Day of the Dead by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Read Free Book Online Page A

suffered serious damage. The common folk, accustomed to scraping by and concealing their misery with dignity, only showed up at the hospital when the situation had advanced beyond any remedy and there was nothing left for the physicians to do but try to alleviate their pain.
    Modo thought about the torrents of filthy water gushing out of the backed-up city sewers and pouring into the ground-floor
bassi
, carrying waste and dead animals onto the floors where children played. He shook his head and shuddered; it was a miracle that so many people were still alive, to be sure. Often, after his regular shift was over, when he was so exhausted that his eyes refused to close, he’d wander the city’s alleyways and
vicoli
, administering medical care to those in need of it. Old women tried to kiss his hands, but he recoiled: he wished there were more he could do. He wished he could give them medicine, but he only managed to pilfer a few doses here and there, when those people needed cartloads of it.
    Tonight, for instance, I’d be much more useful out there than in here autopsying a corpse, he thought as he looked down at the little boy spread out naked on the table, bruise-blue in the spectral light, his head resting on a wooden block. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell Ricciardi no, and so instead of comforting the living, he found himself digging around inside a dead body.
    He mused about the strange nature of his friendship with the commissario. They certainly weren’t kindred spirits: Modo was outgoing and overly emphatic, while Ricciardi was reserved and rarely laughed; but in some strange way he felt closer to him than anyone else he knew. Perhaps it was because they were both loners: perhaps it was because they both observed the times they lived in with the same disenchantment and melancholy. Or perhaps it was because they felt the same pity for that teeming city and its desperate populace. Each of them chose different battles, though: the doctor opted for the path of explicit dissidence, the commissario for silent action.
    He pulled the pocket watch out of his vest fob: ten o’clock. It had probably been about twenty-four hours since the little boy’s death. He checked his surgical tools, clean and arrayed neatly in a metal tray next to the autopsy table. As always they looked ordinary and inoffensive: needle and thread, scissors, knives of various gauges and lengths, a handsaw and a pair of hacksaws, a bone chisel and a hammer. He thought of his father, a skilled carpenter who had worked until he was seventy so that Modo could attend medical school. You see, Papà, we’re not all that different in the end. In the end, I saw, hammer, and chisel, too.
    Ricciardi, Ricciardi: damn you, and damn your stubbornness. He remembered something from the Great War, on the Carso front, where he’d been the battalion medical officer. He’d met a lieutenant, a Calabrian named Caruso. He was a slight man of few words, swarthy and dark haired, constantly on the move. The two men had hit it off and they spent long evenings together in the trenches, listening to the distant rumble of artillery, swapping stories about women and the faraway cities they called home.
    Caruso had a gift: he knew before anyone else what would happen in battle. He’d say: now watch, they’re going to move over here, they’re going to maneuver in thus-and-such a direction, they’re going to try to outflank our machine gun emplacements. And right on schedule, as if Caruso himself were directing the whole operation, the chiefs of staff and the Krauts would do exactly what he’d predicted. But it didn’t stop him from taking a bullet right between the eyes, one September night: that was one thing he hadn’t seen coming.
    Ricciardi reminded him of Caruso: the same sad half-smile, the same tense, active hands, the same gaze lost in contemplation of who knows what distant grief. The same strange ability