Page 267 of Marcello

This is the part where the hero just sits there like a useless piece of shit.

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Iasked Lucrezia a few questions to bring me up to speed.

I couldn’t understand why Cesare was so confident about attacking the hospital in broad daylight. Wasn’t he afraid the cops would show up?

It turned out Cesare had ordered Cicciobello to shoot up the Piazza della Repubblica as a distraction. All the police in the city were currently there, trying to stop the mass murder in progress – which explained why I’d seen all those cop cars rushing away from the hospital.

I sat there in stunned silence.

As a kid, I’d ridden the carousel at the Piazza. As a teenager, I’d gone there on dates.

It was one of the most popular, crowded places in all of Florence…

And our guys were there right now, shooting everyone they could.

I knew Cesare was a vicious psychopath with zero conscience –

But this was beyond anything else he’d ever done.

He usually killed people in the Camorra, or who had some connection to it. Prostitutes, bookies, drug addicts.

Not civilians.

But today he’d ordered the slaughter of dozens of innocents as a smokescreen for his revenge plot against one man.

It was beyond comprehension…

And it made me wonder again how terrible my eternal punishment would be, knowing that I’d let such a monster continue to walk the earth.

But besides being inconceivably evil, Cesare’s actions were also incredibly stupid.

“We’re endangering half our men and making them targets for the police, just to provide a distraction?” I asked in astonishment.

“Yes,” Lucrezia said acidly. I could tell she did not approve. “Diciassette and Curtiello are between here and the Piazza, just in case Rosolini somehow escapes.”

As soon as she said it, I thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if he did?

That is, ‘funny’ in a horrific, pointless kind of way.

But as they say, Speak of the devil…

A few minutes later, a black Mercedes drove up about 50 feet in front of us.

The driver’s side rear window rolled down, and I saw a blond man with a beard.

The Swede! I thought in shock –

And then recognized the man behind him from the mugshot I’d seen.

Dario Rosolini!

That was when the Swede raised his pistol and pointed it right at us.

“GET DOWN!” I screamed –

Too late.