Traitors to All Read Online Free Page B

the end of it.’
    ‘Mascaranti will have to make sure you’re not spotted. But that’s not all, I’m also going to have our special team, the S. squad, tailing you.’ He started shouting. ‘And don’t tell me that’s too many people. If you know anything at all about this profession, you must already have realised what could happen to you.’
    No, he didn’t tell him it was too many people: Carrua was absolutely right.
    ‘And Mascaranti will also let you have a gun,’ he said it harshly, but without hope. ‘With a special temporary permit, of course, because you aren’t allowed to carry a weapon.’
    ‘No, no guns, I don’t like being armed.’
    ‘These people are often armed.’
    He refused categorically, vaingloriously. ‘Don’t give me a gun, I’m already dangerous enough without one.’ He wanted to say more – that if he had a gun he wouldn’t hesitate to fire it, he wouldn’t hesitate at all – but he didn’t say it, because Carrua knew.
    ‘All right, forget it,’ Carrua said, yielding. ‘That means Mascaranti will have to take care of both of you. Anotherthing is, these people will phone you at home, so we’ll put a tap on your phone and record all the calls you make or receive.’
    That was fine with him.
    ‘And one more thing: I have to inform the Commissioner of the investigation.’ He stood up. ‘If anything happened to you, I’d be fired, they’d send me back to Sardinia to eat bread and olives.’
    ‘You seem to be eating plenty of olives here.’
    ‘Don’t try and be clever,’ Carrua said. ‘Just tell yourself I have no desire to be fired, so I don’t want anything to happen to you. It doesn’t matter to me if we discover anything or not, because we’re not going to eradicate these people all by ourselves. But I want you in one piece, and I don’t want us all to end up in the newspapers.’
    Duca also stood up, a little less irritable now. ‘Let’s go, Mascaranti.’
    ‘Yes, doctor,’ Mascaranti said.
    Carrua also stood up. ‘He doesn’t like to be called doctor,’ he said to Mascaranti: he was the one who was irritable now. He picked up the pile of ten-thousand-lire notes. ‘And you have to keep this and spend it was as if it was yours. These people may search you and they need to find their money on you.’
    Of course. Below, in the courtyard of Headquarters, a pigeon, a single pigeon, stood motionless in the sun, as if it was asleep, or as if it was a fake bird made of stone, and the car with the radio, which Mascaranti had gone to fetch, passed within one metre of the pigeon, but the bird did not move.

4
    The bell rang, very, very politely. Mascaranti shut himself up in the kitchen and moved his gun from his holster to his jacket pocket. Duca went and opened the door. They didn’t do this every time the bell rang, but since nobody ever rang that bell now that his sister and niece were in the Brianza, and in fact nobody had rung it for four days now, especially not in that polite – too polite – way, they knew this was the moment they had been waiting for. And as soon as he opened the door, Duca saw the case, it really was a case, not a big bag, and he saw the woman’s beautiful long legs, such young legs, and such a young face, and her body encased in a bright red dress coat.
    ‘Dr Lamberti?’ The voice was less young, and much less polite than the way the bell had rung: although she spoke Italian, there was a strong tinge of Milanese dialect, that heavy, vulgar Milanese from the far edge of the city, from Corsico or Cologno Monzese, where Milanese, unrefined but pleasant, merges with more rural and alien-sounding dialects.
    He nodded, yes, he was Dr Lamberti, Duca Lamberti, and he let her in, because he had already understood.
    ‘Silvano sent me,’ she said in the hall. She wasn’t wearing make-up, apart from lipstick and false eyebrows drawn with a pencil, with blank spaces beneath where the real ones should have been, an effect he found clownish