Day of the Dead Read Online Free Page A

blotches of red on his neck and his forehead. He’d leapt to his feet and the sheet of paper had fallen from his trembling fingers. He’d stared down at it, muttering something incomprehensible, and then he’d dropped back into his chair, waving weakly for Ponte to take the document to the chief.
    From that moment on, Garzo had becoming increasingly difficult with each passing day. He locked himself in his office for hours on end, checking and rechecking police reports and depositions from months earlier, terrorized by the possibility of an inspection; or else he’d burst into the sentry post, shrieking in falsetto that the sheer slovenlinesss of the room was unbelievable. And now he was actually showing up at police headquarters shortly after sunrise, when all poor Ponte wanted was to sip a cup of ersatz coffee and smoke his morning cigar in peace. Ponte glanced at the calendar: eight more days of this would really be more than he could bear.
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    Garzo glanced at the calendar for the fourth time in half an hour, and decided that he simply couldn’t take eight more days of this tension. Il Duce. Il Duce
in person, the Great Condottiere, the Chief of the Italian Nation, the Man of Destiny to whom the Italian people looked with boundless faith would be here, perhaps in his office, standing right in front of him. He might even smile at him, reach out to shake his hand. For the thousandth time since he first read the telegram from the ministry, he felt faint. The Duce’s safety was the responsibility of the army and the secret police; that, at least, wasn’t his concern. But the chief of police had stated it in no uncertain terms: the cleanliness and appearance of police headquarters and of the city in general were Garzo’s personal responsibility.
    In short, it was up to him, and him alone, to ensure that the Duce, the interior minister, and all the functionaries who would be coming down from Rome found Naples to be the perfect Fascist city, free of crime and anything unsightly. And he was determined to make sure that that was exactly the kind of city they would find.
    Once again, for what must have been the thousandth time, he opened his pocket mirror and checked his mustache—grown recently at his wife’s suggestion—to make sure that not a single hair was out of place. His wife, a woman who was as energetic as she was despotic, had been uncompromising in her view that when it came to a man’s career, his physical appearance was an important calling card. And she knew whereof she spoke: her uncle was retired on a prefect’s pension, after scaling all the summits of a ministry career.
    Garzo knew that he wasn’t a particularly astute investigator; he’d always felt a certain disgust for the criminal mentality, and he hated having to dirty his hands by interacting with thugs and hooligans. But he compensated for this with his considerable talent for personal relations, adhering to the tried and tested principle of being firm with the weak and weak with the strong: kissing up and kicking down. This approach had allowed him to free himself of actual duties and take on a series of executive positions, in which he had employed his God-given skills as an organizer. He knew how to see problems coming and prevent them, isolating the causes and carefully removing them.
    And what, he mused, could the problems be now? What could possibly come between him and the Duce’s praise, the minister’s compliments, the chief of police’s grateful embrace? His thoughts turned immediately to Ricciardi, and to his usual sardonic expression.
    It was a fine time for the Duce’s visit. There were no investigations under way, no unsolved cases, no unrest. For once, everything was running smoothly. So why did he feel so uneasy?
    Ricciardi was a good detective, no doubt about that. He’d solved complex cases, some of which had been real stumpers; Garzo had once remarked to