Needle in a Haystack Read Online Free PDF Page A

us with the only proof we ever get that what we sense is real.
    The friends remain silent. The wind starts to blow, night deepens. Fuseli seems woken from a dream.
    You’re still suffering from Marisa’s death. Pain has the virtue of making people deeper beings. Suffering makes the good guys more compassionate, more noble; it makes the bad guys worse,
more perverse, more wicked. So what can I do about it? Just stay calm. Trying to resist will only make it worse. In time it will pass. Right now I’ve got a lovely bottle of red waiting to be drunk and a pork loin stuffed with pineapple cooking in the oven, which it would be plain stupid to eat on my own. You fancy tackling it with me? Did you wash your hands after work? Are you crazy? That’s where the extra flavour comes from.

5
    A sticky night descends on the city. Eva is out on the terrace gathering in the washing when she hears engines and people running in the street. She peeks out cautiously. The house is being surrounded by soldiers dressed in army fatigues and carrying rifles. The olive-green bonnet of an army truck pokes around the corner. Twenty soldiers fan out in formation. An armoured car crosses the road, demolishes the railings, ploughs across the garden, charges the door and sends it flying, then pulls back quickly. The troops advance shooting. Physical fear takes control of her muscles, emptying her mind of any thought other than the need to flee. She leaps down the staircase that gives on to the backyard, gets a foot up on the gas pipes and climbs the dividing wall, jumping down into the neighbouring garden. She sprints across it and scales another dividing wall. An Alsatian jumps up at her from the shadows and she avoids its jaws by a whisker. A light comes on and a voice calls out, which distracts the dog for a split second, allowing Eva to duck into a passageway and shut the gate behind her. Away from the angry barking, she scampers up a staircase and onto a rooftop, where she waits to get her breath back.
Glued to the wall, she feels like an animal pursued by a pack of hounds, fleeing from the gunshots that ring out into the night sky and echo off the river. She comes across an empty room and enters. There are long make-up tables with mirrors and lights, like a theatre dressing room. She drops into a chair. She doesn’t even recognize her reflection in the mirror, her face is so distorted by fear. She holds her head in her hands and starts to cry. Outside, the gun battle draws to an end with the final, sporadic coups de grâce . Far off, she hears the sound of the movement of troops, motors, muffled orders. Completely exhausted and her mind a blank, her body shuts down and she dozes.
    Two days ago, Manuel, her partner, her friend, her companion, ran into an army ambush. She thinks of him and Silvio, lying in a street in Tigre like discarded objects, in puddles of blood. Manuel’s death pains her in the head but not in the heart, because her love for him died the last time they saw each other, the last time they would ever have each other, when she told him and he wouldn’t listen. Because Manuel barely ever listened to her, obsessed as he was with a cruel determination to change the world, whatever it took.
    Something alerts her. Voices from the stairwell, approaching. She stands up. She looks for a place to hide, the voices getting ever closer. Like a mouse, she scurries under the make-up table and pulls a chair in front of her. From her hiding place she sees the legs of two women who come through the door talking loudly.
    You see the shit that went down over there? I heard the shots. Seems like the military busted a hide-out. Crooks? Guerrillas. What happened? How the hell should I know? I was hardly going to go over and ask.

    Another woman comes in and sits down on the seat in front of Eva, who has to press herself right up against the wall to avoid the woman’s legs. They change out of their simple street clothes, putting on provocative