The Brewer of Preston (21 page)

Still at a loss as to what he was doing, Sciaverio, hiding behind the broad bottoms of three ladies who had fainted and were piled one atop the other, fired another random shot of the carbine. At this point Lieutenant Sileci and his horse leapt into the open space that had formed around Don Memè and his two charges. The lieutenant had had the inner door opened by his soldiers, who nevertheless remained on guard to prevent people from exiting. The jump he executed was truly for the annals of horsemanship, something he had learned not at riding school but during his fraternal association with a fugitive brigand whom he used to visit in the bush during his free time, for fun and friendship and common business interests. Sileci bent down from the horse, grabbed the prefectess by the arm, and put her in front of him in the saddle, then seized the prefect, hoisted him up, and put him in the saddle behind him. Then he spurred his horse to make it leap yet again and turn back. This time, however, the beast, weighed down as it was, couldn't manage it.

At that very moment Headmaster Cozzo, literally in the throes of ecstasy over having successfully fired his revolver, got off a second shot right behind the horse's ears. Terrorized, the creature leapt over the entire throng and ended up outside the theatre. With the help of the militiamen, Sileci put the prefectess and prefect in their carriage and sent them off to Montelusa under an escort of four of his men.

The passage of Sileci's horse, however, had inevitably opened a momentary breach in the line of militiamen outside, and the crowd took advantage of this, spilling suddenly out into the open, just as the lights in the square were going out. What had happened, in fact, was that a handful of young men from the town, to help their fellow townsfolk trapped inside the theatre, had decided that the darkness of the night would be their friend, and so, tying three street lamps with cables to three horses, they had uprooted them. Whereupon, for no reason and without being ordered to, the soldiers began to attack the people who were running away in the piazza and on the streets. And still other things happened. Such as when Sciaverio, pursued by a militiaman, fired a shot that hit the soldier in the hand, or when a militiaman named Francesco Miccichè, in pursuit of another civilian, entered a very narrow alleyway and received a chamber-pot full of shit and piss on his head.

Lieutenant Puglisi did not take part in any phase of the battle. At the start of the mayhem he had sat down in a seat in the orchestra and buried his head in his hands.

I
t was a pleasure to set the fire, no doubt about it. But then to see it grow, climb higher and higher, spreading outwards, eating everything in its path as it sang, little by little the pleasure turned to joy and I was as hard as if I was fucking.

“I gotta try that again,” Traquandi said to himself, stripping down naked and lying belly-up, as he nearly always did when he wanted to facilitate the onset of sleep.

In the cot beside his, Decu had already been sleeping soundly for the past hour, his breathing long and regular, as if he were singing a lullaby to himself.

The following night they were awakened by an insistent knocking at the door. The knocking was not so hard as to seem like a command; rather, it was more like a request to enter. But it sufficed, when the two awoke with a start, to make their blood run cold.

“Hold it, don't open,” Traquandi ordered Decu, realizing that the other was about to light a candle, and he grabbed the rifle his friend had given him, which he had placed by the head of the bed.

Decu got up slowly, without making any noise, and the Roman did the same. They positioned themselves on either side of the door, as the knocking continued, polite but firm.

“Who's there?” said Decu, trying to sound self-assured.

“Iss me, Decu, your cousin Girlando.”

“Who the hell is it?” asked the Roman.

“It's my cousin, the son of my father's brother.”

“What's he want at this hour?”

“I dunno. I'll ask him.”

There was no need, since the man behind the door continued:

“Open up, Decu, I need to talk to you. To you and the young Roman who's there with you.”

Traquandi literally jumped, nervously clutching the rifle he held in his now-sweaty hands.

“How the fuck does he know I'm here? This is starting to smell fishy to me.”

“Calm down!” Decu replied. “If he knows you're hiding out with me, it means they also know at the commissariat of Montelusa.”

All at once things became clear to Traquandi.

