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It wasn't his habit to pass through those parts; simply, that evening, he was forced to do so because of a poorly maintained sewer.
It had literally burst. The pipe, clogged after years of neglect, had reached the point of no return on a summer afternoon, a little before the final of the European football championship began. Fausto didn't care much about France and Portugal meeting to compete for the trophy, but the game on television meant scrounging a dinner from Aurelio and Luisa—and not just that. There was Graziella, the blonde, with her sculptural breasts and just dumb enough to make him consider his chances. She had even believed his lie that he was profitably involved in certain ultra-modern air conditioning systems. In short, there was enough to make him cross the historic center during rush hour and to convince him to endure the canonical ninety minutes, with the concrete risk that they would turn into one hundred and twenty plus penalties.
The street was invaded by a substance of a slimy-gray color tending toward brown, dotted with a constellation of shredded paper and used condoms, scattered around like the sailboats of the America's Cup. A barrier with diagonal stripes of alternating colors invited him to go around the block, cross the river on the iron bridge, and proceed for a kilometer to the next bridge. The situation was a royal rip-off, considering that the wine, stolen that morning from a market stall, had officially become his after three hundred meters of running and a minute of fear, and now it was unworthily heating up under the passenger seat of his Panda 30.
The grates sounded noisily under the car's wheels, and soon he found himself in the part of the city destined for the rich. There were villas with gardens, apartment buildings with doormen, and many dark sedans parked in the driveways. Well-maintained beech trees alternated with stone and wrought iron benches, while on the part of the road facing the river, menacing parking meters demanded hefty tributes for just a few minutes of parking. The public gardens, larger than he would have conceived for a landing strip, teemed with joggers, sunbathers with their faces offered to the late afternoon sun, and children, some intent on chasing a ball, others busy flying a drone that was surely worth more than his car.
He had never seen that house before. It must have existed for many years, certainly before the two wars and perhaps even before steam trains began puffing along railways across the country. If he had never seen it, perhaps it was because of the tree canopies that had kept it hidden all that time. A recent pruning of the foliage, something that had happened following a mysterious parasite that had attacked the trees in that area, had revealed the existence of that building.
Painted in a freshly retouched salmon color, it stood out behind a thick hedge with its two floors that followed the first. It had a long balcony, secured with railings of metal rods painted in cast-iron color, which occupied half of its facade, and a series of doors and windows that faced it, all closed behind old-fashioned gray-green shutters. Oxidized copper downpipes descended along the three visible corners, and on the roof, an old TV antenna rose beyond the cover of the house behind, quite distant but evidently harmful to good reception. On the northern side, a tongue of ivy was worn with class, as a lady of good society might flaunt a soft silk shawl.
Situated as it was on the slopes of the hill, it could only be reached via a narrow and impervious road, steep enough to discourage the passage of people other than the few residents and convenient for shaking off cops who might want to chase a thief. The hill, which represented the uncontaminated and happy island that occasionally cast a disdainful glance at the layer of smog adorning the city, was only accessible through mostly uncomfortable roads, which sometimes connected to busy arteries while, in many other cases, ended in a dead end on one side and originated from a slightly wider road that was equally difficult to navigate by car. It was vacation season, and the closed shutters showed that the homeowners had gone elsewhere seeking relief.
An invitation. Slowing down slightly, Fausto determined that the area must be poorly lit. Indeed, he saw a first streetlight a few dozen meters downhill and then another, supported by a pole held hostage by climbing plants that emerged from behind the wall of a large estate.
He would turn them off. Judging by the retro taste of the finishes, the house must be inhabited by elderly people, little accustomed to installing alarm systems and still attached to those values of honesty and rectitude, those values that no longer existed.
He would enter. Behind that stone wall, two and a half meters high or perhaps more, was the thieves' paradise, a prize vacation with a low-cost flight and business class return. There was silverware kept in drawers and money, lots of money, placed inside some vase or at most on the back of a sideboard.
Behind that heavy wooden door was the salary of two years, with the thirteenth month, paid holidays, and all the overtime. France and Portugal would meet that very evening. It was obvious that the hosts would win, and equally logical that he, the following day, would pull off the best theft of his career.
Fausto waited for twilight, loitering from one bar to another. It was good to stay away from his studio apartment with bathroom. Despite being on the basement floor of a shamefully ugly building, the landlord always remembered him, the rent he owed, and the reimbursement of condominium expenses. Once the loot was pocketed, no one would see those parts for a month. That day he should have paid, but since the last pickpocketing had yielded a couple of twenty-euro bills and a series of coins insufficient to pay for an aperitif, he had made himself untraceable since the morning.
From time to time, he turned toward the hill and ascertained that the house had remained closed, uninhabited. The only two street lamps surrounding it were damaged. At the beginning of the afternoon, during his reconnaissance tour, he had passed under the lamps and placed a lead weight right in the center, shooting it with his ultra-silent compressed gas gun. There was a sound similar to the hiss of a snake, and then some fragments of plastic rained to the ground. When they would notice the damage, late in the evening, they would make a note to call the municipality's maintenance team the next morning. What mattered was that at night, the darkness would be real, intense as an ink stain and impenetrable to the fallacious eyes of a man.
