As God Commands (47 page)

Why did he kill her?

He couldn't stop thinking about it. He tried desperately to find
an answer, but it was baffling. How could he have smashed in the
head of such a beautiful girl? And what had Fabiana done to deserve
being killed?

His father...

Stop it.

... kneeling over Fabiana's body as it lay there in the rain ...

Stop it!

... lifted up the stone ...

STOP THINKING!!!

... and brought it down.

Cristiano breathed in and once again smelled the sickly odor
of carrion, which entered his mouth and nose and went down
his throat like a mephitic gas. His stomach and the rest of his
body started shaking convulsively and he had to take three steps
backward to stop himself throwing up the crackers he had just
eaten.

He picked up an Esselunga plastic bag and put it over her head
in an attempt to conquer his revulsion.

When he felt that the nausea had passed he looked again at the
girl's body lying with its legs and arms outspread in the middle of
the green table. With the plastic bag over the head it was better.

He observed her. The skin was yellowish. The violet veins, where
nothing now flowed, had come to the surface, like the myriad offshoots of a flash of lightning. The clothes caked with grime and
blood. The fly of the jeans open. The jacket open. The cardigan
and T-shirt torn, as if a wolf had tried to tear her apart. The areola
of a nipple emerged from the white lace bra. A few blondish hairs
stuck out from the panties.

A thousand times he had imagined seeing her naked, but never
like this.

He would have to clean her nails.

That's where they always catch you out. That's where they find
a wisp of wool, a piece of the murderer's skin, and all it takes is a
DNA test and you're fucked. And then he would have to ...

"We've found traces of seminal fluid inside the vagina. We've got
him." That's what they always said in the TV films.

So?

So he would have to pull down her panties. And wash her. Inside
and outside.

No, not that.

He would never be able to do it. It was too much. Besides, the
pants were open, but the panties were pulled up.

He didn't screw her.

No, he didn't screw her. My father would never do a thing like
that to a fourteen-year-old girl.

He picked up the hosepipe.

But why did he kill her?

And the detergent to wash the grease off his hands.

Because Rino Zena is a homicidal maniac.

Then he ought to go to the police.

"My father has murdered Fabiana Ponticelli. She's in our garage. "

No. There must be another explanation. Of course there must.
When his father came out of his coma he would tell him and then
he would understand everything.

His father was a lout and a drunkard, but not a murderer.

But the other night he hurt that blonde who came into my bedroom. That was just a kick up the backside, though. That's different. My father's a good man.

He examined the girl's right hand, frowning. There was something strange, that didn't seem right, but he couldn't think what.
He looked at her left hand. He compared them.

The ring was missing. The skull ring.

Fabiana always had it on her finger.

Where is it?

Beppe Trecca woke up with a start, turned over and almost fell off
the sofa. For a few moments he couldn't make out where he was.
He looked around in bewilderment.

The old television, still on. A folding chair.

This was Cristiano Zena's house.

He sat up and yawned, scratching his head. His back ached and
he was itching all over.

Are there fleas here?

Anything was possible in this pigsty. Even crabs and headlice.

He must go and have a pee and drink some water. It seemed as
if he had half a pound of salt in his mouth. The effect of that rice
with vegetable stock.

He looked at his Swatch.

Four forty-five.

He stood up, continuing to yawn. He massaged the base of his
spine, where he had a cracked vertebra.

He couldn't spend another night on that sofa. The doctor had
told him to sleep without a pillow on an orthopaedic mattress,
preferably a latex one.

It was that imbecile Father Italo's fault that he was in such a bad
way. Three years before, in a village in Burkina Faso, Father Italo,
a Dominican missionary from Caianello, had hit him with a shovel
and broken his third lumbar vertebra.

Beppe Trecca had been there with a group of volunteers, digging
wells for the international project "A Smile for Africa." Under a
sun that roasted your neurons, among skeletal cows, he was working
because he thought it was a worthy cause and because he was going
out with Donatella Grasso, one of the group leaders.

