I Kill by Giorgio Faletti

button, near enough for Frank to smell his freshly laundered shirt.
    Harriet and Homer Woods had started towards the door, opening it just in time to let in a nurse pushing a trolley. As she was leaving, Harriet had thrown a strange glance at the monitor
checking her husband’s heart, as though she thought her presence was necessary for both his heart and the machine to work. Then she had turned away and closed the door behind her.
    As the doctor and nurse bustled around his body covered with bandages and tubes, Frank had asked for a mirror. Without a word, the nurse had taken one hanging near the door and handed it to
him. What he saw in the mirror, strangely without emotion, were the pale face and suffering eyes of Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent, still alive.
    Mirror to mirror, eye to eye. The present overlapped with the past and Frank met his own eyes once again in the big bathroom mirror and asked himself if it had really been
worth it for all those doctors to work so hard just to keep him around.
    He went back into the bedroom and turned on the light. He pressed a button beside the bed to open the electric shutters. They parted with a hum, mixing sunlight with the electric light.
    Frank went over to the window, pushed aside the curtains, pulled the handle of the sliding door, and softly opened it. He went out on the terrace.
    Monte Carlo, paved with gold and indifference, lay below. Before him, under the rising sun, down at the end of the world, the blue sea mirrored the azure sky. He thought back to his conversation
with Cooper. His country was at war on the other side of that sea. A war that involved him and those like him. A war that concerned everyone who wanted to live without shadows or fear in the
sunlight. And he should be there, defending that world and those people.
    There was a time when he would have gone, when he would have been on the front line like Cooper, Homer Woods and all the others. But that time was over. He had almost given his life for his
country and his scars were the proof.
    And Harriet . . .
    A gust of fresh air made him shudder. He realized that he was still naked. As he went back inside, he wondered what the world could still do with Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent, when he
didn’t even know what to do with himself.
     
SIX
    As he got out of the car, police inspector Nicolas Hulot of the Sûreté Publique of the Principality of Monaco saw the yacht wedged in between the other two,
slightly listing to one side. He walked over to the wharf. Sergeant Morelli came towards him, down the gangway of the Baglietto that had been rammed. When they were face-to-face, the
inspector was shocked to see that the other man was extremely upset. Morelli was an excellent policeman, who had even trained with Mossad, the Israeli secret service. He had seen all kinds of
horrors. But he was pale and avoided Hulot’s eyes as they spoke, as though what was happening were his fault.
    ‘Well, Morelli?’
    ‘Inspector, it was a massacre. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He sighed deeply and Hulot thought for a moment that he was about to vomit.
    ‘Calm down, Claude, and explain. What do you mean “massacre”? They told me there was a homicide.’
    ‘Two, inspector. A man and a woman. What’s left of them, anyway.’
    Inspector Hulot turned around and looked at the crowd forming behind the police barricades. He had a sinking sense of foreboding. The Principality of Monaco was not a place where this kind of
thing happened. The police force was one of the most efficient in the world and the low crime rate was an Interior Minister’s dream. There was a policeman for every sixty inhabitants and CCTV
everywhere. Everything was under control. Men got rich or went bankrupt here, but nobody was killed. There were no robberies, no murders, no organized crime. In Monte Carlo, by definition, nothing
ever happened.
    Morelli pointed to a man of about thirty who was sitting at an outdoor cafe with a