The Crossroads (2 page)

He picked up the torch and began to work his way round the fences of the factories, the mud sucking down his feet and brambles blocking his path.

He was on the edge of a ploughed field which in the daytime stretched as far as the horizon. In the distance, if there was no fog – but there always was fog in winter – you could see the grey foliage of the woods that lined the banks of the river.

If it hadn't been for the barking of the dog and his own heavy breathing the silence would have been complete.

Far away, across the river, he could see the lights of the factories hanging in the air and the yellowish glow of the power station.

His fingers, squeezed in the vice of cold, were beginning to feel numb, and the chill was rising up through his feet and biting his calves.

What a fool
.

In his haste to go out, furious with his father, he hadn't put on his socks. The snowflakes were falling on his neck and his jacket was beginning to get wet along the shoulders.

The black silhouettes of the industrial buildings followed one after the other. He passed a bathroom furniture outlet. Toilets. Tiles. Basins. Neatly stacked all around the building. Then a salesroom that sold tractors and farming machinery and the rear end of a discotheque which had had to shut down because it had gone bankrupt.

It's no good, I'm going to wet my pants
.

He switched off the torch, put the pistol in his jacket pocket, lowered his trousers and pulled out his pecker.

Fear and the cold had shrunk it. It looked like a little salami. The spurt of urine melted the snow and a cloud of acrid steam rose from the ground.

As he was shaking it, he noticed that the dog's bark was louder.

The next building was Castardin's furniture factory.

It seemed as if the brute ran on batteries: it didn't even pause for
breath. Every now and then, though, it stopped barking and howled like a fucking coyote.

He switched on the torch and started walking again, more quickly. He was taking too long. Old baldy would already be fuming. He could just see him pacing around the house like a lion.

Cristiano Zena was wrong. At that moment his father was in the bathroom. Standing in front of the toilet, one hand against the wall, he was looking at his reflection in the black water at the bottom of the bowl.

His face was swelling up. Where had his cheekbones gone? His gaunt jaw? He looked like a Chinaman. He was thirty-seven years old and he looked fifty. He had put on several kilos in the last few months. He hadn't dared to get on the scales, but he knew it. His stomach had swollen up too. He kept lifting weights and doing press-ups and struggling with sit-ups on the bench, but that bulge below his pectorals just wouldn't go down.

He couldn't decide whether to piss or to throw up.

His stomach contained a dozen beers, half a litre of grappa and a Poire William.

He hated being sick. But if he got it all out of his system he would certainly feel better.

Meanwhile the dog went on barking.

What the fuck is Cristiano doing? What if he doesn't shoot it
?

One part of his brain was telling him yes, the boy did have the balls to shoot a dog. But another part wasn't so sure: Cristiano was too childish, he only did things out of fear of his father. And if your only motivation is fear, not anger, you'll never be able to pull a trigger.

A sour yellow stream gushed out of his mouth without warning. Rino only partly managed to get it into the toilet; the rest spattered over the tiles.

He sat down on the bidet, exhausted, with the reek of vomit around him.

As he sat there with the toilet spinning round and round like the
drum of a washing machine, he remembered how in his childhood Castardin's furniture factory and all the other buildings hadn't been there. Back then the highway had been a rough, narrow road with poplars and weeds along the sides, not much wider than a country track. All around, there had been nothing but cultivated fields.

Not far from where their house now stood had been the Trattoria Arcobaleno, a little restaurant which specialised in polenta, kid and freshwater fish.

And on the site now occupied by Castardin's furniture factory there had been an old farmhouse, one of those square, barrack-like buildings, with a tiled roof, a large shed and a farmyard full of geese and chickens. It had been the home of Roberto Colombo and his family.

On a large tree by the roadside Roberto had put up a notice:

MOTOR WORKSHOP
LORRIES, RACTORS AND CARS REPAIRED
ITALIAN AND FOREIGN MAKES

And from a branch of the same tree there had hung a swing on which Rino used to go and play with Colombo's daughter.

From his parents' house, down by the river, it took half an hour to get there on foot. But half an hour's walk was nothing in those days.

What was her name? Alberta? Antonia
?

Someone had told him she had got married and now lived in Milan.

One day, while she was sailing back and forth on the swing and he was trying to catch a glimpse of her knickers, her father had arrived.

Sitting on the bidet, Rino couldn't help smiling.

He had never once seen Roberto Colombo dressed in anything but blue overalls, a red bandanna and a ridiculous pair of moccasins made of interwoven leather threads. He was short and stocky and wore glasses so thick his eyes looked like two pinpoints.

‘How old are you, son?'

‘Eleven.'

‘Eleven years old and you're still playing games like a snotty-nosed kid? Your father's dead and all you can do is peek at my daughter's knickers?'

Half-blind as he was, it was a mystery how he had managed to see that.

Colombo had looked Rino over as you might appraise a horse at a fair. ‘You're as skinny as a stray dog, but you're sturdy. A bit of hard work might help develop your muscles.'

So he had taken him on at his workshop. The job was simple: he had to make the cars shine as bright as the day they had left the factory. Outside and inside.

‘It won't make you rich, but you'll earn enough to buy yourself a pair of decent shoes and to help your mother, who finds it a struggle to make ends meet.'

So Rino had started going to the workshop every day after school, and, armed with pump and sponge, had earned the first money of his life.

At five o'clock the girl would bring him a sandwich and a meatball with raisins.

Rino tried to get to his feet, but failed. He wanted to open the window to let in some fresh air.

A swirl of images wrapped around him like a warm blanket. Him and the girl together. Marriage. Children. The workshop. Working there with Cristiano.

What wonderful times those had been! Everything was so simple. It was easy to find a job. There weren't all these bloody laws about working practices and no trade unions to fuck you about. If you had the skill and the will you worked, if you didn't you were out on your ear. End of alternatives.

