As God Commands (39 page)

The social worker turned the heat right up, pushed down the
clutch, selected first gear, glanced in the mirror and nearly dropped
dead on the spot.

The African was standing there peering in at him through the
rear window.

Stop it. Stop thinking.

He must get his father and carry him away and stop wondering
what the hell had happened in that wood. Cristiano Zena returned
to the van, banishing the vision of Fabiana dead. He climbed into
the back and started rubbing his body with a piece of cloth to relieve
the cold that had penetrated his bones.

He hauled out the wheelbarrow and went into the wood.

176

"What happened? I can't remember anything." The African was sitting next to Beppe Trecca, who was driving along at twenty miles
an hour with an expression of terror on his face.

He couldn't even look at him, he was so terrified. This guy sitting
beside him had come back, like Lazarus, from the realms of the dead.

Beppe was so shaken that he couldn't even feel happy.

(You asked for a miracle and the miracle happened.)

But how can it be? A miracle? Happening to me? What sense
does it make? Why has God helped a pathetic little jerk like me?

(The will of Our Lord is inscrutable.)

How often he had uttered this platitude to get himself out of difficult situations. Now he understood its meaning to the full.

The social worker plucked up courage and, without turning, managed to stammer out: "How are you feeling?"

The man massaged his neck. "My head hurts a bit and I've got
a pain here, in my side. I must have fallen over. I don't know what
happened, I can't remember anything..." He was confused. "I was
about to run across the road and then everything went blank. I
woke up on the ground with your car nearby. Thank you, friend."

Beppe opened his eyes wide. "What for?"

"For stopping to help me."

He doesn't even realize that I knocked him down.

A sense of wellbeing relaxed his abdominal muscles and the social
worker knew that God was with him and that he might have been
too hard on himself.

He glanced at the African. He didn't seem to be badly hurt.
"Would you like me to take you to hospital?"

The African shook his head and became as agitated as if Beppe
had suggested calling in at the local branch of the Northern League.
"No! No! I'm fine. It's nothing. Could you drop me at the next
crossroads, please?"

He hasn't got a residence permit.

"Perhaps you ought to see a doctor."

"It's nothing, friend."

"May I at least ask you what your name is?"

The black man seemed to hesitate for a moment about whether
to tell him or not, but then said: "Antoine. My name's Antoine."
He pointed to the road. "Here, drop me here, please. This is fine.
This is where I wanted to get to."

Beppe stopped the car and looked around. There was a crossroads with a winking traffic light, and, all around, a wasteland.

At the end of the plain, beyond the factories and the electricity
pylons, a faint glow had stolen a piece of sky from the night.

"Here? Are you sure?"

"Yes, yes. This is fine, friend. Stop here. Thank you very much."
Antoine opened the car door and was about to get out when he
stopped and stared at him. Beppe saw shining in those big brown
eyes the mystery of the Trinity. "Can I ask you something?"

Beppe Trecca gulped. "Yes, of course."

The African opened his backpack, took out a bunch of socks
made of a spongy white material and held them out to him. "Do
you want them, friend? They're pure cotton. A hundred per cent.
I'll give you a good price. Five euros. Only five euros."

Cristiano Zena, with his chest right up against the steering wheel,
was driving the van downhill around the hairpin bends.

The Ducato's engine, in second gear, was howling.

Cristiano knew that he ought to change gear, but until the bends
finished he wasn't going to take that risk.

Dawn had come at last and the rain had eased off a bit. The
headlights projected two ovals onto the road, which was strewn
with earth and puddles and with branches that brushed against the
underside of the Ducato.

Cristiano glanced back. Lying on the floor, side by side, were
Rino Zena and the corpse of Fabiana Ponticelli.

Fabiana's body was swarming with evidence. He was an expert
on these things, he had seen loads of TV detective films, and it's
well known that if you look under the victim's fingernails you find
the skin of the ...

There was a sort of CLICK in Cristiano's mind, a momentary
blackout.