It was exhausting work and Beppe, for some unknown reason,
had been demoted from a supervising role to one of manual labour.

On the day of the accident, plagued by flies, he had spent the
whole morning unloading concrete bricks, under the tyrannical eye
of Father Italo. At last lunchtime had come. He had gulped down
a thick soup which contained pieces of meat that looked like wood
shavings. Afterward, to get rid of the taste of garlic, he had decided
to suck a refreshing mint.

He had searched for the packet in his pants pocket and found
that there was a hole in it and that the mints had fallen down
into the seat of his pants. He had rested one hand on the cement
mixer and started waggling his leg to make them fall out onto
the ground.

A blood-curdling yell had broken the silence of the savannah.
Beppe had barely had time to turn his head and see Father Italo
leap forward and whack him in the kidneys with a shovel.

The social worker had gone down like a ninepin while the
Dominican yelled: "Turn off the electricity! He's been electrocuted!
He's been electrocuted! Turn it off!"

The excruciating pain and the surprise had prevented Beppe from
saying anything. He had tried to get up but the priest, like a man
possessed, had with the help of three blacks thrown him down again
and grabbed his face and opened his mouth. "The tongue! The
tongue! He'll bite his tongue. Hold it still, for pity's sake!"

Two days later, groggy with painkillers, the social worker had
been put on a plane and repatriated with a cracked vertebra and a
dislocated jaw.

Holding one hand against his side Beppe went for a pee. He
thought he heard noises coming from below. He pricked up his ears,
but heard only the trickle of the urine into the water.

He slouched back to the sofa and collapsed on it, yawning: "What
a hard life!"

The night, at the end of the plain, was beginning to show the first
signs of preparing to leave. A band of fog as thick as cotton wool
lay among the rows of poplars that followed the course of the river.
The dark tops of the trees emerged from it like the topsails of ghost
ships.

Cristiano Zena was panting as he pushed the wheelbarrow carrying the corpse of Fabiana Ponticelli along a track that ran across
fields dotted with puddles.

He was steering from memory, since he couldn't switch on the
torch.

He had lost a lot of time in the garage and it would soon be light
and there was a good chance of meeting someone.

Farmers. Laborers heading for the gravel pits who passed this
way to save time. Boys on motorbikes.

You would have to be a complete idiot not to understand that
there was a human body under that blanket.

So...

So nothing. If I get caught it'll because destiny wants me to be.
I'll say I did it. And when papa wakes up he'll realize how much I
love him.

His arms were beginning to tremble and the river was still a mile
away. His T-shirt, under the armpits and on the back, was completely soaked with sweat.

He had been down this track a thousand times. When he had
decided to build a raft out of empty gas cans so that he could go
rafting, or when he went fishing with Quattro Formaggi, or when
he simply had nothing to do.

Who could ever have imagined that he would come along it
pushing Fabiana Ponticelli's corpse?

If only Quattro Formaggi were there with him. Maybe he knew
if his father and Fabiana had had a secret affair. Or he could have
asked Danilo. But he had disappeared. Cristiano had called him a
hundred times. His cell phone was always switched off. And there
was no reply at home either.

He thought about his phone conversation with Quattro Formaggi.
He hadn't seemed particularly surprised to hear that Rino was in a
coma.

But you know what he's like, he said to himself, wiping his arm
across his forehead, which was beaded with sweat.

He couldn't wait to see him and give him a hug.

He was almost there. The noise of the water even drowned the
roar of the trucks which raced along the highway.

He took off his jacket, tied it around his waist and started pushing
again. The path, as it neared the river, had gradually turned into a
swamp and the small wheel of the wheelbarrow slithered and sank
in the mud. Two heavy clods of earth had formed under the soles
of his sneakers. In front of him, a few dozen yards away, lay a
marsh, lit up by the glow from the power station. The trees stood
out like pylons in the middle of a sea.

