Traitors to All
Page 1
PRAISE FOR
GIORGIO SCERBANENCO
“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
GIORGIO SCERBANENCO was born in Kiev in 1911 to a Ukrainian father and an Italian mother, grew up in Rome, and moved to Milan at the age of eighteen. In the 1930s, he worked as a journalist and attempted some early forays into fiction. In 1943, as German forces advanced on the city, Scerbanenco escaped over the Alps to Switzerland, carrying nothing but a hundred pages of a new novel he was working on. He returned to Milan in 1945 and resumed his prolific career, writing for women’s magazines, including a very popular advice-for-the-lovelorn column, and publishing dozens of novels and short stories. But he is best known for the four books he wrote at the end of his life that make up the Milano Quartet, A Private Venus, Traitors to All, The Boys of the Massacre, and The Milanese Kill on Saturdays. Scerbanenco drew on his experiences as an orderly for the Milan Red Cross in the 1930s to create his protagonist Duca Lamberti, a disbarred doctor; it was during this period that he came to know another, more desperate side of his adopted city. The quartet of novels was immediately hailed as noir classics, and on its publication in 1966, Traitors to All received the most prestigious European crime prize, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. The annual prize for the best Italian crime novel, the Premio Scerbanenco, is named after him. He died in 1969 in Milan.
HOWARD CURTIS translates books from French, Italian, and Spanish, and was awarded the John Florio Prize (2004) as well as the Europa Campiello Literary Prize (2010).
MELVILLE INTERNATIONAL CRIME
TRAITORS TO ALL
First published in Italy in 1966 as Traditori di tutti by
Edizioni Garzanti S.p.A., Milano
Copyright © 1966 Giorgio Scerbanenco Estate
Published in agreement with Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale
First published in the United Kingdom by Hersilia Press
Translation copyright © 2013 Hersilia Press
First Melville House printing: June 2014
Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
ISBN: 978-1-61219-367-0
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART TWO
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART THREE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Translator’s Notes
PART ONE
When television came the first person to install it was my fiancé, the butcher. The whole of Ca’ Tarino would go to his house to watch it, but he’d pick and choose, he’d invite my parents, so I’d go too, and that’s how we ended up engaged. In the dark, he’d put his hand on my knee, then move it up, and as soon as he could he asked me if I was a virgin, and with that hand on my leg and my mother close by I was a bit annoyed so to make fun of him I said, yes, I’d been keeping myself specially for him.
1
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.
For a moment, she was lit by the headlights of a car on the other road beyond the canal, just as if she was on stage, and if they did come up out of the water, she thought, as she stood in that ray of light, she would be able to hold her hand out to them and pull them out, and say she didn’t know what had happened, because of course the two people hadn’t realised that she was the one who had pushed the car – but what if they had realised?
She waited, and only when she was sure that five minutes had passed, or perhaps twice five minutes, perhaps three times, when she was sure that the stinking souls and stinking bodies of those two would never again foul the streets of the world, only then did she move away from the edge of the canal and head towards the little iron bridge, opening her handbag as she did so and taking out a few little squares of soft paper and wiping the rest of the canal water, now almost dry, from her face. The front of her overcoat was wet, though she couldn’t do anything about that, and there was water in her shoes, so when she reached the bridge she sat down on one of the steps, took off her low-heeled shoes, shook the water from them, let them dry a little in the air, then put them back on, even though her stockings were also wet, but she couldn’t do anything about that either: how strange, she had never imagined she would get so wet.