... and there were bound to be millions of other clues, and it
wouldn't take the police five minutes to find out ...

(What?)

Nothing.

Beppe Trecca, with three packets of socks in his hand, entered his
studio flat. He undressed in silence and took a boiling hot shower,
his mind a total blank. He put on his pajamas and lowered the shutters. Outside the rain had stopped and the day had taken possession of the world. The sparrows on the cypresses were timidly
beginning to chirp, as if to say: "Wasn't that a terrible night? It's
over and life can start again."

Beppe stuffed his earplugs into his ears and slipped under the
blankets.

Cristiano Zena turned off the woodland road and found himself
just outside Varrano.

He had almost made it. He had to drive through the village and
take the highway. He turned down a wide, tree-lined avenue and
decided that it was time to change up. He glanced at the lever of
the worn-out gears. He grasped it and was about to go into third
when he heard his father's dark voice saying:

(The clutch. Are you going to push that fucking clutch or aren't
you?)

He pressed down the pedal and got into third at the first attempt.

When he looked outside again he noticed that at the end of the
avenue there was a glow which tinged the tops of the plane trees
blue and orange.

The police!

His heart missed a beat and he instinctively slammed on the
brakes. The van came to an abrupt halt with a screech of brakes
and then started moving forward in fits and starts for ten yards
before stalling in the middle of the road.

Cristiano clung to the steering wheel without breathing. Then he
closed his eyes and clenched his teeth.

What now?

He opened his eyes again and saw some men in phosphorescent
yellow uniforms stretching long tapes from one side of the avenue
to the other. Right beside them was a police car and a truck with
flashing orange lights.

A policeman came toward him, waving his flare.

Cristiano tried to swallow, but couldn't. He kept his head down,
because he didn't want the policeman to see how young he was.

Quick!

He turned the key and the Ducato started lurching forward,
pushed by the starter.

The policeman had stopped fifty yards away and was telling him
to turn back.

Now then ...

(Push down that fucking clutch!)

He puffed out his cheeks in exasperation, stretched out his leg
and with the tip of his toe pressed down the pedal.

Good.

(Now put it into neutral. It's the middle one.)

After several attempts he decided that he had found neutral. He
turned the key again and this time the engine fired. He selected first
gear and gradually released the clutch. The van moved, he pulled
the wheel around and turned back.

On the highway he passed long tractor trailers with foreign license
plates advancing one behind the other like a caravan of elephants.
The sky had turned dark gray and to the east a thin strip of light
was beginning to brighten the plain. The outline of the house seemed
to emerge like a black bunker from the mist that enveloped the fields
and the road.

He parked the van, switched off the engine and got out. He
opened the rear doors.

His father had fallen on top of Fabiana's corpse and under the
bicycle. His head lay in the middle of the remains of the barbecue
and a Peroni beer label had got stuck to his cheek.

Cristiano climbed in and checked to see if his heart was still
beating. He was alive. He got hold of his feet and pulled him
out of the van, taking care not to knock his head against anything. He slid him down into the wheelbarrow again. Then he
closed the doors and wheeled him toward the house, but when
he reached the door he remembered that he didn't have the keys.
He found them in one of Rino's pants pockets. He opened the
door.

After several attempts he managed to hoist him onto his shoulders and slowly, bending under one-hundred-fifty-pounds, he went
up the stairs. Exhausted, without a trace of strength left, he laid his
father on the bed.

Now he had to undress him, but that was something he knew
how to do. How many hundreds of times in the past had his father
had to be put to bed drunk out of his mind?

If there was one thing Dr. Furlan was crazy about it was ziti alla
genovese.

Put six pounds of onions into a large saucepan, add celery, carrots and a piece of lean veal and simmer all day over a low flame.

The onion gradually turns into a dark, delicious-smelling sauce,
which you pour over the ziti together with a generous handful of
grated parmesan and a few leaves of basil.

Fantastic.