Cristiano couldn't remember the waters of the Forgese ever rising
this far.

Quattro Formaggi was still sitting on the chair. He was shivering,
and the pain from his shoulder spread down through his chest in
incandescent waves.

He was holding the crucifix in one hand.

For a moment he had managed to doze off, but a horrific nightmare had wrapped itself around him like an evil-smelling blanket
and fortunately he had woken up.

The television, which was going full blast, echoed in his skull,
but he didn't want to turn it down. He far preferred the screeching
voices of the television to those inside his head.

Besides, if he closed his eyes he saw Ramona naked, lying among
the mountains and the shepherds and soldiers, who were walking
over her body with the sheep. He desired her with such intensity
that he would have cut off his hand to have her.

Then there was that terrible nightmare that he'd had.

He was covered with slimy fur and was one of a pack of dark
creatures running along a dark burrow. Beasts with sharp teeth
and red eyes and long hairless tails, pushing and squeaking and
biting each other in their eagerness to be the first to the end of
the tunnel.

Then they all plunged into a carcass covered with blind larvae
and millipedes and cockroaches and leeches so fat they were nearly
bursting. They began devouring the rotten flesh and the insects. And
he ate too, but without ever sating his hunger.

"The dogs of the Apocalypse neither eat nor allow others to eat,"
Sister Evelina used to say in the orphanage.

But all at once a cold light dazzled him, and in the center of the
ray of light the wraith-like figure of a woman said to him: "You
are the Carrion Man."

"Who? Me?"

"Yes, you!" and she pointed to him, while all the other creatures
fled in terror. "You are the Carrion Man."

And then he had woken up.

He suddenly kicked out at the television, which fell off the table
but went on shrieking.

Why on earth had Ramona chosen to go through the woods?

She made a mistake. I warned her. It's not my fault she went
through the woods.

If she had taken the bypass nothing would have happened and
he would be all right and Rino wouldn't be in a coma. And everything would have been as it was before.

"...was before," the Carrion Man murmured and then started
thumping himself on the leg.

The water had got too deep. Cristiano Zena had abandoned the
wheelbarrow, and as he dragged the corpse toward the river dawn
had broken over the plain.

He hadn't met anyone. He had been lucky-because of the floods
no one had come that way.

Beppe must be awake by this time and would certainly be looking
for him.

In front of him a long, rusty barbed-wire fence emerged from the
water. Two big black crows were perched on it. Beyond, the pebbly
shore was completely submerged by the flood. Cristiano put one
foot on the rusty wire, which disappeared into the water, and pushed
the body wrapped in cellophane over the barrier.

The river came up to his knees and the current was beginning to
pull.

At first he had thought of tying some rocks to the body and
sinking it in the river, but now he had decided that it was better to
let the current carry it away.

By the time they found it, it would be a long way away and no
one would be able to connect it with them. If he was lucky it would
reach the sea, and there the fish would finish the job.

He looked for the last time at Fabiana wrapped in the transparent
plastic.

He sighed. He didn't even feel sorry for her. He felt tired, drained,
reduced to a beast. And alone.

Like a murderer.

He thought wistfully of the days when he used to go down to
the river to play.

He closed his eyes.

He released the body as he had so often done with branches,
imagining that they were ships and galleons.

When he opened them again the corpse was a little island in the
distance.

The one thousand foot long Sarca Bridge, designed by the distinguished architect Hiro Itoya and opened a few months previously
to the accompaniment of hot-air balloons, brass bands and fireworks, had also felt the fury of the storm.

The south bank hadn't withstood the flood, and the highway, for
hundreds of yards, had been invaded by the Forgese's muddy waters.

Teams of workmen had at once set about repairing the embankment, while pumps sucked up the water and spewed it back into
the river, which seemed to be boiling as if a flame were burning
below.