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
PROLOGUE
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.
PART ONE
New York
CHAPTER 1
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 b
y 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.
The woman realized what he was doing, and the knowledge that she was part of that creation brought on another orgasm, even stronger than the previous one, which forced her to curl up in a foetal position.
Drained, Jerry slid to the floor until he was lying with his face turned towards the large windows that looked out on the East River. Even though they were on the seventh floor, he could still sense the reflection of the full moon on the dirty water. He moved his head slightly and there it was – a luminous disc in the middle of the window on the left.
The previous evening, the radio had said there would be an eclipse – which would be visible from that part of the coast. At that very moment, a thin black border was starting to gnaw at the impassive circle of the moon.
Jerry started trembling with emotion.
His mind went back to 11 September 2001. The clamour after the first plane struck – the screams, the sirens, the unmistakable sounds of panic – had come in through his open windows. He had gone up to the roof of his building on Water Street and from there had watched as the second plane struck – and then as the Twin Towers collapsed. It was a master piece of destruction, a perfect example of how civilization could only be redeemed through its own annihilation. And if that was true of civilization, how much truer was it of art, which represented the most advanced outpost of civilization. The fact that thousands of people had died in that collapse did not greatly concern him. Everything had its price, and those deaths were small change compared with what the world had gained from the event.
That was the day he had decided to change his name to Jerry Ko, a deliberately transparent play on words, evoking Jericho, the Biblical city whose impregnable walls had fallen at the mere sound of a trumpet. He was going to bring the walls down too, he had resolved – and himself with them.
As for his real name, he had preferred to forget it, along with the whole of his previous life. There was nothing in that life that was worth preserving.
The nameless woman was crawling towards him, her movements made awkward by the paint drying on her body. He felt her hand touch his shoulder, and then her breath, still hot with pleasure, next to his ear, saying, ‘Jerry, that was really—’
Jerry clapped – and a sensor immediately switched off all the lights except for the shifting colours of the TV screens. Then he placed a hand on the woman’s back and pushed her roughly away.
Not now, he thought.
‘Not now,’ he said.
‘But I . . .’
The woman’s voice faded to a whimper as Jerry pushed her even further away.
‘Be quiet and don’t move,’ he ordered.
She lay there motionless and Jerry again looked at the circle of the moon, by now half swallowed by the darkness. He didn’t care that the phenomenon he was witnessing had a scientific explanation. All he cared about was the allegorical significance of it.
He kept watching the eclipse, sinking into the after-effects of the drugs and the physical effort, until the moon became a black disc surrounded by light hanging in the sky of Hell.
He closed his eyes and, as he drifted into sleep, Jerry Ko hoped the moon would never return.
CHAPTER 2
The woman opened her eyes and immediately closed them again: the daylight coming in through the windows was too bright. She had drunk a lot of champagne the previous night, and now her tongue felt furred and there was an awful taste in her mouth.
She realized that she had been sleeping completely naked on the floor and that it was the cold that had woken her. She shivered and curled up, searching for warmth in the same position in which the previous evening she had sought escape from a truly overwhelming orgasm. It had been a shattering experience. For the first time ever, she had felt completely part of something, something she would remember for the rest of her life. She kept her eyes closed for a little while longer, as if to preserve the images of that amazing event, and her whole body broke out in goose bumps, partly from the cold, partly from the excitement.
Then, with a sigh, she cautiously opened her eyes again. The first thing she saw was Jerry Ko’s back, still naked, the now congealed red paint looking scaly. The loft was lit by the blue glow of early morning, as well as the flashing of the TV screens. They had probably been on all night. The woman wondered if that was the work that had . . .
As if becoming aware of a change behind him, Jerry turned and looked at her with eyes so red, she had the impression that the paint he had smeared himself with last night had gone inside him. He stared at her as if he had never seen her before. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
The question unsettled her, and all at once she felt absurdly embarrassed by her own nakedness. She sat up and put her arms around her legs. Her skin felt strange because of the congealed paint, as though a thousand tiny needles were pricking her simultaneously. A few coloured scales fell on the white sheet beneath her.
‘I’m Meredith.’
‘Meredith, of course.’
Jerry Ko gave a slight nod, as if there was something inevitable about the name. Then he turned his back on her again and resumed dipping his hands straight into the pots of paint and spreading colours on the sheet. Meredith had the impression he was somehow erasing her presence from the room, or from the world.
His hoarse voice surprised her as she was trying to get up without causing abrasions to her skin. ‘Don’t worry about the paint. It’s non-toxic watercolour, the kind children play with. Just take a shower and it’ll disappear. The bahroom’s at the back on the left.’
Jerry heard her steps as she walked away – then, after a while, the roar of the shower.
Wash and go, Meredith . . .
He knew the kind of woman she was. If he gave her the slightest encouragement, she’d stick to him like a tattoo, and he wasn’t going to have that. She had been a means to an end and nothing more. Now that her usefulness was over, she had to disappear. In his mind, he had a vague memory of meeting her th
e previous evening at an opening to which his dealer, LaFayette Johnson, had dragged him. Somewhere on Broadway, he seemed to recall. It was a photographic show, displaying the work of a journalist who had lived for a couple of years out in the wilds of Africa, photographing the members of a supposedly unspoiled tribe.
He had wandered for a long time among those faces and voices and clothes without the slightest curiosity as to who was who and what was what. After a while, the boredom of it all had started to cancel the effect of the ecstasy pill he had taken before leaving home and he longed to be somewhere more exciting.
‘Are you Jerry Ko?’
He had turned towards the voice, to be confronted by a woman so grey, she seemed made of vicuna. Her bright red lipstick was the only splash of colour, although the worship in her eyes shone as brightly as it did.
‘Do I have any alternative?’ he had replied.
The woman had not picked up on the dismissal implicit in his words. She had kept going – in love perhaps with the sound of her own voice, like all the people around them. ‘I know your work. I saw your last show. It was so . . .’
Jerry would never know exactly what his last show had been like. He had continued to stare at the woman’s red lips as they moved, without hearing the words coming out of them . . . and that was when the idea had come to him.
Taking her by the arm, he had drawn her towards the door. ‘If you like my work, come with me.’