The Crossroads (14 page)

Cristiano hurried into the kitchen and returned with the glasses.

‘Thank you.' Beppe poured two fingers of whisky into one glass and gave it to Rino, then filled the other glass more than half full and kept it for himself. ‘This is the last glass of strong liquor you're going to have till our next meeting. All right? That's a promise! Do you understand?'

‘Yes, I understand,' replied Rino, like a soldier answering his captain.

The social worker raised his glass to the sky and knocked it back. Rino did the same.

‘Ahhhh …' Trecca twisted his mouth and wiped it with the back of his hand. Then he straightened his tie. ‘Can I use your bathroom for a minute, lads?'

‘Sure,' said Cristiano and Rino, relieved.

The social worker locked himself in the toilet.

‘What's got into him? Did you see that? He finished a whole glass of whisky …' whispered Rino.

Cristiano shrugged. ‘How should I know?'

Beppe Trecca locked himself in the toilet and washed his face.

He had talked to the Zenas without even knowing what he was saying. He couldn't stop thinking about Ida's lips, as dark as black cherries, about the cleavage that she always allowed her dresses to reveal, and about those fawnlike eyes that made her look like Meg Ryan. And above all, about where the hell they could meet.

He looked at himself in the mirror and shook his head.

I'm too pale. Maybe I need a spell under the sunlamp
.

His flat was no good. Too risky. Nor was a hotel. Too sleazy. What they needed was a special, romantic place …

He had a brainwave.

Of course! The camper van, the pride and joy of my cousin's husband
.

He pulled out his mobile and wrote quickly:

He was about to send the message when he had second thoughts and tremulously added:

That afternoon Cristiano Zena got on the bus and went for a ride.

He had no particular aim in mind and only ten euros in his pocket, but he couldn't stay at home on Saturday.

After lunch he had tried to ring Quattro Formaggi to ask him if he wanted to go and look at motorbikes, but his mobile was switched off as usual.

Maybe he had gone to church.

When the doors of the bus wheezed open and Cristiano stepped down onto the pavement it was only four o'clock, but night was already falling over the plain. Between the sky and the earth all that remained was a salmon-coloured strip. There was a biting east wind and the cypresses along the central reservation of the highway were all bent over to one side. The long advertising banners which hung under the footbridge were flapping like the slack sails of a yacht.

Straight ahead of Cristiano lay a kilometre and a half of stores, wholesale and retail outlets, self-service car washes, warehouses, coloured lights, signs flashing up offers and discounts. There was even a mosque.

To the left, behind the low roof of the Shoe Cathedral, among the clouds of smoke produced by itinerant vendors of sausages and roast pork, rose the imposing walls of the Quattro Camini shopping mall. A little further back stood the glass cube of Mediastore, and on the other side of the road the big Opel and General Motors showroom with its lines of new cars, and the wide open space of the secondhand car lot with its streamers proclaiming special offers. And the car park of the Multiplex cinema next to the little McDonald's.

In the middle of the roundabout, onto which two other long, straight roads converged, the old sculptor Callisto Arabuia had erected his latest creation, a huge bronze sculpture in the shape of a pandoro which went round and round spurting little jets of water into a basin.

Cristiano set off towards the mall. The four towers at the corners of the building could be seen, on a clear day, from kilometres away. They were said to be half a metre taller than the bell-tower of the cathedral in St Mark's Square in Venice. For the price of one euro you could go up in a lift to the top of Tower Two. From there you could see the Forgese snaking its way towards the sea, and all the tiny hamlets and villages that speckled the plain.

The mall was an immense rectangular building, bigger than an aircraft hangar, blue and devoid of windows, dating from the mid-Nineties.

That day, in honour of the month of discounts, the tops of the towers had been embellished with hot-air balloons decorated with yellow and blue segments and flaunting the slogan:
BIG BARGAINS TO
BE HAD AT THE QUATTRO CAMINI
. All around the building was a large expanse of asphalt covered with thousands of cars.

