling of accounts, a private dispute, a retaliation between rival gangs, even. In that case, the arrival of the police foretold by Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo took on an entirely different connotation: the police would be coming, sure enough, but only to collect a dead body.
    The more solid the alternative hypotheses became, the more I wondered whether the wisest thing might not be to rush out of the store and call the police myself. But by now Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo had almost drawn even with Matrix, who was coasting along the dairy case without paying him the slightest attention (something that only confused me further, because a fugitive, or in any case someone involved in dodgy or criminal matters, ought to be suspicious of his fellow man by definition, especially when his fellow man is following him), and I felt called upon to stay there, even though I didn’t know what was going to happen, much less in whose defense I was supposed to intervene. Among other things, at that hour of the morning the supermarket was practically deserted, so that, if needed, I wouldn’t have been able to turn to any volunteers for aid and assistance.
    The thing that got on my nerves the most was the fact that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo (if in fact that was his real name) must have figured out what kind of person I was, otherwise he’d never have been able to drag me so successfully into that fucked-up situation in the first place.
    That’s why he’d gone to all the trouble of complimenting me on my inflexibility in negotiating his old friend’s settlement, and I, like a prime sucker, had gone along with it. Obviously I couldn’t take to my heels now—not after allowing myself to be praised as a man of principle.
    In the meantime “Montagne verdi”
 
had finished playing, and a few yards down the aisle there was a little old lady who kept shooting me glances, because she’d already tried three times to reach a jar of cranberry beans, without success.
    I wondered: all those people who are always sticking their noses into others’ misfortunes—the rubberneckers who always cluster around when public disasters occur; those who, when a fistfight breaks out, don’t think twice about risking their personal safety just to elbow their way into the front row; the people who, when they hear two cars crash into each other, even if they’ve been standing in line for forty-five minutes at the post office, will happily give up their turns to run outside to enjoy the show live—where the