Free Traitors to All by Giorgio Scerbanenco

think you could make that much money by importing guns like the one in that case?’
    Mascaranti nodded and handed him the cup of coffee and then the sugar bowl.
    ‘And do you think these are weapons of war?’ He put in the sugar, stirred it, and waited for the reply.
    Mascaranti put in the sugar and stirred it, and as he was stirring it, sitting there beside him, with the alarm clock ticking in the rainy night and the second hand in the shape of a hen swaying with every tick, he pondered unhurriedly. ‘No,’ he said. He sipped a little of the coffee and nodded to indicate that it was good. ‘I mean, even a rolling pin for making pasta could be a weapon of war, but you couldn’t mount a real attack with that kind of gun, at most some kind of commando action.’
    ‘Or something similar, like a robbery,’ Duca said. He tasted the coffee. ‘It’s good like this, it shouldn’t be too strong at night.’ He stood up and went and opened all the other windows in the apartment. In Lorenza’s bedroom, the lid of the steriliser in which Sara’s dummies were left to soak was off. Every night he saw the lid was off and every night he forgot to put it on, and Lorenza had been away for now ten days now. How embarrassing! He took the lid and put it on the steriliser, then looked for the cigarettes he had in the pocket of his jacket which was hanging in the hall, the plain national brand, not for export, and went back into the kitchen. Mascaranti was carefully washing the cups.
    ‘Or else it could be a sample,’ Duca said, sitting down behind him. ‘If someone’s looking to buy wholesale, you open the case and show him the sample, explain that it’s the latest model, and sell it at a reasonable price.’
    Mascaranti dried his hands on the tea towel hanging next to the sink. ‘So we’re dealing with middle men in the arms trade.’
    ‘Maybe,’ he said, simultaneously shaking his head, ‘maybe, but that’s not the heart of the matter.’
    Then the telephone rang. He stood up and went into the hall. It was Sergeant Morini. He listened to his story, and it didn’t even take long to listen to, because Morini was as laconic as Tacitus and the couple’s terrible death – blinded by headlights, riddled with machine gun fire, driven so mad that they threw themselves in the canal – became, in Morini’s description, terse, formal, official, which made the story even more chilling. When the call was over, Duca stood there looking at the telephone, and at the wall, and gave a shudder of disgust.

9
    After the storm, the sky over Milan, because Milan does have a sky, became even bluer than the sky over the Plateau Rosa, 6 and beyond the buildings, from the roof terraces, the snow-covered mountains were clearly visible. The man at the petrol station in the Piazza della Repubblica, where Mascaranti had stopped, was wearing sky blue overalls. He was keen, he didn’t read the newspapers and didn’t know anything, every night in Milan a number of people die, more than during the day, and for the most diverse reasons, from bronchial pneumonia to a machine gun slaying in the Ripa Ticinese, and he couldn’t mourn them all, and besides, not all of them were worth mourning. Nobody had ever tried to rob his petrol station, and so his world had a normal, liveable, even happy dimension. Duca Lamberti looked at the meter on the petrol pump, the triumphant sun, the vivid spring green of the geometrical little lawns in the Piazza. At this very moment, the girl in the red dress coat was in the morgue, without her coat, and in another cold chamber was her unfortunate companion, and these images had no meaning in a normal, liveable world like that of the man in the petrol station.
    ‘I’m just popping over to Ricci’s pastry shop,’ he said to Mascaranti, and he crossed the Via Ferdinando di Savoia, obeying the traffic lights, went in under the arcades of the skyscraper and then into the pastry shop.
    The image of the girl lying in the