nothing to say," Romano cut it short.
Mauro Betti did not flinch, he took the juice that the bartender had placed on the counter and opened a sachet of sugar.
"The juice, instead, I like it very sweet," he said, upending the sachet in it, "although I found out that I could do without it."
After stirring the juice with a long spoon, he drank a hearty swig.
"You see," he said rubbing his fingers along the hairline of his moustache, "I discovered that the particles that make up its vitamins are light-sensitive. If they are crushed while squeezing or even breaking a segment in two, this triggers a chemical process whereby they lose their nutritional value. An orange should be eaten in whole segments, to be sure to benefit of it. Between drinking this and a glass of coloured water there is no difference."
He drained the juice and scooped up the sugar on the bottom of the glass.
"Why drink it then?" Romano asked, jumping into the spider's web on his own accord.
"I drink it out of habit," Mauro Betti said, staring in Romano’s eyes, "the same habit that prompted you to leave the house this morning as if you had to go to work, knowing full well you would go back to your apartment after a walk to the newsstand, with nothing to do to pass the time before going back to bed."
Romano felt the need to swallow, but could not.
"What is the question you ask yourself the most these days?" the presenter asked him, "when you will get your job back? How long will this agony last? Whether you will end up on the other side, with rapists, murderers and psychopaths? Legitimate questions, I'd be the first to ask them myself, but for once stop tormenting yourself and listen to someone else’s voice. Mine, for example."
Betti sucked on the spoon, smacking his lips, and laid it on the ceramic dish.
"How much is it?" he asked the barman.
"Five euro," said the man, punching the price on the till.
"Tell me exactly what you want," Romano said.
Betti paid, waited for the change and looked at Romano.
"Why, didn’t you realize? I want to make you earn quite a lot of money," he said as his moustache became the frame of a devilish smile.
July 18 – 19:35
"What happened?" Riccardo asked in a concerned tone, holding a bottle of white wine.
Alida, on whose forehead a medication stood out, let him in house, explaining that, while she was trying to take a purse from a shelf, a box containing old jeans had fallen on her.
Riccardo grimaced in pain. "Sure you're okay?"
"I'll be better after a glass of this," she said taking the bottle. Riccardo followed her into the kitchen, noticing her slight limp.
"You can open it right now, it’s still cold," he said, not realizing that she was already equipped with a corkscrew. "Forget it."
Alida poured two glasses and gave one to Riccardo, who rattled the rim of his against hers. "So here I am at your home," he said after the first sip.
Alida smiled as the wine tickled her palate. "Excuse me, but I'm not one of those who makes house tours for each person visiting for the first time," she said, leaning on the cabinet where the TV stood.
"Why, anyone does?"
"It happened to me."
"Exciting! Have you been living here for long?" Riccardo asked, looking around and finding the place clean, fragrant and tidy.
"About ten years by now."
"Always alone?"
"No, not always."
Alida put the glass down and walked to the window. It was evening. The sky, speckled with occasional clouds, was lit with warm colours. Her face was almost invisible against the light. Unable to see her expression, Riccardo was in doubt as to whether inquiring deeper in the subject or leaving it alone altogether.
"Are you hungry?" Alida asked, moving away from the window. Riccardo saw she was calm, but decided not to ask other questions nevertheless.
"Enough," he said. "My aunt is used to have dinner at seven!"
"Oh, then I'd better hurry before you faint. I was thinking of cooking a potato tortilla, what do you say?"
"I say I’ll give you a hand. Peeling potatoes is one of the few things I’m good at in the kitchen, aside from drinking wine."
"I’m usually quite good at that too. Actually it’s better to take it easy"
Alida arranged the ingredients for the recipe on the table, gave Riccardo a couple of potatoes and told him to cut them into dices no larger than two centimetres. When he was finished, he sat sipping wine, watching Alida move with confidence and studying her forms under the light dress, that occasionally gave glimpses of new inches of soft leather.
Then he remembered the game and asked if he could turn on the TV for a moment, just to see how Rome was faring in the Italian Cup semi-final.
"Sure. Do you like football?"
"Only when Rome wins."
"A true sportsman," Alida said, opening the eggs box.
