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By Root 1364 0

I want you, I don't want you. And, in any case, to the rare, predestined, and with mysterious deliberation, selected women, he conceded himself: like Divine Grace, the Eternal Health of Jansenius. At times, by contrast, with sudden violence: and to the total confusion of all plausibility. There! Just when everyone had turned the horoscope in a different direction. Boom! He plunged hawk-like on the most resistant hen of the whole coop: as if to punish her (or reward her) with this dazzling deviltry: to rescue her from some recondite weakness in her being, from some ignominy . . . existing prior to this magnifying election. In such case, the gratitude of the magnified could swell to the stars: like her fear, or even perhaps hope, of an encore.

Ingravallo, as you might have expected, even before the arrival of the coroner, in view of the way the events stood, had decided to take Valdarena in. Only later, the morning after in fact, the district attorney's office transformed his state of custody into temporary arrest and arranged for the respective warrant, after the arrest had in effect taken place, and with the subject of the warrant already in Regina Coeli Prison. Until late in the evening the chief and the two experts of the criminological bureau did not desist from their investigations, nor from photographing the deceased. They had brought everything they needed with them. There was no question of telegraphing Balducci, since his return was imminent, nor alerting the various police stations to have him traced: Milan, Padua, even Bologna, because he had to go also to Padua. Cristoforo, the widow Menegazzi, who couldn't stop cooing over the disaster, Bottafavi, Signora Manuela and her hubby, the one from the milk company, offered to go and meet him in a body at the station; he must be spared a shock, prepared in some way. The relatives? A telephone call at noon . . .

The relatives were officially "advised of the event" late in the evening, but Ingravallo, already that morning, had forbidden the men to let them in. Renewed investigation and precise autoptic observation both by the head man Don Ciccio and by Sergeant Valiani . . . well, to tell you the truth, they didn't amount to much. Oh, of course, some signs of theft. But no weapon was found. Still various drawers and such, when you looked in them, told you that there was something up. They apparently weren't so innocent, as they looked from outside. Weapons, no. And no clues to any, except for the red drops on the floor, and that blood . . . tracked by heels. Near the sink, in the kitchen, the tiled floor was wet, with water. A "very sharp" and completely missing knife was probably the instrument most capable of operating in that way. The drops, rather than from any murdering hand, seemed to have dropped from the knife itself. Black they were, now. The unexpected flash, the cutting edge, the brief sharpness of a blade. In her: alarm. Certainly he had first struck all of a sudden, then worked on the throat, insisting, and on the trachea, with ferocious confidence. The "struggle," if one had taken place, can have been no more than a wretched jerk, on the part of the victim, a glance, terrified and immediately imploring, the hint of a movement: a hand barely raised, white, to avert the horror, to clasp at the hairy wrist, the black, implacable hand of the homicide, his left, which already dug its nails into her face and threw back her head to free the throat further, to bare it entirely, helpless against the gleam of the blade, which the right hand had now produced, to wound, to kill.

A waxen hand relaxed, fell back . . . when the knife was already in Liliana's breath, tearing, ripping her trachea; and the blood, when she inhaled, flowed down into her lungs: and her breath gurgled out, coughing, in that torture, and it looked like so many bubbles of red soap: and the carotid, the jugular, spurted like two pumps from a well, plop, plop, half a yard away. Her breath, her last, sideways, in bubbles, in that horrid purple of her life: and she felt the blood in her mouth, and