She climbed the steps onto the little bridge that crossed the canal – it was like a toy rather than a bridge, but she wasn’t a child and she couldn’t enjoy herself on the bridge – and she was shivering, but not from cold – oh, if only! – but no, she couldn’t turn the clock back, once you’ve killed two people there’s no point wanting to turn the clock back, you can’t bring them to life again, and when she was at the top of that schizophrenic bridge which was like a mixture of a Venetian bridge and something out of Jules Verne she swallowed several times to fight her impending nausea at the image of the two people trapped in the car, in the water, struggling, and she started to descend the steps on the other side. After all she wasn’t a professional killer, although theoretically she was an expert, she knew everything, the ways to kill are infinite but she knew almost all of them, she knew that a hot knitting needle, inserted into the skin so that it goes through the liver – you only need a basic knowledge of anatomy – causes a slow, agonising death. Tony Paganica, an American citizen whose parents had come from the Abruzzi, and whose surname the Americans found a bit hard to pronounce, abbreviating it to Pani, had died that way, with a knitting needle in his liver. The thought stopped her from vomiting, stiffened her resolve, and she descended the last three steps from the bridge. The second part was beginning.
Now she was on the tarred road, and the cars were passing in a steady stream, although well spaced out because it was getting late. They passed almost within a few centimetres of her, catching her in their headlights, but they did not stop even though she raised her hand to ask for a lift: a female vagrant on her own in the middle of the countryside, what have we come to? They flashed their lights, but did not stop. Eventually, though, a car did stop: good, kind Lombards from good, kind Lombardy, a husband and wife and a little boy, who either had a taste for adventure or a compassionate urge to help a fellow human being, a poor young girl in the middle of the road at this hour, anything might have happened to her, let her get in, Piero, look, her coat’s all wet, let’s hope she’s all right.
And so Piero pulled up and the girl got in, and as she got in she summoned all her years of studying Italian, because she didn’t want it to appear in any way that she was from San Francisco, Arizona, and said, ‘Thank you, you’re very kind, are you going to Milan?’ And down there, under the water, in that canal beside which the car was travelling, the two of them were still there, and she had put them there.
‘Yes, Signorina, where do you want to go?’ Signor Piero’s wife said, turning to her as she sat in the back seat next to the boy and laughing, she was good-natured, communicative, sociable, charitable in her way.
‘Daddy, she’s American,’ the boy said, as the car neared
the tollgate and slowed down. ‘I heard someone talking like that once before. Is it true you’re American?’ the nine-year-old or eight-year-old or even less asked her directly, and there was a risk if anyone found out that they had given a lift to an American girl, picking her up at the exact spot where a car was found in the canal, maybe as the result of an accident or maybe not, she had to disappear, leave not a trace behind. But this eight-year-old, nine-year-old, whichever he was, had recognised her accent, and she couldn’t get out of it now, the whole mechanism she had created could fall apart thanks to the boy’s pedantry and good hearing.
‘Yes, I’m American,’ she said: you can deceive an adult, but not a child.
‘You speak very good Italian, I would never have guessed,’ the extrovert Lombard woman said.
‘I learnt it in six months, from records,’ she said: it was a rule taught in all the schools – the schools of crime, that is – to draw people’s attention to some harmless subject in order to step them concentrating on another, more dangerous subject.
Signor Piero, who up until a moment earlier had been suspicious – he didn’t like having a stranger in his car, her overcoat was wet, God alone knew from what, she was getting his car dirty, and with all the riffraff you saw these days, only a baby like his wife would have let her get in – all at once became interested. ‘In six months? Really? Did you hear that, Ester? So what they say about learning languages from records is true.’
‘Oh, yes, it’s true,’ the girl said: suddenly she was a saleswoman for language records. ‘Six months ago, all I could say in Italian was O sole mio.’
‘You know, Ester, we should find out about these records, for Roberto, Malsughi could get me a discount,’ Signor Piero said – they had passed the tollgate and now were driving along the Conca Fallata, where the Lambro Meridionale splits into two then joins together again beyond the Naviglio Pavese – and as he spoke the girl looked at her watch: it wasn’t even five to eleven, she had followed her timetable precisely. For a few more minutes, as they drove along the almost deserted avenues, purplish in the purple light of the fluorescent street lamps, the couple giving her a lift conversed among themselves about language records, until she said, ‘Here, please, I’d like to get out here, in this square.’