The Crossroads (46 page)

And so it was that he had found himself on a coach crammed with Juventus supporters bound for the stadium. When they had got off the coach, the Carrion Man had pretended to go to the toilet and had hidden behind a police van and only re-emerged after the match to get back on the coach.

What if he now went into the chemist's shop and the guy forced him to go to a football match again?

The Carrion Man sat down on a bench, uncertain what to do. He needed that aspirin.

He could always go to the chemist's at the station. It was a long way and he would have to go by scooter, but that would be better than facing the maniac.

He was about to return home when two women came out of the Boutique della Carne butcher's shop, on the other side of the road, and stopped outside the chemist's.

They looked sixtyish. One was tall and spindly, like a praying mantis, and the other was small and green, like a goblin. The goblin had a quadruped in tow which looked like a Tasmanian devil.

The Carrion Man saw them debating animatedly outside the chemist's shop window. If they would only go in, the chemist would be too busy to talk to him.

Finally the praying mantis pushed the glass door and the two disappeared into the shop.

The Carrion Man got up and limped in after them. He hid behind a rotating display of foot-care products.

Serving at the counter, besides the madman, was an elderly lady in a white coat, who read the prescriptions and stamped them, extremely hard. She was the one he would have to ask for the aspirin.

Standing in the queue, besides the two women, were an old man in a cloth cap and a boy.

The Carrion Man, clutching his coins in his fist, rehearsed his first speech under his breath: ‘Hallo. Good morning. Could I have some of that aspirin that dissolves in water, please? Thank you. How much is it?'

Meanwhile the two women, less than half a metre away, were talking conspiratorially in low voices.

‘Anyway, he called me five minutes ago …' said the goblin, and showed her friend her mobile phone as if to prove that she wasn't making it all up.

The tall, balding woman knitted her brow. ‘But I don't understand. Where is your husband now?'

‘On the bridge! He's been there for two hours. The traffic is completely stuck.'

‘And what did he tell you, exactly?'

‘Matilde, why do I have to repeat things to you a hundred times? Are you taking that medicine for your head that the doctor prescribed for you?'

‘Yes I am,' snapped the lanky one impatiently. ‘Now will you tell me what he told you? Did he really say there was a corpse under the bridge?'

‘Exactly. That's what he said. Listen, Matilde dear, why don't you do something useful? Why don't you call a taxi and go and see for yourself? That way you'll understand everything.'

‘Oh really, it's impossible to have a conversation with you!' the mantis intended to retort, but all she managed to say was ‘Oh rea …' because a man in a cape who was holding on to the rotating display of Dr Scholl products trod on her big toe and she screamed, partly in fright and partly in pain. On the floor, the man in the cape tried to get back to his feet but like a moose on a carpet of marbles he only managed to slip and slither on the corn plasters and the mint-scented porous insoles, and when he finally managed to get up, limping, sobbing, braying like a mule in a slaughterhouse, he hurled himself at the glass doors of the chemist's and disappeared.

‘Excuse me, do you know what's happened?' Beppe was asking a lorry driver who had got out of a long, yellow-and-black HGV and was smoking a cigarette.

The man puffed out a mouthful of smoke and said in a bored voice, as if this had happened to him a million times before: ‘Apparently they've found a dead body in the river.'

Cristiano, who was still trying to have a doze, winced as if he had been punched in the stomach. He felt a shiver grip the back of his head, his armpits freeze and his cheeks catch fire.

He closed and re-opened his eyes. He opened his mouth. He tried
to listen to what Beppe and the trucker were saying, but a buzzing in his ears prevented him from hearing.

He only managed to catch one sentence from the lorry driver: ‘In these cases they block everything till the magistrate arrives.'

So they had found Fabiana's body.

Straight away
.

He had expected it to be carried down to the sea and be eaten up by the fish, but instead, after less than four hours, it had been found only a stone's throw away from his house.

He tried to swallow, but couldn't. He felt sick. He got out of the car, put his hands on the warm bonnet and let his head hang down.

(
Did you really think the body would disappear, by magic
?
)

I should have buried her
.

(
Did you really think God or your fairy godmother would help
you because you were trying to save your father
?
)

I should have buried her in concrete
.

(
From the moment you entered that wood and decided to
…)

I should have dissolved her in acid. I should have burned her
.

(
You became an
…)

He knew the word.

ACCOMPLICE
.

I should have cut her up in a thousand pieces and fed her to the
pigs, the dogs
.

(
You're guiltier than him
.)

‘Cristiano?' Beppe Trecca was calling to him.

(
You're worse than him
.)

‘Cristiano?'

(
And now they'll get you. They'll catch you in no time. You're
finished
.)

‘Cristiano, will you answer me? What's the matter?'

He raised his upper lip and growled: ‘What the fuck do you want, eh?' He clenched his fists, suddenly feeling an uncontrollable urge to pound that bastard's face to a ball of mincemeat.

The social worker shrank back in alarm. ‘Nothing. You're as white as a sheet. Is something wrong? Do you feel ill?'

A gurgle came up from the depths of his throat and then, spluttering, he managed to say: ‘Why don't you get off my fucking back? What the fuck does it matter to you how I feel? Who the fuck are
you, anyway? What the fuck do you want from me?' As he said all this he noticed that they had been surrounded by a cluster of curious drivers, who had got out of the queuing cars in the belief that they were watching the classic scene of a father quarrelling with his teenage son. Who knows, maybe they were hoping they would start hitting each other, that there would be fireworks.

How he wished he had a nice heavy crowbar so he could smash all their stupid heads in. At least he would have had the satisfaction of carrying out a massacre before spending the rest of his life in jail.

