That was his objective. It was the most frequently used cashpoint in the village, as this bank had more customers than any other in Varrano, so it must be crammed with money.
There were two CCTV cameras positioned above the machine. One to the right and one to the left, so as to cover the whole surrounding area. And no doubt they were connected to a set of video-recorders inside the bank. But that wasn’t a problem.
In actual fact there wasn’t the slightest need for Danilo to sit there watching the movement in front of the bank. He had already worked out the plan down to the smallest detail. But watching that cash machine made him feel better.
The plan for the raid on the Credito dell’Agricoltura had been hatched six months before.
Danilo had been at the barber’s, and leafing through the crime pages of the newspaper he had read that in a village near Cagliari a gang of crooks driving a four-by-four had smashed through the wall of a bank and carried off its cash machine.
While his hair was being dyed the story kept buzzing around in his head; this could be the turning point in his life.
The plan was quite simple.
‘Simplicity is the basis of every well-done thing,’ his father used to tell him.
And it was easy to put into practice. The night in Varrano was so quiet that if you acted fast, who would see you? And who would ever suspect that such a respectable citizen as Danilo Aprea could have robbed a bank?
With the loot he would make Teresa’s dream come true. The dream of opening a lingerie boutique. Danilo was sure that if he gave her a shop his wife would come back to him, and then he would find the strength to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and dry out.
14
After Cristiano’s departure Rino Zena had gone back to sleep, and when he had woken up again the whistling in his ears, as if by magic, had vanished, along with the band of pain round his head. It had been replaced by a ravenous hunger.
He lay in bed and imagined a dish of chargrilled sausages accompanied by plenty of bread.
His cock was hard and his balls were as full as hard-boiled eggs.
How long is it since I last had a fuck?
It had been at least two weeks. But when he had a headache screwing was the last thing on his mind.
This evening I’ll go out on the town, he said to himself, struggling to get up from the mattress and going into the bathroom naked, with his pecker sticking out in front of him like the bowsprit of a schooner.
In the course of his life Rino had encountered difficulties of many kinds, but these did not include finding a woman to fuck or someone to pick a fight with.
And recently he had found a couple of bars where skinheads, punks and all the local freaks hung out. A bunch of rich kids who showed off riding round on Harley-Davidsons worth thirty thousand euros. Rino despised them, but their womenfolk swarmed over him like flies on a dog turd.
All the girls followed the same career pattern: most started out as shaven-headed anorexics who tattooed swastikas and Celtic crosses on their bums and for a while played at being bad girls and slept around. They would fuck up their brains with cut shit, then get sent off to some American clinic to detox, have their tattoos lasered off, marry a rich businessman and end up driving around in a Mercedes wearing a miniskirt and a bouclé jacket.
But Rino took advantage of the transitional phase and of their undiscriminating desire for sex and intense experience. He would put his mark on them, then kick them out next morning with their pussies on fire and a few bruises. And most of the slags came back for more.
Stupid cows!
He plunged into the ice-cold shower, shaved his skull and then put on a tiny vest, his trousers and his boots.
He went down the stairs into the lounge, a room of about thirty square metres. On one side of it was the front door, on the other side a hall leading to the kitchen, a toilet and a broom cupboard.
The floor was covered with reddish linoleum which rode up against the red-brick and concrete walls. On one side of the room was a table draped with a green-and-white checked plastic tablecloth, and two benches. On the other the television area. Two blue plastic crates with an old Saba colour TV on top. To change channels without getting up the Zenas used a broomstick, ramming it against the big channel buttons. Opposite the TV were a sofa bed with a filthy cover and three white folding chairs with plastic threads. There was also an orange-coloured iron bench with a barbell loaded with weights. Lastly, in one corner, next to a big box full of newspapers and a pile of firewood, there stood a cast-iron stove. A ventilator fan on a stick served in winter to spread the warmth of the stove and in summer to stir the sultry air.
Danilo and Quattro Formaggi would soon be arriving.
I can do some work on my biceps, Rino said to himself. But he abandoned the idea. His tummy was rumbling and his cock was still erect.
He turned on the TV and started wanking as he watched a blonde bitch with a pendant as big as the medallion of a turkey round her neck helping a fat man prepare some fillets of wild mullet in a sauce of raspberry, chestnut and sage.
With his pecker in his hand, Rino gave a gesture of disgust. That pansy crap they were cooking had made him lose his hard-on.
15
Danilo Aprea looked at the old Casio digital watch on his wrist.
A quarter past eight and there was still no sign of Quattro Formaggi.
He took out the purse in which he kept his coins. He had three euros and … He brought the small coins closer to his eyes. Twenty … Forty cents.
Four years had passed since they had changed the currency and he still found it confusing. What had been wrong with the lira?
He got up and ordered another grappa.
This’ll be the last one, though …
At that moment a mother entered the bar with a little girl bundled up in a white parka holding her hand.
“How old is she?” he restrained himself from asking the woman.
“Three,” she would have answered. He was sure she was three, or four at most.
Like …
(Stop it) Teresa’s voice reproved him.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Teresa came round this afternoon?
