The Bottom of Your Heart Read Online Free Page B

cart, insulated by blankets and rags, to melt. Once he has received the price demanded, he extracts the block of ice with an iron hook and, before the entranced gazes of the children, cuts off a chunk using a hooked black cleaver, while a
scugnizzo
triumphantly collects the fragments that fall to the ground. Given the weight of the ice, no one will be able to buy it from the upper floors of an apartment building and lower a basket on a rope to haul it up, the way people do with fruit and vegetables; but carrying it back home, up the dark, steep stairs, will be more enjoyable, with that cool bundle in one’s arms.
    Heat, the real heat, lasts only a few days and, with a few rare exceptions, those few days fall between the beginning and the middle of July. Days without rain and without peace, blasted by a harsh light made milky by a shroud of mist that hovers in midair, like a curse floating over the city. Days in which the elderly become taciturn, their eyes lost in the empty air, with no stories to tell, no complaints about their aches and pains, no venomous criticisms of their neighbors or acquaintances in the
vicolo
. Labored breaths become a sort of lugubrious soundtrack; not even monosyllabic responses to the worried questions of their children about how they feel.
    Heat, this real heat, sneaks in through the pores and ransacks the rooms of the soul where memories are kept, and old people have more of those than anyone else. Events from long-ago summers will appear before their eyes, smiling faces and forgotten love songs, strolls along the shore of a sea that was even bluer than it is now. Toothless old women with drool on their chins will, in this heat, turn back into tarantella dancers at long-ago parties, waiting for their beloveds to invite them into the shadows of an apartment house doorway, as cozy as any sheltered bower; and old men forced to sit idle for years will once again be sun-bronzed young fishermen, speaking of love to their fair companions in a boat rocking on the water by night, under a moon hotter than the noonday sun. Heat, the real heat, knows how to be treacherous and cowardly, and it takes it out on the weakest members of society, preying on their melancholy.
    There are only a few days of heat, real heat. But in those few days the atmosphere changes, and the city becomes another place. It tastes like ice and smells like the sea, but it can also have the black color of death.
    Heat, real heat, comes straight from hell.

V
    A nother twenty steps and he’d see him. Not even thirty yards, as soon as he turned the corner. He drew a breath and quickened his gait.
    When he could, he’d take another route, unless that meant unacceptable delays; and if it was absolutely inevitable, then at least he tried to pass by as quickly as he could, to shorten the moment. The moment in which the chilly fingers of suffering would run through his skin and clutch at his heart.
    Once he reached the spot he lowered his gaze; his hands in his trouser pockets, a light jacket unbuttoned over a white shirt, the narrow strip of dark fabric secured over his belly with a gold tie clip, his sole concession to an offhand sartorial elegance. If he’d been wearing a hat, he’d have looked exactly like the other young office clerks or businessmen walking the streets of central Naples, forced by work to go out into the terrible heat of that season. But Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi was no office clerk, nor was he a lawyer, though he had studied the law. He was a commissario, an officer of public safety, and he was heading for his office at police headquarters, as he did early every morning.
    Along the way, though, someone was waiting for him. Someone who had, at least in his physical form, been taken away some time ago by two overheated city morgue attendants before the sorrowful eyes of a small crowd sadly accustomed to events of this sort: a little boy run over by a trolley. Unfortunately, it happened frequently; orphans