Often Cristiano, in his previous existence, had found himself reflecting, as he watched the television news, on the errors committed by Italian murderers. They always made a complete hash of things, leaving lots of clues, and inevitably got caught.
He would make a better job of it. For everything to work he would have to imagine that that corpse was just like a supermarket chicken when you take it out of its wrapper.
Right, here goes.
He took hold of its feet and pulled it to the edge of the van. He managed to slide it into the wheelbarrow without too much difficulty. He closed the doors.
The cleaning of the van could wait till later.
He pushed the wheelbarrow into the garage, and pulled down the shutter.
He had worked the plan out carefully. He had to remove all clues from the body, then wrap it up and throw it in the river.
He took a transparent plastic dust sheet off the piano, then cleared the ping-pong table of all the cardboard boxes, engine parts and tyres and spread the plastic sheet over it. He found a paint-splashed board which had been dumped in the corner among some iron pipes, and laid it obliquely against the table. He put Fabiana’s corpse onto the board, levered it up to the level of the table and rolled it off. Then he laid it out in the middle, as on a dissecting table in a morgue.
Fabiana seemed heavier than when he had put her in the van the night before.
Throughout the operation he had avoided looking at the head, but now he couldn’t avoid it. That mask smeared with congealed blood and framed with a mass of curly blonde hair had been the face of the prettiest girl in the school, the one all the boys lusted after.
Why did he kill her?
He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He tried desperately to find an answer, but it was baffling. How could he have smashed in the head of such a beautiful girl? And what had Fabiana done to deserve being killed?
His father …
Stop it.
… kneeling over Fabiana’s body as it lay there in the rain …
Stop it!
… lifted up the stone …
STOP THINKING!!!
… and brought it down.
Cristiano breathed in and once again smelled the sickly odour of carrion, which entered his mouth and nose and went down his throat like a mephitic gas. His stomach and the rest of his body started shaking convulsively and he had to take three steps backwards to stop himself throwing up the rusks he had just eaten.
He picked up an Esselunga plastic bag and put it over her head in an attempt to conquer his revulsion.
When he felt that the nausea had passed he looked again at the girl’s body lying with its legs and arms outspread in the middle of the green table. With the plastic bag over the head it was better.
He observed her. The skin was yellowish. The violet veins, where nothing now flowed, had come to the surface, like the myriad offshoots of a flash of lightning. The clothes caked with grime and blood. The fly of the jeans open. The jacket open. The cardigan and T-shirt torn, as if a wolf had tried to tear her apart. The areola of a nipple emerged from the white lace bra. A few blondish hairs stuck out from the panties.
A thousand times he had imagined seeing her naked, but never like this.
He would have to clean her nails.
That’s where they always catch you out. That’s where they find a wisp of wool, a piece of the murderer’s skin, and all it takes is a DNA test and you’re fucked. And then he would have to …
‘We’ve found traces of seminal fluid inside the vagina. We’ve got him.’ That’s what they always said in the TV films.
So?
So he would have to pull down her knickers. And wash her. Inside and outside.
No, not that.
He would never be able to do it. It was too much. Besides, the trousers were open, but the knickers were pulled up.
He didn’t screw her.
No, he didn’t screw her. My father would never do a thing like that to a fourteen-year-old girl.
He picked up the hosepipe.
But why did he kill her?
And the detergent to wash the grease off his hands.
Because Rino Zena is a homicidal maniac.
Then he ought to go to the police.
“My father has murdered Fabiana Ponticelli. She’s in our garage.”
No. There must be another explanation. Of course there must. When his father came out of his coma he would tell him and then he would understand everything.
His father was a lout and a drunkard, but not a murderer.
But the other night he hurt that blonde who came into my bedroom. That was just a kick up the backside, though. That’s different. My father’s a good man.
He examined the girl’s right hand, frowning. There was something strange, that didn’t seem right, but he couldn’t think what. He looked at her left hand. He compared them.
The ring was missing. The skull ring.
Fabiana always had it on her finger.
Where is it?
210
Beppe Trecca woke up with a start, turned over and almost fell off the sofa. For a few moments he couldn’t make out where he was. He looked around in bewilderment.
The old television, still on. A folding chair.
This was Cristiano Zena’s house.
He sat up and yawned, scratching his head. His back ached and he was itching all over.
Are there fleas here?
Anything was possible in this pigsty. Even crabs and headlice.
He must go and have a pee and drink some water. It seemed as if he had half a kilo of salt in his mouth. The effect of that rice with vegetable stock.
He looked at his Swatch.
Four forty-five.
He stood up, continuing to yawn. He massaged the base of his spine, where he had a cracked vertebra.
He couldn’t spend another night on that sofa. The doctor had told him to sleep without a pillow on an orthopaedic mattress, preferably a latex one.
It was that imbecile Father Italo’s fault that he was in such a bad way. Three years before, in a village in Burkina Faso, Father Italo, a Dominican missionary from Caianello, had hit him with a shovel and broken his third lumbar vertebra.
Beppe Trecca had been there with a group of volunteers, digging wells for the international project ‘A Smile for Africa’. Under a sun that roasted your neurons, among skeletal cows, he was working because he thought it was a worthy cause and because he was going out with Donatella Grasso, one of the group leaders.
It was exhausting work and Beppe, for some unknown reason, had been demoted from a supervising role to one of manual labour.
On the day of the accident, plagued by flies, he had spent the whole morning unloading concrete bricks, under the tyrannical eye of Father Italo. At last lunchtime had come. He had gulped down a thick soup which contained pieces of meat that looked like wood shavings. Afterwards, to get rid of the taste of garlic, he had decided to suck a refreshing mint.
He had searched for the packet in his trouser pocket and found that there was a hole in it and that the mints had fallen down into the seat of his trousers. He had rested one hand on the cement mixer and started waggling his leg to make them fall out onto the ground.
A blood-curdling yell had broken the silence of the savannah. Beppe had barely had time to turn his head and see Father Italo leap forward and whack him in the kidneys with a shovel.
The social worker had gone down like a ninepin while the Dominican yelled: ‘Turn off the electricity! He’s been electrocuted! He’s been electrocuted! Turn it off!’
The excruciating pain and the surprise had prevented Beppe from saying anything. He had tried to get up but the priest, like a man possessed, had with the help of three blacks thrown him down again and grabbed his face and opened his mouth. ‘The tongue! The tongue! He’ll bite his tongue. Hold it still, for pity’s sake!’
Two days later, groggy with painkillers, the social worker had been put on a plane and re
patriated 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!’
211
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.
212
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.
213
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.
214
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 c
ondor, 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.’