Liar Moon by Ben Pastor Read Free Book Online Page B

write, it was easy to put up with abuse.”
    De Rosa quivered like a dart waiting to be released. “And do you believe she just happens to be in Verona now that Lisi has been killed?”
    Patiently Bora looked down at the Italian. “No. Not by chance. I believe someone told her to come.”
    “But who? Who’d profit from alerting her?”
    Bora controlled the hilarity he felt at De Rosa’s frustration. “I don’t know yet. But as you say in Italy, every tangle meets the comb sooner or later. We’ll just have to keep combing the right way.”
     
    Out in the Sagràte fields, Guidi was the first to reach the place after the dogs.
    A man lay supine in the ditch, his shoulders nearly encased in the freezing ground. Ice crystals created delicate spider webs in his bloody nostrils. His eyes, wide open and opaque, showed little of the irises, turned back under the upper lids. Stiffly the man’s elbows adhered to his hips in the tomb-like narrows of the ditch, though his forearms rose at an angle and his hands clawed upward like the legs of dead chickens on the butcher’s counter. A black stain on his chest marked the spot where life had been blasted out of him. Along his left cheek, bristling with unshaven beard, a dark jellied trickle formed a snaking path to his ear, which was filled with dry blood.

    The dead man had no shoes on. Stiff in the cloudy, icy water of the ditch, his feet stuck up covered only by army socks of an indefinable colour. The big toe of his left foot peeked from a hole in the wool. A miserable mixture of Italian and German army clothing covered the entire body. Whether a partisan or deserter, the corpse had no visible weapons on or near him.
    Guidi ordered the body to be lifted out of the ditch and searched thoroughly.
    Turco came up with a piece of mould-blue dry bread, parsimoniously nibbled all around. He showed it to Guidi.
    “Wanted to make it last, Inspector.”
    “What else is there?”
    Turco kept rummaging. “Nothing.”
    Guidi ordered the men to search for weapons in the area, though he expected to find none.
    “He’s not the man we’re after, that’s all. The description doesn’t even come close. God knows who he is, but I bet the shoes we found were his. The convict probably took them from him after killing him.”
    Turco assented. “Well, he’s been dead a few days. Santi diavuluni , but why would anyone?…”
    “If I knew, I’d tell you, Turco.”
    Guidi was annoyed by Blitz’s persistent smelling and pawing of the dead man, and stepped away. These were the times when he grew tired of his sad profession, and became unwilling to talk. Behind him the sun had nearly completed its low arc, and had escaped a long bank of clouds enough to draw enormously long shadows under everything that stood. Guidi’s shadow reached well past the edge of the field, and the shadows of the corn stubble formed a bluish forest on the bare lay of the land.

    “Let’s go back to Sagràte,” he ordered the group. “I have other things to do before dark.”
     
    After the ostentation of Lisi’s funeral, Verona’s poor side appeared to Bora as something from another world. Darkened by curfew, tenement houses packed tightly beyond the railroad tracks formed a tall maze he had to enter, park in and walk through.
    It took him some time to find the midwife’s address. Even so, the leprous front of the multi-storeyed house was so dismal, he double-checked his note in the unsteady glint of his lighter. It was here, and no mistake. Bora walked in, closed the door behind him, found the light switch. He looked up the malodorous stairwell, at the ten ramps of steep, worn stairs leading to the fifth floor, and started his climb.
    The late Italian supper-time lent smells and sounds to the house. Behind the flimsy front doors, at every landing different voices flowed to Bora. Children whimpering or old people’s complaints – each sound, unhappy or irate, mingled with the stench of cabbage soup, latrines