The Crossroads (43 page)

While he waited for a nurse to arrive he thumped his left thigh.

The place seemed deserted.

He plucked up courage and entered. He shut the door behind him as quietly as possible and set off, hardly daring to breathe. To his right there was a big dark room. At the far end of it a sepulchral light shone down on a bed where a man lay quite still.

There were winking lights all around, and a greenish monitor. He walked towards the bed with bated breath.

Rino was lying there with his eyes closed. He seemed to be asleep.

Quattro Formaggi stared at him, twisting his neck. Finally he grabbed hold of his wrist and pulled him, as you might a child that doesn't want to get up. ‘Rino …' He knelt down beside the bed and, still holding him by the wrist, whispered in his ear: ‘It's me. Quattro Formaggi. I mean … It's Corrado. Corrado Rumitz. That's my name.' He started stroking his cheek. ‘Rino, will you tell me where Ramona is, please? It's important. I have to do something with her. Something very important. Will you tell me, please? I need the body. If you tell me, God will help you. Do you know why you're in a coma? It was God. He punished you for what you did to me. I'm not angry with you, though. I've forgiven you. You hurt me, but it doesn't matter … I'm easy-going. Now, please, will you tell me where Ramona is? You'd better tell me.' He looked at him for a moment, sniffing and scratching his cheek, then snorted impatiently: ‘I understand, I'm not stupid … You don't want to tell me. Never mind. I've brought you a present.' He showed him the clock and then lifted it up, ready to bring it down on his head. ‘It's all yours …'

‘What are you doing here?'

Quattro Formaggi jumped in the air like a champagne cork. He lowered the clock and spun round.

There was someone standing in the doorway, hidden in the shadows. ‘This is not visiting hours. How did you get in?'

The man, tall and thin, in a white coat, came closer.

He didn't see me. He didn't see me. It was dark
.

His heart pounded in his chest. ‘The door was open …'

‘Didn't you see the notice with the visiting hours?'

‘No. I found the door open and I thought …'

‘I'm sorry, but you'll have to leave. Come back tomorrow.'

‘I came to see my friend. I'll go now, don't worry.'

The doctor came even closer. He was balding, and his head was small. He looked like a vulture. Or rather, a newly hatched pigeon.

‘What were you doing with that clock?'

‘Me? Nothing. I was …'

Answer him. Go on
…

‘… looking for somewhere to hang it. Cristiano told me Rino was in a coma and I thought I'd bring him his clock. It might help him to wake up. Mightn't it?'

The doctor glanced at the monitor and adjusted the wheel of a machine. ‘I don't think so. All your friend needs is rest.'

‘All right. Thank you, doctor. Thank you.' Quattro Formaggi held out his hand, but the doctor ignored it and accompanied him to the door.

‘This is an intensive care unit. So it is absolutely imperative to observe the visiting hours.'

‘I'm sorry …'

The doctor closed the door in his face.

At four o'clock precisely the alarm clock started ringing.

Cristiano Zena silenced it with a slap. He had slept a long, dreamless sleep without interruption. He hadn't even got up for a pee. His bladder was bursting. But he felt better.

He turned on the torch and stretched.

Outside, the sky was black and dotted with stars.

Cristiano had a pee, washed his face with cold water and put on some warm clothes. He went down the stairs, trying not to make any noise. It was warmer on the ground floor.

Beppe Trecca was sleeping on the sofa, with his face against the back. He was curled up in a blanket that was too short for him and one of his legs was sticking out.

Cristiano tiptoed into the kitchen, closed the door quietly, took out a packet of rusks and ate them, one by one, in silence. Then he drank two glasses of water to wash them down.

Now that he had slept and eaten, he was ready.

From now on every move he made would have to be weighed up at least three times in advance.

On the kitchen table there was a packet of Dianas belonging to Rino.

Let's have a nice cigarette
.

His father always said that when he was about to start a job.

Cristiano wondered whether now that Rino was in a coma he still felt the need to smoke. Maybe when he woke up he wouldn't have the habit any more.

He picked up the box of matches and took one out. He held it against the brown strip.

Right, if it lights first go, everything will go smoothly
.

He struck the match and it lingered for a second, as if unsure
whether to light, but then, as if by magic, a little blue flame rose up.

Everything will go smoothly
…

He lit the cigarette and took two long drags, but his head started spinning.

He extinguished it immediately under the tap.

‘I'm ready', he whispered.

While Cristiano was smoking his cigarette, Quattro Formaggi, in his underpants and dressing gown, was staring at the TV and drinking Fanta from a family-sized bottle.

There was a cook with a moustache who was preparing some speck and couscous roulades and saying that they made tasty and original little bites for a picnic in the country. Then there was a commercial break, after which the etiquette expert, a short man with dyed hair, began to explain how cutlery should be arranged on the table and how one should kiss a lady's hand.

