The Crossroads (44 page)

Two days later, groggy with painkillers, the social worker had been put on a plane and repatriated with a cracked vertebra and a dislocated jaw.

Holding one hand against his side Beppe went for a pee. He thought he heard noises coming from below. He pricked up his ears, but heard only the trickle of the urine into the water.

He slouched back to the sofa and collapsed on it, yawning: ‘What a hard life!'

The night, at the end of the plain, was beginning to show the first signs of preparing to leave. A band of fog as thick as cotton wool lay among the rows of poplars that followed the course of the river. The dark tops of the trees emerged from it like the topsails of ghost ships.

Cristiano Zena was panting as he pushed the wheelbarrow carrying the corpse of Fabiana Ponticelli along a track that ran across fields dotted with puddles.

He was steering from memory, since he couldn't switch on the torch.

He had lost a lot of time in the garage and it would soon be light and there was a good chance of meeting someone.

Farmers. Labourers heading for the gravel pits who passed this way to save time. Boys on motorbikes.

You would have to be a complete idiot not to understand that there was a human body under that blanket.

So …

So nothing. If I get caught
it'll
because destiny wants me to be.
I'll say I did it. And when papa wakes up he'll realise how much I
love him
.

His arms were beginning to tremble and the river was still a kilometre away. His T-shirt, under the armpits and on the back, was completely soaked with sweat.

He had been down this track a thousand times. When he had decided to build a raft out of empty jerrycans so that he could go rafting, or when he went fishing with Quattro Formaggi, or when he simply had nothing to do.

Who could ever have imagined that he would come along it pushing Fabiana Ponticelli's corpse?

If only Quattro Formaggi were there with him. Maybe he knew if his father and Fabiana had had a secret affair. Or he could have asked Danilo. But he had disappeared. Cristiano had called him a hundred times. His mobile was always switched off. And there was no reply at home either.

He thought about his phone conversation with Quattro Formaggi. He hadn't seemed particularly surprised to hear that Rino was in a coma.

But you know what he's like
, he said to himself, wiping his arm across his forehead, which was beaded with sweat.

He couldn't wait to see him and give him a hug.

He was almost there. The noise of the water even drowned the roar of the lorries which raced along the highway.

He took off his jacket, tied it round his waist and started pushing again. The path, as it neared the river, had gradually turned into a swamp and the small wheel of the wheelbarrow slithered and sank in the mud. Two heavy clods of earth had formed under the soles of his trainers. In front of him, a few dozen metres away, lay a marsh, lit up by the glow from the power station. The trees stood out like pylons in the middle of a sea.

Cristiano couldn't remember the waters of the Forgese ever rising this far.

Quattro Formaggi was still sitting on the chair. He was shivering, and the pain from his shoulder spread down through his chest in incandescent waves.

He was holding the crucifix in one hand.

For a moment he had managed to doze off, but a horrific nightmare had wrapped itself round him like an evil-smelling blanket and fortunately he had woken up.

The television, which was going full blast, echoed in his skull, but he didn't want to turn it down. He far preferred the screeching voices of the television to those inside his head.

Besides, if he closed his eyes he saw Ramona naked, lying among the mountains and the shepherds and soldiers, who were walking over her body with the sheep. He desired her with such intensity that he would have cut off his hand to have her.

Then there was that terrible nightmare that he'd had.

He was covered with slimy fur and was one of a pack of dark creatures running along a dark burrow. Beasts with sharp teeth and red eyes and long hairless tails, pushing and squeaking and biting each other in their eagerness to be the first to the end of the tunnel.

Then they all plunged into a carcase covered with blind larvae and millipedes and cockroaches and leeches so fat they were nearly bursting. They began devouring the rotten flesh and the insects. And he ate too, but without ever sating his hunger.

“
The dogs of the Apocalypse neither eat nor allow others to eat
,” Sister Evelina used to say in the orphanage.

