The man I had to kill - First Chapter

STEFANO MANNUCCI

The man I had to kill

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by Simplicissimus Book Farm

The Book

Jack Settano couldn't known that going into that hotel room that night his future could have changed. But surely he knew that saving that woman's life would have sanctioned his death

sentence.

And

now

someone

was

looking for him in the snowy city streets with orders to kill him. Because you can hide your past,

but

you

can't

fool

your

destiny.

Especially for those who - like Jack Settano - destiny had made a murderess of profession.

Author's Note: This is a work of ďŹ ction. Names, characters, places and events are the product of the author's imagination.

Any resemblance to any actual events or persons,

living

coincidental.

or

dead,

is

entirely

THE MAN I HAD TO KILL

PART ONE

Chapter One

She who read my hand - a dark-eyed girl in the dawn of a new year - predicted to me with a sad voice that for me art would be a leisure and love a suered vice, and my life would be short as its beginning was so painful.

But who knows if that girl had understood, between the lines of my hand, the destiny's design that would make me a professional murderess.

It all began on a December evening.

I was sitting at a pub counter, drinking a glass of rum, when someone behind me said my name: ÂŤJack... Jack Settano! You are Jack, aren't you?Âť I turned around toward that voice. A man came up to my chair with making discreet.

I watched him for a few minutes without being able to give him an identity. Only a er the

man

said

his

name

was

Marcus,

I

recognized his face.

We met during the war.

I hadn't received medals of honor on the day I killed the lieutenant.

It was a May morning. I was in the ďŹ ring squad.

Civilians were helpless lined up in front of us.

The women held their trembling children close to their breasts.

The village houses were still burning.

My eyes were clouded by drugs they had given us.

I could hear the orders of the lieutenant - urging us to shoot without mercy - cover the screams of the wounded.

The soldiers next to me shot against the civilians who fell to the ground like twigs under the hailstones.

I aimed at the lieutenant who had ordered the shooting.

I shot straight to his heart and I looked down.

I left the rifle fall to the ground.

Blood slid beneath my combat boots.

They arrested me immediately.

The

insubordination

wasn't

allowed.

Its

existence was to be denied.

Rebellion was a ower that had to be extirpated before it could germinate in the fruitful souls.

It was better the rash action of a nihilistic

madman that the act of insubordination of a disobedient conscience.

Because madness exists in all people.

In someone it’s poetry, in someone it’s violence, in someone it’s art, in someone it’s asphyxiation.

Sometimes, it’s sleeping placid as a puppy on the mother’s womb.

Sometimes, instead, it screams and trembles under

the

skin

until

it

comes

out

and

scratches. With sharp nails it scratches the life.

With eyes like diamonds it cuts the night.

I was judged a madman.

And in the loneliness of a cell I was imprisoned.

In order to not infect the other soldiers. To be a warning to other soldiers.

I was a prisoner for a immemorial time.

I didn't know when I would have been led to the gallows.

I lost count of the hours and days.

Only the thin moonlight, gliding through the trick window grates, marked the passing of the nights.

It was Marcus who opened the cell door the night when the war ended.

A still bleeding wound furrowed his face.

The enemy now was reaching our positions.

Officers had fled before giving the order to evacuate.

Marcus accompanied me in the yard. The barracks was in flames.

We fled together over the fence of the camp.

I never saw him again since that dawn when our lives were divided on different boats.

Marcus’s voice distracted me from the memories.

He asked me if I was working. I answered I wasn't working for years.

It wasn't easy to find a job, when in all my life I had only learned to shoot and kill.

It wasn't easy to become a clerk, when my hands were always dirty with blood and never with ink.

Outcast of war. A piece of debris abandoned on the shore by history's river.

The condemnation to madness had saved me from shooting, but it had also condemned me to marginalization.

Marcus asked me if I could still shoot.

I didn’t hold a gun for years.

I hadn't killed a man since when - at the end of war - the killing had come to be considered an illegal act.

Marcus told me he would call me to offer me a job, but I would have to maintain absolute

secrecy with anyone.

Secrecy wasn't a problem.

By now I was a solitary man.

Marcus came out of the pub.

At the bottom of the room some young punks danced a pogo singing Last Caress of Misfits.

Among them, leaning against a wall, a girl in the Ramones t-shirt sniffed butane gas from a canister she kept hidden inside the leather bag.

I finished drinking rum and walked out from the pub.

On the street corner, as in every hour of her every day, Annarella was smoking away the bitter years of her life from a cigarette. A few steps

further,

someone

was

selling

love.

Someone else was selling death in bags.

I walked along the way back to home.

I slipped into the night like a reflection over a foggy window.

Trembling like a shadow in a mirror of rain.

The leaves fell gently on my hair.

They fell from trees, whose strong roots broke the cement of the sidewalk, but whose fragile branches were crying quivering their crimson foliage over me.

On my way.

On the skin of my face that took refuge in

the coat collar to protect itself against the wind of the coming winter.

I arrived at the front door of my building.

I crossed the threshold of the hallway and climbed the stairs up to my apartment.

Entered into the house, I walked in the bedroom

and,

a er

having

opened

the

window, I lit a cigarette. The last cigarette of the night.

I turned my gaze to the opposite building. I knew what I expected to find.

The old lady was spinning on herself.

She was spinning as she was used to do in every night.

From right to left and then back to the right.

She was spinning into the room in front of the opened window.

It didn't matter if against the rain or toward the sun.

Every day, anyone who was walking in the sidewalk, and he raised his head to look at the buildings over the tram tracks, looking toward the ďŹ h oor of an old nineteenth-century building, he would ďŹ nd the open window and the old lady in her silent dance.

A bent arm to place the palm of her hand against her cheek.

The other arm raised with the open palm of

her hand toward the sky.

Someone said she prayed for her husband never returned from war.

Someone said she prayed for the child she had never given birth.

I said nothing, and silently I watched the old lady spending the hours of her days spinning on herself from right to le

and then back to

the right, spinning into the room in front of an open window.

I turned my gaze from the building.

I watched the silent city skyline - alone and distressed, but still tremendously beautiful begin

to

color

gradually

with

cars

and

cigarettes, whores and mounted policemen, ash of photographs and sparks of tram, and then again a thousand of lights shining like artificial stars above the streets.

I put out the cigarette and walked away from the window sill.

I le

the window open to let the wind in the

room.

I lay down on the bed. I wasn't sleepy.

I would have to spent another night in company of my ďŹ de melancholy. I closed my eyes.

The distant screams of a woman tramp maddened by the sweetness of sleepless nights

spent in lonely city streets - echoed in the darkness of the alleys.