Teresa Carucci, a woman as insipid as a bowl of celery soup (as Rino had put it to him once) and whom Danilo had asked to be his bride one evening in 1996, had left him four years ago to set up home with a tyre dealer who she had been working for as a secretary.
Yet Teresa continued to see Danilo. Unknown to the tyre dealer she brought him trays of lasagne, spezzatino and rabbit cacciatore to put in the freezer. She would always arrive out of breath, sweep the flat and iron his shirts and he would start begging her to stay and give it another try. She would retort that it was impossible to live with an alcoholic. And, in the early days, sometimes she had felt sorry for him, and had lifted up her skirt and let him screw her.
Danilo watched the little girl happily eating a huge croissant. Her mouth all smeared with icing sugar.
He took the glass off the counter and went back to his table.
He knocked back the grappa. The alcohol warmed his oesophagus and his head became lighter.
That’s better. Much better.
Until five years before the most Danilo Aprea had been able to drink was a finger of moscato. ‘Alcohol and I don’t get on,’ he would say to anyone who offered him a drink.
This remained the case until 9th July 2001, when alcohol and Danilo Aprea decided that the time had come to bury their differences and become friends.
Until 9th July 2001 Danilo Aprea had been a different person with a different life. He had worked as a night-watchman for a freight firm, had had a wife whom he loved and Laura, a three-year-old daughter.
On 9th July 2001 Laura Aprea had choked to death, with the cap from a bottle of shampoo stuck in her windpipe.
A year later Teresa had left him.
16
Cristiano arrived at the bus stop, but the bus had just gone. And with it his chances of making th
e first lesson.
If only he had been a year older … If he’d had a motorbike he could have got to school in ten minutes. And he would have had the fun of riding across the fields and rough tracks. As soon as he finished school next year he was going to get a job – he should be able to earn enough to buy one in six months.
The next bus wasn’t due for half an hour.
What do I do now? he asked himself, kicking at a little mound of snow that was melting away on the pavement.
If he could find someone to give him a lift maybe he could slip into class without being noticed.
But who’s going to stop here?
Along that stretch of the highway everyone drove flat out.
He set off, with his woolly hat pulled down over his head, his headphones in his ears and his hands in the pockets of his jacket. The air was saturated with water; the drops were so small you could hardly tell it was raining.
With Metallica shrieking in his eardrums he looked around and lit a cigarette.
He wasn’t really all that keen on smoking, though he enjoyed the sensation when his head started spinning. But if his father caught him with a cigarette in his mouth he’d kill him.
‘One of us committing suicide by nicotine is quite enough,’ he always said.
In front of him was a strip of asphalt which ran as straight as a ruler and faded into a leaden haze. To the right lay the fields of sodden earth, to the left the row of industrial buildings. When he came to the Castardin furniture factory with its red banners proclaiming special discounts he stopped. The gate was closed and the dog lay there on the ground, tangled up in his chain. Head framed by a dark pool. Jaws open. Eyes rolled back. Gums flecked with foam. Stiff as a piece of frozen cod. One paw sticking out, as straight and stiff as a walking stick.
Cristiano inhaled a mouthful of smoke as he looked at the corpse.
He didn’t feel sorry for him.
He had died like a fool. And for what? To defend some arseholes who kept him chained up day and night and beat him with sticks to make him even more ferocious than he was by nature.
He threw the stub on the ground and walked on, as cars and lorries drove past him, churning up a spray of filthy water.
He remembered Peppina, a little mongrel with a long body and legs as short as jam jars.
His mother had got her from the dogs’ home in the days before she left home. How often Cristiano had said to himself that a woman could ditch her son and husband if she liked, but not her dog. You had to be a real cow to do a thing like that.
Rino didn’t want Peppina in the house because he said she was a stupid little beast and if he was in a particularly bad mood he would threaten to kill her. The real reason he didn’t want her around, in Cristiano’s opinion, was that she reminded him of mama, but when it came to it he never gave her away.
Cristiano was different, he liked Peppina. She always made a fuss of you, and if you picked her up she would nibble your earlobes. She lived for tennis balls. She woke up thinking of them and went to bed thinking of them.
You would throw a ball for her and she would keep going to fetch it and when you got fed up she would sit down beside you with the ball between her little paws and keep nudging at you with her nose till you threw it for her again.
One day – it must have been in the summer because it was very warm – Cristiano had arrived home from school, and the school bus (which brought primary school children right to their doors) had left him opposite the house, on the other side of the highway.
He had a treat in store for Peppina: he had gone all the way to the sports club and behind the fences of the tennis courts, in a drainage ditch choked with weeds and nettles, he had collected a lot of balls. He was on the point of crossing the road when Peppina emerged from behind the house, going like the clappers. She looked funny when she ran, like a furry train. How on earth had she heard him arrive? The wooden gate was usually closed, but that day it had only been pushed to.
Cristiano realised that the silly little mutt intended to cross the road to join him.
He looked right and left and saw a constant stream of lorries. In a split second he realised that if he shouted to her to stay where she was she would think he was urging her on and dash across the road.