But all at once a cold light dazzled him, and in the centre of the ray of light the wraith-like figure of a woman said to him: ‘You are the Carrion Man.'

‘Who? Me?'

‘Yes, you!' and she pointed to him, while all the other creatures fled in terror. ‘You are the Carrion Man.'

And then he had woken up.

He suddenly kicked out at the television, which fell off the table but went on shrieking.

Why on earth had Ramona chosen to go through the woods?

She made a mistake. I warned her. It's not my fault she went
through the woods
.

If she had taken the bypass nothing would have happened and he would be all right and Rino wouldn't be in a coma. And everything would have been as it was before.

‘… was before,' the Carrion Man murmured and then started thumping himself on the leg.

The water had got too deep. Cristiano Zena had abandoned the wheelbarrow, and as he dragged the corpse towards the river dawn had broken over the plain.

He hadn't met anyone. He had been lucky – because of the floods no one had come that way.

Beppe must be awake by this time and would certainly be looking for him.

In front of him a long, rusty barbed-wire fence emerged from the water. Two big black crows were perched on it. Beyond, the pebbly shore was completely submerged by the flood. Cristiano put one foot on the rusty wire, which disappeared into the water, and pushed the body wrapped in cellophane over the barrier.

The river came up to his knees and the current was beginning to pull.

At first he had thought of tying some rocks to the body and sinking it in the river, but now he had decided that it was better to let the current carry it away.

By the time they found it, it would be a long way away and no one would be able to connect it with them. If he was lucky it would reach the sea, and there the fish would finish the job.

He looked for the last time at Fabiana wrapped in the transparent plastic.

He sighed. He didn't even feel sorry for her. He felt tired, drained, reduced to a beast. And alone.

Like a murderer
.

He thought wistfully of the days when he used to go down to the river to play.

He closed his eyes.

He released the body as he had so often done with branches, imagining that they were ships and galleons.

When he opened them again the corpse was a little island in the distance.

The three hundred and twenty-three metre long Sarca Bridge, designed by the distinguished architect Hiro Itoya and opened a few months previously to the accompaniment of hot-air balloons, brass bands and fireworks, had also felt the fury of the storm.

The south bank hadn't withstood the flood, and the highway, for hundreds of metres, had been invaded by the Forgese's muddy waters.

Teams of workmen had at once set about repairing the embankment, while pumps sucked up the water and spewed it back into the river, which seemed to be boiling as if a flame were burning below.

The traffic, pouring in from all the roads of the plain, had slowed down till it got stuck in a motionless, honking mass.

Now, less than thirty-six hours after the storm, one lane had been reopened and the column, made up of HGVs travelling to or from the frontier and cars full of commuters, was moving fitfully forward, controlled by temporary lights and police.

Right in the middle of the bridge, in a Mercedes S-Class as black as the wings of a condor, sat Mr and Mrs Baldi.

Rita Baldi, thirty-one years old, was a pale, thin little woman, dressed in a pair of jeans and a short T-shirt which left exposed her navel and a strip of seven-month pregnant stomach. At that moment she was painting her fingernails with varnish and now and then glancing up unseeingly at the sombre sky.

The bad weather had returned.

Vincenzo Baldi, thirty-five years old, looked like a cross between
Brad Pitt and the brown long-eared bat which lives on the island of Giglio. His unkempt beard merged with a pair of dark glasses. He was smoking a cigarette and blowing the clouds of nicotine out through a gap above the window.

They had been sitting in the queue for nearly two hours.

In front of them was a German HGV which was transporting organic compost (cow shit) to somewhere or other. The phosphorescent bottle of air freshener attached to the air vent was doing its best, but the smell of excrement filled the car.

They would never make it to the appointment with the engineer Bartolini now.

Bartolini had found what he claimed was a definitive solution to the problem of the damp which afflicted their little house like a mysterious curse. The moisture was rising up through the walls, which were becoming covered with multicoloured moulds. The plaster was cracking and crumbling away. The furniture was warping and the clothes in the drawers were rotting. The solution, according to Bartolini, was to cut horizontally through all the outer walls of the house and to insert an impermeable sheathing patented in Scandinavia, so as to block the fatal rising of the damp.