Quattro Formaggi pressed
PLAY
on the videorecorder with his foot and Ramona appeared, in handcuffs, in the sheriff's office.

‘So what do I have to do to avoid going to jail?'

Henry, a muscular black police officer, twirled his truncheon in his hands and eyed Ramona. ‘You have to pay bail. And a high one too. And I don't think you have any money.'

Ramona pushed out her big breasts and said in a knowing tone: ‘No, I don't. But there's another way. An easier one.'

Henry released her from the handcuffs. ‘Well, the only thing for it is to find the little blonde's corpse as soon as possible. You've got to find her and put her in the crib.'

‘Okay, boss. I'll go out and find her.'

Quattro Formaggi took another sip of Fanta and, with glazed eyes, murmured: ‘Good man, Henry.' He turned towards the kitchen. There was a strange buzzing noise. Maybe it was the fridge. But it might be the gigantic wasp that had got trapped. A wasp with a two-metre wingspan and a sting as long as your arm.

The insect must have stung him on the chest while he was asleep,
because he could feel his guts rotting, and his skin felt as if there were a million white-hot needles sticking into it. And his headache never let up. A fire rose up through his neck and boiled his brain. When he touched his temples he could feel his forehead, his eyebrow arches and his eyes tingling.

The crucifix wasn't working.

He had never taken it off, just as Ricky had told him, but the pain, instead of decreasing, was growing.

God is angry with me. I've lost Ramona. I don't deserve anything.
That's the truth
.

It was cold, but the heavy jacket, flannel shirt and fleece cardigan covered Cristiano well. The ice-cold air went down his throat, which was still irritated by the cigarette, as he rolled up the door of the garage. He turned on the long neon lights, which crackled, shedding a yellowish glow over the large basement room. By the workbench he found a pair of orange plastic gloves, the kind people use for washing the dishes. He put them on.

He went over to the van, took the keys out of his trouser pocket and opened the back doors, hoping that, for some obscure reason, Fabiana's body would not be there any more.

He switched on the torch and shone it inside.

The corpse was there. Dumped to one side. Like a pile of old clothes.

Like a dead thing
.

Inside the van there was a faint but sickly odour.

After twenty-four hours a corpse already begins to smell
.

One of the few certainties Cristiano Zena had was that, if he did things properly, he would dispose of that body in such a way that nobody would be able to trace it to his father.

This certainty was based on the fact that he had watched all three seasons of
CSI
.

CSI
is an American TV series in which a team of highly intelligent forensic scientists studies and examines corpses with technological
instruments, while brilliant detectives elicit information even from the smallest and apparently most insignificant clues.

E.g.: they find a shoe. They analyse the sole. There's some dog shit on it. By a study of the DNA they establish the breed. Dalmatian. Where do dalmatians go to crap? They send troops of officers out into all the public parks to study the concentrations of dalmatians and eventually pinpoint with mathematical precision the place where the murderer lives. That kind of thing.

Often Cristiano, in his previous existence, had found himself reflecting, as he watched the television news, on the errors committed by Italian murderers. They always made a complete hash of things, leaving lots of clues, and inevitably got caught.

He would make a better job of it. For everything to work he would have to imagine that that corpse was just like a supermarket chicken when you take it out of its wrapper.

Right, here goes
.

He took hold of its feet and pulled it to the edge of the van. He managed to slide it into the wheelbarrow without too much difficulty. He closed the doors.

The cleaning of the van could wait till later.

He pushed the wheelbarrow into the garage, and pulled down the shutter.

He had worked the plan out carefully. He had to remove all clues from the body, then wrap it up and throw it in the river.

He took a transparent plastic dust sheet off the piano, then cleared the ping-pong table of all the cardboard boxes, engine parts and tyres and spread the plastic sheet over it. He found a paint-splashed board which had been dumped in the corner among some iron pipes, and laid it obliquely against the table. He put Fabiana's corpse onto the board, levered it up to the level of the table and rolled it off. Then he laid it out in the middle, as on a dissecting table in a morgue.

Fabiana seemed heavier than when he had put her in the van the night before.

Throughout the operation he had avoided looking at the head, but now he couldn't avoid it. That mask smeared with congealed blood and framed with a mass of curly blonde hair had been the face of the prettiest girl in the school, the one all the boys lusted after.

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 odour 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 backwards to stop himself throwing up the rusks 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 knickers. And wash her. Inside and outside.

No, not that
.

He would never be able to do it. It was too much. Besides, the trousers were open, but the knickers 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 kilo 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. Afterwards, to get rid of the taste of garlic, he had decided to suck a refreshing mint.

He had searched for the packet in his trouser pocket and found that there was a hole in it and that the mints had fallen down into the seat of his trousers. 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!'