A Walk in the Dark Read Online Free Page B

cylindrical lighter with the face of Betty Boop on it. That must mean something, I thought.
    She thanked me for taking the case. I told her I couldn’t see any problems – using those very words, which I usually hate: I can’t see any problems – and then I asked her to sign the papers agreeing to have me as her attorney.
    She asked me if she was doing the right thing, bringing a civil action.
    Of course not. It’s madness. We’ll both be slaughtered. You and especially me. All because when I was a child I read comics featuring Tex Willer and now I’m
incapable of turning back when that would be the most intelligent thing to do. Like right now, with this case. As my more pragmatic colleagues have done.
    I didn’t say that. Instead, I reassured her. I told her not to worry, of course this wasn’t a simple case, but we’d do the best we could, we’d be resolute but at the same time tread carefully. And a whole lot of nonsense like that. The next day I would go the Prosecutor’s department, talk to the prosecutor and get the papers. Fortunately, I said, the prosecutor, Dottoressa Mantovani, was someone you could trust. That much was true.
    I told her we’d meet again a few days before the hearing, after I’d had a look at the papers. I preferred not to talk about the case until I had an idea of what was in the file.
    The meeting lasted at least half an hour. Sister Claudia didn’t say a word the whole time, just kept looking at me with those inscrutable eyes.
    As they left, I threw a glance, almost involuntarily, at her tight jeans. Just for a moment, until I remembered she was a nun, and that wasn’t the way to look at a nun.

8
    It was the weekend again.
    We’d been invited to a party by two friends of Margherita’s, Rita and Nicola. They were nice people, a bit eccentric, who in order to have more space at their disposal had moved to a villa just outside the city, on the old road that runs south between the sea and the countryside.
    Put like that, it sounds romantic. But the villa was half in ruins, the garden looked like the garden of the House of Usher, and every night girls from Eastern Europe congregated a few yards from the gate, in various stages of undress depending on the season. Their clients’ cars stopped practically in front of Rita and Nicola’s house. There was a constant stream of them until well into the night. Every now and again, the police or the carabinieri turned up, hauled in the clients and the girls, sent some of the girls back to their countries, and for a few days the traffic stopped. Then, within a week, it all started again, just like before.
    The countryside behind the villa was populated by packs of wild dogs and scattered with ruins used as storage for stolen goods. I could say that with some certainty, seeing as how one of the fences who used these ruins was a client of mine who’d once been arrested while unloading a truck full of stolen hi-fis into one of them.
    None of this seemed to be a problem for Rita and Nicola. They paid an absurdly low rent for a thousand
square feet, which they’d never have been able to afford in the centre of town. The house was full of the strangest things. And, when there was a party, the strangest people.
    Rita was a painter and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts. Nicola had a New Age bookshop, specializing in oriental and esoteric philosophies and practices.
    One of the rooms in the villa had mats on the floor and mirrors on the walls. This was where they held seminars on transcendental meditation, tai chi chuan and shiatsu, and study sessions on The Tibetan Book of the Dead , Chinese astrology, and so on.
    Nicola was a kind of Buddha of Suburbia, like the Hanif Kureishi character. Only he didn’t operate in Seventies London, but in Bari in the early twenty-first century. Between Iapigia and Torre a Mare, to be precise.
     
     
    As I was getting ready to go out, cleaning my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror, I thought I saw something