Black Run (20 page)

The driver nodded.

As Rocco and the blond driver headed toward the rear of the truck, the other driver, the black man, stuck close to the truck, with a slightly frightened expression on his face. Italo looked at him, his hand on the holster that held his pistol. The man noticed and smiled. One of his eyelids was twitching, and from time to time he licked his lips.

“This guy is shitting himself!” Italo shouted.

“Bring him here!” Rocco replied. “And pull out your gun. Things are getting intense here.”

Italo drew his pistol and looked at the young Rasta, whose eyes got big at the sight of the weapon. “C'mon, let's go . . .” And the two men moved off together.

They were all clustered around the truck's rear doors. The driver was inserting a key from the ring into the container's double door lock. The guy was taking entirely too much time, as far as Rocco was concerned. So he grabbed the keys out of the driver's hands and opened the lock himself. The tumblers clicked and the handles turned freely. Italo, pistol in hand, never took his eyes off the two truck drivers. The container's two large doors swung open. Inside the truck, instead of boxes or crates, was another container.

“What the fuck? A container inside a container?” said Rocco. “Let's climb in and open this one too.”

The noise of an approaching vehicle made Italo turn around. It was a dark blue Fiat Ducato delivery van, slowing to a halt right next to the truck.

“What now?” asked Italo.

“Relax,” the deputy chief replied just as Sebastiano opened the driver's-side door and got out of the van. Italo smiled. “I'd forgotten about him.” And he snapped a sharp military salute. Sebastiano, fully immersed in the role of a cop, saluted back. The two truck drivers silently observed the new arrival. Sebastiano glared menacingly back at them. He stood six foot four, making him the same height as the two young men. Then he spat on the ground and sized up the truck's contents.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?”

“A container inside a container,” Rocco replied as he gestured for the young blond man to follow him. They climbed in.

The smaller container was red and had a lock on the two rear doors. The deputy police chief looked at the set of keys. He held them out to the pimply truck driver. “Which one?”

He took the key ring in hand and started sorting through them in search of the right one. Then it all happened in an instant. The pimply blond driver hurled the keys at Rocco's face, and Rocco, caught off guard, stumbled and fell backwards, just far enough to allow the driver to leap out of the truck and take to his heels. The black man, quick as a bolt of lightning, unleashed a straight-armed punch at Italo, who slammed to the ground; his pistol went spinning away from him. Sebastiano was just in time to turn around and see them both running away down the road. Rocco leaped off the truck and went over to Italo, who was holding a hand to his lip and grimacing with pain. He picked up his pistol and took off after the two fugitives. Sebastiano, by contrast, shrugged and gave up the chase even before starting.

The bastards were running hard. At the crossroads for Chenoz, the two went in opposite directions. Rocco decided to follow the white driver. Too many cigarettes and too much time spent without exercise were already leaving him out of breath. The young blond man was pulling away. The deputy police chief's knee was screaming in pain. He could have shot him, knocked him down, and taken him in. But then his professional instincts vanished all at once.

What am I doing?
he asked himself.
Fuck this
. And he slowed to a halt. “Go on, handsome, go ahead! Run all the way back to Rotterdam, you asshole!” he shouted after him.

Bent over double and heaving from the exertion, he spit a gob of saliva onto the asphalt. Then he pulled himself erect with both hands flat on his lumbar muscles and tried to stretch, an exercise as pointless as it was painful. He felt his spine pop a couple of times. At last he turned around and made his way back to the truck.

Italo had a split lip. Sebastiano had put a little snow on it. Nothing serious. Rocco picked up the truck keys from the pavement. “Better this way, if you ask me. It gives us more time to work, no?” Sebastiano nodded. Italo smiled. “But they made complete fools of us,” he said, “and I don't like that.”

“No, we made fools of them,” Sebastiano replied. “Come on, Rocco, let's go—open up.”

Rocco climbed back onto the truck and went over to the lock on the interior container. He tried the first key. Then the second. Finally, the third key turned in the lock. The doors swung open with a metallic screech.

Eyes.

Dozens and dozens of eyes looking at them. Rocco stepped back and almost fell out of the truck.

