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Читать онлайн «Blood Curse»

Автор Маурицио де Джованни

This is what Ciro Esposito was thinking about on this last night of winter, when he had finished cleaning and was getting ready to fasten and lock the two heavy wooden shutters that protected his shop’s front door. He was the only shopkeeper on the Via Salvator Rosa who worked this late. But his workday wasn’t over yet. A man, murmuring a greeting under his breath, walked into the shop.

Ciro recognized him; this was one of his oddest customers. Lean, of average height, taciturn. Thirtyish; swarthy, narrow-lipped. Nondescript in every way, except for his green and glassy eyes, and for the fact that he never wore a hat, not even in the dead of winter. What little he knew about him only heightened the discomfort he instinctively felt in his presence. These were not times in which one could afford to displease customers, especially regulars, but this one, in particular, was no walk in the park. The man said good evening, took a seat, and closed his eyes as though asleep, bolt upright in the chair, as if embalmed.

“Buona sera, Dottore,” he said, using the classic term of respect for the college-educated. “What’ll it be?”

“Just the hair, thanks. Not too short. A quick trim. ”

“Yessir, I’ll have you out of here in just a moment. Make yourself comfortable. ”

The man leaned back. He looked around quickly and Ciro saw him stiffen in alarm, holding his breath for a brief instant. Was it Ciro’s imagination, or had he looked at the chair on the far end of the room, the one belonging to the dead man? The barber decided he was becoming obsessed; he was starting to think that everyone who came in could see the bloodstains he’d so painstakingly scrubbed away.

With a sharp sweep of his hand, the customer brushed aside the stray shock of hair that dangled over his narrow nose. He looked even more ashen by the light of the electric lamps, as if there were something wrong with his liver; his dark complexion verged on the yellowish now. The man heaved a sigh and closed his eyes.

“Dottore, are you all right? May I get you a glass of water?”

“No, no. Just hurry, please. ”

Ciro started snipping away rapidly, starting with the hair on the back of the man’s neck. He couldn’t know what the customer, eyes shut tight, was trying so hard not to look at.

The customer could see a man, sitting at the far end of the room, head sunken between his shoulders, hands lying limp on his legs, a black cloth tied around his neck, his eyes fixed on the mirror on the wall. Just above where the cape was tied ran an enormous gash, like a smile scrawled by a child, out of which waves of blood were pumping rhythmically. From behind his clamped eyelids, the customer could sense the corpse slowly turning its head to look at him: the faint snap of the vertebrae in its neck, the damp slithering of the wound’s twin lips.

“What I’d give to see how she likes it now, the slut. Now that she’s deprived her children of their father. ”

The customer raised one hand to his temple. Ciro felt increasingly uneasy; there was no one on the streets at that time of night, and that good-for-nothing shop assistant of his had gone home long ago. What else could befall him? The scissors clipped away at an ever-faster pace. The man was holding his eyes shut tight, and the barber could see beads of sweat standing out on his forehead. Perhaps he had a fever.