The Crossroads (29 page)

I'm very tired. Perhaps I'd better call it off for this evening
…

But he knew himself too well – if he backed out now he would never have the courage to do the raid on his own the next day. And then he would be forced to share the loot with somebody else.

No. It's out of the question
.

Only he felt drained and his eyelids were drooping.

He must give himself a boost. And there was only one way he knew of doing that. He shuffled into the kitchen, yawning. He ransacked the cupboards and discovered, among all the other junk, a bottle of Borghetti coffee liqueur.

He took a swig and immediately felt better.

(Instead of standing here like an idiot, go and see if anyone has
left the keys in their car in the garage.)

This brilliant idea could only have come from the clown on the bedroom ceiling.

‘That's right! You're a genius!'

If there existed a plan of destiny that the course of his life should change that night, he would certainly find a car open.

In the first place he wasn't suffering.

That was one good thing.

Also, he didn't think he was dead.

That was another good thing.

There had been one immense instant, when the fluorescent cloud had been suddenly swallowed up by the blackness, during which Rino had been sure that his story had come to an end.

Now, however, the violet had returned.

Nobody had actually certified that he wasn't dead. But Rino had always believed in heaven and hell, and this place was neither the one nor the other. Of that he was certain. He was aware of still being inside his own body.

He could think. And to think is to live.

And although he wasn't suffering greatly, he was aware of a distant fire, a far-off pain and the ants running through his veins, but he also thought he could hear from a thousand kilometres away The Police singing and the rain falling on the leaves, dripping in silver drops on the branches, trickling down the bark of the trees and soaking the earth.

He was blind. Insentient. Paralysed. And yet, strangely, he could hear.

When he had come to, the darkness had been less intense, shading gradually into a phosphorescent violet, and suddenly millions of ants had been there. They covered the plain as far as the horizon. They were big, like the ones that appear in the wheatfields in August. With shiny heads and antennae.

Rino couldn't make out whether they were outside or inside him. And whether that desert over which they were crawling was him.

He sensed that there was another reality just behind the violet cloud which enveloped him. The reality from which he had fallen.

The woods. The rain.

He saw himself in the woods with the rock in his hands, Quattro Formaggi, the dead girl.

That was where he must get back to.

He thought he was still there, and he was sure Quattro Formaggi had gone to get help.

Danilo Aprea, holding the bottle of Borghetti coffee liqueur in one hand, had checked the cars in the garage. One by one.

All locked.

In that bloody condominium everyone lived in terror of having their cars stolen. And you could bet your life they had burglar alarms and all the latest security gadgets installed.

He had thought of smashing a window and putting the ignition leads together, like you see people doing in films.

But he was no good at that kind of thing. He would still be there at daybreak trying to get the dashboard open.

If only Quattro Formaggi was here
…

Danilo gnashed his teeth like a rabid dog and shouted, white in the face with rage: ‘Fuck you! Fuck the whole lot of you! You won't stop me. Do you hear? You won't stop me. You're doing everything you can to stop me, but you won't succeed. No! No! And no! I'm going to do this raid.' He kicked the door of a Mini Cooper, hurting his foot like mad.

He hopped around, cursing and swearing, and when the pain eased he raised the bottle of Borghetti coffee liqueur, gulped down a third of it and staggered towards the garage door.

In his trouser pocket he had his mobile phone.

When Rino Zena thought of the mobile he saw it appear huge, as if projected onto the violet sky.

It wasn't a photograph of a mobile phone, but a drawing done with a big black marker pen. The numbers written in a childish hand, and where the display should have been, a circle with a smile and eyes. He could have gazed at it for ever.

But now he must get his mobile out of his trouser pocket …

He must speak to the ants and explain to them what they had to do.

Danilo stood on the parapet of the canal, hands on hips, gazing blankly at the raindrops.

In the dim light shed by the lamp-post on the little footbridge they seemed like silver threads, which dissolved on the brownish surface of the canal.

The pebble shores and the greater part of the pillars under the bridge had been engulfed by the rising waters. If the rain kept coming down like this, by morning the flood would be over the dykes.

Danilo was soaked through to his pants. His cheeks and chin frozen and the lenses of his glasses streaked with rain.

It had taken just fifty metres, the distance from his home to there, out in that downpour, to reduce him to a sopping rag.

A polystyrene box, the kind that is used for packing fish, raced along through the waves, bobbing up and down, like a raft in the rapids of the Colorado River, and disappeared under the bridge.

Trying to ignore an icy trickle that was running down his back, Danilo closed his eyes and tried to remember where, five years ago, he had thrown the keys.

About here
.

On the 12th of July five years ago … It was boiling hot and
the mosquitoes were driving me mad
.

After Laura's funeral he had sent Teresa home with her mother and had taken the Alfa and stopped at a bar where he had drunk the first glass of grappa of his life and for good measure had bought a whole bottle, then he had gone to a car accessories shop,
bought a tarpaulin and returned home. He had parked the car in the garage, covered it with the tarpaulin and gone down to the canal.

That day it had looked very different. There had been no rain for a long time and the canal had shrunk to a stinking stream, infested with insects, which flowed slowly among carcases of scooters, skeletons of washing machines and bog arum in bloom.

Danilo had looked at the greenish water. Then he had taken the car keys out of his pocket and hurled them with all his might into the canal. The bunch had sailed over the stream and the sandy, reed-covered bank, hit the dyke and fallen back onto the foreshore, disappearing among some big concrete blocks embedded in the dry mud.

This he remembered well, because for a moment he had thought he had better go down and throw the keys in the water in case the old men, who sometimes came to fish from the bridge, should find them and then go and steal his car. But he hadn't done it.

