The Brewer of Preston Read Online Free PDF Page B

she raised an oar—her index finger—and directed it carefully towards the tiny spot giving rise to all the agitation and, having found it, started striking it with the oar, harder and harder. Since she did not know the required mumbo jumbo, other perhaps more appropriate words came to her lips:
    â€œOh Gaspàno, oh Gaspàno, oh my dear Gaspàno . . .”
    And all at once the waterspout collapsed and fell back into the gulf, turning into a dense, sticky froth.

    He was no longer boat nor sea, but only a man, a bit tired, breathing heavily. Concetta licked his perfectly hairless chest, which looked like a little boy’s. It tasted of salt, like that of her dear departed. He shut his eyes and squeezed her a little harder.
    â€œDo you even know my name?” asked Concetta, whose eyelids were also getting heavy and starting to droop. It had been a long and tiring journey. Gaspàno did not answer her. He had already fallen asleep.

Get me Emanuele
    â€œG et me Emanuele!” enjoined His Excellency the prefect of Montelusa,Cavalier
Dottor
Eugenio Bortuzzi, handing the bailiff a voluminous folder of documents he’d finished signing.
    â€œHe’s already here; he’s been waiting outside for the last half hour.”
    His Excellency frowned.
    â€œYou, Orlando, have always been a proper blockhead. You should have told me at once. Go.”
    No sooner had Orlando the bailiff walked out the door than Emanuele Ferraguto—better known in the province as Don Memè or, more simply,
u zu Memè
(that is, “Uncle Memè”) especially by those not related, even remotely, to him—materialized in his place, blotting him out. It looked like a conjuring trick.
    Fiftyish, tall, just the right amount of lean, and fairly well dressed, Don Memè, a broad, cordial smile on his face, made a slight bow, waiting for the prefect to signal to him to come forward.

    Rumor had it that Don Memè had never stopped smiling in his life, not even when the police lieutenant lifted the sheet, five years back, to show him the tortured, mangled body of his son Gnazino, who hadn’t made it to the age of twenty, stretched naked on a slab of marble. When, after the autopsy, Don Memè, still smiling, had politely asked the coroner to explain, the doctor informed him that, in his opinion, the young man’s killers, before strangling him, had cut off his tongue, sawn off his ears, gouged out his eyes, and removed his dick and balls. In that order. And Don Memè had taken careful note of this order on a sheet of paper, using a copying pencil that he wet from time to time with the tip of his tongue. The message borne by that corpse in the very manner of its death was clear. Whoever killed the boy thought he talked too much and was a little too quick to bed the members of the fair sex, regardless of their tender age or marital status.

    In the two months that followed, Don Memè had devoted his energies to a complicated business transaction at the end of which, having ceded to others the rights to the Cantarella estate, he received in exchange, at his country house, his sons’ two assassins, in such a condition that they could not lift so much as a finger.
    Still according to rumor, Don Memè had wanted to see to the two men personally, having first donned some overalls so as not to stain his suit with blood. Taking out the sheet of paper on which he had written after speaking with the coroner, he hung it from a nail, and then proceeded to follow his notes blindly, showing not a whit of imagination. All the same, after cutting off their cocks and balls, he did have a burst of creative originality and strayed from the script. That is, he took the two dying men, laid them both across the back of a mule, and went and impaled them on the branches of a Saracen olive tree that stood on the now-ceded Cantarella estate.
    When the corpses were discovered, by then eaten by dogs and crows, the