“You mean you're telling me the guy out there is a cop?”

“Yes. But mostly he's my cousin.”

“And what do you mean by ‘mostly'?”

“I mean that in these parts that means something.”

“Think about it,” said the voice outside. “If I wanted to catch you, I would have caught you. You were both sleeping like babies. But not only do I have no intention of catching you, there's no way I could. I'm alone and unarmed. And anyway, Decuzzo, have I ever betrayed you?”

It was these last words that made up Decu's mind.

“We can trust him,” he said softly to Traquandi. Then, loudly: “I'll open the door for you in a minute.”

The Roman quickly got dressed as Decu lit a lamp and went to open up.

In the doorway stood a squat man with arms raised, his right hand holding a lantern that shed light on a ruddy, friendly face, that of a man well-disposed towards the world as it was, with its people, trees, and animals.

“Greetings, Decuzzo,” he said, smiling. “Can I come in?”

Decu didn't answer but stepped aside to let him in, while Traquandi leapt back towards the rear wall, keeping his rifle trained on the new arrival. But the policeman seemed to pay no mind to him. He set his lantern on the floor and sat down on a nearby chair, so that the light shone only on him and his ruddy face, leaving the other two in the cone of shadow, as if to show that he was exposing himself because he had nothing to hide.

“And so?” asked Decu.

“It's all rather complicated,” said Girlando. “Complicated to explain and to understand.”

“You here to screw me?” came Traquandi's brutal question, unable as he was to understand the formality between the two.

“No,” said the cop, raising a hand. “No. On the contrary.”

“Then, out with it, cousin!”

“Decu, you may be nervous, but so am I. Because if the commissariat ever finds out that I came here to see you, my career is ruined, to say the least. You have to understand that. We need to talk this over and try to see where things stand. So, to begin: That prick of a prefect of Montelusa decides that the new theatre in Vigàta has to open with a worthless opera. And he gets his way, turning everyone against him. And the opera ends up the way it was supposed to end up, in a pile of shit. Do we all agree on that?”

“We agree,” said Decu, a bit thrown off by the fact that his cousin was approaching things in such a roundabout way. He couldn't tell where his cousin was going with this.

“Then what happens?” the cop continued. “What happens is that after everything grows calm again, two hours after the pandemonium in the theatre, the theatre catches fire. And that's strange.”

“Why?” asked Traquandi. “Fire takes time to catch. In all the confusion, if somebody dropped a cigar—”

Girlando cut him off with a stare.

“I haven't got any time to waste. If we're just going to bullshit ourselves with this story of a cigar, I'm going to get up and leave.”

“All right, all right. Go on,” said Decu.

“Everybody knows us Vigatese. And they all know we're capable of doing the worst kinds of things, but always on im- pulse, in the heat of the moment, face-to-face. We would never do something like this on the sly, two hours after the fact, all nice and rested. We never have second thoughts the way cornuti do. Therefore, whoever burned down the theatre was not from Vigàta, but an outsider. And Lieutenant Puglisi had this exact same idea and went and told it to the commissioner not two hours ago.”

“So who does Puglisi think did it?” Decu asked, pallid.

“Puglisi thinks it was the Mazzinian who came here from Rome and who's been in town for the last four days.”

“Me?” Traquandi asked huffily.

“Yes, you,” said Girlando, eyeing him calmly.

“But even if it was true,” Decu cut in, “how would Pu- glisi prove it?”

“If he ever gets his hands on the gentleman in front of me here,” said the cop, “you can bet your family jewels he will make him talk.”

He sighed and lit a cigar by the flame of the lamp, letting the others stew in their own juices in the meantime.

“But I'm of another opinion,” said Girlando, after taking his first puff on the cigar, as he watched the smoke rise.

The other two clung to these words like castaways to a plank of wood.

“What?” they asked, practically in chorus.

