The Fallen Read Online Free Page B

replied, and watched the boy pick himself up and begin to gather together the mess of smashed dinner plates.
    “Yes, you did. You are a man of your word. Who would have guessed it?” Maggio turned to the boy. “And you,” he said, swatting him in the back of the head. “Maybe next time you will listen to me. Now, I have business with the dottore , so watch over things until I get back.” Maggio came and put his arm around Cioffi’s shoulder. He smiled. “Come with me. Don Abruzzi is eager to meet you.”
    They made their way back across the square towards the central rail station, its expansive edifice pockmarked and scorched, its tall window frames emptied of their leaded glass. The whole while they walked, twisting and turning their way through the crowded piazza, Maggio pinched the thin muscle at the base of Cioffi’s neck and told him how he would be thanking him soon. “You see, it is because I like you,” he said, “that I’m doing you this good turn. And now maybe things will be even between us, eh?”
    Past the rail station, on the south side of the square, they turned down a side street, and partway along the side street they turned again, this time into a narrow alleyway.
    There were no windows in the buildings that adjoined the alleyway, and the air was close and smelled faintly of urine. Cioffi grew nervous, and Maggio, as if sensing he might flee, tightened his grip so that his thick fingernails dug into Cioffi’s skin. A little farther along, a young man sat on a wooden crate. Until then he had only ever seen Renzo Abruzzi from afar, moving along the crowded pavements of the Spaccanapoli and Pedino with his train of thick-necked cronies. But he had heard the whispers about him and knew enough to be wary. Abruzzi came from the legion of scugnizzi , the street boys who haunted Naples’s poorer neighbourhoods, castaway children who grew up rough to become burglars and pickpockets. It was said that he was fond of using a knife, and that he liked to cut smiles into the faces of those who crossed him. And now Cioffi saw the knife, a thin-bladed flick knife that, at the moment, Abruzzi was using to peel the skin from an unripened orange. He did not look up at them until he had removed the last bit of green-tinged rind. Then he bit into the orange. Juice ran from the corners of his mouth and down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. He chewed for a moment, and then spat the mangled pulp onto the ground.
    “Tastes like shit,” he said. He pointed the tip of the knife blade at Cioffi. “You’ve kept me waiting.”
    “I’m sorry,” Cioffi said. He stared into the young man’s limpid blue eyes. They had all the emotion of the glass beads in a doll’s head.
    “What time do you call this?” Abruzzi said to Maggio.
    “Eleven o’clock.”
    “It’s a quarter past.”
    “I’m sorry, don Abruzzi.”
    “Don’t call me that. What am I, a fat old man like you?”
    The second-hand dealer fidgeted. He didn’t appear to know what he should do with his fleshy hands, folding them first in front, then in back, and finally plunging them into the pockets of his trousers.
    “Never mind.” Abruzzi put the knife away and stood up. He held a hand, still sticky with juice, out to Cioffi. “I know you, dottore . Do you know me?”
    “Yes, sir. I do.”
    There was a sharpness about Abruzzi, his features raw-boned: high cheeks and a narrow chin, lips thinly drawn and nose slightly aquiline. There seemed very little to him physically. His slender frame looked lost inside his clothing, as if his dark jacket, his white shirt, his neatly knotted tie were all made for a body two sizes larger than his own. He was smaller than Cioffi, and there was something foolish about the creme in his hair that held the part so carefully in place.
    “And are you frightened, dottore ?” Abruzzi asked.
    Cioffi felt a flush of panic. He glanced back along the alleyway and wondered how far he might be able to run