The Quattro Camini attracted people from far and wide. It was the largest mall within a radius of a hundred kilometres. A hundred thousand square metres, distributed over three floors and two mezzanines. Plus an underground car park with a capacity of three thousand vehicles. The ground floor was given over to the Coral Reef hypermarket where those big bargains were to be had and you could take home a crate of beer for less than ten euros. The rest was occupied by shops. You could find everything your heart could possibly desire: a branch of the Monte dei Paschi bank, sales outlets of Vodafone and TIM, a post office, a nursery, the big clothes and shoe
stores, three hairdressers, four pizzerias, a wine bar, a Chinese restaurant, an Irish pub, a games arcade, a pet shop, a gym, a medical testing centre and a solarium. The only thing it lacked was a bookshop.

In the centre of the first floor there was a large oval concourse adorned with a fountain in the form of a boat and a marble staircase leading up to the second floor. It had been intended by the architect as a surreal re-creation of Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

Cristiano walked across the car park, hunched up against the icy wind. There were huge crowds, it being the first day in the long month of special offers.

A long queue of vehicles was waiting at the automatic barriers of the car park and a river of people was pouring in through the doors. Families came out with trolleys piled high with goods; there were mothers with children bundled up like astronauts on pushchairs, gangs of teenagers on scooters weaving in and out between the cars, drivers quarrelling over parking places, coaches spewing out parties of old folk. In one corner of the car park there was a little funfair with dodgems and a shooting gallery.

The music blared out fuzzily from the loudspeakers next to the doors.

Cristiano looked behind the row of rubbish bins where Fabiana Ponticelli and Esmeralda Guerra usually hung around with their group in the summer and parked their scooters in the winter.

The Scarabeo with the smiley was there, chained to Tekken's motorbike.

His heart began to beat faster.

He looked at the motorbike. He hated to admit it, but that son of a bitch had a beautiful machine. He had changed the wheels and had racing ones put on, to make it easier to slalom through the traffic. Cristiano also noticed that the exhaust pipe wasn't the standard one. God only knew how much it had cost him to have it modified. But that wasn't a problem. His father was a big-shot at Biolumex, the light-bulb factory near San Rocco, so he had always been spoiled rotten.

Cristiano couldn't help seething with envy. But then he told himself that rich kids had it too easy and when the going got tough they started whimpering like girls.

Suppose there's an earthquake, for example, and he loses everything
he owns, Tekken won't know what to do, he'll be so sad to
be poor that he'll hang himself from the nearest tree. Whereas I
won't lose a thing.

It would be cool if there was an earthquake
.

He also found comfort in the idea that great men have always had to struggle through shit on their own. Just think of Eminem or Hitler or Christian Vieri.

He joined the crowd going into the mall.

Inside it was very warm. At the sides there were lots of girls dressed in miniskirts and jackets showering you with promotional flyers about telephone call rates and discounts on gyms and solariums. A cluster of people had formed around a man who was cutting carrots and courgettes with a plastic gadget.

As always Cristiano stopped outside Cellulandia, the mobile phone shop.

How he longed for a mobile.

He was probably the only pupil in the whole school who didn't have one.

‘Aren't you proud to be different from all the others?' That had been his father's reply when he had pointed this out.

‘No. I'm not proud. I want one too.'

He passed an electrical goods shop which was advertising fantastic offers on monitors and PCs. But he didn't stay long. He was jostled by shoulders and bellies, deafened by lipsticked mouths shouting in his ears, choked with clouds of perfume and aftershave, dazzled by tinted hair.

Why the hell had he come to this madhouse?

He reached the Electric Bear Pub and had a look round inside to see if Danilo was there.

The tables were dimly lit by soft lighting and surrounded by dark figures. The bar, too, was crowded with people perched on stools. Three plasma screens were showing a wrestling match. The music was deafening. And whenever anyone gave a tip the waiters rang a bell.

There was no sign of Danilo.

Cristiano went out and with the last three euros in his pocket bought a slice of pizza topped with salami and mushrooms. He
decided to have a quick stroll around without stopping to look at the shop windows.