“In my opinion, it was Cocò Impiduglia, the nitwit, the town idiot, who started the fire. Impiduglia can't even talk; he's less than animal. A dog's got more brains than him. And everybody in Vigàta knows there's only one thing that gives him pleasure: setting fire to the first thing he sees. We've arrested him four times: once for setting fire to a straw hut; another time it was a wooden hut. In all good conscience, I think it was him this time, too. Puglisi's wrong.”

“If you're so convinced it was that stupid, crazy shit who set fire to the theatre, why'd you come here in the middle of the night to bust our balls?”

Traquandi was anxious. He had taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and was continually wiping his mouth.

“Because it's all very complicated. And I'll explain why. Puglisi is not only convinced that the person who set fire to the theatre, causing two deaths, was the Mazzinian from Rome. He also had the courage to tell the commissioner to his face that if he'd immediately had the Roman arrested, he'd never have had the time or the means to burn down the blessed theatre. And therefore, still in Puglisi's opinion, the commissioner himself is also responsible for the chaos. And that's very serious. Puglisi is a gypsum donkey.”

“And what the fuck does that mean?”

“It means he's someone who follows his own path, no matter what happens, even if Samson and all the Philistines die. Understand what I mean?”

“Perfectly,” said Decu.

“And so I, on my own, without saying anything to anyone, decided to find a way to set everything right. Since the commissioner gave Puglisi the warrant to arrest the Roman early tomorrow morning, at dawn—in other words, a few hours from now—I dashed over here. If, when he gets here, Puglisi finds you sleeping like an angel all alone, with no sign of the Roman having been in your house, then the whole story becomes a fantasy of Lieutenant Puglisi. There's no proof, no nothing.”

“I get it,” said Traquandi. “You're saying I gotta clear out of here fast.”

“Exactly,” said Girlando.

“All right, then. But am I supposed to run away just like that? Where am I gonna go? Where am I gonna run to?”

“Just like that, no. They'd catch up to you in no time, and there would be hell to pay, especially for me, who let you escape.”

“So what do we do?”

Girlando paused artfully, extinguishing his cigar butt.

“At the crossroads about a hundred yards from this house, I've got a trusted man of mine waiting for you. His name is Laurentano and he's got two horses, one for you and one for him. If you leave now, without delay, by midmorning you'll already be near Serradifalco, where there's another person of mine who can keep you at his house for three or four days. After which he'll decide himself where to send you.”

“So I have to go?”

“Of course you have to go. The arrangement I've made solves everything. Puglisi won't find you, and his idea of who burned down the theatre won't be worth shit. My cousin will deny ever meeting you, and I'll arrest Cocò Impiduglia and persuade him to say what I want him to say, even if it's that he set fire to Rome in Nero's day. That way we can all go on living happily ever after, the commissioner included, like in one of those stories people tell children to help them fall asleep. Believe me, there's no other solution. Think it over, both of you. I'm gonna go outside and get a breath of air.”

They thought it over, discussed it, nearly came to blows, embraced, and made up their minds. Traquandi gathered his belongings, shook Decu's hand, and left in the company of the policeman.

“Stay awake and wait for me, because I need to talk to you,” Girlando whispered to Decu before leaving with the Roman.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he returned, visibly content.

“Your Roman friend is in the right hands now. And you should thank me. Because if not for my idea, tomorrow morning you'd be in jail, and it would be very hard to get you out. Two people died, Decu, don't forget that.”

“What should I do when Puglisi comes?”

“Don't do anything at all. Or, at the most, get upset, show surprise, start yelling in anger. Meanwhile lemme have this rifle. I don't like the idea of Puglisi finding a firearm in here. I'll throw it into the well as soon as I leave. You have to tell Puglisi you don't know anything about this Roman, you've never seen him, and, as for the fire at the theatre, you're as innocent as the Baby Jesus. Even if he's so pigheaded that he still arrests you, he'll have no choice but to set you free after half a day. Now gimme some wine; I think I caught a chill.”