obvious.'
'It is just too obvious/ murmured Sabatino. 'I wonder why.'
Gesualdo didn't seem to hear.
'And meanwhile/ he said, bringing the car to a halt at the top of the Scalini del Petraio, 'instead of following this thing up and grabbing a piece of the action while we can, we have to drop everything to go and hold Dario's hand.
Jesus!'
Sabatino sighed and got out of the car.
'You were the one who took the call, Gesua. If it'd been me, I'd have told him to look after his own problems.'
'He sounded so desperate. Said it was a matter of life and death/ * If he's pissing us about, it will be. His.'
They ran down the steps three at a time, through the little square where a boy was chasing a chicken which had escaped from its wire enclosure, and on down the final precipitous alley to their temporary home. Dario De Spino was standing at the door, rubbing his hands anxiously.
'Thank God you're here!' he blurted out. 'They're threatening to kill themselves! I would have called the cops, but I didn't think you'd want them snooping around. Besides, their papers aren't in order and I don't want to make matters worse.'
'Who?' demanded Gesualdo.
'Why, your new neighbours on the first floor, of course!'
Sabatino blasphemed loudly.
'You dragged us all the way over here for that? Let them kill themselves, if that's what they want.'
'Of course they won't kill themselves!' snapped Gesualdo.
'That's all talk. Your problem, Dario, is you don't understand women.'
'Certainly not these ones,' De Spino replied with a touch of pique. 'Albanians aren't flexible like us. Everything's gloom and doom, blood and guts. They scare the hell out of me, to tell you the truth.'
'That's your problem,' returned Sabatino. 'You're the one who decided to take them under your protection. If they've gone hysterical, you deal with it. It's got nothing to do with us.'
De Spino shook his head pityingly.
'You're trying to ingratiate yourself with the Squillace family by keeping an eye on the property, right? Well, how do you think it's going to look if two illegal immigrants top themselves in the place on your shift, eh?'
Gesualdo pushed impatiently past.
'Well, since we've come all this way, we may as well take a look/ He led the way upstairs and knocked on the door of the lower apartment. There was no reply. He tried the handle, but the door was locked. Sabatino leant out of the window at the end of the landing. A narrow ledge ran from this to a balcony outside the rear bedroom. With the air of someone to whom such feats are part of the job, he climbed out of the window and stepped out along the ledge, pulled himself over to the balcony and looked in through the window.
'Holy Christ!'
'What is it?' demanded Gesualdo. 'Break the door down!' Sabatino yelled urgently, clambering back in through the window.
They put their shoulders to it, and when that didn't work Gesualdo pulled his pistol and shot the lock off.
Then he kicked the door open, ran across the room and threw open the door to the bedroom. Libera and Iolanda were lying stretched out on the floor, each grasping a length of wire bared at one end and plugged into a wall socket at the other. Their eyes were closed and their mouths agape, tongues extended.
Gesualdo circled the bodies cautiously and unplugged the lengths of wire from the wall. The other end was still grasped tightly in the victims' fingers. He pried these open, revealing extensive blackening. Meanwhile Sabatino was feeling for a pulse.
'This one's alive!' he said, bending over Libera.
Gesualdo put his hand on Iolanda's bosom, then leant down and proceeded to administer the kiss of life.
Sabatino did likewise with Libera. After a long interval, the victims began to show feeble signs of animation. The two men immediately redoubled their efforts, squatting astride the women's supine bodies and pumping their chests vigorously.
Dario De Spino, all this while, had been looking on from the doorway. He appeared to be holding his breath, for some reason, as a result of which his face had turned bright red.
XX
Professor Esposito had arranged to meet Aurelio Zen in Piazza del Duomo, but when Pasquale dropped his passenger off there was no sign of the professor. Pasquale was sceptical as to the chances of his ever reappearing.
'Your watch must have cost — what? — three, four times what you owe him? Why should he let you redeem a pledge which is worth more than the debt it secures?'
This verdict was delivered with the gravity and assurance of an economist explaining why the government's fiscal policies are doomed to failure. Zen had no answer to its implacable logic, but he decided to wait for fifteen minutes anyway. Before dismissing Pasquale, he broke the mobile phone out of the box and, as a test, dialled his answering machine, which was taking calls for the disconnected phone.
There were two messages. The first was from Gilberto Nieddu, asking him to get in touch 'as a matter of the gravest urgency'. The other was from someone called Luisella, who just said she would callback. Zen switched off the portable and was about to put it away when he realized who Luisella was. He closed his eyes and uttered a curse.
'How's that, duttd?' asked Pasquale with a worried look.
'This thing brings bad luck/ muttered Zen, holding up the mobile phone.
Pasquale seemed to take this complaint literally.
'I can change it for another, if you want. But what's the problem, exactly?'
'My ex-wife just called me.'
'Ah!' said Pasquale, as though everything was now clear. 'That's not the phone, duttd. That's the moon.'
'The moon?'
'It'll be full tonight.'
Zen shrugged.
'That happens every month, Pasquale. I haven't heard from my wife for seven years. Why now?'
'Because it's also the solstice, duttd. When the solstice and the full moon fall on the same day, even San Gennaro is overmatched.'
With this thought, Pasquale went off to circulate the poster of John Viviani amongst his fellow tassisti. Professor Esposito still had not appeared, so Zen dialled Gilberto Nieddu's number in Rome — or rather the number of a printing shop in the outskirts of the city belonging to a distant relative whom Nieddu had roped in on a 'Sardinians versus the Rest of the World' ticket when times got tough.
Zen left a message and his number with this cut-out, then held the line until Gilberto was put through.
'Aurelio! Thank God you called.'
From the tone of his friend's voice, Zen gathered that his message had been something more than mere hyperbole.
'What's happened?'
'It's your mother, Aurelio. I don't want to alarm you unnecessarily, but… well, she seems not to be at home.'
Behind Zen's back, a chorus of car horns played a brassy big-band fanfare.
'That's impossible! She never leaves except to come and visit your kids.'