Meanwhile, it was getting dark. The city was closing its shutters, the last stragglers were leaving the office, and the incurable drinkers were looking for some open pub. The hunt for parking had begun, and families were about to gather around the table. All televisions were tuned to the news: a single concert of news and scoops vomited all together from open windows. Beyond the river, an odor of algae rose towards the park. Paying attention, one could hear the sound of water even from a distance.
On the hill, assisted by the premature darkness caused by abundant trees, the street lamps of public lighting had turned on. Two of them had remained unlit.
He landed on the soft grass. He did so beyond the wall he had easily climbed over with the rope ladder. He had brought it in his backpack along with a headlamp for running, a small crowbar, and a tiny pen-sized LED flashlight. All the rest of the space, including the side pockets and the one on the closure, was destined for the loot.
The faint LED light framed an unlit garden lamp, a cement sidewalk that went around the entire building, and flowerbeds accompanied by a collection of statuettes that reproduced the characters of Tolkien. A hobbit with hairy feet was eyeing him from behind a clump of daisies, while the reproduction of an elf, on a 1:25 scale, seemed ready to fire an arrow right in his direction. The mean face made it believable.
The city projected a halo of luminescence on the horizon, and the windows of the house opposite let through a timid and distant light, which barely filtered through the foliage. Apart from the chirping of crickets and the homeopathic trace of traffic noise from the streets, they were close to absolute silence.
He had arrived on the spot under the cover of darkness. No one had noticed him, apart from a late cyclist who was struggling up the hill to meet his dinner. He had passed with his head bent over the handlebars and a shortness of breath that had surely drained the blood from his brain. Fausto could swear he hadn't even noticed him.
The line of hedges that ran through the garden, dividing it into two exact parts, lent itself to covering his advance. He thanked his good fortune, and after a few steps, he found himself in front of the access door, large enough to let a car enter. It was closed with a padlock, which he opened with a simple hairpin. It took him less time than allowed to a Rischiatutto contestant to answer half a dozen very difficult questions.
Once inside the garage, he put on the headlamp, not at all surprised that no alarm had gone off. It was a room with a vaulted ceiling studded with salt efflorescence, bare brick walls, and a floor covered with rather worn stoneware. In the center of the environment, next to a series of shelves covered with dark cloths, a cherry-red Lancia Flavia demonstrated his thesis: house of nostalgic elderly people, at the thermal baths to treat their rheumatism or at the sea looking after a swarm of irreverent grandchildren.
He was truly sorry. That car, a 1966 model with 102 horses sleeping under the hood, was kept so well that it would have appealed to many collectors. He wondered how much they would pay him for the tip.
He bypassed the obstacle. A flash, sudden and unexpected, blinded him for an instant. Instinctively, he jumped backward and bumped against the hard frame of the shelves. His hand went to his belt in search of the compressed gas gun. He pointed it in front of him, without a precise target. He found shelter in a niche in the wall, assumed a profile position to not be an easy target, and waited, with his heart bouncing between his throat and chest. If it was necessary to shoot, he would. No one would die because of those small lead pellets, but the deterrent effect would work enough to cover his escape. The rope ladder had been positioned on the wall for any eventuality, and his Panda was waiting anonymously in a nearby parking lot, with a fake license plate borrowed from an old 127.
When he realized that the flash had only been a reflection of light on the Flavia's chrome, he let out a stifled laugh. No matter how accustomed one becomes to being a thief, no matter how much one refines the techniques and acquires cold blood, the possibility that something might go wrong always remains triggered, like a war residue buried under the sand.
He pointed the spotlight in the direction of the car. That double triad of headlights on the nose, together with the grille that looked like a grinning open mouth, scared him, recalling infernal machines that wandered around Castle Rock to exterminate the enemies of its owner.
He counted to ten. The seconds, although dragged towards the end of the count, were not enough to regain his lost calm. He counted to ten again. This time he did it thinking about the firm breasts of the blonde airhead who had kept him company during the European final, while Aurelio and Luisa followed the raids on the field. There had been a promising opportunity that evening, but he had not been able to take advantage of it. In his head, a thousand thoughts had chased each other, connected to bills to pay, rents to honor, and hillside villas to raid. Since he had noticed that house, passing through the obligatory route dictated by the detour, he had been as if kidnapped by the thought of entering it, of penetrating it. Who knows what the blonde with the firm breasts had thought of that excitement he had displayed. It was of a sexual nature, but not towards her. It was directed at a pile of bricks and stones.
On the wall toward the interior, a door opened. He framed it with the beam of light and saw that it was barely ajar. It must lead to the stairs. He pushed. The hinges had been recently lubricated, and the door slid until it stopped against the wall next to it. A staircase with stone steps started about ten meters beyond and then turned, disappearing into a narrow passage. Before tackling the corridor, he looked over his shoulder again: the car was motionless. He scrutinized it, lingering on the details: the tires like new, the bumper polished with care, and not even a grain of dust on the bodywork. The windshield gleamed with a shade of blue. He didn't know how, but the moment he had turned his back, he had felt the sensation of being watched.