Dr. Furlan's wife made it extra tasty by adding a little bacon fat.
And she cooked it for so long that nothing was left of the veal but
the memory.

The problem was that Andrea Furlan, after losing the basketball
final at the club, had returned home at midnight howling with
hunger, had opened the fridge and wolfed down half a casserole of
the stuff without even heating it up, and then, not content with that, had added three slices of a pie filled with endives, olives and capers,
and two sausages.

In that state he had collapsed into bed. He had woken up three
hours later for his shift in the ambulance.

Now, as he sat between Paolo Ristori, the driver, and nurse Sperti,
he could feel the onions and sausages trying to climb their way back
up his digestive system. He felt terribly sick and his stomach was
as tight as a basketball.

What he would really have liked to do was get into the back and
take a five-minute nap on the stretcher while those two fools bickered with each other.

With a disgusted grimace on his face, Furlan observed Ristori.

The driver was chewing gum and flashing his lights obsessively
at a truck full of pigs which wouldn't get out of the outside lane.
He thought he was Michael Schumacher. On the pretext that he had
to get around quickly he drove like a maniac.

"So anyway he crapped in his pants..." said Michela Sperti, a blonde
girl muffled up in her orange uniform. Underneath her jumpsuit (Paolo
had seen her once in a bikini at the local swimming pool and gone into
shock) she was a mass of muscles so precise and well-defined they
looked like so many fish piled up one on top of the other. Her enthusiasm for body-building had cost her her tits and her menstrual cycle.

Ristori gave her a quick glance. "Are you telling me your
boyfriend crapped in his pants during the preliminary rounds of
Mr. Olympia?"

"Yes. While he was on the platform doing the poses."

"No ... please..." stammered Andrea, and putting his hand in
front of his mouth he gave an onion-flavored belch that almost
knocked him out.

"Well, if you stuff yourself with Guttalax three hours before the
competition..." Michela started biting her fingernails.

"Why the hell did he do that?" asked Ristori.

"He was a half-pound overweight. He would have been excluded
from his category. The idiot had drunk half a bottle of Ferrarelle
mineral water that morning. He went to the sauna, he sweated
like a pig, but it was no good, he didn't lose half a gram. So he
realized his intestine must be full. And he purged himself, but it
took effect just when he was doing a front double bicep."

Furlan saw the house and pointed to it: "Slow down! Slow down!
This is the place. Stop."

"Okay, boss." Ristori flicked the indicator and swerved abruptly,
entering the front yard of the Zenas' house at full speed, skidding
on the gravel and stopping half a yard short of a Ducato van.

Michela turned on him furiously. "You bastard! The next time
you do a sudden turn like that I swear I'll punch you on the nose."

"Ooh! Who are you, then? Sharma the She-Devil?"

Furlan took his first-aid case and got out of the ambulance. The
fresh air made him immediately feel better. He went toward the
front entrance of the house. The door was open.

Ristori with the stretcher and Sperti with the oxygen cylinder
followed him into the house, shoving each other aside like two
teenagers.

The doctor found himself in a large room. A table covered with
beer cans. Some white plastic chairs.

What a dump.

In the half-light he could just make out a figure sitting on a folding
chair.

Furlan went over and saw that it was a tall, thin, stork-like boy
who was looking at them blankly. He wore a long orange bathrobe
and a pair of baggy underpants. He was pale and had dark rings
around his swollen, bloodshot eyes. When he saw them enter he did
nothing but open his mouth.

He's either high or in shock.

"Was it you who called 911?" Ristori asked the boy.

He nodded and pointed to the stairs.

"You look a bit strange. Are you all right?" nurse Sperti asked
him.

"Yes," the boy said, as if in slow motion.

Furlan looked around. "Where is he?"

"Upstairs," said the boy.

Furlan dashed up and in the first room found a shaven-headed
man covered in tattoos lying on a mattress. He was squeezed into
a pair of flannel pajamas with blue and white stripes.