The Day of the Owl Read Online Free PDF Page A

both mule and land.
    Had it not been for his fear, the informer would have reckoned himself happy and an honest man both morally and financially. But terror lurked within him like a rabid dog, growling, panting, slobbering, sometimes suddenly howling in its sleep. For incessant gnawing at the liver and sudden painful stabs at the heart, like alive rabbit's in a dog's mouth, doctors had made diagnosis after diagnosis and prescribed him enough medicines to fill his dressing-table drawer; of his terror the doctors knew nothing.
    He was sitting in front of the captain, turned slightly sideways so as not to look him in the face, and nervously twisting his cap, while all the time the dog inside him bit, growled, bit again. The evening was icy cold and the tiny electric stove in the captain's office gave out so little warmth that it made the vast, bare room seem even colder. Even the old-fashioned whitish enamelled tiles with which it was paved looked like ice. Still, the man was sweating; a cold death-shroud enveloped him, chill over the fiery laceration of the lupara slugs which were already rending his flesh. From the moment he had heard of Colasberna's death, the informer had begun thinking out his story. At each detail he added, each little touch, like a painter standing back from his canvas to judge the effect of a brush-stroke, he would say to himself: 'Perfect. Not another thing needed,' but kept on adding and retouching. And he was still feverishly adding and retouching even as he told it to the captain. But the captain knew, from a voluminous dossier on the police informer, Calogero Dibella, alias Parrinieddu or 'Little Priest', that of the two cosche or local mafia groups (cosca, they had explained to him, meant the thick cluster of artichoke leaves) Dibella was closer to, if not actually a member of, the one which had certain if unprovable connections with public works. As S. was a coastal town, the other cosca, younger and more enterprising, mainly concerned itself with the contraband of American cigarettes. He thus foresaw the informer's lie; but in any case it would be useful to watch the man's reactions while telling it.
    He listened without interrupting, occasionally adding to Dibella's discomfiture with a distracted nod. In the meanwhile he thought of those other informers buried under a thin layer of soil and dried leaves high in folds of the Apennines. Wretched dregs, soaked in fear and vice; yet they had gambled with death, staking their lives on the razor's edge of a lie between partisans and fascists. The only human emotion they had was the tormenting agony of their own cowardice. From fear of death they faced death every day; until finally it struck, final, permanent, unequivocal death, not the double-cross, the double death of every hour.
    The informer of S. was risking his life; sooner or later one cosca or the other, either with a double-barrel of lupara or a burst from a submachine gun (the two cosche also differed in their choice of weapons), would fix him. But between mafia and carabinieri, the two sides between which he played his game of chance, death could come to him only from one side. On this side there was no death; there was only this fair, clean-shaven man in his smart uniform, who lisped, never raised his voice, or treated him with scorn. Yet he was just as much the law as was that gruesome death. To the informer the law was not a rational thing born of reason, but something depending on a man, on the thoughts and the mood of this man here, on the cut he gave himself shaving or a good cup of coffee he has just drunk. To him the law was utterly irrational, created on the spot by those in command, the municipal guard, the sergeant, the chief of police or the magistrate, whoever happened to be administering it. The informer had never, could never have, believed that the law was definitely codified and the same for all; for him between rich and poor, between wise and ignorant, stood the guardians