He felt like an idiot. The last apartment robbery had yielded him a brand-new computer, the number 666 of the limited production of the Gibson Les Paul 295 Florentine W/Bigsby, and five nice hundred-euro bills, which that jerk of an owner had left in plain sight in the center of a small plate in the living room. The whole job had lasted less than five minutes, had happened in the middle of the night, and he had felt no anxiety.
And yet now he was feeling it. After the first two meters of corridor, he encountered a door on the left. The brief inspection brought to light a shelf of rich wines. They were all very expensive champagnes: Louis Roederer Cristal, Broël & Kroff, Bollinger Vielle Vignes, and Krug Clos d'Ambonnay. This last bottle, he estimated, if his memory wasn't deceiving him, could cost up to 3000 euros.
He would endure the sweet weight in his backpack, oh yes! He would even make two trips, if necessary.
The second cellar was populated with gardening tools, including a backpack brush cutter and a combustion mower, with a nice 10-horsepower head barely disguised behind a black mask adorned with the emblem of a bull ready to charge. The blades were still stained with chlorophyll and earth. That smell of fuel mixture and grease, which reached the nose strong as a cannonball, reminded him of his father, who had tried in vain to make him passionate about work. He wasn't interested in working, sweating, and getting his hands dirty with earth. His old man could have told him all the fairy tales in the world about dignity, honesty, and rectitude, but he was interested in getting to work once every few months, opening the right villa, the perfect shop, or the wallet with some rich pension inside.
The right villa was there, under his feet, on his head, and all around him. Walls, cement, wood, bricks, and metal. Water flowing like blood in the pipes and energy flowing through the electrical cables. Bolts, ties, and earth crushed under the weight of years. If the morning showed the day, he had seen the sun rise on a collection of wines that, alone, was worth a year of a worker's labor.
Upstairs, in the house, he had not yet entered. He would find all sorts of treasures, money, jewelry, and quoted art pieces. Perhaps within the walls of that apartment was preserved a stamp collection or some very rare and precious book, kept on a shelf without particular precautions.
The third door enclosed a large boiler, drowsy under its diver's suit. Like the car, it was old, or rather vintage, but the sensation of power it transmitted was priceless. It probably consumed more diesel than a container ship, but evidently, the rich and affluent homeowners didn't care at all. As with all things present in that place, there must have been a particular affection, an attachment to the object, to its history. It had the burner installed at its base like the engine of a missile. It would unleash hell next autumn. He was sure of it.
He passed by and, after inspecting the ascent of the stairs, put his foot on the first step.
He had noticed the flicker of the TV turned on, and this had not made him desist from climbing the stairs and entering. One of the many banal and totally useless precautions to discourage thieves was precisely that of leaving a light or the television on. In his case, it had reassured him and confirmed that the owners were truly away from home.
An old black and white film projected its essential brightness on the Persian carpet, unrolled in front of a pair of armchairs covered with sheets. At that moment, Spencer Tracy, an old desperate fisherman, was fighting against the sea and against the shark that was biting his prey, little by little: "If the boy were here, he would wet the ropes. Yes, if the boy were here, if the boy were here..."
The headlamp broke the electric penumbra of the screen and made a horizon tour like a lighthouse. What he saw pleased him. On the wall opposite were interesting paintings, something that had to do with the landscapes of Lo Iacono, at least as far as could be understood from the fleeting aureole of light that had summarily examined them. A shelf wedged between one window and another housed a collection of cups and medals, many of which had the air of being solid gold. There was also a cat in black ebony, carved and entirely handmade. The homeowners had reserved an entire compartment for it. The door that interrupted the wall at the back opened onto a bedroom that gave the impression of being the depository of many secrets. On the opposite side, there was access to a hallway with a bookcase, a telephone cabinet, and a silver picture frame that made no effort to remain hidden. The worthless still life that could be glimpsed in the background had very much the air of concealing a wall safe, one of those that could be wrenched off with a crowbar and carried home under the arm.
Fausto rubbed his hands and decided that, first of all, he would turn on the lights. It was completely useless to wander around that house with the risk of tripping over some carpet, when all the windows were closed with heavy shutters, and the old chandeliers, with all dusty coiled lightbulbs, could only project a weak light barely sufficient to move around.
He put his hand on the switch and turned it on. A crown of gray hair appeared, surrounding a large bald head resting on the backrest of the farthest armchair. On the skull, the skin had corrugated into many small waves. It must have been there for some time because a yellowish halo had formed on the sheet covering the resting place.
Fausto, as before in the garage, suddenly backed up and bumped against the dish rack behind him. A service decorated with floral motifs gave rise to a concert, and he instinctively brought his hands to his ears. Like a bird that had ended up in a room by mistake, he tried, agitating, to reconstruct the geography of the place and find the escape route. When he succeeded, a closed door prevented him from continuing. He found himself with the palms of his hands pressed against the wood and the anxiety that drained energy from reason.