And I killed all these people. I did it with my own hands. So
when you come out of your coma – if you ever do come out of it,
you bastard – we can see who killed more people, you stupid son
of a bitch
.

Trecca moved towards him. ‘Cristiano! Listen …!'

But Cristiano Zena wasn't listening. He was looking up at the sky, at those brown clouds so low he could have touched them with his fingertips, those clouds that would soon pour even more water on this shitty world, and he felt himself levitating, as if aliens had suddenly sucked him up into space. He swayed dizzily, raised his arms towards the clouds, threw his head back and imagined he was puking out everything he had inside him, all that blackness he had inside him, that black anger, that fear, that feeling of not being worth a shit, of being the most pathetic little jerk on the planet, the loneliest and most desperate creature in the world. Out. Yes, out. He must spew out of his mouth all the thoughts, all the anxieties, everything. And turn into a black dog. A black, brainless dog, which ran, stretching out its legs, curving its body, straightening its tail. It barely touched the ground and it spread out, as perfect as an angel.

‘An angel …' he muttered. He looked with a strange smile at Beppe, the lorry driver in the leather waistcoat, at the car drivers who seemed like mannequins and behind them, beyond the highway, at a green strip of waste land which separated two ploughed fields and across which he could run for ever till he came to where he would be free. Free.

He looked again at Trecca, then sprinted towards the fields and with an incredible leap hurdled the guardrail and for an endless moment felt as if he was flying.

The rain poured down on the umbrellas of hundreds of curious bystanders looking down from the bridge and the embankments, it poured down on the silvery spotlights that shed beams of aseptic light on the black waves of the river and on the cellophane that hid the corpse, it poured down on the raincoats of the traffic police, it poured down on a big makeshift tent that had been erected on the very spot where Rita Baldi had first seen the corpse, it poured down on the police cars and the fire engines, it poured down on the four-by-fours of the divers and on the minibuses of the local television stations and on the yellow cape of the Carrion Man.

He was there, squeezed in among the crowd, looking down from the bridge.

Fifty metres below, a red rubber dinghy was fighting the rapids and eddies, trying to reach the body wrapped in plastic.

The Carrion Man's gaze shifted from the black river to the embankments crammed with umbrellas, from there slid over the highway completely covered with stationary cars and over the soaked policemen, rose up into the sky where a helicopter was whirring and finally came to rest on his own trembling hands.

The hands that had produced all this …

When an ant finds the corpse of a mouse it doesn't keep the discovery
to itself. The first thing it does is to run like mad to the
anthill and tell everyone: “Hurry! Hurry! You'll never guess what
I've found!
”

Half an hour later the carcase is completely covered with ants
.

It's exactly the same with human beings
.

If he hadn't killed the girl, all those people would now be in their homes. Not standing there shivering in the rain to see what he had done.

It had been him who had created that ten-kilometre queue of cars, too. He'd had those spotlights put there. He had made those carabinieri come. And he would make people sit down at a table to write about him.

And the incredible thing was that nobody could imagine that the man God had ordered to do it was there in their midst.

You see that guy over there? That poor cripple you all think is
a pathetic little pillock? Ladies and gentlemen, it was him. He was
the one to whom God entrusted the mission
.

And they all start clapping and cheering
.

“
Bravo! Bravo! You lucky man!
”

This situation was very agreeable. Very agreeable indeed.

The Carrion Man remembered that once Duccio Pinelli, a welder who had worked in their team at Euroedil, had described to him and Rino how at the age of eighteen, after a booze-up at the pub, he had run over a cyclist on the Bogognano road. Ambulances and police cars had come to the scene of the accident, and the road, just as it was at that moment, had been closed for ages and there had been a tailback ten kilometres long.

‘That was the most important thing I've done in my whole life,' he had explained. ‘Do you know how many people there are in a ten-kilometre queue of cars? Thousands. Do you realise how many thousands of people wasted four hours of their lives because of me? They missed appointments, arrived late at work, and God knows what incredible opportunities they missed. I changed their destinies. Starting with those of the cyclist and his family. No,
important
isn't the right word.
Important
sounds like something positive. There's another word, a better one, which I can't think of. It's on the tip of my tongue …'

‘Significant?' Rino had suggested, in a drunken stupor.

‘That's the word! Significant! In the rest of my life I must have changed the destinies of two, maybe three people at most. But on the day of the accident I changed the destinies of thousands of people.' He had sat there in silence for a long time, his eyes staring into nothingness. Then suddenly he had added: ‘Maybe for the better in some cases, who knows. Perhaps because of those four hours' delay two people had the chance to meet, get to know each other and fall in love.' Then he had stretched his arms and concluded: ‘Yes, that was the most significant moment of my life.'

And now the Carrion Man, too, had done something significant. Something a thousand times more significant than what Duccio Pinelli had done.

This would make the front pages, perhaps even the TV news.

Cristiano Zena was sitting on the carcase of a burnt-out Fiat 127 and watching as hundreds of seagulls, their wings outspread, wheeled in the rain over a crater piled high with rubbish.

Thousands of tons of smoking refuse, on which crows and gulls feasted and mechanical diggers and trucks climbed.

He had found it in front of him. Quite suddenly.

After jumping down from the highway, he had run as fast as he could across the fields, he had skirted warehouses, followed fences and been barked at by dogs on chains, then all at once he had looked up at the sky and seen gulls circling like vultures that have spotted a dead animal. He had gone on, with his hand pressed against his side and his head drooping, across the weed-strewn, stony ground, and that circular crater almost a kilometre wide had appeared in front of him.

This is where all the shit ends up
.

He lit the last cigarette in the packet he had been carrying in his pocket for the past week and took a long drag on it, without feeling any pleasure.