Chapter One

The bus was just about to leave, amid rumbles and sudden hiccups and rattles. The square was silent in the grey of dawn; wisps of cloud swirled round the belfry of the church. The only sound, apart from the rumbling of the bus, was a voice, wheedling, ironic, of a fritter-seller; fritters, hot fritters. The conductor slammed the door, and with a clank of scrap-metal the bus moved off. His last glance round the square caught sight of a man in a dark suit running towards the bus.

“Hold it a minute”, said the conductor to the driver, opening the door with the bus still in motion. Two ear-splitting shots rang out. For a second the man in the dark suit, who was just about to jump on the running-board, hung suspended in mid-air as if some invisible hand were hauling him up by the hair. Then his brief-case dropped from his hand and very slowly he slumped down on top of it.

The conductor swore; his face was the colour of sulphur; he was shaking. The fritter-seller, who was only three yards from the fallen man, sidled off with a crablike motion towards the door of the church. In the bus no one moved; the driver sat, as if turned to stone, his right hand on the brake, his left on the steering-wheel. The conductor looked round the passengers’ faces, which were blank as the blinds.

”They’ve killed him”, he said; he took off his cap, swore again, and began frantically running his fingers through his hair.

”The carabinieri”, said the driver, “we must get the carabinieri”.

He got up and opened the other door. “I’ll go”, he said to the conductor.

The conductor looked at the dead man and then at the passengers. These included some women, old women who bought heavy sacks of white cloth and baskets full of eggs every morning; their clothes smelled of forage, manure and wood smoke; usually they grumbled and swore, now they sat mute, their faces as if disinterred from the silence of centuries.

”Who is it?” asked the conductor, pointing at the body.

No one answered. The conductor cursed. Among the passengers of that route he was famous for his highly skilled blaspheming. The company had already threatened to fire him, since he never bothered to control himself even when there were nuns and priests on the bus. He was from the province of Syracuse and had little to do with violent death; a soft province, Syracuse. So now he swore all the more furiously.

The carabinieri arrived; the sergeant-major, with a black stubble and in a black temper from being woken, stirred the passengers’ apathy like an alarm-clock; in the wake of the conductor they began to get out through the door left open by the driver.

With seeming nonchalance, looking around as if they were trying to gauge the proper distance from which to admire the belfry, they drifted off towards the sides of the square and, after a last look around, scuttled into alley-ways.

The sergeant-major and his men did not notice this gradual exodus. Now about fifty people were around the dead man: men from a public works training centre who were only too delighted to have found such an absorbing topic of conversation to while away their eight hours of idleness. The sergeant-major ordered his men to clear the square and get the passengers back on the bus. The carabinieri began pushing sightseers back towards the streets leading off the square, asking passengers to take their seats on the bus again. When the square was empty, so was the bus. Only the driver and the conductor remained.

Il Giorno della Civetta by Leonardo Sciascia, 1961, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver.