The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Page B

kills himself, then he kills himself. It’s cowardice, it means they don’t have the courage to go on living. You have to face life head-on, no matter how shitty it is.”
    His voice sounded like distant thunder. Aragona snickered.
    â€œSo you’re saying that if someone jumps off a viaduct a hundred feet in the air, he’s a coward. And so is someone who puts the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, or drinks a bottle of acid. It seems to me that it takes more courage to die than to live.”
    As Romano was preparing a comeback, Palma ran in hastily, a sheet of paper in one hand: “Guys, we’re in business. And this one’s major: a woman was murdered on the waterfront, the wife of a notary. Lojacono and Aragona, you’re up.”

XII
    L
et’s see: what time is it?
    By now they’ll have already found you.
    It would have been the housekeeper, the Bulgarian woman. She must have searched the house for you—the kitchen, the bedroom. Maybe she tried the handle of the bathroom door, to see if you were in there. And the door would have swung open, into silence and darkness.
    The apartment must have seemed deserted. Nothing, except for the wind shrieking outside. Not another sound.
    Then she’d have walked down the hallway, uncertain. Maybe she assumed you’d left.
    I wonder what it would be like, if emotions hung in the air like a smell. If the scent of your sad smile, the last time I saw your face, was still suspended in the room. What sort of a scent would it have had, your smile?
    She must have gone looking for you, the Bulgarian housekeeper. Moving circumspectly among the furniture and the carpets, taking care not to knock anything over in the dark. Maybe she wouldn’t have even turned on the lights, for fear you might be fast asleep somewhere and she’d wake you up.
    But there’s no real risk of that, is there? As far as waking you up goes, no one on earth can do that.
    Who can say what she did, when she finally came face-to-face with you. Or face-to-face with what was left of you, to be exact. A bundle lying in the semidarkness of the windows, shuttered to preserve the last scraps of night.
    I look outside. The wind is still blowing, and big black clouds are being shoved across the sky. It’s not raining, now.
    Instead, just a few dozen yards from your dead body, the sea spray is still whirling through the air, covering the walls of apartment buildings and the balconies with salt. But all around you, everything is inert. Motionless.
    Your snow globes, for instance. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Shelves filled with them, arranged according to that odd system you seemed to prefer. With fake snow, lying nicely and obediently at the bottom of the globe, just waiting to be shaken up. What will become of them now, of your snow globes? We’ll have to think about what to do with them.
    With all of them, except for one. That one, I think, will follow a different path. It will go on its way through crime labs and courtrooms; it’ll wind up in a big cardboard evidence box, archived on some forgotten shelf. And there it will sit for years and years, until it’s finally thrown away. That snow globe is special. Unique. The one with the girl playing the little guitar. The one with your blood smeared on its surface.
    The one that ripped away your last truly happy smile, and then ripped away your life.
    I wonder what she’ll do, the housekeeper, when she finally understands. When she realizes that it’s you, or that it used to be you, now lying there in a pool of blood with your head bashed in. She’ll scream, I think. Or maybe not. Bulgarians are tough.
    Now starts the hard part. For me, for those of us who are still here.
    Not for you.
    For you, it’s all over.
    Too bad. If only you’d been reasonable.
    If only you hadn’t turned your back on me.
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XIII
    A s soon as Palma finished, Aragona