it was a winter afternoon at four o’clock it was already getting dark out by six o’clock it’s nighttime and it was drizzling one of those classic shitty afternoons that you get in the winter there was a traffic jam and the boy sat staring out the window of the schoolbus he saw these two murder victims these two dead bodies the cars were all scattered along the roadside because it must have just happened as he looked at the corpses stared at them in amazement because he didn’t know what killing was yet one of the bodies was lying prone on the hood of the car by the driver’s side door the boy recognized him by his long hair the bushy mustache the blood crusted face it was Simeone and there was Simeone’s son lying dead inside the car halfway out the passenger side door the boy in the bus looked at the two of them shocked at the sight it was bedlam sirens were wailing horns honking people huddling under umbrellas the boy recognized Simeone and it overwhelmed him wounded him inside because he had seen Simeone only a few days before that and Simeone had frightened him

the boy felt a twinge of remorse as well because when he had seen Simeone in his house surrounded by those enormous black dogs he had wished him a violent death and yet there he sat staring out through the raindrops running down the schoolbus window in the schoolbus stopped in the traffic jam in the pouring rain but the thing that he found most disturbing and even frightening was the fact that his classmate Gianni who came from a well to do respectable educated family and all Gianni sat explaining not just to the boy but to the whole schoolbus in considerable nuance and detail who the murder victim was and why he was killed and who had killed him and he described and explained all these things the way you might describe a soccer game you had seen on TV he said that’s Vittorio Simeone the Bardellino clan killed him because he was affiliated with the Cutolo clan he was the clan boss in this town and the Bardellino clan wants to destroy the Cutolo clan because they’re planning to take over around here

the boy sat listening in shock because his mind was going back to the memory of seeing Simeone as a living person he didn’t remember him as a particularly pleasant or likable person he had gone with his father at year’s end to Simeone’s house all the farmers and peasants who fell under his purview would go to pay a call on him once a year they would go to take him his bribe the payment for a year of guardiania or protection some would bring him wine others a slaughtered pig already butchered into ribs and sausages still others would bring him various other things and really if you stopped to think about it it wasn’t all that much as payment for protection but his father told him in the car that Simeone had recently just gone ahead and sold a fruit orchard that belonged to a peasant who owned a neighboring plot of land Simeone didn’t say a word to him about it he just pocketed the money and sold it out from under him and when the owner of the orchard went out to work on his land he found a new owner already working there and he was unable even to protest and the boy recalled arriving with his father in front of this enormous country farm house outside of town they were let in the front door they waited half an hour the father talked with Simeone and gave him his fifty thousand lire they smoked a couple of cigarettes together