Traitors to All

“A gem … A vivid portrait of Milan’s seamy underbelly … Scerbanenco reveals Duca Lamberti to us; in doing so, he also unveils the Italian hardboiled hero.”

–CRIME FICTION LOVER

“Scerbanenco’s dark, moody novels have much in common with the darkest of Scandinavian crime fiction … This forgotten noir classic from 1966 is finally available in translation. That’s good news!”

–LIBRARY JOURNAL

“There is courage in his books, the courage to call things by their name … No filters shield you from the reality, which is as desperate, fierce, and stark as in the best novels of James Ellroy or Jim Thompson.”

–
CARLO LUCARELLI

“[Scerbanenco can be] as dark as Leonardo Sciascia, as deadpan realistic as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, as probing in his observation of people as Simenon, as humane as Camilleri, as noir as Manchette … but with a dark, dark humor all his own.”

–DETECTIVES BEYOND BORDERS

“The Duca Lamberti novels are world-class noir, and their publication in English is long, long overdue.”

–THE COMPLETE REVIEW

It isn’t easy to kill two people simultaneously, but she stopped the car at the exact point she had studied many times and knew almost to the centimetre, even at night, and could recognise because of the curious, gothic, Eiffelesque little iron bridge that spanned the canal, and, as she stopped the car in the exact square centimetre she wanted, like an arrow hitting the dead centre of a target, she said to the two people sitting inside, the two people she intended to kill, ‘I’m getting out to smoke a cigarette, I don’t like smoking in the car,’ and got out without waiting for a reply, although the two people, made sluggish by their big dinner and also by their age, did grunt, yes, she could get out, and once free of her presence they arranged themselves as if to sleep better, old and fat as they were, both of them in white raincoats, the woman with her woollen scarf around her neck, the scarf a similar liverish Havana brown colour to her neck, which made her look even fatter, her face resembling that of a big frog, even though, millions of years earlier, when the war wasn’t over yet, the Second World War, she had been very beautiful, so they said, this woman the girl was about to kill, together with her companion: this woman officially known as Adele Terrini, although in Buccinasco and in Ca’ Tarino, where she was born and where they knew a lot about her, they called her Adele the whore, whereas the girl’s father, who was American and stupid, had called her Adele la Speranza: Adele Hope.

The girl was American, too, but she wasn’t stupid and, as soon as she got out, she closed the car door behind her, locking it, just as all the other doors were locked, and then she lit her cigarette and looked across at the other side of the canal, the main road to Pavia, where, given the hour, there weren’t many cars passing, which was another thing she had calculated, and then, as if strolling, she came up behind the car, a modest, lightweight Fiat four-seater: she didn’t know what model it was, but she had sized it up and knew it was ideal for her purposes.

Anyway, there in the middle was the canal, called the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese: it was quite a difficult, incomprehensible name for her, as she was an American and her Italian teacher in San Francisco, Arizona – nothing to do with the other San Francisco – hadn’t stooped to explaining such niceties as the fact that
alzaia
was the name of the rope used for towing boats and barges against the current of a river or a canal and referred to the fact that they rose slightly as they were towed,
alzaia
deriving from
alzarsi,
to rise. It wasn’t the etymology or philology of the name that interested her, though, but the fact that the canal was perfectly situated between two roads, and the fact that in that season the waters of the canal were high, and the bigger of the two roads, the tarred one, was an A-road – she had carefully noted the official name, it was State Highway 35, Strada dei Giovi – while the other, the untarred one, still touchingly rustic, was the old canal road. And between them was the canal.

And canals contain water, if they haven’t been drained, and this one hadn’t, and what’s more, this one didn’t have railings or ropes or posts of any kind: on a dark night, a car could fall in without anything to stop it. And so all she had to do was push it slightly, this Fiat of which she didn’t even know the model, and everything was straightforward
and easy, everything happened easily in a few seconds, as she had predicted – she had set it all up, the position of the front wheels, which she had left turned slightly to the right, towards the canal, and the engine idling, so that it was like pushing a cart down a slope – and the car, with those two people inside it, made sluggish by the chicken with mushrooms and the gorgonzola and the baked apples topped with zabaglione and the dark Sambuca, all paid for by the American girl they probably thought was as stupid as her father, who had been a past master at stupidity, the car with Adele the whore or Adele Hope and her companion inside it slipped with wonderful ease into the canal, into the high waters of the canal, and that fall into the water happened exactly when she had planned it to happen, in other words, when there were no cars passing on the main road on the other side of the canal – State Highway 35, the Strada dei Giovi – and it was almost completely dark, and all you could see was the lights of cars approaching in the distance.

Water splashed up and hit her, even wetting her face, although it didn’t extinguish her cigarette, then another, almost sibilant splash hit her on the chest like a jet from a pump – she had never imagined that a car, in falling into the water, would provoke such a fountain – and she felt her cigarette go limp between her lips, it was definitely extinguished now, and she peeled it from her lips and spat it out, that mess of wet paper and tobacco, her face and hair also wet with the foul-smelling water of the canal – the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese – and then stood waiting for bubbles to appear on the surface.

She waited in the darkness. The road on this side of the canal, where she was standing, was completely dark; the road on the other side of the canal, the tarred road, was also
in darkness, but arrows of light broke through the soft fabric of the night, the lights of cars, the cars of Milanese coming back – not from the river, because it was a weekday and you can’t go to Santa Margherita on a Wednesday, can you, because on Wednesday you have to be in the office, or even if you don’t have any commitments in the office, you have to track down people in other offices – but during these mild spring days some Milanese went in the evening, after the office, to out-of-town trattorias, the least adventurous stopping at those along the Via Chiesa Rossa, or going further, but no further than Ronchetto delle Rame, and the bold ones going past Binasco and even Pavia, all the way to high-class taverns that weren’t really taverns, where they ate and drank vaguely genuine food and wine in a vaguely rustic atmosphere, and now, at this hour, they were returning home, to Milan, driving slowly on that beautiful spring night, until there were other cars in front or behind and they surged forward, flashing their lights, and these were the lights she could see as she waited for the bubbles to come.

But the bubbles didn’t come. Through the lowered windows, at least those in front, the car had immediately filled with water, and immediately there was complete silence, and it was just a question of watching and waiting, hoping nobody came along the road: a penniless couple on a Vespa looking for shelter on the rustic canal bank, a drunk cyclist on his way home, a cart filled to the brim with young men from the nearby hamlets and farms on the lookout for girls from other nearby hamlets and farms, provoking long but not bloody feuds between one farm and the next in the area between Asago, Rozzano, Binasco and Casarile. And still she waited, she waited for at least five minutes: if the windows are open, it’s possible to get out of a car even if it’s underwater, and so she waited, looking at the water, overcome
with fear that one of the two, or even both, might emerge all at once from the water, still alive and screaming.