The Fallen Read Online Free Page A

fallen building. Watching the soldiers pulling away the wreckage, climbing the hills of rain-darkened rubble, passing buckets of debris along a procession of outstretched arms, was like watching an assembly of ants swarm a carcass. Then a shout went up behind him as the young man who had been standing on his own rushed the barricade. He knocked the MP to the ground and then threw himself onto the pavement beside the dead woman in the blue dress. He pulled back the blanket and clutched her body to his chest. From where he stood, Greaves saw the horrible disfigurement of her face: the brow pushed in so that there was a deep hollow in the centre of her forehead, her left cheek smashed, flattened in such a way that it pulled her pale lips into a ghoulish smile, the vacant stare of her bulbous eyes. Then the second MP descended upon the young man, hookinghis baton under his chin and crushing it against his windpipe so that his cries strangled in his throat. The first MP got to his feet again and unholstered his pistol and brandished it at the crowd to keep them at bay. Greaves looked on, as if what he was watching was no more than a performance of unfortunate street theatre. Only after the young man had been choked into unconsciousness did he release his grip on the dead woman, who fell back onto the pavement with a soft thud.
    “If you steal anything, I will catch you.”
    The bed of the cart was piled with tins: tins of frankfurters and beans, tins of pork and beans, tins of ham and beans, tins of almost anything imaginable and beans. Aldo Cioffi looked from the tins to the stallkeeper, a tall, thin man with a close-cropped beard that framed his pointed chin; with his tubercular complexion, he did not seem the sort who could run very far or very fast.
    “And when I catch you, I will beat you.”
    Cioffi took stock of himself. Another night spent on the floor of Lello’s salotto without a pillow or blanket had left him with an ache in his side that might be a cold in the kidneys; and thanks to a crack in the leather of his left shoe, the ulcer on his ankle had opened again; and then there was the fact that he hadn’t eaten a proper meal in nearly a week. The results of this cursory examination were not encouraging: it didn’t seem likely that he was the sort who could run very far or very fast either.
    Cioffi smiled at the merchant. “My friend, I would not think of it,” he said, and turned away.
    Piazza Garibaldi was teeming. The great square, as well as the surrounding streets that ran between it and the Castel Capuana, home to the law courts, was the heart of the city’s black market. Here thespoils of the marketeers were laid out for all to see: sugar and salt, powdered milk, powdered eggs, chocolate bars, and cigarettes; the divested contents of field ration kits—bully beef and hardtack biscuits, haricot and oxtail, treacle cake soaked in molasses; socks and watches, boots and blankets, woollen helmet liners, and undergarments stitched from remnants of parachute silk.
    On the far side of the square, near the statue of the great liberator, Marcello Maggio hawked his wares: old clothes and kitchenware, picture frames, lamps, religious figurines, an old commode—items looted from bombed-out apartment houses and deserted villas.
    When Cioffi reached his stall, Maggio was arguing with a boy of perhaps fifteen who stood before the heavy-set merchant, his arms piled high with fine china—a serving tray and dish, plates and saucers. Before Cioffi was able to discern the crux of the disagreement, the second-hand dealer swept a weighty hand out at the boy and sent the crockery smashing to the ground. Broken china littered the pavement, and when the boy bent to pick up those few pieces left undamaged, Maggio shoved him hard in the back so that he fell to the ground. Then he looked over at Cioffi.
    “ Dottore ,” he sneered. “I thought maybe you weren’t going to come.”
    “I told you I would, Marcello,” Cioffi