Once again, he gripped the compressed gas gun. Once again, his cardiac muscle contracted fearfully. If it had burst, he wouldn't have been surprised. At that moment, the thing that bothered him most was not so much the rather concrete hypothesis of ending up in jail, but the embarrassment he would make in recounting the circumstances of his arrest.
At the height of the mockery, Mr. Wolf's big face materialized on the screen, in color this time: "Well, it's not yet time to give each other blowjobs!"
He looked back and pushed with all his strength. The door barely creaked, and his feet slipped on the parquet. He was trapped.
He decided he would scare the homeowner by pointing his pseudo-gun at him. He would fall for it hook, line, and sinker. He would yell in his face, spitting in all directions and letting his skin turn a reddish-purple, or rather no, he would wear the stocking that he had prudently put in his pocket, he would vomit assorted threats at him, and he would descend from the balcony while the old man worried about cleaning the shit from his pants. He would leave that place so quickly that witnesses, if there ever were any, would tell of a hare free in the fields.
Looking behind him again, he put the tights on, unrolling them over his head like a condom. Suddenly, the yellowish light of the room took on a brownish tone. He observed the head resting on the backrest. It was still in its place. It reminded him of his old man at home when he was still alive. Every evening of every day, he would collapse in a trance on the couch in front of the television turned on. He would do it if he had worked, if he had been on vacation, or if he had claimed sick leave. He would do it on official holidays and all the blessed Sundays after the game listened to on the radio, after a walk downtown, or wearing his workshop overalls. His old man had been destroyed by a life he had accepted with too much resignation.
Perhaps the owner had also fallen asleep in front of the television and wouldn't even notice him. The door that had barred his escape must have closed due to a draft or something similar. The justification didn't please him, but he had to give himself one.
He gripped the weapon, pointing the barrel downward. The trick was meant to confuse ideas, to suggest that the muzzle had a credible diameter for something that could kill, not for a toy like his.
The TV returned to black and white. It was evident that the man was awake and was exercising his sacred right to channel-surf. How he hadn't noticed the noise made by the plates remained a mystery.
Fonzie, Arthur Fonzarelli, was warning a thief caught in the Cunningham house, a vile apartment rat like him: "If you do the job with the tool, you'll get a year instead of a month!"
It wasn't possible. Fausto convinced himself that he was delirious, that fear was playing nasty tricks on him. It was just his suggestion, the result of a moment of discouragement and the sum of some unknown factor, a kind of worm that had known how to dig into his unconscious. Contradicting the explanation he had just given himself, he convinced himself instead that he had seen correctly, that the house was inhabited, and that he had taken a blatant misconception. He thought that perhaps he should have studied the heist with more care, added a survey the next day, evaluated every possible eventuality. He regretted not having done the classic phone call test, not having tried to hit the windows with a stone to see if anyone would have rushed to check who it had been.
As if that method had scientific value, he began counting to ten again. From one to seven, the numbers were swallowed like indigestible pills; the last digits of the count, on the contrary, came out proud and well articulated: seven, eight, nine... ten.
At ten, he leaped into the room. The man's head still protruded from the top of the backrest.
He literally collapsed into the remaining free armchair, and a cloud of dust and mites rose from the sheet. He felt the springs of the cushion creak and his feet sink into the high pile of the carpet. He could do nothing, shout, flee, or shoot. The last of the options was the least practicable because the man in front of him was already dead. Fausto quickly got used to that image, just the last of the horror show he had witnessed.
The bald man was breathing with difficulty. He rhythmically raised his chest, up and down, and in doing so, blood came out of a hole in the center of his chest. The spurts overcame the hand he kept on his abdomen and went to form a muddy little lake in the hollow between his joined legs. When he had the courage to look him in the eyes, to raise his eyes to meet those sunken orbits, he recognized the same look of hatred and desperation he had received five years before, when that man had died before his eyes with a gunshot to the heart. Clutching the armrests, Fausto tried to say something in his defense.
"It wasn't me who shot, you should know that..." The man moved slightly, using one arm to lift himself. The pool of blood was lost in the crevice that had formed between his thighs. The splashes from the chest, meanwhile, continued to come out like from a broken pipe. "I just saw a flash and then I felt a strong pain, here." The finger went into the hole, stopping the hemorrhage. "Who cares who shot! You and your ugly face were there, in front of me. You picked up the briefcase I tried to defend, you tore it from my hands, you ran away making sure that your flat ass was the last thing I saw before dying..."
"It was Rocco who shot!" And naming Rocco, he remembered that bloodied syringe inserted in the center of a bruise on his arm. It had been his death sentence, a sentence cut with some exaggerated bad stuff for his already drug-filled veins. With the money taken from the briefcase, he had rushed in search of his pusher and, to his misfortune, had found him that very evening.
He hadn't even realized he had killed a man. It had all happened so quickly that the stolen money had been spent even before that poor man's corpse could cool.