Anyone would have thought that it was mathematically impossible for them still to be there – the current must have carried them away and by this time they would be out in the depths of the sea. But that was in ordinary circumstances. The circumstances in which Danilo found himself were not ordinary; this was his life, and if destiny had decided that he should find them, find them he would.

He ran along the canal, crossed the little brick bridge and went back along to the point where he remembered the keys falling.

He looked down. It wasn't a very big drop. Two or three metres. If he lowered himself down with his arms the jump wasn't impossible.

The problem would come later, when he had to get out.

Twenty metres downstream there was a tree trunk sticking out of the water.

From there I can climb up onto the road
.

Danilo took off his glasses and put them in his jacket pocket.

He climbed up on the parapet, took out the chain with the Padre Pio medallion, kissed it and lowered himself down from the edge.

Now he only had to drop down.

It's just a question of finding the courage
.

But even if he couldn't find the courage, he'd never be able to pull himself up again with the mere strength of his arms, so …

He took a deep breath and let himself go.

He landed up to his waist in water. It was so cold he didn't even have the strength to cry out. A billion needles pierced his flesh and he was immediately caught by the strong current. He had to cling with both hands to some weeds that grew in the cracks between the bricks of the dyke to stop himself being swept away.

He couldn't even rest his feet on the bed, such was the strength of the current. And the weeds, although they were tough, wouldn't support his weight for long.

He started searching for the keys on the bed of the torrent. He let go with one hand and the river pushed him under.

He drank a lot of water which tasted of earth.

He put his head up and started spluttering and then, gasping for breath, started groping around on the bed again. He felt with his fingertips the edges of the concrete blocks covered with algae and the slippery stems of the water plants. It was difficult to move his fingers, which were numb with cold.

They're not here. How could they be? Only a fool like me could
have thought that after five years
…

The branch he was clinging to, without warning, came away from the wall. Danilo felt the current seize him, started thrashing about with his arms and legs like a drowning dog, trying to resist, but it was impossible, so in desperation he tried to grab hold of the concrete blocks, but they were slippery. His knuckles knocked against a steel rod sticking out of the mud. He managed to catch hold of it and hung there, amid the eddies and the deafening roar of the water, like a great big tuna fish caught on a hook.

He knew he couldn't hold on for long – the cold was unbearable and the current was pulling him – but if he let go he would be swept away and would be dashed against the sluicegate a kilometre downstream.

What the hell am I doing?

Suddenly, like a sleepwalker who wakes up to find himself on a ledge on the fifth floor of an apartment block, he was terrified to see what a mess he'd landed himself in. Only suicidal madness could have brought him from the cosy warmth of home to the swirling eddies of a canal in spate.

He exploded into a fusillade of unrepeatable blasphemies which
would have damned him for all eternity if he hadn't already been long since doomed, he was sure, to the fires of hell.

He was almost exhausted, he tried to resist, to cling on to the steel rod, but by now only his nose was sticking out of the water, like a shark's fin. He was about to give up when he realised that there was something around the rod, something like a metal ring.

He touched it.

No! It wasn't possible!

In his excitement he almost let go.

The keys!

I've found the keys!

My keys
.

All three of them. The one for the car, the one for the front door and the one for the roll-down shutters of the garage.

What an incredible stroke of luck!

No, it was blasphemous to call it luck. It was a miracle. A fully fledged miracle.

When he'd thrown them the keys had hit the dyke, and as they fell the ring that held them together had dropped over the steel reinforcing rod.

It was a bit like that game in the funfair where if you throw a quoit over a bottle you win a cuddly toy. But he hadn't taken aim. He hadn't even seen the rod.

This meant that God, fate, chance, or whoever it was, had wanted it to happen. What were the odds against such a thing happening? Ten billion to one.

Those keys had remained there, all those years, immersed in the water and mud, waiting for him to go and retrieve them.

Half-drowned and nearly frozen to death, Danilo Aprea felt a sensation of warmth in the middle of his chest which heated him up and banished any doubt or fear about what he was doing, just as a red-hot furnace instantly turns a piece of paper to ashes.

Up there in heaven there was someone who was helping him.

He slipped the keys off the rod and gripped them tightly, digging them into the palm of his hand. Then, confident that he would find a way of getting out of that river, he took a deep breath, shut his mouth, held his nose and let go.

The three rusty cables supporting the big banana strained like the rigging of a sailing ship in a northerly gale.

About thirty metres away from the sign, in the Rimor SuperDuca 688TC, Beppe Trecca and Ida Lo Vino were going at it hammer and tongs.

The social worker was lying on his back in the sleeping compartment above the driver's cabin, and sitting astride him, in a cramped version of the ‘candlesnuffer' position, Ida was pounding and panting and massaging her small white breasts which spilled out of her black lace bra.

Deafened by the noise of the rain, the thunder and Ida's head bumping against the camper's padded ceiling, Beppe breathed in and out, with his best friend's wife impaled on his penis, and engaged in a battle against his sympathetic nervous system, which had decided to make him have an orgasm in the space of a few seconds. He felt it rise inexorably up through his spinal cord, sink its teeth into his thighs and converge angrily on his pelvis, contracting his muscles.

He must get Ida to slow down, to stop for a moment – just a moment would be enough – because if she went on like this he wouldn't be able to hold out much longer …

He grabbed her by the waist, trying to lift her up and take it out of her, but she misinterpreted the gesture, clung to him tightly and, still pumping away, whispered in his left ear: ‘Yes … Yes … You don't know how often I've imagined this moment. Shaft me!'

Okay, so that didn't work. He'd have to find some way of delaying the orgasm on his own – distract himself, think of something disgusting, repugnant, which would calm him down. All he needed was a moment and it would pass.