The Crossroads (45 page)

She closed her eyes and opened them again. A pleasant smell of water and mud rose up from the river, which seemed to be exploding between its concrete banks.

Her gaze fell on the remains of some trees which had got caught against the pier that supported the bridge. The branches were covered, like a tramp's Christmas tree, with coloured plastic bags. Nearby two ducks were resting. A male with a shiny green head and a female in her light-brown livery. That couple of fowls certainly got on well. They lay there serenely, one beside the other, cleaning their wings on a big plastic parcel …

‘What's that?' she said out loud.

Rita Baldi squinted and put up her hand to screen her eyes from the glare.

She couldn't make it out. It looked like …

She reached into her handbag for a pair of thin Dolce&Gabbana glasses and put them on.

With an instinctive gesture she touched the place where her baby was growing, and then started screaming.

The Carrion Man was rotting.

In his whole life he had never felt so bad. Not even after he'd had the electric shock. On that occasion he had felt fire shoot through him, then darkness.

Now it was different. Now he was slowly rotting.

He was lying on the bed and kept rubbing his stomach, which was as hard and taut as a drum.

He could feel them. The fly larvae moved, they fed on his flesh and corroded his guts. The pain began from there and spread through his whole body, right out into his hair and toenails.

Maybe I should go to hospital
.

But they would ask him a lot of questions. They would ask him how he had got into that state and then they would make him stay.

He knew what people were like. People wanted to know. People asked questions.

They would put him next to Rino. And Rino would open his eyes, he would sit up, pointing his finger, and shout: ‘It was him! It was him! He killed the girl.'

And you'll go to prison, where at night they take you and
…

At the thought of going to prison a blade of searing pain cut through his shoulder and released a thousand sparks up through his neck and into his head. He felt the pain spurt out from his tainted flesh, penetrate the sweat-soaked mattress, seep down through the legs of the bed, spread over the floor and down through the walls, through the bricks, into the foundations, along the pipes, into the dark earth and from there into the roots of the trees, which dried up and shed their leaves and withered in silence.

The Carrion Man placed on his stomach the crucifix given to him by Ricky, the messenger of God, and it seemed to bring a little relief.

He got up, shuffled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

The skull of death showed through the skin of his face. He raised the hood of his bathrobe and his bony face disappeared, swallowed up by shadows. Only his glistening, bloodshot eyes and yellowish teeth stood out, as if hanging in the void.

That was the face of death. And when it came out of his corpse it would smile as he was doing at that moment.

When he was small he'd had meningitis and his temperature had risen above forty.

‘It was a miracle you didn't die. You must thank the Lord,' the nuns said to him.

The fever had been so strong they had immersed him in the fountain opposite the orphanage. He remembered there being eels in the basin and the water boiling and the eels being cooked and turning white.

But perhaps it never happened
.

He remembered the aspirin that dissolved. That had happened.

He saw it in front of him. An enormous white disc which undulated in the glass and broke down into bubbles, spray and froth.

He wanted the aspirin that dissolved. He would give everything he owned to feel its salty taste on his dry tongue.

He went into the kitchen. On the dresser was a jamjar full of cents and half-euros. He had enough money to buy some aspirin.

The problem was going outside. The mere thought of meeting people made him feel as if he was drowning, as if he was being seized by a thousand hands and dragged down to the bottom of the ocean.

(
If you don't take an aspirin you'll die
.)

At first he didn't recognise the voice. Then he smiled.

Cristiano.

It was Cristiano's voice.

How long was it since he had last thought of him? How could he have forgotten him? He was his best friend, his only true friend.

A pang, sharper than the pain he felt in his body, gripped his heart and something hard and pointed pierced his throat.

It had only taken one night and everything had changed.

(
What have you done
?
)

(
How could you
?
)

It wasn't me. It was God. I didn't want to do it, truly I didn't
.
I swear to you, I didn't want to. It was God who made me do those
things. It's nothing to do with me
.

‘Everything has changed,' he said, and he felt his eyes brim with tears.

He thought of his strolls round the shopping mall with Cristiano, their walks by the riverside, the evenings they spent eating pizza and watching TV with Rino and Danilo.

None of that would happen any more.

He was no longer Quattro Formaggi. He was the Carrion Man now.

He put on – yelping with pain as he did so – some trousers, a high-collared cardigan, his cape and scarf, and stuck a pompom hat on his head.

(
You must go straight to the chemist's, buy the aspirin and come
home as quickly as possible. If you do that you won't come to any
harm
.)

He took a handful of coins from the jamjar, crossed himself, walked towards the entrance and opened the door of hell.

‘Why all the traffic? I don't understand,' grumbled Beppe Trecca at the wheel of his Puma. Cristiano, with his hoodie pulled down over his forehead and his arms crossed, barely heard the social worker.

Drowsily he gazed out of the window at the factory buildings, the sales outlets and the long fences on each side of the road.

They would move five metres, then stop. It was torture. They were on the highway and in half an hour they had only moved about half a kilometre.

Trecca thumped the steering wheel irritably. ‘Something must have happened. An accident. It's not normal, this traffic.'

Cristiano observed him out of the corner of his eye. He had never seen him so agitated.

He closed his eyelids and rested his head against the window.

Why hasn't he sent me to the judge yet?

He felt too tired to answer his own question. He wished he could
sleep for another twelve hours. And he couldn't face the thought of going back to his father and seeing him on that bed.

The idea that the sun rose and set, that people sat in traffic jams, that they could drop an atomic bomb, that Christ could come back down to Earth, and that the male nurses could take the piss out of his father, laugh at him, while he lay there stretched out like a puppet, made him feel sick, and so angry that his hands were beginning to tingle.

