ambulance was coming, too.
To Manuel, time started flowing again only when he saw the agents getting out of the car in front of the house before his.
A couple in bathrobe and tracksuits pointed at him from afar. It was them who had called 113 after the double shot had ripped the stillness of the night. Manuel did not move. Next to him, with his fingerprints on the trigger, was the rifle with which he had killed a stranger.
Everything will be fine, he kept telling himself, while his eyes kept going from the agents to the corpse of the man in blue linen.
I am not a murderer.
The cops got back in the car, set it in motion and reached Manuel’s house.
I killed a wolf, not a man.
He was chanting that like a prayer.
I killed a wolf, not a man.
I killed...
Manuel left the ground when two cops hauled him by his arms.
June 16 – 00:32
Together with the forensics, a second ambulance arrived on the scene.
The girl, identified as Giada Bascherini and found lifeless at the bottom of the slope after a twenty feet jump, was the first to be taken to the hospital for further tests.
The driver and nurses who would take care of transporting the second victim, the lawyer Luca Menozzatti, were smoking silently, watching the operations of the agents around the corpse of the man. The adrenaline rush and the anxiety to provide for assistance quickly had abated as soon as they had realized that the face of the corpse was a chunk of mushy meat.
Manuel Bracconieri, in shock, sat handcuffed in the backseat of a patrol car while, a few yards away, inspector Brembati was patrolling the area, wiping sweat from his forehead from time to time with a crumpled handkerchief.
June 16 – 08:12
Four of the rabbits in the room had survived.
The smell of the blood of the tattered animals, mixed with that of the food in the tanks and the sweat of Alida, was unbearable.
In various places, the floor was covered with not-yet-clotted blood, and this time a few shreds had reached the ceiling. A chunk of meat fell to the ground with the soft thud of a wet rag.
Alida’s fury, amplified by her anxiety about Luca, had been more violent than usual. The music had been over for hours, and the only sound was that of the traffic, coming through the grid.
She opened her eyes and took a few seconds to realize she was still alive. Her temples were throbbing, and a loud and familiar sound kept coming to her head at regular intervals.
A distant, urgent ring.
The phone!
She opened the niche in the floor, picked the key and freed herself from the collar. The chain fell to the ground with a loud noise, scaring the rabbits scattered around the room. Before leaving, she made sure that the spotted rabbit was still alive. There it was, next to the food tanks. It stared at her motionless, attentive, its ears pricked.
Alida reached the kitchen supporting herself on the walls of the corridor, as if she were on a ship at sea, and answered in a faint voice.
"Yes, it’s me" she said, wishing for a robe with which to cover her body.
She looked out the window. No one was at the window in the opposite building, so she felt less uncomfortable.
She sat and listened.
When the policeman stopped talking, the cordless fell out of her hand.
She ran into the dressing room, and before she could dress she had to sit down on the bed and wait for the dizziness to grow less intense. She was weak, she should have eaten something, but her stomach was still upside-down.
She wore a light dress and sandals, she picked up the car keys and left the house.
In the elevator she noticed that her mouth was still stained with blood. She wiped it as best she could, then looked at her hands. Blood under her fingernails. She tried to clean them, then she decided against it. There was no time.
Before reaching the police station, where she had been summoned, she stopped at a newsstand and bought a newspaper. Back in the car, she opened it at the pages with the news about Rome and read in one go the article on the murder of Labaro.
Terror at the gates of Rome. Manuel Bracconieri, 34, interior designer, was arrested at dawn, following the double murder of Giada Bascherini, 23, and Luca Menozzatti, 40, north of the capital, in the town of Labaro. According to the reconstruction of the investigators, the first victim was pushed from the edge of the raise in Via di Torre Annunziatella, falling to the field below, while the man, a prominent lawyer living at Parioli, died after a gunshot exploded at close distance. The relationship between the murderer and the couple who was looking for intimacy in a street off Via Flaminia remains obscure, but it is possible that the man may have acted out of jealousy, having an affair with the girl in turn.
