Giorgio Faletti - I Kill

‘No.’ That single syllable uttered in such a calm voice erected a wall between them. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

There was a knock at the door and Claude Morelli walked in without waiting for an answer.

‘Inspector…’

‘What is it, Morelli?’

‘There’s someone from Radio Monte Carlo outside.’

‘Tell him I’m not talking to reporters now. There’ll be a press conference later, whenever the chief decides.’

‘He’s not a reporter, inspector. He’s a deejay who hosts an evening radio show. He came with the station manager. They read the papers and they say they have some information on the two crimes at the harbour.’

Hulot did not know how to take the news. Anything useful was like manna from heaven. The thing he was afraid of was a parade of maniacs convinced that they knew everything about the homicides, or even wanting to confess that they were the killers. But he could not afford to leave any stone unturned.

He blew out his cheeks. ‘Show them in.’

Morelli went out and it seemed like a prearranged signal for Frank, who got up and retreated to the door just as Morelli came back, accompanied by a young man with long, black hair, about thirty, and an older man, about forty-five. Frank glanced at them and stood aside to let them in, then took advantage of the occasion to slip through the half-open door.

‘Frank,’ called Hulot after him. ‘Sure you don’t want to stay?’ Frank Ottobre left the room without a word and closed the door behind him.

Outside police headquarters, Frank turned left on Rue Suffren Raymond and soon found himself walking down Boulevard Albert Premier, the road that ran along the coast. A crane moved lazily against the blue sky. The crew was still at work dismantling the Grand Prix bleachers and piling them on to long trucks.

Everything was happening by the rules. Frank crossed the street and stopped on the promenade in front of the harbour to watch the boats coming and going. There was no trace of what had happened on the wharf. The Beneteau had been towed away somewhere safe so that the police could get to it during the investigation. The Baglietto and the other boat that had been rammed were still there, gently nudging each other’s fenders as the waves brought them close. The police barricades had been removed. There was nothing left to see.

The harbour cafe had resumed its normal activity. What had happened was probably attracting more customers, curiosity seekers who wanted to be at the centre of things. Maybe the young sailor who had discovered the bodies was there, enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame and recounting what he had seen. Or maybe he was staring silently into a glass, trying to forget.

Frank sat down on a stone bench. A boy sped past on Rollerblades, followed by a younger girl having trouble with her skates and whimpering for him to slow down. A man with a black labrador was patiently waiting for his dog to finish responding to the call of nature. Then he took out a plastic bag and a little shovel from his pocket and scooped up the evidence, diligently depositing it in the bin.

Ordinary people. Like everybody else, but with a little more money and happiness, or so it seemed. Maybe it was all just a show and nothing more. A cage was still a cage, even if it was made of gold, and every person created his own destiny. Everyone built his own life or destroyed it, according to the rules he alone invented. Or rules he refused to make. There was no escape.

A yacht was motoring out of the harbour. From the stern, a blonde woman in a blue swimsuit waved goodbye to someone on the shore. For a moment the sea and its reflections stirred his memory.

After he had left the hospital he and Harriet had rented a cottage in an isolated spot on the Georgia coast. It was a wooden house with a red-tile roof built about 100 yards from the shore, in the middle of the dunes. There was a veranda with large sliding glass doors that opened in the summer, transforming it into a patio.

At night they listened to the wind blowing through the sparse vegetation and the sound of the waves hitting the beach. In bed, he could feel his wife hold him tightly before falling asleep. Her frantic need to assure herselfofhispresence,asifshecouldnotreallyconvinceherselfthathe was still there with her, alive.

During the day they lay on the beach, sunbathed and swam. The stretch of coastline was practically deserted. People who loved the sea and the life of crowded beaches went elsewhere, to the ‘in’ places, to watch bodybuilders working out or girls with silicon breasts strutting by as if the were auditioning for Baywatch. Lying there on the towel, Frank could expose his thin body to the sun without being ashamed of the red scars or the painful mark of the heart operation where they took out the piece of metal that had nearly killed him.

Sometimes Harriet traced the sensitive flesh of the scars with her fingers, and tears glistened in her eyes. Sometimes silence fell between them, when they both thought the same thing, remembering the suffering of those last months and the toll it had taken. They did not have the courage to look at each other then. They each looked out at their own piece of ocean until one of them silently found the strength to turn and embrace the other.

From time to time, they did some shopping in Honesty, a fishing village that was the nearest town and looked more like Scotland than America. It was a peaceful little place, without the slightest ambition of becoming a tourist resort. The wooden houses all looked more or less alike and were built along a street that ran parallel to the ocean, where a concrete barrier above the rocks stopped the waves during winter storms.

They ate in a restaurant with large windows across from the pier, built on struts with a wooden floor that echoed with the waiters’ steps. They drank chilled white wine that misted their glasses, and they ate freshly caught lobster, staining their fingers and splashing their clothes when they tried to crack open the claws. Harriet and Frank laughed like children. They seemed to be thinking about nothing. They spoke about nothing. Until the phone call.

They were at home and Frank was slicing vegetables for the salad. There was a delicious smell offish and potatoes baking in the oven. The wind outside swirled the sand from the peaks of the dunes; the ocean was covered with white foam. The sails of a few windsurfers cut swiftly through the air. Harriet was sitting in a cane chair on the veranda the whistling of the wind kept her from hearing the phone. He had stuck his head out the kitchen door with a large red pepper in his hand.

‘Phone, Harriet. Can you answer? My hands are dirty.’

His wife had gone over to the old wall phone that was ringing with its old-fashioned sound. She had picked up the receiver and he stood there watching her.

‘Hello?’

Her face had changed, the way faces do when they hear bad news. Her smile had faded and she had stood in silence for a moment. Then, she had put down the receiver and looked at Frank with an intensity that would torment him for a long time.

‘It’s for you. It’s Homer,’ she had said, turning and going back to the veranda without another word. He had gone to the phone and picked up thereceiver,stillwarmfromhiswife’shand.

‘Yes?’

‘Frank, it’s Homer Woods. How’re you doing?’

‘Fine.’

‘Really fine?’

‘Yes.’

‘We got them.’ Homer spoke as if their last conversation had taken place ten minutes before. If he had noticed Frank’s monosyllabic replies, he had not let on.