STEFANO MANNUCCI

The man I had to killThe man I had to kill

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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.