The article went on reporting the testimony of two neighbours, who had raised the alarm awakened by the shots, and the detail of the dog of the murderer found dead next to the victim's car.
Alida had ceased to store the information.
In her mind, there was only the sentence in the first few lines, multiplied: the couple who was looking for intimacy in a street off Via Flaminia.
She had bought the paper to be prepared for the interview with the police, but had not reckoned she could not be ready for what she was going to read. At least she had no more doubts: Luca’s metamorphosis was less angry and deprived of sexual instincts simply because he resorted to other methods of venting them in his everyday life.
He fucked girls.
Alida looked up from the newspaper and stared at the buildings of Piazza Ungheria. It was not the heat to make their contours sway, but the tears that had started filling her eyes.
June 16 – 09:47
A young cop made Alida sit down in a room smelling of ammonia and cigarettes. The walls were yellow like the skin of the fingers of a heavy smoker.
After a minute the door opened again and in came an overweight man, looking exhausted, with bags under his eyes and the large belly hidden by a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was boiling hot and seemed to be straight out of a six-hour interrogation that had not given him the answers he was hoping for. Before introducing himself, he lit a Marlboro 100's, sat opposite Alida and exhaled from his sweating nose two strands of smoke that spread over the table.
"You smoke?" inspector Brembati asked.
"No," Alida answered.
"I'm sorry for what happened to your husband." There was little conviction in the man's voice. As well as in his eyes.
Alida did not speak.
"Don’t be tense, we summoned you here just to ask a few routine questions about your life together."
"I'm not tense. Maybe you know more than I do."
"You mean the woman in the car?" the inspector asked, wiping his bald forehead with a handkerchief in bad need of being wringed out.
"That's what I read in the paper."
"Papers like to dwell on unimportant details. Dr. Menozzatti was with a younger woman, that much is true, but we can’t be certain that they were intimate."
"What do you think they were doing? Looking at the stars?"
"Perhaps at the moon," the inspector said.
Alida's throat clenched like a fist and she did not swallow until Brembati continued.
"I mean, until we receive the lab results we cannot discard any hypothesis. We are currently examining the bodies for signs of sexual intercourse, but you understand, in other words... if you already knew that your husband had an affair, that would speed up our operations."
Alida gripped the arms of the chair. "I thought he was faithful, at least until an hour ago. I know nothing about that woman."
"Does the name Manuel Bracconieri mean something to you?" Brembati showed Alida a photo of the murderer. "Maybe there was bad blood between him and your husband. It might have been a settling of scores."
"Because they dated the same woman?" Alida asked.
The inspector agreed with a nod.
"I don’t know w
ho he is," Alida said.
"Had your husband made any enemy? People who bothered him?"
"Not that I know."
"You sure?"
"Inspector, can I ask you a question?" Alida asked, staring into his eyes. Only now she realized that a dense patch of capillaries had exploded on his left cheekbone. Stress, maybe. Or alcohol.
Brembati leaned slightly forward. "Tell me."
"Did this Manuel Bracconieri" Alida asked, glancing again at the photo "suffer any injuries or wounds that don’t heal and don’t stop bleeding?"
The inspector didn’t answer, his face remained blank, but Alida understood she had hit the mark.
"Are you wondering how I know? Don’t be surprised, maybe newspapers like to fictionalize facts, but the journalist who wrote that article had to be well informed. One who liked details."
The inspector moistened his upper lip. He did not need to. Even that part of his body was sweating profusely. He spoke in the tone of someone confessing some dirty deeds to a priest, "The murderer was wounded in the chest by what looks like a dog's paw."
"His Schnauzer, probably," Alida suggested.
"Probably."
Although the idea of an innocent man in prison because of the man who had betrayed her hurt her more than the bite of the moon, she could not afford to say anything.
The secret of the race. Before anything else.
"Have you analyzed the dog’s claws?" she asked, studying the small eyes of the inspector.
"What?"
"To look for traces of skin or blood of the murderer."
"No need, it was the only animal at the murder scene. No one else could have inflicted those wounds to Bracconieri."
A nervous silence fell in the room, broken only by the