“I cheated you?” Salvatore protested, smiting his brow.
“You've got it the wrong way around. It was you that tried to cheat me, but you didn't succeed.”
The fact was, Nino had hung a picture of St Anthony on the wall of the bar-room -
a clipping from an illustrated magazine which he had cut out and framed.
Salvatore offered to buy this picture one day, ostensibly because he found it so beautiful.
By dint of skillful haggling, Nino had persuaded Salvatore to part with a radio in exchange,
laughing up his sleeve to think that Salvatore was getting the worst of the bargain.
After the deal had been struck, it turned out that nestling between the picture and its cardboard backing was a banknote of which Nino had known nothing.
Discovering that he had been outsmarted, Nino angrily demanded the money back because it hadn't been included in the bargain.
Salvatore refused to hand it over, whereupon Nino refused to serve him any more, and that was how it had all begun.
Once they had traced their vendetta back to its original cause, the men fell silent for a while.
Then Nino said, “Be honest, Salvatore, did you or didn't you know about that money before we made the deal?”
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