Джанрико Карофильо - Rome Noir

After which Peppe got on the motorcycle and sped off in great excitement, the wind cooling his sweat.

It Was an Instant

The first symptom hinting at a brain tumor had been difficulty walking. Peppe had wanted to accelerate and instead he braked. It was an instant, then he retook control of the situation. When, shortly before the robbery, the doctor, a woman, in tears, apologizing over and over again, explained about the mistake — a simple, stupid, imbecilic mixup of X-rays — Peppe felt as if he had been reborn. And as a result of that sensation, he was like a child who has not yet learned to walk. For long minutes, in fact, he couldn’t remember how to walk. Now, on the motorcycle, with the gold tokens, he felt that he had regained full control of his faculties. He was happy. The horizon was clear.

He certainly didn’t expect a drunk to cross the street like that. Obviously Peppe tried to brake, but because of a sort of strange, unexpected symptom, he accelerated and hit the man.

The Architect

Riccardo came out of the bar and realized that he was about to faint. A classic drop in blood sugar. Riccardo often watched the TV show Paperissima, which featured people caught at embarrassing moments, and laughed heartily when he saw couples passing out at the altar from emotion. He couldn’t understand how it was possible to lose your strength like that, so that you seemed like a sack of potatoes left to itself, or someone who, given a push, staggers slightly, then, taking a dozen steps forward, falls flat on his face, powerless, like a dead man. He had the thought that the neighborhood was in the process of being renovated, before his sight darkened; and in spite of the blackness into which he was plunged, he took five steps, like a drunk, right into the middle of the street, and was violently struck by a motorcycle proceeding at high speed. When, after seventy-two hours, Riccardo finally regained consciousness, he realized, reading the newspaper, that he had been an involuntary hero, one who brings about the arrest of the foolish old protagonist of a comic heist of gold tokens, because, having fainted, he ends up under the motorcycle and flies forward a few meters. Every article he read emphasized the fact that the gold tokens, scattered all over the street, had been set upon by the neighborhood residents. Of every age, old and young, new arrivals and longtime inhabitants.

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Tangenziale

The sports car speeds along the asphalt ribbon. The last mechanic who worked on it said that a car that low brings bad luck; the mechanic is a Jehovah’s Witness and he’s convinced that the closer you are to the ground the farther you are from the grace of God.

He drives looking straight ahead, she tilts her head slightly to the right; her forehead, hidden by blond bangs, hits the window at every bump. An almost constant noise, monotonous, grating.

Jolt.

Thump.

Jolt.

Thump.

He would like to tell her to move, to pay attention, but all he manages to do is grunt. He opens his mouth as if to speak but remains suspended between the last thought and the first word, in apnea. She won’t help; she watches the unbroken stripe that marks the emergency lane and remains silent. At the interchange for the Castelli Romani he takes the ring road; the car points south.

Signal, a glance in the rearview mirror, the engine grinds as he slows down and lets himself be swallowed up in the darkness by the broad asphalt ribbon filled with tires and metal plates.

He’s trying for the fourth time — he’s begun to count the number of times he tries.

He does it partly to occupy his mind and partly to make sure that everything is really happening and that it’s not the fault of some nausea-inducing systemic bug in the universe that spits us out by the billions onto earth.

How are you? he manages to say.

Then, again, there’s that pale forehead knocking against the glass, and the silence.

For one, three, ten interminable seconds.

She opens her mouth, parts her crimson-painted lips, and says, in a very distant singsong, Look out, you should be in the right-hand lane.

Suddenly he feels a crash beneath his breastbone, the collision between a raging and unsustainable irritation and the knowledge that you need patience if you want to be the superman of a woman like this.

For an instant he hates her.

For an instant it seems to him that two yellow eyes are approaching in the rearview mirror and he feels like laughing and shouting in fear.

He doesn’t need a reason to hate her.

He doesn’t need a motive to kill her.

He would give an arm to have her again the way she was at the beginning.

He brings a hand to his heart and feels nothing.

He lowers the volume on the radio with the index finger of his right hand and sighs loudly.

Again he tries to say something, I... but she interrupts him.

Shut up. Shut up. I’ve never seen anyone act as ridiculous as you so many times in a single evening. Why can’t you leave me alone, let me live and breathe? Why are you so incredibly insecure?

Tonight? he asks as if he hadn’t been aware of a thing.

Yes, tonight. Always trying to find my hand, hand, hand. As if you were a five-year-old child looking for his mother... Will you get it through your skull that I’m not your mother? I need a man, a real man, who gives me security but doesn’t suffocate me. You suffocate me, you’re like a murderer strangling his victim. I can’t breathe anymore...

He watches the knuckles of his fingers turn white, he feels the grip of his hands crushing the leather steering wheel. He accelerates, now the car is pressed tight to the road, aggressive and fast.

She continues, Always whining, demanding. First you don’t want me to talk at all and you’re insulted by everything I say, then I mingle at the party and your eyes are following me like radar. I don’t recognize you anymore...

She knows that to end the sentence properly she has to take a long pause and say...

I don’t know.

He brakes in order to avoid hitting a truck that’s traveling as slowly as an elephant.

He sees himself reflected in the sloping windshield of his car.

Thin, tan, curly hair mussed, white shirt at least as tired as he is.

Why do you talk to me like that? he asks, defenseless.

But he knows perfectly well why she talks like that.

Because he’s been transformed into a coward.

Because together they’ve completely destroyed the monument of their story and he can’t bear it.

For months he’s been crying at night, secretly, drowning his sobs in the pillow and getting up every five minutes.

He signals right, he needs gas.

The station is deserted, the self-service pumps work twenty-four hours a day. On the automatic cash register there’s a flyer, the face of a smiling young man in an IP cap. He reads the caption while he inserts twenty euros in the slot. It’s a newspaper clipping.

The boy was a gas-station attendant.

He worked at that station.

He was killed three weeks ago in a robbery, by thieves after the cash.

Two hundred and forty euros.

And so?

And so? she asks.

Let’s get going, I’m tired and my contact lenses are getting dry...

He finishes reading quickly, chooses a pump, and thinks that the kid didn’t deserve it.

Maybe no, maybe yes, but not like that, and anyway he feels bad for him.

He feels bad.

He thinks that she, lustful and fierce as a mantis, would have deserved it much more.

For what she’s doing to him, to them, to the monument of the two of them.

To die a terrible death, the death of a woman who leaves her man instead of caring for him through hard times.