The score was 0-0.
To pass the time, Riccardo zapped through the channels and stopped on LA7.
"I hate him," he said, pointing the remote control at the TV.
"Who?" Alida leaned back.
"The man presenting 2030."
"I don’t watch much TV," she said, putting her head in a cupboard in search of paprika.
"Mauro Betti. One who should be in jail for what he has done. But there he is. What arrogance."
Alida approached Riccardo with the bowl in which she was whisking the eggs with salt and paprika.
"Is the moustache real?" she asked amused, without losing the rhythm.
"Come on, no one would grow a moustache like that."
"Turn the volume up. Since we’re watching, at least let’s hear what he says."
"Nonsense," Riccardo said, doing as Alida asked, "That’s a talk show that brings together evidence of supernatural events passing them off as real."
"Sounds interesting."
The show had just begun. Betti was in the middle of the television studio surrounded by a series of guests, among which Riccardo easily recognized Romano D'Abbagli.
"I know that man," he said, pointing at the screen.
Alida stopped beating the eggs for a moment.
"The man on the right of the presenter," Riccardo continued. "He’s a guard at Rebibbia, we must have met a million times. He’s the one who shot a prisoner, haven’t you heard?"
To Alida it was as if someone had replaced her knees with ball bearings. The wound in her leg started throbbing again. She put the bowl down on the table, took a chair and sat down before she could plunge to the floor.
The framing of the studio of 2030 widened to show a large screen placed behind the guests, on which loomed the image of a wolf's head with fiery eyes, foaming at the mouth. Above it, in large block yellow letters, the words HOMO HOMINI LUPUS.
"What did I say? Bullshit!" Riccardo repeated caustically, without taking his eyes off the screen on which a close-up of the bold and lamp-tanned Mauro Betti appeared.
The presenter raised an eyebrow and began to speak in the tone of a magician before his final number, "The crime news in this morning newspapers reported the killing of Manuel Bracconieri, an inmate in Rebibbia prison in Rome. What was omitted is that, after his death, the agents accused of being his murderers were subjected to individual interviews, during which they reported the same hallucinatory version. I don’t use the term hallucinatory lightly, since what they have described is that the man upon whom they fired was a sort of monster, a demon, or rather... a werewolf."
Betti paused and turned to Romano D'Abbagli, who seemed to have just swallowed a brick, then looked again at the camera, with an even more penetrating gaze.
The shot widened and there was an overview of the studio, with the voice-over of the presenter, "Toxicological tests performed to verify the assumption of drugs showed negative results for both. At present they are still suspended from their job, waiting for judgment."
The camera zoomed on the face of Betti.
"Where is the tru
th? Where does nightmare begin and reality end? What did they actually see before shooting on the body of Manuel Bracconieri? Let's ask Mr. Romano D'abbagli, the man who claims to have killed a murderous beast that night, before it regained human shape."
D’Abbagli coughed, stammered something, then began to speak softly.
"You see now why I like football?" Riccardo asked, ready to change channel.
"Wait!" Alida started forward, knocking over the bowl with the mix, snatched the remote from the hands of Riccardo and, after having turned the volume up, kept staring at the TV, heedless of the eggs flowing slowly towards the sink.
Endless exchanges about what Manuel Bracconieri had become rose among the experts, prodded by Betti. Their thesis sank in legends dating back to Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Medieval European cultures.
After the testimony of Romano D'Abbagli, still unaware that he would not receive a single penny for his intervention, the numerous cases of lycanthropy occurred in France in the sixteenth century were mentioned. They talked about Gilles Garnier, killing and devouring children in an area infested with wolves in which, in the same period, four others were accused of lycanthropy, victims of an epidemic that expanded into Germany.
Also in Germany, a further case, that of Peter Stubbe, was renowned for its inaudible violence.
Thanks to the extensive historical data and the accuracy with which he referred to documented sources, Alida recognized among the guests professor Cesare Seda. She knew his studies, having read everything there was to know about the evil afflicting her.
With a balanced tone, contrasting sharply with the horrors he was describing, the man went so far as to demonstrate, by analyzing ancient links of kinship, an
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