Marco Vichi - Inspector Bordelli 04 - Death in Florence by Marco Vichi Page B

pockets. They all gave a start and looked at one another. One step forward was enough … The boys jumped on their scooters and were off at full speed, shouting insults and laughing.
    Finally Bordelli went to help the victim, who was still on the ground, from where he’d witnessed the scene. His face was bleeding, and he was breathing heavily. The inspector had seen him walking about the neighbourhood in the past and had immediately understood that he didn’t like women.
    ‘Everything okay?’
    ‘To be honest, I was feeling better before,’ the man muttered, slurring his words. But he managed a smile. He looked to be about the same age as the inspector. He was thin, with a long, gaunt face, and two watery eyes like a beaten dog’s. The orange silk scarf around his neck was blood-stained, like his shirt and jacket.
    ‘Would you like me to take you to Casualty?’
    ‘Do you really not recognise me, Bordelli?’ said the man. The inspector took a good look at him, and suddenly remembered.
    ‘Don’t tell me … you’re Poggiali …’ he said.
    ‘Or what’s left of him,’ Poggiali said, smiling. He got to his feet with Bordelli’s help, and then leaned against the wall to keep from falling.
    ‘It was the same story even at school, remember?’ Poggiali touched his teeth to make sure they were still all there.
    ‘My memory’s a bit hazy,’ said Bordelli, shrugging. In truth he remembered his school days perfectly well, when the Fascist regime glorified the sort of masculine man who impaled women. Even in middle school the boys used to make sport of queers and sometimes even beat them up, although many of them used to follow them into the bathrooms and let them masturbate them for a few cents.
    ‘You pack quite a punch,’ said Poggiali.
    ‘I used to box a little as a kid.’
    ‘God bless boxing.’
    ‘I live just round the corner here, come and tidy yourself up,’ said Bordelli, picking up Rosa’s umbrella.
    ‘I live nearby too, why don’t you come to my place?’
    ‘As you wish,’ said the inspector, curious to see where Poggiali lived. They started walking down Via Maggio side by side. Poggiali was still wiping the blood off his face, limping almost like Piras.
    ‘Only you and a couple of other friends used to leave me alone,’ he said.
    ‘I have to confess that at the time I didn’t have much sympathy for people like you.’
    ‘What about now?’
    ‘Good question …’
    ‘What exactly is it about us poofs that bothers you all so much?’ Poggiali asked, with a frankness that made Bordelli smile.
    ‘It’s not an easy subject for people of our generation,’ the inspector admitted.
    ‘Nor for today’s youth, apparently.’
    ‘There have always been idiots and there always will be.’
    ‘You should all be happy to have fewer rivals hunting for birds, no?’
    ‘I’d never thought of it that way.’
    ‘In other words, what do
you
care if we like men?’ said Poggiali, turning on to Sdrucciolo de’ Pitti. Bordelli didn’t know how to reply, and his old school chum smiled.
    ‘Whenever you see a queer you immediately think of some perversion, something sexual and nothing else. You imagine the sight of two men fucking and it disturbs you.’
    ‘I suppose you’re right,’ said the inspector, realising that Poggiali’s orange scarf had immediately made him think of the boy who’d been raped and murdered.
    ‘And yet I assure you that we homos have the same full range of feelings as you humans,’ Poggiali said blithely.
    Arriving at a door with the paint peeling off, he pushed it open and they climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Poggiali’s flat didn’t look very big, but even the entrance had something elegant and unusual about it. They went into a small sitting room cluttered almost obsessively with statuettes, theatre masks, ceramics, crazy paintings, terracotta animals, busts of generals and ephebes, and bouquets of dried roses. Two walls were covered with bookshelves up to