As the solid mass drifting along Gallery B dragged him with it, he nearly bumped right into Fabiana Ponticelli.

He just managed to dodge her. He heard Esmeralda saying: ‘This way! This way!'

Two colourful imps darting through the crowd, uttering little squeals of joy. They jumped. They got shoved by people they came up against, and they shoved back in their turn. They got a lot of insults hurled at them, but didn't even hear. They seemed possessed by a crazy demon.

He followed them, trying to keep out of sight, yet never taking his eyes off them. Fabiana, quite suddenly, pointed at a clothes shop, and in gales of laughter she and Esmeralda plunged inside, hand in hand. Cristiano approached the window.

They took skirts, cardigans and T-shirts off the shelves, gave them the briefest of glances then rolled them up and dumped them back in a heap among the neat piles. But every now and then they would stop and look at the walls and the ceiling.

At first Cristiano couldn't make out what they were doing. Then the penny dropped.

The CCTV cameras
.

When they were out of range of the cameras one of them would make a loud noise, attracting attention, and the other would quickly stuff the things in her bag.

He saw Fabiana enter a fitting room with her handbag while Esmeralda kept watch outside the curtain, pretending to try on a hat, and when a shop assistant came over, furious at the mess they had made, she put on a phoney smile and started asking her a lot of questions, leading her away towards a distant shelf.

Cristiano had no doubt that Fabiana, concealed in the fitting room, was busy with a pair of pliers, cutting the security tags off the clothes.

When she re-emerged, she made a sign to Esmeralda and calmly, with the bag bulging, they walked out of the shop and melted into the crowd.

They were good. Holy shit, were they good.

He was hopeless at stealing. He made every mistake in the book.

It took him ages to summon up the courage, and if the shop assistants never caught him it was only because they were too bloody thick. But he always ended up taking things that weren't any use. A pair of Adidases that were too small for him. Another time a PlayStation joypad which there was no point in having without the console.

The worst time had been when he had had the brilliant idea of stealing Strawberry, the ferret in the pet shop.

It had been love at first sight when he had seen that furry creature. It had a face like a mouse, the ears of a teddy bear and two ink-drops for eyes. A coat the colour of cappuccino and a tail like a paintbrush. It slept in a big cage, lying on a kind of hammock. A little notice said TAME. And Cristiano, unseen by the woman who owned the shop, had opened the cage and put his hand inside. Strawberry had let him stroke his stomach, and had grasped his thumb with his little paws and licked it with his rasp-like tongue.

Day after day he had gone to the shop to ask for information about how much he cost (an impossible price!), what he ate, where he crapped, whether he was good-tempered, whether he smelled, and finally the shopkeeper had said in exasperation: ‘Either buy him or get lost'.

Cristiano, offended, had headed for the door, but before reaching it he had seen that the bitch was selling a packet of cat biscuits to a customer. He had opened the cage, grabbed Strawberry by the scruff of the neck and without further ado stuffed him in his trousers and legged it.

The ferret, after a few seconds, had started struggling, squirming and scratching as if someone was trying to kill it.

Meanwhile Cristiano was trying to walk nonchalantly along the mezzanine floor but the animal was tearing the skin off his thighs. Eventually he couldn't stand it any longer and started shouting out loud and hopping through the crowd like a thing possessed. He stuck his hand down his trousers while behind him a voice started shouting: ‘Stop thief! Stop thief! He's stolen my ferret! Stop him!'

The shopkeeper was running after him among the astonished faces. Cristiano broke into a run. Then the ferret's little head popped out at the bottom of his trouser-leg, Cristiano shook his leg and the
animal shot out, flew a couple of metres through the air and then bolted in the direction of the TIM shop, while Cristiano raced towards the exit.

After that traumatic experience he had sworn to himself that he would never shoplift again.

But in the meantime, where had those two girls got to?

He went on along the gallery, looking into the clothes shops and shoe shops.