The Bastards of Pizzofalcone Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the balcony.
    Then they’d left, all of a sudden. They must have received an attractive offer, because Donna Amalia hadn’t seen any of the usual warning signs of an impending move: a moving truck had shown up out of the blue, and in barely two days’ time they had packed up and left, bag and baggage, headed who knows where. Donna Amalia certainly wouldn’t miss them, there was never anything new to watch, by now she knew them too well.
    The renovations had been done in a hurry because, from what she was able to see, there were a lot of workers in that apartment, for many hours every day. From her vantage point, she could see into nearly all the rooms, and the construction workers kept all the windows and balcony doors flung wide open. They’d even installed air conditioners in every room. Very fancy. She’d been asking that stingy son of hers to put air conditioners in every room for months now, but he’d only had one installed in the living room: according to him, they were bad for her bones. As if Donna Amalia’s bones could possibly get any worse.
    Then
she’d
arrived. A single person, a young woman.
    She must have come during the night, because Donna Amalia hadn’t noticed a thing, and Donna Amalia sat sentinel all day long, from sunup to late evening. First they’d moved in the furniture, every stick of it new; then a couple of crates of linen, and Donna Amalia had recognized the logo of a famous shop downtown. And suddenly, a few lights had come on and the pale blue glow of the television set could be seen.
    One time, the window of what must have been the bedroom swung open, and a dark-haired guy had fiddled around with the handle; then it had swung shut, and since then, the curtains hadn’t been pushed aside once. The curtains in the
whole apartment
. That wasn’t right.
    The guy at the window hadn’t been seen since. She could only see a girl go by, behind the curtains. She recognized her silhouette. Another time the girl had poked her face up close to the glass of the French doors that gave onto the living room balcony, and Donna Amalia had been left breathless because she seemed pretty. Beautiful, in fact. Even Donna Amalia, who knew how to find even the smallest flaws in anyone, was forced to admit that the girl’s face was perfect. But then she’d vanished, and never appeared again.
    Donna Amalia, through that slut Irina, had arranged for a few discreet questions to be asked of the local shopkeepers. No one, absolutely no one, knew who lived in that apartment. No one supplied the place, no one delivered groceries, no one had a new customer who happened to be a stunningly beautiful young woman. No one.
    As signs go, Donna Amalia thought to herself, this one was hard to interpret. Tremendously hard. Which meant there had to be something going on, something big, because when the signs didn’t fit into a system, that meant she was missing some detail.
    Donna Amalia waited. Then she waited some more. Everything else in the neighborhood went on as usual, but the apartment across the street continued not to fit into any known system. She even tried talking to her son about it, during the one weekly conversation she managed to pry out of him, but he said the same thing the slut Irina always said: sure, sure. And with some excuse, he ended the phone call.
    It all seemed so strange that, in the end, Donna Amalia sent that slut Irina to buzz the intercom. She’d coached her to perfection: Irina was to say that she was looking for Signora Esposito, the one who lived on the second floor. And then, as soon as they answered, she was to say, very innocently: oh, I’m so sorry, I must have rung the wrong buzzer, and then, finally, she was to rush back to describe to Donna Amalia the voice that had answered. But no one had answered, even though that slut Irina claimed she’d rung twice. And yet the girl was home, because Donna Amalia had seen her go