Respect for those who deserved it
.

Then one day Rino had arrived to find Colombo shutting up shop. A certain Castardin had appeared out of nowhere and bought up the farmhouse and all the land around it. Even the Trattoria Arcobaleno.

‘They've opened some new workshops in Varrano. They're as big as factories. Nobody comes this way any more … It's a good offer.'

End of story.

‘Good offer my foot,' muttered Rino, getting to his feet. ‘The poor gullible prick.'

The furniture factory was twenty metres away. Bathed in the glow of halogen lights, it stood out in the night like a lunar base. The fence was high and there were coils of barbed wire along the top.

‘Shit. The barbed wire.'

They had put it up some time ago, after thieves had broken in one night.

A mechanical noise mingled with the barks. A truck.

Cristiano switched off the torch, squatted down and waited for it to pass. It had yellow headlights and was clearing the snow.

Maybe school will be cancelled tomorrow. Great!

When the truck had moved far enough away, Cristiano walked the last few metres and stopped behind the factory.

The dog was barking even louder now, if that was possible. But he couldn't see it from there.

Cristiano couldn't remember whether they let him off his chain at night, though he had been past the factory very late sometimes.

He jumped up and down to get the feeling back into his feet, which were like blocks of wood. ‘I hate you! Why do you do this to me?' He bit his hand to stop himself screaming with rage. He felt a lump in his throat and it hurt as if he'd swallowed a shard of glass.

I've had enough. It's fucking cold … I'm going home
. He took three steps, kicking at the snow, but then stopped.

Going home was not an option.

He walked round the perimeter of the fence, looking for the best place to climb up.

All the while the dog kept barking in the same monotonous way.

Near one of the posts that supported the wire netting the loops of barbed wire weren't so big.

He grabbed hold of the post, put the toes of his boots into the mesh and reached the top without difficulty. Now he had to avoid getting stuck on the barbed wire. Calmly he put over first one leg and then the other, and, holding his breath, jumped down. He landed in the carpentry area.

He took out the pistol, released the safety catch and primed the gun.

He knew very well how to use it.

His father had taught him how to shoot in a scrapyard. At first he hadn't been able to hold his aim; his arm had shaken as if he was suffering from Parkinson's disease. But constant shooting at car windows, rear-view mirrors, rats and seagulls had taught him that it was all a matter of posture and breathing.

‘It's like squatting over a hole-in-the-ground toilet,' Rino had told him.

Legs apart, backside slightly protruding, arms outstretched but not too stiff. Gun in line with your eyes. And the way you breathed was crucial. You had to put the tip of your tongue against your bottom teeth, breathe out through your nose and, as your stomach deflated, count up to four and then shoot.

He looked around. No one in sight. The mongrel was barking away on the other side of the building.

If he approached slowly he would have a good chance of getting close enough to take aim at him. The snow would muffle his footsteps and the stupid mutt was so busy barking he wouldn't notice he was about to be dispatched to doggy paradise.

If it did go for him he would have to be cool enough to stop, crouch and take aim as it ran towards him.

He moved forward in a squatting position, quelling his desire to run, till he came to a pile of planks. They formed a long block more than four metres high which stretched out to the end of the yard, a few metres short of the highway. Cristiano climbed up, putting his feet between the planks and gripping their ice-cold edges with his hands. When he was on top he realised that there was a gap of about a metre between one pile and the next. Like between the carriages of a train.

From where he stood he could see a segment of the deserted car park, and the children's playground, with the roundabout and its dwarves, the swings glowing white in the lamplight, and the lampposts themselves with their glass globes emanating milky spheres.

No sign of the dog.

Crawling along the wet planks on his hands and knees, he reached the end of the first pile. He steeled himself and jumped; the planks rose and fell with a tremendous clatter. From where he landed he could see the other side of the car park, and three vans emblazoned with the words:

He couldn't see the dog, though. And yet he must be very near. Or was all that barking just a recording?

Then he saw, about thirty metres away, a dark shape on the ground. Near the long entrance gate. Half-covered in snow … From that distance it looked like an overcoat.

Cristiano moved closer, crawling over the planks.

The thing on the ground was moving. Only slightly. But it was moving.

And he understood.

The stupid beast had got himself tangled up in the long chain that was supposed to enable him to move around the perimeter of the building. Now and then he raised his head.

That's why he's barking so much
.

The stupid great mutt.

Shooting him from there would be child's play. Even if he didn't kill him first shot, the dog wouldn't be able to move, and he would certainly send him to his maker with the second.

He's barking because he can't move. I could set him free, then
he would stop barking
.

No, he must kill him, because the truth was that his father didn't give a damn whether the dog barked or not. He hated Castardin, so the dog had to die.

Period.

That was precisely how things were.

Rino Zena hated old Castardin with the same devout intensity with which a Cistercian monk loves his Lord.

‘It's in my character. If you cross me just once, you've finished with me for good and I'll always be out to get you. Okay, I may have a shitty character, but it's the one I was born with. It's easy to get on with me: just don't fuck me around and everything will be
fine.' Such was the reply that Rino would give to anyone who gently tried to suggest to him that he might be a trifle touchy.

A few years before this story, Rino Zena had been taken on at the factory as a transporter of furniture.

He was paid in cash and earned more from tips than from the pittance he got from Castardin.

Things had gone reasonably well, with Rino grumbling to anyone who cared to listen that he was treated like dirt, until the day old Castardin in person had phoned to ask him to take the furniture for a children's bedroom to the home of Councillor Arosio.

‘Please, Zena, be on your best behaviour. There's no one else I can send; they're all out doing deliveries. Arosio is an important customer. Cover up those tattoos or you'll frighten the children. And speak as little as possible.'