The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo Read Free Book Online Page B

others had been masked with opaque paper to prevent anyone seeing through to the other end of the hall. This despite the bank’s proclaimed motto: “Territory and Transparency.”
    “I’ll be frank with you, professor,” the woman confessed in a low voice. “We’ve had no contact with head office for a week and no couriers have come.”
    “Are you trying to tell me you don’t think any more money will get here?”
    The woman moved her mouth without speaking; her eyes shone as she shook her head.
    “I know it’s not your problem, but I haven’t been paid myself for three months.”
    Under the vertical light waiting for him outside the building, Leonardo was seized by consternation. What should he do? That morning he had woken refreshed and unexpectedly vigorous and, before going down into the village, had worked for a couple of hours, ignoring the sharp twinges of pain running through his arms and legs. Now that energy was a distant memory: he felt exhausted and soaked with sweat.
    At the post office he handed in his letter, slipping it under the glass window as lazily as the assistant took it and put it in the receptacle for outward post, then he returned to the square. The sky was a cloudless white; the sun covered the village without producing any shadows. The buildings, the two trees in the square, and the metal octagon of the old newsstand seemed insubstantial objects with no density. Everything seemed about to evaporate.
    It was then that he saw the teenage boy materialize from a side street. With his short black hair and pointed chin he was heading for the bar with studied indifference, wearing the same clothes as in the vineyard, though he had rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal a tattoo on his right shoulder.
    Leonardo told himself that Lupu would never have dreamed of sending him to the village and decided his presence there was not a good sign. He raised an arm to attract his attention, but at that moment the boy turned his head to take a quick look at his reflection in the windows of the bar, and a second later he was inside.
    When Leonardo followed, he found the boy standing in the middle of the main room watching the four men playing cards at the only table. Making up the game that morning with Danilo, the postman, and the man with the beard was an insurance agent who had once been the local
pallapugno
champion and the owner of a tobacconist’s shop.
    “Got any cigarettes?” the boy asked.
    None of the players lifted their eyes from their cards. The boy took a couple of paces toward them and stopped a meter or so away.
    “I’d like some cigarettes,” he repeated in a calm, firm voice.
    Danilo looked up.
    “We don’t sell cigarettes,” he said.
    “So what’s them over there then?” the boy asked, indicating a dozen packs on the shelf behind the counter.
    Once in a London theater Leonardo had seen a show with a young actor who was famous on television. Every evening he attracted an audience of adoring girls who would have liked him as their boyfriend, as well as ladies of a certain age who would have liked him as their son or lover. In order to prove he was not just a petty small-screen celebrity, the actor had chosen an extremely complicated script and was applying himself to his performance in a spirit of frank self-denial. So much so that when in the third act his jacket was supposed to have vanished from its clothes hanger, but unfortunately was in fact still there for the whole audience to see, he had turned to the clothes hanger and the supposedly blind and pregnant actress who was playing the part of his woman, and asked her, as if the words were part of the script: “Where’s my jacket? Who’s taken my jacket?”
    Since the blind woman was not supposed to be able to see the jacket, the actress had swallowed her cue, hoping for assistance from the actor who, far from helping her, had headed with great strides for the clothes hanger and, running his hands around the jacket without