The Killer in My Eyes

Giorgio Faletti
graduated with a degree in Law and went on to become a singer-songwriter, TV comedian and actor.

I Kill
was his first thriller. Published in 2002, it topped the bestseller lists for over a year. The novel has since been translated into more than twenty-five languages, including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Also by Giorgio Faletti

I Kill

I Am God

Constable & Robinson Ltd

55–56 Russell Square

London WC1B 4HP

www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

Copyright © Giorgio Faletti, 2012

Translation copyright © Howard Curtis, 2012

The right of Giorgio Faletti to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

Publication data is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84901-998-9 (B-format paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-78033-387-8 (A-format paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-78033-522-3 (ebook)

Printed and bound in the UK

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To Roberta, the only one

Song of the Woman Who Wanted To Be a Sailor

I stand here on this cliff

my eyes embrace the sea
,

I dream the same old dreams

these dreams won’t let me be

The surface of the waves

like craters on the moon
,

like twisting trails of snakes

or trees cut down too soon.

And this strange old heart of mine

now sets sail upon the sea . . .

I stand here on this cliff

look down upon the sea
,

I hear the mermaids sing
,

singing their song to me.

Their song is sweet to hear
,

as honey on the tongue
,

Their song strong as the wind

that blows down old and young.

There’s no glory or desire

that can tear my dreams apart.

There’s no grindstone known to man

Can crush this rock inside my heart.

Connor Slave
from the album
Lies of Darkness

The darkness and the waiting are the same colour.

One day, a woman will be sitting in the dark, and she will have had enough of both to be scared of them. She will have learned the hard way that sometimes sight isn’t exclusively physical, it’s also mental. Beyond the curtains in the place where she waits, beyond the windows, in the yellow glare of 1,000 lights, the dazzle of 1,000 neon signs, will lie the madness they call New York.

On the low table next to her chair, there will be a Beretta 92 SBM – a gun with a slightly smaller handle than usual, expressly designed for women.

She will have cocked it before putting it down on the glass table top, and the noise of the bolt will have echoed in the silence of the room like the sound of a bone cracking.

Gradually, her eyes will have grown accustomed to the darkness and she will have gained some idea of the place where she is, even with the lights off. She will be staring at the wall in front of her, sensing rather than seeing, the dark patch of a door.

Once, at school, she learned that when you look intensely at a coloured surface and then take your eyes away, there remains imprinted on your pupils a bright patch of colour exactly complementary to the one you have just been staring at. This cannot happen in the dark, however, since darkness generates only more darkness.

When the person she is waiting for has arrived, light will suddenly flood the room.

After an apparently endless road travelled, after a long journey down a tunnel where only a few paltry lamps showed the way, two people will finally emerge into the light. The only two people in possession of the truth.

A woman scared by the knowledge that she has it.

And the man she is waiting for.

The killer.

Stark naked, Jerry Ko slid to his knees on the huge white sheet he had taped to the floor and, after a moment’s contemplation, plunged his hands in the big can of red paint between his legs and raised his arms towards the ceiling, letting the paint run slowly down to his elbows. There was something of the pagan ritual about the gesture, the transformation of the human form in order to achieve contact with a higher spirit. With the same fluid movements, he proceeded to smear the paint over his body, sparing only the areas around his penis, mouth and eyes. Gradually, the blood-red paint gave him the appearance he wanted: one single vast, festering wound.

He looked up at the woman. She stood there in front of him, also stark naked, her body painted a different colour, a particularly intense shade of blue.

Jerry reached out and touched her outstretched hands with his own. The sound as their palms came together was the sucking of liquid on liquid. The colours started blending into one another. Slowly he guided her until she was kneeling in front of him. The woman, whose name he had completely forgotten, was somehow indeterminate, both in age and physical appearance. In normal circumstances, Jerry would have considered her almost repulsive, but right now she was perfect for the work he was planning. To his mind, in fact, shrouded as it still was in the effects of the pills he had taken earlier that evening, disgust was an essential component of the work. As he looked at her slightly pendulous breasts, which not even that bright colour could improve, his penis started swelling. His arousal had nothing to do with the woman’s nakedness, but everything to do with the sexual effect that making one of his works always had on him. Slowly, he lay down on the sheet, his mind engorged by the coloured shapes his body was tracing on what would become one single huge painting, subdivided into panels of equal size.

For Jerry Ko, art – creation – was above all a matter of chance, of chaos. That was why it needed two things intimately connected with chaos: sex and drugs.

Jerry Ko was completely crazy. Or at least, in his total narcissism, he liked to think so. He motioned to the woman whose name he couldn’t remember to come closer. She lay down on top of him, placing her hands either side of him, her eyes half closed and her breathing slightly laboured. Jerry felt her paint-smeared hair lightly brush his navel. He grabbed her head and guided it towards his now completely erect member, which stood out white against his painted body. Her lips opened and he felt the sticky, worshipping warmth of her mouth envelop him completely.

Now he could see the two of them as superimposed patches of colour reflected in the large mirror on the ceiling. The slight movement of the woman’s head was barely visible at that distance, but he could feel it. A sense of elation welled up in him. He pressed his hands, palms open, on the white sheet beneath him. When he looked up and saw the prints he had left on the sheet, his excitement increased.

Why waste time painting a body on canvas when that body could paint itself?

He saw in the mirror, and felt on his skin, the blue hands of the nameless woman move up his sides, leaving two coloured stripes on his red body.

He heard her say, ‘Oh Jerry, I’m so—’

‘Shhh.’ He silenced her by placing a finger on her lips. Red paint on red lipstick.

The loft was dimly lit, most of the light coming from a bank of silent TV screens, linked together and computer-programmed to show a random sequence of colour mixtures, interrupted every now and again by a dissolve that reduced these mixtures to fragments and recomposed them into images of terrible disasters and atrocities – thousands of bodies floating along a river during the Rwanda massacres, episodes from the Holocaust, or the atomic mushroom cloud over Hiroshima – alternating with highly explicit sex scenes.

‘Quiet, now,’ Jerry whispered. ‘I can’t speak. I mustn’t speak.’

He forced the nameless woman to lie down beside him, then pointed at their reflections in the ceiling mirror.

‘I have to think. I have to
see
.’

He felt the woman’s excitement clothe her like an aura. Turning abruptly, he opened her legs and penetrated her in a single violent movement. In so doing, he knocked over the can of paint he had used on himself. From her supine position, the woman saw the red paint spread across the white sheet, as if all the blood in her body was suddenly gushing out, and the almost liturgical purpose of their union overwhelmed her. Her desire turned to frenzy and she began moaning louder and louder, in perfect rhythm with the urgent thrusts of the man she held between her loins.

Even though she didn’t know it, Jerry was convinced of the fact that both sex and art were destined to end in failure. That an artist carried within himself the seeds of his own destruction.

However many nameless women he screwed on sheets fixed to the floor, however much paint he applied to surfaces prepared to welcome them, the work he yearned for would forever remain beyond his reach, a fleeting idea immediately obscured by the images of everyday life.

With a long moan, the woman reached orgasm, trying in vain with her hands to grip the sheet. Jerry could resist no longer. Leaping to his feet, he masturbated frantically, scattering his seed over the marks their movements had left, as if trying in some unnatural, blasphemous way to inseminate the sheet.