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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. "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 suffered 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." This is a free preview of the first chapter.
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STEFANO MANNUCCI
The man I had to killThe man I had to kill
UUID: 52bbe986-75c0-11e5-8c77-119a1b5d0361
This ebook was created with StreetLib Write
( http://write.streetlib.com)
by Simplicissimus Book Farm
The BookThe 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 fiction. Names, characters,
places and events are the product of the
author's imagination.
Any resemblance to any actual events or
persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
THE MAN I HAD TO KILL
PART ONEPART ONE
Chapter OneChapter 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 suffered 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:
«Jack... Jack Settano! You are Jack, aren't
you?»
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 firing
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 flower 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 fi h floor of an old nineteenth-century
building, he would find 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,
flash 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 fide 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.