Fausto closed his eyes tightly. He knew it wouldn't help end the nightmare he was living. He had tried to scream, to agitate like someone with tarantism, to inflict suffering on himself. Nothing, it had served nothing. The man in the armchair was always there, in his place, and he had been able to do nothing but sit in front.
"I apologize. That robbery was not supposed to end like this. Rocco was nervous, agitated. He was sweating, suffering like a dog, and couldn't wait any longer. The withdrawal crisis, you understand, the crisis was destroying him. Do you understand what a withdrawal crisis from heroin means?"
The man shook his head.
"It's a terrible thing, you stop reasoning, you experience pains so strong that you would want to die..." "And indeed, I died..."
Fausto was silent. That robbery five years earlier, when Rocco had pressed the trigger with the ease used in video games, had been archived without culprits, or at least without any living man being able to pay for his crime. The carabinieri had found so many traces at the scene that led to Rocco that they hadn't even bothered to look for his, which were also abundant at the crime scene. They had found the culprit already dead with the stolen briefcase abandoned at his side. They had satisfied the press, the relatives, and saved the money for the trial, all in one fell swoop.
Coughing, the man in the armchair spat a mixture of blood and drool on the carpet. When he did, the stream of blood from his heart reached almost to Fausto's shoes, who instinctively withdrew. Maintaining a minimum of lucidity, he saw that a gold watch was resting on the television cabinet. Only the homeowner didn't want to leave, didn't want to disappear from his nightmare. From time to time, he tried to lift his wounded body by pushing on the armrests, but he only obtained a creaking of the armchair that seemed to deform under the weight.
The cold that Fausto felt in his legs, along with a taste of rotten teeth in his mouth, made everything absolutely real. He listened to his heart beating in his ears and a tremor in his back that felt like the shock of an electric chair.
The dead man was stirring the saliva in his mouth. Lucio realized too late that he was about to spit at him and didn't have time to dodge. He shouted. "I couldn't prevent Rocco from shooting, I couldn't read his mind, I..."
On television, there was Tony Montana. Against the background of a fiery sunset pasted on the wall like wallpaper, he had just placed a bullet in the stomach of Mel Bernstein, a corrupt cop: "Son of a bitch..." "Goodbye Mel, have a good trip!" BANG!
That's how it had happened five years before: BANG! And the man with the bag full of cash had collapsed to the ground, with his mouth wide open in a scream stuck in his throat. Fausto remembered that sound of broken bones at the moment when his vertebrae hit the edge of the sidewalk.
He wasn't channel-surfing. The television was enjoying proposing its very personal interpretation of the moment. Suddenly, the channel shifted to the chronicle of an open-heart surgical intervention, where dozens of tubes and metal forceps were inserted into a bloody chest, and this made Fausto's stomach contract in an effort to vomit.
The emergency door of ER opened to let the stretcher pass. Around a body without signs of life, two nurses alternated, one of whom was holding up the IV with his right hand. Dr. Carter rushed over, placing the medical chart he had in his hand on the reception counter. "What do we have?" "Gunshot wound with hemothorax and involvement of T4"
Lucio gave in to a nervous tic. He was going crazy. He tried to escape, to escape from that torture while the dead man was making fun of him, laughing in his face. After a while, the laughter began to resound in the room and make the Bohemian crystal housed in a locked display case tremble.
He put his hands to his ears to not hear and suddenly stood up. He seemed like the pilot of a fighter plane in trouble who had ejected with the entire seat. He ran towards the door that had prevented him from passing earlier and broke it down with a shoulder charge. He traversed the corridor that went towards the stairs with the speed of a train. He passed by the doors and felt them opening. From the rooms came all the skeletons that in his life he had locked in closets.
The lady from the grocery store in that small town, whom he had robbed by making her taste the sharp blade of his knife, emerged from the master bedroom. She was so elderly that she would have died of old age, she and that ridiculous blue apron that made her look like the clerk of a hardware store. She would have died in her bed, boring children and grandchildren with the stories of her life, he had told himself ten years before. Instead, the lady, fifty years spent behind that counter, the first of which was spent compiling the sums of grocery expenses on the back of bread paper, had gone home with a lump in her throat, a humiliation so great that she hadn't had the courage to tell her son and a pain in her chest that had manifested as if a dog had bitten her heart.
She had died that very night, from the distress. From the bathroom emerged a couple of mugged women. The first had felt her femur crumble when she had fallen in the street right in front of a braking car, the second had chased her pension for ten meters believing she had traveled a thousand. They had both died, one after a painful and never satisfactory recovery from the joint reconstruction operation, the other from pneumonia because, along with that pension, the money for heating had also gone away.
They ran like gazelles, after death. Fausto felt them coming from behind, along with a hot wind that set his back on fire. Screams, insults, and hasty steps that echoed in the corridor. A herd of frenzied horses. If he hadn't had the courage to turn around to see those ghosts, he would have thought of a herd of horses frightened by an explosion, ready to overwhelm everything and everyone.
