The Edge of the Horizon

9

Seeing him holed away behind his desk with that childish frown he sometimes wore when he had too much to do, Spino thought how Corrado always loved to play the part of the cynical newspaper editor, a type they’d seen together in the movies so many times. Spino had arrived ready to tell his friend about his Sunday outing. The morning’s newspaper, as always on Mondays, was almost exclusively given over to soccer and contained no news of any importance. He would have liked to have told Corrado that Sara was perhaps about to set off for a short vacation, and if he wanted to take him on free of charge as a private investigator, here was an occasion not to be missed.

But when Corrado said: “Another,” holding up two fingers, Spino’s good humor suddenly evaporated and he sat down without the courage to speak, waiting.

“The policeman died last night,” Corrado said, and he made a gesture with his hand, a cutting gesture, as if to say “that’s it” or “end of story.” There was a long silence and Corrado began to leaf through the pages of a file as if there was nothing more to say about the matter. Then he took off his glasses and said calmly: “The funeral will be held tomorrow; the corpse is laid out in a mortuary room at the police barracks; the wire services have already released the text of the official telegrams of condolence.” He put the file back on a shelf and fed a piece of paper into his typewriter. “I’ve got to write it up,” he said. “I’m doing it myself because I don’t want any trouble, just straightforward news, no speculation, no fancy stuff.”

He made as if to start writing, but Spino put a hand on the machine. “Listen, Corrado,” he said, “yesterday I spoke to a priest who knew him, I saw a letter. He was a sensitive person, maybe this business isn’t as simple as it seems.”

Corrado jumped to his feet, went to the door of his little glass office and closed it. “Oh, he was sensitive, was he?” he exclaimed, turning red. Spino didn’t answer. He shook his head in a sign of denial, as if not understanding. So then Corrado said to listen very carefully, because there were only two possible explanations. First: that when the police arrived the dead man was already dead. In fact The Kid died by the door to the apartment. Now, the gun that killed both him and the policeman, from which six shots were fired, was found on the kitchen balcony at the end of a short passage. So obviously it wasn’t suicide since a dead man couldn’t possibly run back the whole length of the passage and go out on the balcony to leave the gun there. Second explanation: the gun, with somebody holding it, was on the balcony, waiting. The Kid knew this, or didn’t know, impossible to be sure. At a certain point the police knock on the door and The Kid calmly goes to open it. And at that moment the gun pokes in from the night and fires repeatedly both on The Kid and on the police. So then, who was the dead man? Unknowing bait? Or aware that he was bait? A poor fool? Someone who wasn’t involved at all? An inconvenient witness? Or something else again? All hypotheses were possible. Was it terrorism? Perhaps. But it could equally well have been something else: vendettas, fraud, something secret, blackmail, who knows. Perhaps The Kid was the key to everything, but he might also have been just a sacrificial victim, or someone who stumbled into an encounter with destiny. Only one thing Corrado was sure of: that it was best to forget the whole business.

“But you can’t let people die in a vacuum,” Spino said. “It’s as if they’d died twice over.”

Corrado got up and took his friend by the arm, pulling him gently to the door. He made an impatient gesture, pointing to the clock on the wall. “What do you think you’re going to find out?” he said, pushing him outside.