Authors: Niccolo Ammaniti
Steal You Away (48 page)
But before he could move, Pierini asked him: ‘Do you know Miss Palmieri’s dead?’
Pietro looked him straight in the eye. And he said it: ‘Yes, I know. I killed her.’
Pierini blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Don’t talk crap! She drowned in the bath.’
‘Who are you trying to kid?’ Bacci chimed in.
‘It was me who killed her,’ Pietro persisted, earnestly. ‘I’m not talking crap.’
‘Oh yeah? Why did you kill her, then?’
Pietro shrugged. ‘Because she failed me.’
Pierini nodded in agreement. ‘Prove it.’
Pietro began pedalling slowly away. ‘Inside the house, somewhere, there’s a grass snake, I took it there. Go and see, if you don’t believe me.’
It might even be true
, Pierini said to himself, throwing away the stub.
Moroni’s no bullshitter
.
The Miele household was celebrating. And there were good reasons for doing so.
In the first place, Bruno had been promoted and in September would be joining a special squad of plain-clothes detectives who would be investigating the links between local and organised crime. His dream was finally coming true. He had even bought a new Golf, to be paid for in fifty-six easy instalments.
In the second place, old Italo was retiring. And with permanent disability he would be getting a tidy little sum at the end of each month. From September onwards, therefore, he would no longer be spending his nights in the cottage by the school, but in his farmhouse with his wife like any normal human being, and would be able to tend to his vegetable patch and watch TV.
So, despite that African heat, father and son had organised a party in the field behind the house.
A long carpet of charcoal embers was surrounded with stones, and on top was an old bedspring, and beef offal, pork chops, sausages, scamorzas and little tunas were roasting.
Italo, in vest and sandals, was checking with a long pointed stick that the meat was done. Now and then he would wipe a damp cloth over his bald pate so as not to get sunstroke and then call out that the sausages were ready.
They had invited practically everyone they knew and there were at least three generations together. Children chasing each other round the vineyard and squirting each other with water from the pump. Pregnant mothers. Mothers with prams. Fathers stuffing themselves with tagliatelle and red wine. Fathers playing bocce with their children. Old men with their wives sheltering from that pitiless sun under the parasol and pergola and fanning themselves. A radio-cassette recorder in a corner was playing Zucchero’s latest album.
Clouds of excited flies buzzed about among the smoke and the delicious food smells and settled on the trays of pastries, rice croquettes and mini-pizzas. Horse-flies were batted away with
rolled-up newspapers. Inside the house there were a group of men clustered around the TV watching football and a group of women gossiping in the kitchen as they cut up bread and salami.
Everything as expected.
‘Mm, this carbonara’s delicious. Who made it? Was it auntie?’ Bruno Miele, with his mouth full, asked Lorena Santini, his fiancée.
‘How should I know who made it?’ snorted Lorena, who had other problems at that moment and who, having got sunburned on the beach, was the colour of a lobster.
‘Well why don’t you go and ask? This is how carbonara should be made. Not that pap you make, which is practically a spaghetti omelette. You cook the eggs. I bet this is auntie’s work.’
‘I don’t want to get up,’ protested Lorena.
‘And you expect me to marry you? Ah, never mind.’
Antonio Bacci, who was sitting between Lorena and his wife Antonella, stopped eating and intervened. ‘It is good, I agree. But to make it really special there should have been onions in it. That’s the original Roman recipe.’
Bruno Miele raised his eyes to the heavens. He felt like throttling him. Thank God he wouldn’t be seeing any more of this guy from next winter, otherwise they might have come to blows one day. ‘Don’t you realise what nonsense you talk? I don’t know why you open your mouth. You know nothing about cooking, I remember you telling me once that it spoils bass if you grill it. You don’t know how to eat … Carbonara with onions, for goodness’ sake!’ He had got so worked up that little bits of pasta flew out of his mouth as he talked.
‘Bruno’s right. You know nothing about cooking. Onions go in amatriciana,’ echoed Antonella, who never missed a chance to put the boot in on her husband.
