Authors: Niccolo Ammaniti
"An angel..." he muttered. He looked with a strange smile at
Beppe, the truck driver in the leather vest, at the car drivers who
seemed like mannequins and behind them, beyond the highway, at
a green strip of waste land which separated two plowed fields and
across which he could run forever till he came to where he would
be free. Free.
He looked again at Trecca, then sprinted toward the fields and
with an incredible leap hurdled the guardrail and for an endless
moment felt as if he was flying.
The rain poured down on the umbrellas of hundreds of curious
bystanders looking down from the bridge and the embankments,
it poured down on the silvery spotlights that shed beams of aseptic
light on the black waves of the river and on the cellophane that
hid the corpse, it poured down on the raincoats of the traffic police,
it poured down on a big makeshift tent that had been erected on
the very spot where Rita Baldi had first seen the corpse, it poured
down on the police cars and the fire engines, it poured down on
the four-by-fours of the divers and on the minibuses of the local
television stations and on the yellow poncho of the Carrion Man.
He was there, squeezed in among the crowd, looking down from
the bridge.
Fifty yards below, a red rubber dinghy was fighting the rapids
and eddies, trying to reach the body wrapped in plastic.
The Carrion Man's gaze shifted from the black river to the
embankments crammed with umbrellas, from there slid over the
highway completely covered with stationary cars and over the soaked
policemen, rose up into the sky where a helicopter was whirring
and finally came to rest on his own trembling hands.
The hands that had produced all this ...
When an ant finds the corpse of a mouse it doesn't keep the discovery to itself. The first thing it does is to run like mad to the
anthill and tell everyone: "Hurry! Hurry! You'll never guess what
I've found!"
Half an hour later the carcass is completely covered with ants.
It's exactly the same with human beings.
If he hadn't killed the girl, all those people would now be in their
homes. Not standing there shivering in the rain to see what he had
done.
It had been him who had created that ten mile line of cars, too.
He'd had those spotlights put there. He had made those carabinieri
come. And he would make people sit down at a table to write about
him.
And the incredible thing was that nobody could imagine that the
man God had ordered to do it was there in their midst.
You see that guy over there? That poor cripple you all think is
a pathetic little bastard? Ladies and gentlemen, it was him. He was
the one to whom God entrusted the mission.
And they all start clapping and cheering.
"Bravo! Bravo! You lucky man!"
This situation was very agreeable. Very agreeable indeed.
The Carrion Man remembered that once Duccio Pinelli, a welder
who had worked in their team at Euroedil, had described to him
and Rino how at the age of eighteen, after getting drunk at the pub,
he had run over a cyclist on the Bogognano road. Ambulances and
police cars had come to the scene of the accident, and the road, just
as it was at that moment, had been closed for ages and there had
been a backup ten miles long.
"That was the most important thing I've done in my whole life,"
he had explained. "Do you know how many people there are in a
ten mile line of cars? Thousands. Do you realize how many thousands of people wasted four hours of their lives because of me? They
missed appointments, arrived late at work, and God knows what
incredible opportunities they missed. I changed their destinies.
Starting with those of the cyclist and his family. No, important isn't
the right word. Important sounds like something positive. There's
another word, a better one, which I can't think of. It's on the tip
of my tongue..."
"Significant?" Rino had suggested, in a drunken stupor.
"That's the word! Significant! In the rest of my life I must have
changed the destinies of two, maybe three people at most. But on
the day of the accident I changed the destinies of thousands of
people." He had sat there in silence for a long time, his eyes
staring into nothingness. Then suddenly he had added: "Maybe
for the better in some cases, who knows. Perhaps because of those
four hours' delay two people had the chance to meet, get to know
each other and fall in love." Then he had stretched his arms and
concluded: "Yes, that was the most significant moment of my
life."
And now the Carrion Man, too, had done something significant.
Something a thousand times more significant than what Duccio
Pinelli had done.
This would make the front pages, perhaps even the TV news.
