Free The Brewer of Preston by Andrea Camilleri Page A

said the theatre was the work of the devil! He said the theatre was straight out of Sodom and Gomorrah! He’s a holy man, is Patre Virga! He said there’d be fire, and fire it is!”
    Having used up the bull, Gnà Nunzia went back inside. Turiddru noticed that, somehow or other, Hoffer’s machine had managed to tame the flames a little. Without a word, he broke into a run, went through the front door, and shot up the stairs.
    Not five minutes later, Turiddru Macca emerged from the smoke with Gnà Nunzia draped over his shoulder, immobile.
    â€œDid she faint?” inquired Puglisi.
    â€œNo, sir. I punched her in the face.”
    â€œWhy did you do that?”
    â€œShe said she didn’t want to come down in her nightgown with all these wicked men about.”
    â€œThe fire in dis haus ist kaput!” said engineer Hoffer, practically singing for joy. “Who eltz liffs upshtairs?”
    Puglisi looked up.
    â€œThere’s a widow lives on the second floor, Concetta Riguccio. But there’s been no sign of her. With all this commotion at this hour of the night, she would have asked for help if she was at home. I know the lady. She probably went to sleep at her sister’s house tonight.”

Only the young have such feelings
    O
nly the young have such feelings
, thought Don Pippino Mazzaglia with a touch of envy and another of commiseration while listening to the speech of Nando Traquandi, the young man who had arrived from Rome under cover of secrecy and whom he’d been hiding at his country house for the past week. Slender, with reddish, curly hair and small spectacles behind which flashed a pair of wild eyes, the Roman raised his left hand to his chin every now and then to scratch, tic-like, a thin beard, while every four or five words his right hand brought a small handkerchief to his lips to wipe away the little white spot of condensed spittle that formed at each corner of his mouth.
    Traquandi had arrived in Sicily with two letters of recommendation, one from Napoleone Colajanni and one from the Honorable Pantano, member of parliament, asking their Mazzinian friends to provide refuge, assistance, and sustenance to the young man, who, they said, had been entrusted with a mission as dangerous as it was secret. Pippino Mazzaglia had obliged him, but from the very first words he exchanged with him, he had formed a precise idea of the whole matter: that nothing but trouble would come of the outsider’s presence in Vigàta. The youth saw the light of only one truth: that white was white and black was black. He hadn’t lived long enough to understand that when black comes very close to white, close enough to touch it, a middle line forms, a line of shadow, where white is no longer white and black is no longer black. The shade of that line is called gray. And inside that line, where the colors, in marrying, give birth to a third, it is difficult to name things precisely and see them in clear outline. It’s like when the evening advances and the darkness, which is not yet complete, not yet night, makes you mistake a person for a tree. But the young man had none of these concerns; it was clear that he knew where to put his feet when the light faded.
    What an unpleasant fellow!
Mazzaglia said to himself, as the Roman talked on and on.
I feel like I’m seeing myself, thirty years ago, before the Bourbon court, about to take it up the ass with ten years of hard labor. My pride was eating me alive. That must mean that, at the time, I was as big of an asshole as this guy
.
    â€œI have some documents here that show just how extreme the situation has become,” the youth said without pausing to catch his breath. “I’m going to read you a few passages from a report to the minister that we managed to get our hands on, though I won’t say how.”
    He adjusted his small eyeglasses, slipped his hand into a satchel full of papers, and started looking. At that