Judges by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Crime
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2015-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

There were only two places in Bologna where you could get pastis to compare to those made in Marseille. Because it is not just about mixing water and Pernod—which even then would not be a real pastis, though it comes to the same thing—you need the right water and the right spirit and the right hand and the right atmosphere. Basically, you need Marseille.

He had gone to Marseille for a couple of years after being struck off, when it almost looked like he was going to go to prison. A brother-in-law who was a lawyer had kept him out of jail, but in France he had specialised in patching up gangsters with gunshot wounds, and only when it looked like he might end up inside over there as well, had he come back to Italy. Bologna had seemed anarchic enough, underneath it all, and over the past five years he had had second thoughts and then convinced himself all over again, at least a dozen times.

But Bologna was Bologna, not Marseille, and he could only get a Pernod that would almost hit the spot at an osteria in Pratello, where the owner was from Marseille, and a little bar in Pilastro, God knows why.

The osteria made a better drink than the bar, but Pilastro was more down at heel than Pratello and he didn’t want to be seen by the wrong people. In that hole on the edge of town, amongst the little concrete low-rises like beehives, the police almost never came round. And when they did, everyone knew about it straight away.

The bar had no tables outside, just chairs with plastic slats that had been white once upon a time. Sanna sat down in the setting sun, under the metal canopy, with his glass resting on one knee. He always wore his shirt buttoned up, but he undid the collar because the early July heat was oppressive that year, and the sultry humidity brought you out in a sweat.

It had not taken much to convince the Ricciuti brothers to help him, far from it. They owed him plenty of favours. Or rather one of them did, the younger one, who used to be an armed robber and had been shot by security guards a couple of times. Now he had teamed up with his elder brother, turning over apartments and breaking into safes, but a hip fractured by a 9mm bullet still gave him trouble, and Sanna got him prescriptions for painkillers under the counter and free of charge.

But if he had told them who they were working for and why, he might not have been able to convince them even with a debt of honour. Especially the way Valentina had put it.

“Now I’ve gone underground just like you—an underground examining magistrate. So I’ll run an underground investigation. I’d uncovered the alleged headquarters of one of the accountant’s companies and I was about to ask the finance police to do a search. So I’m asking you to do it instead: an underground search.

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