Cristiano Zena was sitting on the frame of a burnt-out Fiat 127 and
watching as hundreds of seagulls, their wings outspread, wheeled in
the rain over a crater piled high with trash.
Thousands of tons of smoking garbage, on which crows and gulls
feasted and mechanical diggers and trucks climbed.
He had found it in front of him. Quite suddenly.
After jumping down from the highway, he had run as fast as he
could across the fields, he had skirted warehouses, followed fences
and been barked at by dogs on chains, then all at once he had looked
up at the sky and seen gulls circling like vultures that have spotted
a dead animal. He had gone on, with his hand pressed against his
side and his head drooping, across the weed-strewn, stony ground,
and that circular crater almost a mile wide had appeared in front
of him.
This is where all the shit ends up.
He lit the last cigarette in the pack he had been carrying in his
pocket for the past week and took a long drag on it, without feeling
any pleasure.
He turned. Through the car's glassless windows he saw that
nothing remained of the sun but a violet halo.
The police will have started searching for the murderer by now.
At the thought of hundreds of people all trying to understand
who could have killed Fabiana, he felt as if he was suffocating.
In fact he had been feeling like this ever since his father's phone
call had woken him up in the middle of the night. He couldn't
breathe deeply, and even if he opened his chest and breathed in hard,
he never completely filled his lungs with air.
Suddenly he remembered the piranha he had seen in the pet shop
in the mall.
It was a handsome creature with a red belly. The size of a large
sea bream. Around one pound.
Cristiano didn't like piranhas at all. They sat there motionless in
the middle of the fishtank and did nothing. No fish was more boring.
And this one looked really stupid, with that expressionless face,
those crooked teeth jutting out of its mouth and those eyes as black as licorice allsorts. They had put him in a tank that was too small
for him, in the company of a large turtle, one of those green ones
with orange patches on their cheeks. The ones people keep in bowls
with little plastic palm trees till they get fed up with them and flush
them down the toilet.
Well, turtles are creatures it's better not to mess with. They're
tough animals. Cold-blooded. They never die. Tropical beasts, used
to living in warm water, but they're perfectly happy in cold water
too, where they grow as big as frying pans. And in the natural world
there are few animals more voracious and aggressive than turtles.
They're worse than crocodiles, which may be voracious, but at least
when they're full they flop down on the bank, where even if you
kick them they don't take a blind bit of notice of you. But turtles
are always hungry.
Anyway, the piranha and the turtle were in this little fishtank in
the pet shop in the mall. The turtle flapped those little flippers of
his as if he didn't even know how to swim and stretched out his
neck and TAG, took a bite with that pointed beak of his out of the
piranha's fins. He had already eaten half of its tail and its lateral
fins were reduced to two stumps.
Cristiano, seeing what that monster was doing, had run to the
owner of the shop to tell her. But she had stared at him with about
as much interest as she showed in the tubs of goldfish food.
Cristiano had gone back to the fishtank and the turtle had continued to butcher the piranha, which had accepted the torture with
a patience and resignation that made your guts churn in your belly.
But at one point the turtle, after attacking the fin, had turned
its attentions to the gill cover. One bite. Then another. And finally
it had sunk its teeth into the gill itself, which was swollen with
blood. The tank had filled with a red cloud, which had faded to
pale pink in the water. And that blood had come into contact with
the piranha's nose. Its eye had come to life like a computer screen
that has been on standby and the fish had started to quiver, to get
excited, just like a shark would do at the blood of its prey: but
this wasn't the blood of its prey, it was its own blood, and suddenly the piranha had shot into action, unsheathing a row of sharp
teeth, and had ripped the turtle's throat open as easily as you can
get a run in a stocking.
Cristiano had succeeded, with the help of a net (he wouldn't
have put his hands in there for anything in the world), in getting
the reptile out of the tank before the piranha could kill it, and had
thrown it into another one full of little neon tetras. The turtle, half
dead, had swooped on the little fish and was swallowing them
whole, but those that were still alive re-emerged through the gash
in his throat.
