Numero Zero Read Online Free Page B

to his neck, but his face was that of Telly Savalas, Lieutenant Kojak. There—always some allusion.
    â€œCute little thing, that Maia, no?”
    I was embarrassed to admit that I’d hardly looked at her. I told him I kept my distance from women. He shook my arm: “Don’t play the gentleman, Colonna. I saw you watching her on the sly. I think she’d be up for it. The truth is, all women are up for it, you just have to know which way to take them. A bit too thin for my taste, flat boobs, but all in all, she’d do.”
    We arrived at Via Torino and made a sharp turn at a church, into a badly lit alley. Many doors there had been shut tight for God knows how long, and no shops, as if the place had long been abandoned. A rancid smell seemed to hang over it, but this must just have been synesthesia, from the peeling walls covered in fading graffiti. High up was a pipe that let out smoke, and you couldn’t work out where it came from, since the upper windows were bricked up as though no one lived there anymore. Perhaps it was a pipe that came from a house that opened on another side, and no one was worried about smoking out an abandoned alley.
    â€œThis is Via Bagnera, Milan’s narrowest street, though not as narrow as Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche in Paris, where you can’t walk along side by side. They call it Via Bagnera but once it was called Stretta Bagnera, and before that Stretta Bagnaria, named after some public baths that were here in Roman times.”
    At that moment a woman appeared around a corner with a stroller. “Either reckless or badly informed,” commented Braggadocio. “If I were a woman, I wouldn’t be walking along here, especially in the dark. They could knife you as soon as look at you. What a shame that would be, such a waste of a pert little creature like her, a good little mother happy to get fucked by the plumber. Look, turn around, see how she wiggles her hips. Murderous deeds have taken place here. Behind these doors, now bricked up, there must still be abandoned cellars and perhaps secret passages. Here, in the nineteenth century, a certain artless wretch called Antonio Boggia enticed a bookkeeper into downstairs rooms to check over some accounts and attacked him with a hatchet. The victim managed to escape, and Boggia was arrested, judged insane, and locked up in a lunatic asylum for two years. As soon as he was released he was back to hunting out rich and gullible folk, luring them into his cellar, robbing them, murdering them, and burying them there. A serial killer, as we’d say today, but an imprudent one, since he left evidence of his commercial transactions with the victims and in the end was caught. The police dug down in the cellar, found five or six bodies, and Boggia was hanged near Porta Ludovica. His head was given to the anatomical laboratory at the Ospedale Maggiore—it was the days of Cesare Lombroso, when they were looking at the cranium and facial features for signs of congenital criminality. Then it seems the head was buried in the main cemetery, but who knows, relics of that kind were tasty morsels for occultists and maniacs of all kinds . . . Here you can feel the presence of Boggia, even today, like being in the London of Jack the Ripper. I wouldn’t want to spend the night here, yet it intrigues me. I come back often, arrange meetings here.”
    From Via Bagnera we found ourselves in Piazza Mentana, and Braggadocio then took me into Via Morigi, another dark street, though with several small shops and decorative entrances. We reached an open space with a vast parking area surrounded by ruins. “You see,” said Braggadocio, “those on the left are Roman ruins—almost no one remembers that Milan was once the capital of the empire. So they can’t be touched, though there isn’t the slightest interest in them. But those ruins behind the parking lot are what remains of houses bombed in the