If I catch anyone making fun of him I'll kill them, I swear to
God I will
.

“
Learn to sleep lightly, Cristiano. It's when you're asleep that
the buggers will get you!
” his father had said the night he had sent him to kill Castardin's dog. It seemed as if a century had passed.

No, he couldn't face going to see him.

He wanted to go back home and look for the ring, that fucking skull ring. After abandoning the corpse in the river Cristiano had returned home and while Trecca slept he had searched for it.

He had turned the garage upside down, and he had looked carefully in the van when he had cleaned it up.

It wasn't there.

He had searched in the jacket and trousers that his father had been wearing.

It wasn't there either.

It had to be still in the woods!

His father's fingerprints on that ring were the only evidence that could link him with Fabiana's death.

‘Do you think I ought to turn off down Via Borromeo? I wonder if …' Trecca asked him.

Cristiano pretended to be asleep. Being in the traffic jam meant not being in the hospital.

“
Trecca's here. Quick, get out the Monopoly
.”

The image of him and his father hurriedly setting out the little houses and the money on the board while Trecca parked his car appeared on the screen of his eyelids, and a faint smile curled his lips.

One thing Cristiano just couldn't understand was why this guy was busting his arse for him.

If the roles were reversed I wouldn't lift a finger
.

Trecca had gone to pick him up at the hospital, taken him home, done his back in sleeping on the sofa and now he was taking him to see his father again.

“
Nobody does anything for anybody. Look behind
people's
actions, Cristiano
.” That was what Rino had taught him.

And yet he had a hunch Beppe Trecca wouldn't be getting any overtime pay at the end of the month for looking after him.

Maybe he just likes me
.

Anyway, in a few days, if his father didn't wake up, the judge would bung him into a home or foster him out to some shithead.

He must find Danilo as soon as possible. He could adopt him, at least until papa came out of the coma.

If I can find him, that is
.

And if they didn't let him stay with Danilo, he would run away.

Beppe Trecca was dying for a coffee.

‘Why all the traffic? I don't understand,' he said, without expecting any reply from Cristiano.

About a kilometre down the road there was a bar, but with this tailback … He couldn't even imagine how long it would take.

The social worker thumped the steering wheel irritably. ‘Something must have happened. An accident. It's not normal, this traffic.'

As well as a coffee, he could do with a good massage. The springs of that battered old sofa had given him a terrible backache.

What a hellish night he'd had. Too cold, much too cold. And on top of that the roar of the trucks on the highway. When you closed your eyes you felt as if you were lying on the hard shoulder of a motorway.

He peeked at Cristiano out of the corner of his eye.

He had hidden himself in his hoodie and seemed to be asleep.

Now would be the perfect time to tell him everything.

“
Listen, Cristiano, I've got to tell you something. Danilo's been
killed in a car accident.” No, on second thoughts maybe I'll tell him
later
.

Later that day he would also have to call the juvenile judge. Maybe he could persuade him to wait a bit longer. A few days.

Long enough for Ida to forget him.

But how long would it take
him
to forget
her
?

He had only spent one day without seeing her or speaking to her, but it seemed like a year. Previously they had met all the time. Once a week they would go shopping at the Quattro Camini. And Ida would stop him buying deep-frozen junk food. Then he would take her to pick up the children from the swimming pool. And if they happened not to meet for a couple of days they would speak on the phone. She was his best friend.

My life partner
.

He kept thinking obsessively of the two of them in the camper making love. Of the pleasant smell of her skin. Of her hair, so smooth to the touch. Of feeling her tremble in his arms. It had been the most beautiful thing in his life. And for the first time he had behaved like a man. He had taken their lives in hand and had been ready to face up to his responsibilities.

Suddenly he had understood what it meant to live.

But now, in the desperate state in which he found himself, he would erase that night and go back to the days when they had been just friends. The days when he used to lie to himself.

He looked around.

To the right was Truffarelli's, a big sanitaryware outlet.

He had gone there with her to choose the majolica for the toilet in the house in the mountains that Mario had bought.

Everything on that cursed plain reminded him of her.

I can't stand any more!

He must leave. For some faraway place. For Burkina Faso, to dig artesian wells. It was the only thing for it. Once he had found Cristiano a home he would resign from his job and just go.

It had been easy to get as far as the chemist's.

No one had given him so much as a passing glance. Or if they had, the Carrion Man hadn't noticed, because he had kept his eyes on the ground.

The old chemist's shop, Molinari's, with its flashing red cross and its window display with the torso of a brown man covered in bandages and advertisements for skin-toning creams, was there, on the other side of the road.

Now all he had to do was go in, ask for the aspirin, pay and make his escape.

The Carrion Man scratched his cheek, screwed up his lips and thumped himself several times on the thigh.

He couldn't make up his mind whether to go in or not. The chemist was mad, completely out of his mind. He had got the idea, from God knows where, that the Carrion Man was a keen Juventus fan.

The Carrion Man hated madmen, strange people, anyone abnormal. And he loathed football.

He seldom went to the chemist's, but whenever he did that guy, a skinny man with a receding hairline and a goatee beard, would start talking to him about players he had never heard of and the league tables, and once he had invited him to go to Turin to watch a Champions League match.

‘Go on, why don't you join us? We're a great bunch of lads. We always have a great time. We're going by coach.'

The Carrion Man had a problem: if anyone said something about him that wasn't true, he couldn't put them right. He was too shy.

Once he had agreed to do a yoga course just because a guy who worked with him in the construction firm had told him he was sure he would like it.