The container was full of people.

“Holy shit!” said Rocco in a faint voice, little more than a whisper. From the darkness of the container inside the truck emerged eyes, teeth, and faces. “Who are they?”

Sebastiano shook his head. Italo cautiously came forward, one hand on his aching lip. “Indians?” he asked in an undertone as Rocco got down off the truck. The truly weird thing was the absolute silence that reigned inside that surreal cubbyhole. None of the inhabitants of the metal cavern emitted so much as a peep.

“Let's get them out of there.
Out!
” he started shouting in English.
“Out of here!”
And together with Italo and Sebastiano, he started gesticulating to get the people to leave the truck.

Slowly the dark mass produced a tangle of arms, legs, and heads. And teeth. These human beings were smiling, and whispering something in a distant language that sounded like a prayer. Italo started lining them up along the side of the road. “One, two, three . . .” And women started climbing out of the truck, some with children in their arms, and there were young men, and boys and girls of all ages.

Italo went on counting: “Fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight . . .” They practically overflowed the roadside by now. “And fifty-nine . . . Rocco, what are we going to do?”

Rocco stood staring at the truck as it went on vomiting out people. A cornucopia of human misery.

Italo stopped when he got to eighty-seven. They were all out. And there they stood, eyes wide with fear. Terrifyingly skinny, shivering with the cold. One of them extended a hand gripping a passport. Sebastiano leaned toward him and took the document. “Acoop Vihintanage . . . They're from Sri Lanka.”

The man's head wobbled from side to side. “Ah!” he said. Then he threw his arms around a man to his right and a woman on his left.
“Amma . . . akka!”

“I don't know what you're saying,” said Sebastiano.

“Brother . . . sister . . . mine.”

“He says that these are his brother and sister,” Italo translated.

“Well, who the fuck cares,” said Sebastiano, handing back the passport. Then he went over to Rocco. “What now?”

“What do I know? Let's try to understand where they were going. Italo? These people speak English—find out more or less where they were heading.”

“Right away.” Italo went over to the man who had handed over his passport. Rocco climbed back into the rear of the truck.

“What are you doing?” Sebastiano called.

“I want to take a look around. Figure out what's inside.”

“Here,” said his friend, tossing him a pocket flashlight. Rocco switched it on and walked into the truck.

A stench of sweat and massed humanity assaulted him with the ferocity of a starving wild animal. He was forced to run back out, coughing. “Holy shit . . . There must be an outbreak of cholera in there!”

“Who knows how long they've been locked up in that container. Put a handkerchief over your mouth.” Now Sebastiano tossed him a white handkerchief.

“Is it clean, at least?” Rocco said, examining it.

“Even if it isn't, it couldn't be worse than what's inside the container; so don't worry,” Sebastiano replied. Rocco covered his mouth and nose, switched the flashlight on a second time, and went in.

He could barely fit inside without bumping his head against the ceiling. Millions of grains of fine dust danced in the shaft of light that cut through the darkness. There were rags on the floor. Patchwork bags. A wooden rocking horse and a tin car. Then the flashlight lit up what looked like a switch. Rocco flipped it, and a fluorescent light went on on the container's ceiling. Now he could see the scene in all its squalor. Heaped up on the floor were the few possessions of those people, wrapped in plastic trash bags or bundles of torn and filthy rags. Rocco walked the length of the container. His footsteps echoed metallically in the small space. He reached the end of the container. There was nothing else. Still, something didn't add up. He walked back, and this time he counted ten paces, stepping on papers, rags, and apple cores as he went. Then he jumped down out of the truck.

“What's going on?” asked Sebastiano, noticing Rocco's furrowed brow.

Rocco said nothing. He retraced the same ten paces outside the truck. He stopped. It was another three paces to the end of the truck's container.

“Seba?”

His friend walked over to him. “What is it?”

“The container is ten paces long. Which means it runs to here, you see? It's at least three yards from here to the end of the truck.”

“What are you saying?”

“That there must be something in there, behind the container.”

“What are we supposed to do about it? We can't hope to haul it out of there—you'd need a crane.”

