Traitors to All Read Free

was in the driveway of his own house, driving his cab up onto the pavement and stopping just in front of the bar.
    ‘A gin,’ she ordered: it was an odd bar, long and narrow, like a corridor, into which a miniaturist rather than an interior decorator had somehow fitted everything, from a juke-box to a telephone and even a pinball machine. Even ordering a gin had been a mistake – a girl alone at that hour drinking such an exotic liquor – and the four men who were in the place, apart from the owner, looked at her more closely, it was obvious she was the Anglo-Saxon type, and with her stockings and shoes still damp, she was leaving quite a trail behind her, or maybe not: the city was full offoreigners because of the Fair, and by the evening most of them had been drinking and were rather eccentric. Back in the taxi, she lit a cigarette, which, coming on top of the gin, gave her strength. It was over, she had done it. She did not even spend three minutes in her room in the Palace Hotel, it only took her two to change her shoes and stockings and put on her raincoat, and one to close the suitcases, which she had prepared earlier. The bill was ready, and she had her money ready, she spent another minute distributing tips and waiting for the taxi she had called. Two minutes later, the taxi had dropped her at the station.
    She was already familiar with that Babylonian temple, and she knew everything. ‘To the Settebello,’ she said to the porter who picked up her two suitcases and leather shoulder bag. As she followed the porter, a Southerner offered her his company, smiling at her with a frighteningly horse-like set of teeth, his upper lip adorned with a moustache he must have thought irresistible to women, but two Carabinieri were coming along the platform where the Settebello stood waiting and just the sight of them must have put this ladies’ man off because he abruptly left her alone.
    She already had her ticket, and a reserved seat. Four minutes after she got on, the Settebello set off. At eight in the morning, she would take a plane for New York from Fiumicino. She had studied the schedules, they were engraved in her memory: at three in the afternoon, local time, she would land in Phoenix, one among the hundred and ninety-five million American citizens, a very, very long way from the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese.

2
    The doorbell rang, too politely, but however a bell rings, there are times when it isn’t a good thing for it to ring, when it’s better for nobody to turn up, because everyone is obnoxious. But the man to whom he was forced to open the door, given how politely the bell had rung, was even more obnoxious than predicted.
    ‘Dr Duca Lamberti?’
    Even his voice was loathsome, in its perfect Italian, its perfect courtesy, its perfect clarity, he could have taught an elocution course, and Duca hated anything that was too perfect.
    ‘Yes, that’s me.’ He stood there in the doorway, without letting him in. Even the way he was dressed was obnoxious: it was spring, certainly, but this man was already going around in a cardigan, without a jacket, a light grey cardigan, with dark grey suede at the wrists, and so that nobody should think that he didn’t have the money to buy himself a jacket, he was wearing a pair of light grey driving gloves – not those vulgar ones that left the back of the hand uncovered, but whole gloves, with the back and fingers complete and the palms interlaced – and they were clearly visible, because he displayed them ostentatiously, in order to make it clear from the start that he owned a car appropriate to these gloves.
    ‘May I come in?’ He was full of cordiality and false spontaneity.
    Duca wasn’t pleased, and made no attempt to conceal it, but let him in anyway, because the ways of life are infinite and mysterious. He opened the door to his defunct surgery, or rather his abortive surgery, and let him in. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, not even inviting him to sit down, he even turned