Antonio Bacci held up his hands in surrender. ‘All right, calm down. I didn’t insult you. What would you have done if I’d said there should have been cream in it, killed me? Okay, there shouldn’t have been any onions in it … What’s the big deal?’
‘You’re always sounding off about things you know nothing
about. That’s what’s so annoying,’ retorted Bruno, still not placated.
‘I’d have liked it better if there’d been onions in it,’ mumbled Andrea Bacci, who was already on his third helping. The boy was sitting next to his mother, wolfing down his food.
‘Oh sure, that would have made it even more fattening.’ Bruno scowled at his colleague. ‘You ought to take this boy to the doctor. How much does he weigh? Eighty kilos at least. When he starts growing he’s going to be a monster. Watch out, these things shouldn’t be trifled with.’ And to Andrea: ‘Why are you so hungry, anyway?’
Andrea shrugged and began mopping up the sauce with a piece of bread.
Bruno raised his arms and stretched. ‘I could do with a coffee now. By the way, didn’t Graziano come?’
‘Why, is he around? Is he back?’ asked Antonio Bacci.
‘Yes, I saw him outside Miss Palmieri’s house. He asked me what had happened, I told him and he went off without even saying goodbye. Strange.’
‘Do you know what Moroni said?’ Andrea Bacci nudged his father.
Bacci senior ignored him. ‘But wasn’t he supposed to be on tour?’
‘Well, maybe it’s finished. I told him about the party. Perhaps he’ll come.’
‘Papa! Papa! Do you know what Moroni said?’ Andrea persisted.
‘For goodness’ sake, why don’t you go off and play with someone your own age and leave us in peace?’
Bruno was sceptical. ‘The amount of food he’s eaten, he won’t even be able to stand up. You’ll have to call a breakdown truck to lift him.’
‘But I wanted to say something important,’ the boy whimpered. ‘Pietro Moroni said he killed Miss Palmieri …’
‘Okay, now you’ve said it. Run along and play,’ said his father, pushing him away.
‘Wait a minute …’ Bruno pricked up his antennae. The antennae thanks to which he now belonged to a special unit and wasn’t going to remain an ordinary officer like that numbskull Bacci. ‘And why did he say he killed her?’
‘Because she failed him. He said it’s the truth. And he said there’s a grass snake in Miss Palmieri’s house. He put it there. He said to go and see.’
Pietro was with his father and Mimmo in the farmyard nailing boards onto the roof of Zagor’s kennel when the cars arrived. Those two, in their green Peugeot 205 with a Rome number plate, accompanied by a police car.
Mario Moroni looked up. ‘What do they want now?’
‘They’ve come for me,’ said Pietro, laying down his hammer.
Dear Gloria
,
First of all, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
.
A few days ago I spoke to my mother and she told me you’ve
decided to go to Bologna University. She heard from your mother.
You’re going to do film studies or something, is that right? Not
economics after all, then. You were right to hold out against your
father. It’s what you wanted to do. People ought to do the things
they want to do. I’m sure this film course will be very interesting
and Bologna’s a nice lively city. So they tell me, anyway. When I
leave the institute I want to travel all round Europe by train and
I’ll come and see you, so you can show me around
.
It won’t be long now, in two months and two weeks I’ll be
eighteen and I’ll be leaving. Amazing, isn’t it? I can hardly believe
it – at last I’ll be able to get out of this place and do what I want.
I haven’t decided what that is yet. But I’ve heard you can study
for a degree at night school and maybe I could do that. They’ve
offered me a job here, actually, helping the new arrivals to settle
in and that sort of thing. They’d pay me. The teachers say I’m
good with children. I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it, all
I want now is go on that trip. Rome, Paris, London, Spain. I’ll
decide about the future when I get back, there’s time for that
.