That queue had raised the tension in the car. And since they had got into the vehicle the two hadn't exchanged a single word.

As a matter of fact they hadn't had a dialogue of more than a few words for a week (they had quarrelled, though neither of them could now remember exactly what about), so Rita was amazed when Vincenzo said: ‘I've bought a new car.'

It took her a moment to recover from her surprise and another moment to wet her lips and reply: ‘What? I don't understand.' Though she understood perfectly well.

He cleared his throat and repeated: ‘I've bought a new car.'

Her nail brush hung suspended in the air: ‘What car?'

‘Another S-Class. But the next model up from this one. Petrol again. A few more horsepower. A few more accessories.'

Rita Baldi breathed in.

Her childhood friend Arianna Ronchi, who had become a member of parliament, said that, thanks to that profession, she had learned that before replying impulsively and regretting it later you should
always touch an object and let out your anger, as if you were discharging the electricity from a live battery. But it was in Rita Baldi's nature to reply instinctively, the same nature that induces a porcupine to raise its quills even on the approach of a predator. So she couldn't restrain herself: ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘Tell you what?'

It is a painful experience shared by many people that, once the conjugal knot has been tied, the man/woman whom you thought to be a brilliant, intuitive creature turns out to be a complete dickhead.

At that point what do you do?

In thirty-six per cent of cases, according to a recent survey, you call your lawyer and ask for a separation. Rita Baldi was one of the other sixty-four per cent. She had resigned herself to the situation, but her husband's idiocy never ceased to amaze her.

‘That you wanted to change the car! When did you get this one? Not even six months ago! Why didn't you tell me?'

‘Why do I have to tell you everything?'

What drove her wild with rage and gave her an irresistible desire to pick up things and smash them was that Vincenzo always answered a question with another question.

Rita took a deep breath and in an apparently placid voice tried again: ‘All right. I'll explain to you why. In the first place …' Another deep breath. ‘Because you've just bought a BMW motorbike. Then you bought a Danish refrigerator for …' she didn't want to but couldn't stop herself, ‘… your crappy wines. Then you bought that thing … What's it called? The tractor for cutting the grass. Then …'

He interrupted her. ‘Well? What's the problem? Who pays for them?'

‘Not you. Seeing that we have to pay instalments until 2070. Your son will still be paying them and probably his son will too …' She was too furious to be able to express this microeconomic concept. ‘Tell me something. Isn't this car all right? What's wrong with it? Is it crap? Well, if it's crap …' She kicked out with the stiletto heel of her Prada shoe at the air-conditioning control unit. And then at the display of the satnav.

Vincenzo Baldi's left arm moved with the deadly speed of a
scorpion's tail and she was pinned to the back of her seat by a hand gripping her carotid artery. Only then did her husband turn his head and smile. His sunglasses concealed two furrows burning with hatred. ‘You do that again and I'll kill you! I swear I'll kill you.'

And she, at this point, like a kid, a fawn or something of the kind, started thrashing about, screaming, wriggling and muttering: ‘Oh that's great! That's really great! Go on and kill me, then! Kill me! Kill me and your son, you pathetic …' and she was about to insult him when her survival instinct advised her to stop.

He withdrew his hand and she, gasping for breath, twisted away, picked up her handbag and got out of the car.

Vincenzo Baldi lowered the window: ‘Come back here. Where are you going?'

Another question.

Rita didn't reply. She threaded her way through the queuing cars, stepped over a barrier of traffic cones and, holding onto the guardrail, looked down from the bridge.

She knew she wouldn't jump off. Though imagining that she would made her feel much better.

Little one, if I jumped off I'd save you from a shit of a father
… But don't worry, I'll leave him sooner or late
r
, she said to the son she carried in her womb.