He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to cross the road and stop her, but there was too much traffic.
Peppina had pushed her nose between the gate and the gatepost and was trying to open it.
He had to stop her. But how?
Of course, he must throw her a ball. A long throw. Towards the back of the house. But not too high, or she wouldn’t see the ball and it would all be in vain.
He took a tennis ball out of his trouser pocket, held it up so that she could see it, took aim and threw it, but even as it left his hand he realised he had misjudged it. For a moment he clutched at the air as if trying to pull the ball back, but it flew straight and fast and too low and hit the front of an approaching articulated lorry. The yellow sphere shot up into the air and fell back into the middle of the road, where it started bouncing wildly up and down. Peppina, who had managed to wriggle her way out, saw the ball in front of her and ran to get it. By some miracle she avoided the first lorry, but not the second; it ran over her, first with its front wheels, then with those of the trailer.
It was all over in a few seconds and Peppina was nothing but a heap of flesh and fur squashed on the asphalt.
Cristiano, rooted to the spot on the other side of the road, wanted to do something, wanted to pick her up off the ground, but there was a river of metal flowing in front of him.
For the rest of the day he stood at the window crying and watching Peppina’s corpse being turned into a little mat. He and his father had to wait till evening, when the traffic had slowed down, to remove her remains from the road. There was hardly anything left of her – just a furry brown scarf, which his father had chucked in the rubbish bin, telling Cristiano to stop blubbing, because a dog that only lived for a ball didn’t deserve to live.
So, Cristiano said to himself, Castardin’s beast was the second dog he had killed in his life.
17
After turning the key in each of the three locks that sealed the door of his flat, Quattro Formaggi went up the steps that led to Corso Vittorio. It was cold, and his breath condensed in the air into white vapour. A solid grey blanket of clouds covered the sky, and it was drizzling.
Quattro Formaggi waved to Franco, a shop assistant in the Mondadori Mediastore, which occupied all the upper floors of the house.
The building stood in a central position, among the clothes shops and shoe shops, close to Piazza Bologna and the church of San Biagio.
The previous owner, the old notary Bocchiola, had died leaving the whole building to his children, except for a flat in the basement behind the lifts, which he had bequeathed to Corrado Rumitz, aka Quattro Formaggi, his trusted caretaker and factotum for over ten years.
His heirs, furious at his decision, had done everything they could to get rid of the tramp, offering him money and alternative accommodation and mobilising lawyers and psychiatrists, but to no avail. Quattro Formaggi wouldn’t budge.
In the end they had managed to sell the rest of the building at a knock-down price to Mondadori, who had divided the three floors into the holy trinity: music, books and videos. The owners of the firm had, in their turn, made several attempts to buy the basement, wanting to turn it into a storehouse. But they had no luck either.
Quattro Formaggi put on his pea-green full-face crash helmet, unlocked the chain that tied up his old green Boxer and with one kick at the pedal started it first time.
The engine fired and the exhaust pipe belched out a cloud of white smoke, which snaked its way down the street and gathered under the red-and-black-striped awning of the Café Rouge et Noir.
Giuliana Citran and Colonel Ettore Manzini, who were sitting at one of its tables, started coughing, choked by the fetid smoke of the three-per-cent mixture. The old lady s
pat out a piece of croissant filled with white chocolate, which was instantly hoovered up by Ottavio, the colonel’s wire-haired dachshund.
‘Don’t breathe in, whatever you do, Giuliana, don’t breathe in! You’ve only just recovered from pneumonia!’ said the colonel, pressing his napkin over his mouth.
‘Oh my goodness, it’s all gone down my throat! Help!’ croaked Giuliana, sticking out her tongue.
It took them a few minutes to recover their composure, and by the time they had Quattro Formaggi had ridden off on his scooter, despite the fact that the centre of the village was strictly out of bounds, day and night, to any form of transport equipped with wheels, skates, air cushions or caterpillar tracks.
For a while the old lady and the colonel sat in silence, too indignant for words.
Finally, after taking a sip from her cappuccino, Giuliana managed to say: ‘It’s scandalous. Did you see what he did?’
The colonel shook his head. ‘Quite disgraceful, Giuliana. I’ve heard the wretched man takes rubbish into his house.’
‘Really, Ettore, do you mind? I’m eating …’
Manzini sank his teeth into a doughnut and said: ‘I’m sorry, my dear, but these things make my blood boil. So much for all the fine talk about cleaning up the centre of Varrano. People like that need to be helped, locked away in some institution …’
Giuliana wiped the crumbs away from her mouth and asked: ‘So you know who he is, do you?’
The colonel nodded: ‘I most certainly do.’
It was rumoured in the village that Corrado Rumitz was Bocchiola’s illegitimate son – that the late lamented notary had dumped him in an orphanage when he was a baby, but then, twenty years later, had been overcome with remorse and had given him a job and left him that flat which was worth a fortune.
18
As Cristiano Zena walked along the highway, resigned to going on foot, he heard the high-pitched drone of a scooter’s exhaust pipe growing louder and louder behind him.