I must admit I wasn’t sure whether to write to you, we haven’t
been in touch for so long. In my last letter I told you I didn’t want
you to come and pay me a visit. I hope you weren’t upset but I
couldn’t bear to see you like that, after all this time, and in this
place, for just a couple of hours. We wouldn’t have known what
to say to each other, we would have talked about the usual things
people talk about in these cases and then you would have gone
and I would have been miserable, I know. I’d made up my mind
to phone you as soon as I got out so that we could meet in some
nice place, far away from here
.
In the end I decided to write because I needed to tell you something
I’ve often thought about in all these years and which perhaps
concerns you too, in a way – the reason why, that day in the
piazza, I told Pierini about Miss Palmieri. If I’d kept quiet, maybe
nobody would have found out and I wouldn’t have been sent to
the institute. The psychologists kept asking me why I’d told him
and for a long time I replied that it was because I’d wanted to
show Pierini and the others that I was strong too and that I didn’t
let people push me around and that after they failed me I was
wild with rage. But that wasn’t the truth, I was lying
.
Then a few weeks ago something happened. A new boy arrived,
a Calabrian boy who had killed his father. He’s fourteen. He speaks
broad dialect and when he talks – which isn’t often – nobody
understands a word he says. Every evening his father used to come
home and beat up his wife and sister. One evening Antonio (but
everyone here calls him Calabria) took the bread knife off the table
and stuck it in his chest. I asked him why he’d done it, why he
hadn’t gone to the police to report him, why he hadn’t talked to
anyone about it. He didn’t answer me. It was as if I didn’t exist.
He just sat there by the window smoking. So I told him I had
killed someone too, when I was about the same age as him. And
that I knew how it feels afterwards. And he asked me how it did
feel and I said, awful, terrible, with something inside you that
won’t go away. And he shook his head and looked at me and said
it wasn’t true, that afterwards you feel like a king, and then he
asked me if I really wanted to know why he had killed his father.
I said yes. And he said: because I didn’t want to become like that
bastard, I’d rather be dead than like him. I’ve thought a lot about
what Calabria said. He understood more quickly than I did. He
understood at once why he had done it. In order to combat something
evil which we have inside us and which grows and turns us
into beasts. He cut his life in two in order to escape from that.
It’s true. I think the reason I told Pierini I’d killed Miss Palmieri
was that I wanted to get away from my family and Ischiano. I
wasn’t conscious of it when I did it, nobody would do such a thing
if they were conscious of it, it was something I didn’t know at the
time. I don’t really believe in the subconscious and psychology, I
think everyone is what they do. But in that particular case I think
there was a hidden part of me, which took that decision
.
That’s why I’m writing, to tell you that when I promised you
that night on the beach (how often I’ve thought about that night)
that I’d never tell anyone, I really meant it, but then maybe the
fact that you were leaving for England (but you mustn’t feel guilty
about that) and seeing Miss Palmieri’s body again broke something
inside me and I had to say it, spit it out. And I really believe
I changed my own destiny. I can say that now, having spent six
years in this place which they call an institute but which in so
many ways is just like a prison and I’ve grown up and finished
high school and maybe I’ll go to university myself
.
I didn’t want to end up like Mimmo, who’s still there fighting
with my father (my mother tells me he’s started drinking, just like
him). I didn’t want to stay in Ischiano Scalo. No, I didn’t want
to become like them, and soon I’ll be eighteen and I’ll be a man,
ready to face the world with (hopefully!) the right attitude
.
Do you know what Miss Palmieri said to me in the bathroom?
She said that promises are made to be broken. I think there’s some
truth in that. I’ll always be a murderer, even though I was only
twelve, it makes no difference. There’s no way of atoning for such
a terrible thing, not even the death penalty. But in time you learn
to live with it
.
That’s what I wanted to tell you. I broke our pact, but maybe
it was better that way. But now I’d better stop writing, I don’t
want to make you sad. My mother tells me you’re beautiful and
I knew you would be. When we were small I was sure you’d be
Miss Italy one day
.
Love
,
Pietro
P.S. You’d better watch out – when I come to Bologna I’m going
to grab you and steal you away
.