He gripped his stupid compressed gas gun and laughed. No weapon had ever stopped nightmares, ghosts, and all the damned manifestations of the afterlife. He had read enough Dylan Dog comics to get an idea about certain topics, but he gripped it anyway, under a strong and sweaty grip. He wouldn't have been surprised at all if by mistake a shot had gone off, straight into his testicles.
He tripped over a vase. The succulent plant fell and inflicted a torture of thorns in his shin. He cursed, without at all repenting of being heard by people who might even have a direct relationship with the Lord.
"When a man with a gun meets a man with a rifle, the man with a gun is a dead man" The television volume was so high that it could be heard in all the rooms.
In pain, Fausto turned toward the living room and saw the corridor clear. He thought that the rancorous old women hadn't even bothered to follow him there. Gritting his teeth, he pulled out the first of the twenty thorns that had reduced his flesh to a pincushion, and a blood stain began to spread quickly on his pants.
The television seemed to have turned off. No noise, no echo from the room he had abandoned by breaking down the door. The second thorn came out with a lament. He let himself go on the carpet of the floor and had a novel view of the coffered wooden ceiling.
Lying down, with burning eyes, he cried. He evaluated all the mistakes of his existence, the arrogance, the total hostility to his father's advice, a good man, a solid man. He prayed as he knew how for those people who had suffered and died because of him.
He saw them alive again, in those moments when fear had erased their dignity, in which desperation had moved their last steps, in which a bullet had opened the heart. He sensed their smell, the implorings, the humiliation that had penetrated their defenseless souls. The vibrations of the prayer calmed him at first, then diffused in him a sense of tiredness and sleep. He slipped into unconsciousness in the company of the image of a tall, thin man armed with a large rifle. He had materialized it in his thoughts so well that he thought it had been fixed on his retina.
"When a man with a gun meets a man with a rifle, the man with a gun is a dead man." It wasn't the TV, it was a ghost armed to the teeth, and it had a rifle. Only that he couldn't count on a pistol but on a pathetic farting simulacrum. He wielded that weapon with one hand, reviving a thousand clichés of merciless bounty killers from western films, ruthless bandits, and infallible buffalo hunters.
The specter had put in his mouth that phrase of Clint Eastwood, one of those that anyone remembers by heart, a bit like that bullshit of Forrest Gump and the box of chocolates. The Winchester 1873 carbine that he was holding under his armpit had all the appearance of having just been lubricated, and he was on the ground lying down, more or less with the dignity of a worm.
He didn't recognize him immediately. When he saw that blue spot that encircled his neck, he understood. He also gave himself an explanation of why that man was supporting his head with his free hand. He did so because his neck was broken, because, eight years before, he had hanged himself after he, a petty thief, had taken his new car from under his nose.
That Golf had cost him all his savings, the furious wrath of his wife, and the long faces of his three children, left without money to go on vacation. He had laughed seeing that pathetic man, with a garish tie around his neck that matched his jacket like a yellow spit on the sidewalk. He framed him in the rearview mirror, increasingly distant, increasingly small, with that tie bobbing right and left. FLAP FLAP
He had laughed seeing him desperately give up the chase, bent over his knees with the vomiting efforts that, amidst the curiosity of passersby, he could no longer hold back. Two days later, his suicide had been reported in a small article in the local news:
Forty-nine-year-old civil servant took his life by hanging himself with his tie from a beam in the garage, an annex to his small house in the southern outskirts. His children found him at dawn. They had gone to look for him in the garage when they noticed that he had not taken with him the fake leather clutch bag that he never failed to bring to the office. The hypothesis is that the man had fallen into depression due to the theft of his new car.
The carabinieri have opened an investigation, and the prosecutor has ordered an autopsy.
The newspaper article made no mention of that hunting rifle, which was surely among the memories of the deceased. Perhaps it had been the last object seen before dying, when he was preparing to secure the tie to the steel beam that crossed the room from one side to the other. Maybe he had thought of ending it all with it, but perhaps, at the idea of leaving relatives a mess of blood and brain to clean up, he had opted for that horrible tie.
He tried to say something but had to desist. Distracted, he let go of the hand that was supporting the head, and it bent to the side, resting on the shoulder. The neck, swollen and purplish, had stretched so much that the ear had surpassed the deltoid. Lucio saw the arm with the carbine going in search of the hair and pulling to straighten the head. When the dead man succeeded, he remained in that position, with the barrel serving as a hat.
"Come on, now run away..." Fausto didn't immediately understand, shaking his head looking from bottom to top. "Now run, shake me off, like you did that time you stole my car. Come on, what are you waiting for? Burn rubber!"
There were at most five meters to the end of the corridor, then the door and beyond the stairs descending to the floor below. Just as they had dematerialized, the two old ladies who had organized an avalanche in the corridor and the man with the hole in his chest sitting in the armchair, the subject with the rifle, the nostalgic of the old west, would have vanished too. At that point, it would all be over; he would take his things to change the air. To hell with the villa theft, the silverware, and the masterpiece paintings. He would never be a thief again, neither the pickpocket nor the robber.
