These Dark Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

done in ancient days. A decrepit old woman sat on a wooden chair on the sidewalk. Natalia had never known her name. She’d been known as a strega , a witch, since Natalia was a child.
    Just then, a young mother wheeled her baby carriage up to the old woman, who pulled two sewing needles from her jacket and inserted one needle into the eye of the other, chanting, “ Vacchi e contro e perticell agli vocchi, crepa l’invidia e schiatton gli ochi. ” Eyes against eyes and the holes of the eyes, envy cracks and eyes burst.
    Protection against the evil eye.
    The next corner brought Natalia onto a market street. The vendors signaled to one another in case one was doing something that would arouse the law.
    “I have lovely peaches. No charge for the carabiniere.” The woman was not five feet tall—a muscular nonna in torn sneakers. She was missing her front teeth. Probably dealing numbers from her “office”—the folding table behind the cantaloupes and tomatoes. An orange-and-white cat dotted with black peeked out from below a sawhorse table heaped with fish. Of particular interest were the sardines, silver and sleek, their tiny bead-eyes open and shiny.
    All around, sellers hawked their wares—cherries and oranges, sausages and cheeses, pinwheels, underwear, shoes. Natalia sensed items being covered, boxes hidden, but she didn’t look.
    The hungry—mainly gypsies—lurked all day, waiting for vendors to be distracted or to step away for a moment so they could vanish a melon or a plum. Failing that, they would even salvage discarded spoils or the odd onion that rolled into the gutter.
    “Look at those.” The nonna pointed to a mound of purple blossoms fallen from the trees still flowering all over Naples.
    “Every week I sweep and every week they come back. What are you gonna do? They say they cure mental problems. I don’t need the blossoms, but I should. You’re young. You don’t know. When I was growing up, after the War, life was terrible. People were hungry. They broke into the aquarium for food. My father brought home a bag of goldfish. And now we got this garbage.” She pinched her nose. “Speaking of garbage, you heard? Last night. They got Franco Tozzi. He was a piece of shit, but a little boy was playing next to the car when the bomb went off. Burned so bad, his mother didn’t recognize him.” She made the sign of the cross.
    Natalia paid for the grapes and peach and strolled on, glad to move away from that particular stretch of street. Patches of gold stained the buildings. Sheets of laundry lines billowed like synchronized swimmers.
    Natalia recognized Pino’s curly head bent over a display of figs.
    “Have you ever seen any as beautiful as these? Try one,” he said when he saw her.
    “Delicious,” Natalia said.
    The vendor was filling two bags. “I got some for you,” Pino said.
    Not everyone could work with Pino. He had a reputation as an eccentric, refusing a car, even a motor scooter, attached to his old bicycle. He was a Buddhist, which intrigued her. He looked at things from unusual angles. “Lou Scarpetto,” Pino said, introducing the fruit man. Pino didn’t mention Natalia by name.
    “Delighted,” Scarpetto said. “Your boyfriend and I went to school together. Way back.”
    “Boyfriend”? What was her partner thinking?
    “Smartest in the class,” Lou said. “A real brain.”
    “Lou—” Pino protested.
    “Nah. It’s true. And it figures. Pino Loriano is a carabiniere, and I end up selling fruit!”
    Scarpetto. Natalia put the name through her mental file. The Scarpettos ran all the produce in this part of town. This pudgy, unshaven man with a ratty apron was more than a millionaire. And, in spite of his genial face, he had killed or ordered killed more than one unfortunate soul.
    “We played football together,” Scarpetto continued, handing them the figs. “I used to weigh the same as him, can you believe? Married life!” He slapped his belly.
    Pino reached for his