“Right, or else . . .” And he felt the metal shell of the truck. He banged on it. Then he grabbed a rock and slammed it against the exterior of the truck. Not a scratch. “This sucker is tough.”

“Do you want to try to punch a hole in the container?” Sebastiano suggested.

“With what?”

“We'll hammer it with a tire iron.” Sebastiano turned around and headed toward the dark blue van. He opened the rear doors while the silent army of Sri Lankans watched the two men busy themselves around the truck. Italo was still talking with the man who'd presented his passport and with his brother. Sebastiano climbed into the truck, brandishing a cross-shaped tire iron. He walked back to the far end of the container and started banging away. The metal was barely dented, and aside from scratching the paint and making a hellish amount of noise, Sebastiano obtained no appreciable results. He threw the tire iron to the floor and came back. Outside the truck, Rocco was waiting for him. “Well?”

“Nothing. What we need here is a drill, a milling cutter, something like that.”

Rocco looked around. Countryside with ditch on the right, countryside with trees on the left. He walked into the middle of the road. He walked toward the curve. Just then, Italo walked over to Sebastiano. “So they were heading for Turin. That's where they had an appointment with someone, I don't know, who was going to get them a place to stay and some paying work.”

“What the hell do I care? I mean, I'm not a cop, Italo!” Sebastiano replied.

“I was just telling you what I found out,” the officer replied. “I sweated my ass off to get that much information out of them.” At least his lip wasn't swelling up. “What is he looking for?” the officer asked, motioning to the deputy police chief in the middle of the road.

“Who knows.”

“What are we going to do with these people?” asked Italo. “We can't just leave them in the middle of the road here. They're going to freeze before long.”

“Let's get them back aboard the truck. At least that'll keep them warm. I can't think of anything else,” said the big man, throwing his arms wide. “You tell me, of all the things to have happened!”

Italo moved toward the column of Sri Lankans just as Rocco was coming back. Rocco saw him leading the group of huddled refugees toward the truck. “What are you doing?”

“Sebastiano says to put them back in the truck. Otherwise they'll freeze to death.”

“No. I have a better idea. Sebastiano, you stay here and keep an eye out!” he shouted at his friend, who responded with an affirmative thumbs-up.

“You have your gun?”

Sebastiano pulled out a Beretta that he'd tucked under his belt behind his back and displayed it to Rocco.

“Excellent!” he shouted and headed off.

“So where are we going?”

“Get the people and tell them to follow us.”

Italo nodded, went over to the man with the passport, and spoke to him in English. “Okay, you. Follow us. Follow!”

Marco Traversa and his wife, Carla, were returning home. They'd just spent a horrifying evening at dinner with old friends from high school. One of those reunions that Marco usually did his best to avoid. He knew that it's best after thirty years not to see old friends. They are never enjoyable evenings. They're hours and hours spent telling one another about health problems and troubles with your children or carefully calculating who's covered the most ground since school or kept the fullest head of hair. Marco worked in a bank. The Audi he drove was secondhand, and Carla worked from home, doing translations for a small Val d'Aosta publishing house. No children, no world travel, a humdrum existence. He didn't have a lot of stories to tell his former classmates. And he'd never much liked the role of the listener. Especially if that meant sitting and hearing Giuliano's stories about his sailboat or Elda talking about the pit bull puppies she raised in Champorcher. Luckily, Signor and Signora Traversa had been able to get away early with the excuse of a predawn appointment the following day and had left the newly renovated villa owned by the Miglios, with a good-night to the other fifteen members of their class, the old Terza B of the Liceo Classico XXVI Febbraio. The only thought that went through Marco's head as he took the curves on the road to the highway was the Breathalyzer test. If the highway patrol stopped him, he'd be in trouble. It wasn't as if he'd had a lot to drink, but everyone knew that two glasses were enough to get your license revoked, your credit card demagnetized, and a sentence of forced labor in Cividale del Friuli, breaking karst rock with a pick. He was driving slowly, just 45 miles per hour, even though Carla was urging him to accelerate, if nowhere else, at least on the straightaways, where, if the police are out, you can see them from miles away.