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By Root 1456 0

splendor, the debatable and ultradesired pearl necklace, two or three bangles, an amethyst, the garnet cross, the ball of lapil-laruli (so it was written), the corals, the jewelry, possessors of the names and the descriptions which figured, colleagues and brethren of the topass, in the first and following lines of the first and second sheets of the Martinazzi list, or rather, to be more precise, the Mantegazzi. Owners of the names and the titles, in general use, in some cases a tiny bit difficult: ring "of" ruby with two pearls, brooch with small black pearl and two emeralds, pendant "of" sapphire, as one might say of pastry, "surrounded" with brilliants, carcanet typed as carcanot, then corrected to carcano, of garnets in old (sic) style, string of (the o a hole, of course) white pearls (quite fake) et cetera, small ring et cetera, large brooch with onyx stone et cetera. A good reading exam for the aspiring carabinieri's course, thought Pestalozzi.

Time, meanwhile, was pressing: that very morning, before noon, he had to return to Marino with the topaz in his pocket and with everything else he had managed to recover, in his wanderings so intensely fruitful of gems, gold, false pearls, girls pretty or ugly but all equally lying. Of the recovered, the found or not found, he had to render an account to the sergeant, list in hand: the names were strange and difficult, with something magic about them, mysterial, Indian: with all those holes, like so many punched railroad tickets, in the place of every o. The second list, incomplete because a sheet was missing, but no less pocked than the first, seemed to him, on the other hand, a pain in the ass, a lousy pain that didn't concern him at all, a job deferred to another, since officer Ingravallo, that big head who instead of brilliantine used tar, had said "expressly" that he wanted to deal with it himself. So that was Don Ciccio's business. Typed on a red ribbon, as if the ribbon had been dipped in blood, the list of the "Balducci stolen property" seemed to him materialized from a nightmare: sheeted and reported in pages from a secret horror which was not, on that mad equinox morning so filled with prognostications, no, was not the carabinieri's responsibility. No, the solitary country outside, dampened by the squalls of rain, barely eyed by the sun awake from time to time, no, it didn't want the horror re-created: which clothes, after the sudden flashes of the knife, all condonation denied life by the beast, the immobility of the funereal relic. Before the eyes of the concierge and the police (even before the ascertainments of the law) or of the terrified cousin who had come in without knowing, so he said, then among the carpet slippers of all, men and women, a whitened simulacrum for the wax museums of death: and that putrid ichor, down from the rent throat, the days following, in an odor of morgue. What he had recovered were jewels and gold "from the door opposite," the jewelry of the blond countess, in any case: and in the successive flashes of a dreamed (not seen) image, the corporal sighed. And fantasticating already that he would appear before her in his sergeant's stripes, in the guise of recoverer-savior, he tried at the same time to untangle himself from all the serpents of doubt: ". . . but perhaps some of the others, too, from the iron coffer of the murdered woman." He didn't waste time checking. By now he was in a hurry. Over any possible gems of Signora Balducci, with that half-recovered list there, the ambiguity of hypothesis hung still: the recognition and division of the individual items were to be carried out in the barracks, up at Marino, or perhaps in Rome at Santo Stefano del Cacco, while the jewels of Countess Mantegazza, which were individualized in the relative list, claimed each one, with prompt evidence, its stolen identity. And then, to tell the truth, his reason began to compute the remaining probabilities : in an hour and a half two lucky coups like this, a topaz on a finger and a chamber pot full of topazes, were even too much from the miserly cornucopia