He stood up, and the man loaded the Winchester. In doing so, he had to use both hands, and the broken neck, left without support, collapsed onto his chest, going to kiss the sternum.
Confusion, disorder. The apparition agitated, beginning to rotate on itself, hitting the walls with the rifle barrel. On the first turn, it knocked down a painting; on the second, it hooked the drawer of the curtain hanging from the ceiling; on the third, it began shooting wildly. A sector of the coffered ceiling disintegrated, the glass door of the study exploded with a roar, and a bullet entered the spine of a book with a dull thud, transforming "Elective Affinities" into "Elec ve Affinities." A bullet, real, tangible, and deadly, grazed Fausto's ear and lodged in the wall covered with an anachronistic velvet wallpaper.
He ran down the stairs, and the specter tried to follow him. He looked like a turkey at the local market, hung at the counter by its legs with its head banging from one side to the other. He hit the doorpost and dissolved with a kind of grunt.
Of him remained only the acrid smoke of the shots and a violent tinnitus like a ship's siren. Soldier Hudson, just landed on LW 426, whimperingly pronounced his line. Although the television was now far away, his words were perfectly distinguished: "You're on the express elevator to hell... going down!"
The staircase descended through the belly of the house in a spiral. After a first flight followed some fan-shaped steps, which curved without a landing. At the bottom of the last stretch began the corridor that led to the garage.
Fausto didn't even realize he was sweating, seized by nervous contractions of the stomach and slightly wounded by the rifle bullet that had grazed his earlobe. He interrupted the rest he had granted himself on the steps and went toward an uncertain luminosity, which projected orange blades on the floor.
The boiler, the post-war residue he had noticed going up, had turned on by itself. From the small window facing the furnace, flames were rumbling, along with the burner motor that was spinning like an unvalved diesel. A smell of hot cast iron was climbing all the way up. He stopped in front of the door, hypnotized by the fire that emanated outside the nozzles. He wouldn't have been surprised if he had seen a muscular stoker who, blackened by soot, was pouring generous shovels of coal through the manhole. It would have seemed normal to him to also see an undertaker pushing spartan coffins into the heart of the flames. With a little patience, he would have also endured a tongue of fire coming out of the door and chasing him throughout the ground floor.
None of this happened. He passed undisturbed and saw the industrious mechanism working under a console of colored lights that turned on and off. The tangle of counters, pumps, and rusty, sweaty pipes that twisted above and all around seemed to him something similar to the intestine of a prehistoric monster.
He left it all behind. The cellar with the gardening tools was silent and dark. The spades, hoes, and especially the mower, lay cold along with a collection of fertilizers and weed killers arranged on boards fixed to the wall. On the ground, the watering hose was rolled up on itself for half a meter in height, and boots and heavy shoes presented themselves like a formation of good soldiers, without even a bit of hardened mud having detached from the soles.
It was over. The nightmares had abandoned him, and along with them had gone the guilt feelings. He would leave that house without anything that wasn't his, and from that moment, he would begin to behave like a decent person.
He saw the red Lancia sleeping in the comfortable belly of the garage and the door, which he himself had forced to enter, still ajar. Waiting for him outside was the rope ladder to climb over the stone wall and a bit further down his old car rendered anonymous by a false license plate.
Dragging his feet on the ground, he passed in front of the cellar. He couldn't help it; he had to enter. He turned on the light and filled his eyes with that wonder.
They were lined up like cannon shots ready to be fired. Those bottles of champagne, which had already delighted him on the way in, seemed to be waiting for him. Louis Roederer Cristal, Broël & Kroff, Bollinger Vielle Vignes, and Krug Clos d'Ambonnay, stuff to convert the most upright teetotaler to alcoholism.
The Kroff, Bollinger Vielle Vignes, elegant as a lady in black, seemed to be inviting him to approach, to open it. The bottle, lying on the furniture with the neck positioned in the wooden hollow, shone with the golden finishes of its label and provoked. Sinuous and just pearled with a few drops of moisture, it looked like a high-class woman in skimpy clothes, black and straight hair, a very expensive necklace, and so, so much energy to explode.
It exploded. The cork flew with enough force to make itself felt clearly in his testicles. The jet of wine was expelled with the violence of a broadside and hit him full in the face, taking his breath away. A champagne worth thousands of euros was literally suffocating him.
He tried to oppose with his hands and, when he finally succeeded, the Louis Roederer Cristal, Broël fired its cork, hitting him in the eye. He saw a flash and felt a stream of wine literally slapping him. Moving away, he bumped into a shelf full of reds, from Tuscany, from the Langhe, and also an Aglianico del Vulture special reserve, which fell and shattered on his skull.
Don't mix whites with reds, still with sparkling! He couldn't remember who had told him that. The certain thing was that his blood, copious from the wound on his scalp, had blended very well with the intense ruby red of the 2007 vintage.