Well, Cristiano Zena, at that moment, felt just like the piranha
in the mall, under attack from all sides. And when he finally scented
the smell of blood, his own blood, he would spring into action and
kill someone.
He threw the cigarette butt on the ground and mashed it to pulp
with his sole.
What if somebody saw me?
Suddenly he wasn't quite so sure that no one had seen him when
he had thrown the corpse in the river. All it needed was one fisherman, or anyone at all, even at a distance of hundreds of yards,
and he was finished.
Cristiano wiped his hand over his forehead. He was sweating and
felt sick.
They'll find me. They're bound to find me.
Hold on a minute!
Hold on one goddamn minute! You didn't kill her! What are you
thinking of? You didn't kill her! It wasn't you! You didn't do anything. You only did what any son would have done.
"Any son would have done what I did," murmured Cristiano,
with his hand over his mouth. "They'll understand."
Like hell they will... I'll go to jail for the rest of my life.
"Why oh why... ? Shit!" He jumped to his feet, and just as he
was aiming a kick at the dented door of the 127 his cell phone
started ringing. He took it out of his pocket, hoping it was Danilo.
But it was Trecca ...
He let it ring and after a dozen rings it fell silent and then he
called Danilo again. His cell, as usual, was switched off. He tried
his landline.
It was free. It rang and rang, and nobody answered.
He was about to hang up when a woman's voice suddenly said:
"Yes, hello?"
"Hello..." replied Cristiano in amazement.
"Who is it?"
"It's Cristiano ..."
A moment's pause, then: "Rino's son?"
Cristiano recognized the voice. It was Teresa, Danilo's wife.
"Yes ... Can I speak to Danilo?"
There was a brief silence, then in a lifeless tone Teresa said: "You
haven't heard?"
"No. What?"
"Danilo ... Danilo's gone."
"What do you mean, gone? Gone where?"
"He had a terrible car accident. He went off the road and crashed
into a wall and..."
No, it couldn't be true... "He's dead? I don't understand, is he
dead?"
"Yes. He's dead. I'm sorry..."
"But why is he dead?"
"Apparently he was drunk. He lost control of the car... " Teresa's
voice seemed to be coming out of a hole.
Cristiano took the phone away from his ear and let his arm slide
down. He switched it off, staring at the gulls in the sky, the trash,
the columns of black smoke.
Danilo was dead.
Like Cristiano's heart.
Which felt nothing any more. Absolutely nothing.
He didn't give a damn if Danilo, his adoptive uncle, that fat lump
Danilo, had crashed into a wall and been killed.
The only thing that came to his mind was that now he was really
in the shit.
I've got to run away. I've got to find Quattro Formaggi and we've
got to run away.
But first I must explain to Papa.
On the river, a few miles away from the garbage dump, the cara-
binieri's rubber dinghy had succeeded in approaching the corpse.
The crowd had suddenly fallen silent, and the only sounds were
the rustle of the rain on the umbrellas, the buzz of the incandescent
spotlights which sent up spirals of steam, and the rush of the river.
A diver in wetsuit, lifejacket and harness jumped off the dinghy.
For a moment an eddy seemed to suck him under, but then he was
thrown up again and managed to get the current to carry him to
the tree on which the corpse was caught. He put his arms around
the bundle and was laboriously hauled back onto the dinghy.
From the embankments, and from up on the bridge, there came
a burst of applause which was lost in the roar of the river.
The Carrion Man, peering over the parapet, was scratching his
neck so hard that it bled.
Ramona.
Who had done it? Who had wrapped her in that plastic sheet and
thrown her in the river?
It can't have been God. He doesn't get his hands dirty.
God always gets others to do things. He gives the orders and
someone else has the job of carrying them out.
Why didn't you tell me to do it? I would have understood. I
would have sacrificed my plan to finish the nativity scene. I've done
everything for you.