Traitors to All Read Free Page A

his back on him and went and sat down on the window sill: when you have a window that looks out on the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, with the trees all newly green for spring, you have everything you need.
    ‘May I sit down?’ Ignoring the way he was being treated, the man – he couldn’t have been more than thirty – continued to give off an obnoxious air of sociability and cordiality.
    Duca did not reply. At eleven in the morning, the Piazza Leonardo da Vinci is a placid desert on the edge of town, which even prams with innocent children in them can cross easily and where the occasional almost empty tram passes, and at that hour, in that season, on that mild, cloudy April day, you could still love Milan.
    ‘Maybe I should have phoned first,’ the unknown man said, completely impervious to any show of hostility, ‘but there are things that can’t be said by phone.’ He was still smiling, still trying to establish some kind of complicity with him.
    ‘Why?’ Duca said, from the window sill, watching an honest housewife on her way home with a shopping bag on wheels.
    ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. You don’t know me, I’m Silvano Solvere, but you certainly know a friend of mine, in fact, he’s the one who sent me.’
    ‘And who is this friend?’ He wasn’t at all curious, except, perhaps, about one thing: what filthy genie this man was about to let out of the bottle. With his elegance, his good manners, the cleanliness of his body – but only his body – hereally did seem a merchant of filth, and it was only a matter of knowing exactly what kind of filth he was going to try and sell him.
    ‘Attorney Sompani, you remember him, don’t you?’ He did not wink, he was too well brought up to wink, but in a subtle way he made his voice wink, if a voice can wink, still with the intention of creating between him and Duca a current of familiarity, almost of complicity. In cunning people, obtuseness is congenital and incurable.
    ‘Yes, I remember him.’ Oh, yes, he certainly did. The worst punishment had not been to spend three years in prison, but to be in prison with Turiddu Sompani. His other cellmates were bearable, they were just ordinary villains, thieves, would-be murderers, but not Turiddu Sompani, no, he was repellent, partly because he was so fat and flabby, and partly because he was really a lawyer and there’s something both ridiculous and frightening about a lawyer in prison. He had got two years, instead of the twenty he probably deserved, because he had let a friend of his, who couldn’t drive and was also blind drunk, get into his car and drive it, and this friend had driven with his girlfriend straight into the Lambro, near the Conca Fallata, while he, Turiddu, stood on the bank and called for help: a story so murky that not even the meanest public prosecutor could do anything with it, even though everyone – judges, jurors, the public – was of the opinion that Turiddu Sompani’s friend could not have driven into the Lambro by chance.
    ‘Well, Attorney Sompani told me that you could do me a favour,’ said the perfect Silvano. He pretended to be embarrassed, but it was only pretence, he seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t be embarrassed sitting naked astride Garibaldi’s horse in the Largo Cairoli at the aperitif hour.
    ‘What favour?’ Duca asked patiently – you had to bepatient or you’d kill yourself – getting off the windowsill and going and sitting down on a little stool in front of the merchant of filth, and it was almost as if he could see him with his bottles of filth in his hand, about to open one. A doctor struck off the register, as Duca was, is an interesting specimen to some people. Since he had left prison, he’d had plenty of opportunities for work. All the pregnant girls in the neighbourhood, all the girls who were afraid they were pregnant, had turned to him, crying, threatening suicide, but in vain, and there had been so many that he had