At the second attempt to escape the bombardment, the remaining champagne corks struck promptly. One of the two went into his mouth. He gasped. With two fingers, he tried to retrieve it but only succeeded in pushing it even further down. It tasted of aged cork and tin foil. Agitating, covered with his blood and the Aglianico that had also filled his underwear, he tried to cough and managed to move the cork a little, which finally offered itself to the grip of his fingers smeared with saliva. When he managed to remove it, he was attacked by vomit and let himself go, violently splashing against the wall, while the last drops of fine wines were lost in the puddle that had formed on the ground.
He collapsed on his knees, stunned by a carnival of smells, and fainted.
"This is what happens when being apartment rats, robbers, and car thieves. You should know that, Fausto. People attribute a special value to their things, charge them with energy. Let's not talk about money, because for that, they would kill..." "I didn't kill anyone!"
His father, who was cleaning him with a small white rag, was young, roughly the age he might have been when he was a teenager. Even then, he enjoyed stealing his classmates' pencil cases and selling them in the poor section.
He closed his eyes and waited for that vision to disappear too. When he reopened them, his father had replaced the rag with a new one and had aged twenty years. Listening carefully, one could perceive that slight rattle in the lungs that would later kill him. In the pocket of his shirt, the usual one with slightly yellowed armpits and that third button that mom always forgot to replace, the half-empty pack of unfiltered Nationals. He too had had his vices, after all.
"Ok, Dad, but now spare me the lecture; this has been a shitty evening!"
He got up with difficulty. In doing so, he saw the figure of his parent gradually become transparent until it disappeared behind the hint of a bitter smile. The still-closed bottle of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay was pointing threateningly at his forehead. He moved toward the corridor.
"They're coming out of the walls. They're coming out of the goddamn walls!"
Still him, Hudson. The space marine from Aliens: The Final Showdown was still crying on himself and was acting as a harbinger of doom, as usual. Lucio rushed into the corridor and saw that Hudson was right. A thousand arms came out of the walls, young and hairless, hairy, wrinkled, of men and women. He tried to pass through them, but they stripped him of everything.
First, the clothes went to shreds, and then a gold chain he wore around his neck was ripped off. His wallet, his documents, and the car keys had been taken first.
By the fifth meter of the journey, he was naked as a worm. He saw a piece of his pants disappear between the bricks and his underwear get stuck between the plaster and the wall. By now, his brain was in water, and he didn't know how the sensations he was experiencing could be so realistic. He felt the cold, the granular floor cutting his bare feet, and the arms scratching him on his back.
He ran to the garage. He would leave from there without clothes. He didn't care at all if he was on foot; they would mistake him for one of the many madmen left around to fill the voids of the night.
He crossed the door and discovered that the Lancia Flavia was no longer there. He heard the soft hum of its engine outside, somewhere in the courtyard.
Covering his intimacy, he headed trembling toward the outside. Not knowing which god to turn to for forgiveness, he blasphemed. He did it to not make mistakes and recited the entire calendar of saints, the Trinity, and the Virgin Mary.
It was there that the elf archer loosed the arrow, hitting him squarely. The burning spread like a gasoline fire, and a milky veil fell before his eyes. Bending down, he saw his belly pierced like a pincushion and collapsed on his knees in the grass.
When the car, skidding and lifting the clods of the garden, ran him over in a flash of headlights, he felt a concert of broken bones, a sound of meat fallen from the balcony, and the lapping of blood splashing everywhere. The last sensations he felt before dying were the smell of hot, dirty iron, exactly like that of the old boiler, and the red-hot muffler of the Lancia Fulvia, sharp as a knife, tearing his back.
The following morning, a few minutes after dawn, the cyclist from the evening before passed for a new exciting itinerary. It would take him to climb a couple of Alpine hills and stop only to eat the sandwiches he had placed in the back pockets of his shirt and which he would wash down with his two water bottles positioned on the frame like the professionals. The sunglasses, bandana, and polystyrene helmet were hanging on the handlebars, ready to be worn as soon as the sun and the mad cars in the center would demand their tribute.
Passing by the stone wall, he saw a rope ladder hanging, of the kind used for rescues or mountaineering. Curious, he carefully leaned his bicycle against the road's edge and tried to climb a couple of rungs to see what was on the other side.
Under the first rays of the sun, grazing the hill and just warm enough to cheer the day, he saw the corpse of a man. He was naked, wet, and covered with serious wounds and stale blood. He must have died recently because the residual heat was making the dew evaporate on the skin and something foamy that he couldn't understand. Surrounded by tall grass, nettles, and large bramble bushes that seemed to be guarding him, he was lying in the very center of that meadow, and the relief of old walls, collapsed many years ago and covered with weeds, barely shaded his bare feet.
A drug addict, he thought, or a homeless person. Someone who had drunk so much that he believed he had entered his own house, or who knows, a tavern to mortgage yet more of his pathetic existence.
He wasn't the first to go and die in that square of bare earth, and he wondered what ever attracted those scraps of humanity to that place.
Annoyed, he returned to the road, mounted his bicycle, and ventured toward the city. As soon as the descent allowed him to release one of the two brakes, and taking advantage of a first red light, he took his cell phone, dialed the police number, and waited.
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