Traitors to All Read Online Free PDF Page B

hours.’
    ‘Leave it if you don’t want it.’ Another brilliant piece of acting, pretending to walk away with the glass.
    ‘No, please, if you had to get married to a butcher tomorrow morning, you’d want to drink a lot too,’ and she made him give her back the glass, and this time, too, she took a big swig, paused, took another big swig, then sat there pensively, holding the glass in her hand.
    This could be useful, knowing that she was about to marry a butcher. It wouldn’t take Mascaranti more than half an hour to find out who, among the men getting married the following day, were butchers: there couldn’t be all that many of them, there might only be one,
the
butcher.
    ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ll turn out the light and open the shutters for a while, too, that way we can let out some of the smoke.’
    ‘I’m sorry, I always stink the place up with my cigarettes.’
    ‘Oh, no,’ he said to her gently, in the darkness, opening the shutters onto the mild Milanese night, ‘it’s just that this apartment isn’t well ventilated.’
    ‘Since you have the window open, give me another cigarette, already lit.’
    ‘Don’t you think you smoke too much?’ he said: she still had the other cigarette between her fingers, he could see the glow of the embers. In this filth, you had to be careful. The visitor known to him only as Silvano Solvere had sent this girl ahead to sound him out: she wasn’t born yesterday, there had to be a purpose behind all the nonsense she was spouting and the odd way she was behaving. He mustn’t make a mistake, he really couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes in his life.
    ‘Thank you,’ she said when he had given her the lighted cigarette, ‘I’m starting to get quite excited, being here in the dark with a handsome man like you.’
    Her words made him feel a bit nauseous, but also made him want to laugh at the insolent confidence some people had in other people’s innocence. ‘Not me,’ he said.
    ‘All right, but don’t get angry, otherwise I might feel even more excited, I told you I like men who get angry easily.’
    The way she said this gave him pause for thought: he was no longer so sure that it was a trap, or that they were testing him, trying to see what he was made of.
    ‘It’s been boiling for ten minutes,’ came Mascaranti’s voice from the hall.
    Duca closed the shutters and switched the light back on. She was completely naked.
    ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ he said harshly. ‘Cover yourself.’
    ‘Go on, get angry, I like it.’
    ‘Stop that or I’ll throw you out.’
    ‘Yes, yes, throw me out, throw me to the ground.’
    He always got the rare specimens, the
trouvailles,
the collector’s items of society. This time, an uncontrollable nymphomaniac. He went to the couch, grabbed her hair, lifted her head, and hit her with the edge of his hand, but not hard, at least not too hard, on the forehead, between the eyes and above the nose. A slap wouldn’t have worked, it would only have excited her even more, instead of which the blow made her sigh, and she relaxed onto the pillow, she hadn’t fainted, but the dizziness had stemmed the outpouring of her libido and stopped her from protesting, at least for the moment.
    ‘Put these back on. I’ll be right back.’ He picked up the bra and slip she had thrown down on the floor amid the cigarette ends and went into the kitchen.
    When he came back with the little bowl of sterilised instruments, she was dressed in her underwear and sitting on the couch. ‘What did you do to me? I feel dizzy, I feel like I do when I’m in Rome and eat a lot of lamb and drink a lot of wine, and afterwards I feel sick, like this.’
    ‘It’ll pass soon, keep sitting on the couch.’ He put the bowl down on the little table, moving aside the suspender belt and the slip. Then he opened his leather case, which was on the chair behind the little table – an elegant little doctor’s case, a gift obviously, from his