The Tempest by Juan de Manuel Prada

Author:Juan de Manuel Prada [MANUEL DE PRADA, JUAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC031000
ISBN: 9781468307849
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2012-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

‘You can’t be trusted on your own. You’re a right mess – looks as if they tried to crucify you.’

Tedeschi had ordered me to lie face down on the bed on which he took his rest, that stately bed converted into a pig-sty with its fine linen sheets turned into something resembling sackcloth, and made stiff and filthy with dirt and dried urine. There was not even electricity in that abandoned palace which had been selected as the scenario for Fabio Valenzin’s death. The only light Tedeschi had came from an oil lamp that made his features look even coarser than by daylight and shed its oily illumination over the sheets, reducing all the stains to one uniform colour, softening their harshness.

‘Right, get your shirt off. Let’s have a look at those wounds.’

My shirt, slashed by the pieces of glass, was in tatters; it was nothing more than a rag in which the rips matched the gashes on my back, and stuck to the congealed blood like a second skin. Tedeschi stripped it off me with a not very gentle hand, making some of the wounds bleed again, and then he poured a stream of his fortified wine over my lacerated flesh.

‘Hang on, this is going to sting.’

His warning came late because the wine was already running into the gashes, disinfecting them with its high brandy content – not to mention the various germs with which Tedeschi had doctored it, through his saliva. Using a piece of cloth which was undoubtedly innocent of any of the prejudices of preventive medicine, he gave me a stiff rubdown, and with fingers worthy of a market gardener, began to weed out the splinters of glass. I buried my teeth in the pillow, and let him grub around, although I had considerable doubts about the effectiveness of his clinical techniques.

‘All the time I thought you were with Giovanna Zanon fucking the hell out of her, and here you are back with me looking like something the cat brought in,’ he said.

I still possessed a small reserve of humour.

‘And what do you think I’d look like if I really had been screwing that old witch? I’d bet anything she keeps a whip in the closet for beating the shit out of any man she gets into her bedroom.’

‘Well, it must be better to have a good hiding while you’re on the job, rather than a thrashing and no fuck at all, don’t you think? But seriously, Ballesteros, you shouldn’t get yourself into so many scrapes. The best thing you can do sometimes is to just sit tight and wait.’

There were pigeons sleeping in the mouldings of the ceiling, all puffed up, and with their heads beneath their wings, like mutilated monsters awaiting the shot that would awake them, and restore them to their full natural shape.

‘You haven’t done much sitting around either,’ I grunted. ‘Chiara, Gabetti’s daughter, told me you’ve been spying on her. Do you really think it’s right to leave the chest unprotected?’

Tedeschi

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