Giorgio Faletti - I Kill

Laurent wondered if he was dead. No, his unknown rescuer seemed much too skilled to kill by accident. He was the type who killed only when he wanted to. Laurent started coughing, bending over to hold his stomach as acidic saliva trickled from his mouth.

‘Looks like I got here just in time, Mr Bedon, no?’ said the man who had saved him, in very bad French with a strong foreign accent. He helped him up, holding his elbow.

Laurent looked at him, thunderstruck, without understanding. He had never seen him before in his life. But the guy had saved him from Valentin’s fists and knew his name. Who the hell was he?

‘Do you speak English?’

Laurent nodded. The man gave a brief sigh of relief. He continued in English with an American accent.

‘Thank God. I’m not very good at your language, as you’ve just heard. You’re probably wondering why I helped you with this -’ he waved at Valentin’s body on the ground – ‘this… I’d call it… embarrassing situation, if you agree.’

Laurent nodded again in silence.

‘Mr Bedon, either you don’t read your e-mails, or you don’t trust rich uncles. I have a proposal for you.’

Laurent’s astonishment was written all over his face. Now he had an explanation for that strange e-mail. He would surely be getting others. This man hadn’t knocked Valentin out and saved his hide simply to carve a Z like Zorro on the wall and disappear.

‘My name’s Ryan Mosse and I’m American. I have a proposal for you. Very, very advantageous, economically speaking.’

Laurent looked at him for an instant without speaking. He liked the sound of that. Suddenly his stomach stopped hurting. He got up, breathing deeply. He could feel the colour slowly returning to his face.

The man looked around. If he was disgusted by the filth of this neighbourhood, he didn’t show it. He was looking carefully at the building.

‘My apartment’s over there,’ said Laurent, ‘but I don’t think you came to buy it.’

‘No, but if we come to an understanding, you would be able to, if you’re interested.’

As he straightened his clothing, Laurent’s brain raced ahead. He had absolutely no idea who this guy was and what he wanted… what was his name? Oh, yes, Ryan Mosse. But Mosse presumably would now tell him. And he would also name a figure.

A very large figure, apparently.

Laurent looked at Valentin, motionless on the ground. The pig’s nose and mouth were split open and a small puddle of blood was forming on the pavement. At that particular moment in his life, no matter who it was that saved Laurent’s hide from someone like Valentin and then talked to him about money, lots of money, Laurent Bedon would listen.

Alone, far from the world, the man listens to music.

The notes of the Minuet from Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 float through the air. Enclosed in his metal box, the man is absorbed in the dancing rhythm of the strings and imagines the musicians’ movements and their concentration as they perform the symphony. Now his imagination soars above like a sky cam floating through space and time. Suddenly, he is no longer in his secret place but in a large room with frescoed walls and ceilings, illuminated from above by hundreds of candles suspended from enormous chandeliers. He shifts his gaze to the right in a view so clear that it seems real. His hand presses that of a woman moving next to him in the sensuous rhythm of a dance made up of elegant swirls, pauses and bows, practised so many times that it is smooth as wine poured into a glass. The woman is unable to resist his fixed stare. From time to time, she turns her eyes, veiled by long lashes, to the audience, seeking confirmation of the incredible awareness that she is the chosen one. There is admiration and envy in all those in the drawing room who watch them dance.

He knows that she will be his that night. In the soft glimmering candlelight, amid the lace and ribbons of the enormous canopy bed, he sees her emerge from the tangle of silks that cover her like rose petals. The rights of the king.

But none of that matters now. They are dancing and they are beautiful. And they will be even lovelier when…

Are you there, Vibo?

The voice arrives, gentle as always, anxious as only that voice can be. His dream, the image that he created before his closed eyes, is lost, crumbling away like burning frames of film.

It was only a moment’s respite from his duty, his burden. There is no room for dreams; there never was and there never will be. They could have dreamt once, when they lived in the big house on the hill, when they managed to crawl away from the obsessive care of the man who already wanted them to be men, when they just wanted to be boys. When they wanted to run, not march. But even now there was a voice that could break any vision their imaginations managed to create.

‘Yes, I’m here, Paso.’

What are you doing? I couldn’t hear you.

‘I was just thinking.’

The man lets the music continue. The last postscript of his thin mirage. There will never be a dance with a beautiful woman for him. For them. He gets up and goes into the other room, where the lifeless body lies in its crystal coffin.

He switches on the light. There is a reflection on the corner of the transparent case. It disappears when he moves and changes position. There is another, but it is always the same. Tiny insufficient mirages. He knows what he will find. Another broken illusion, another magic mirror shattered at his feet.

He goes up to the naked body inside and runs his eyes over the dried limbs, the colour of old parchment. His gaze moves slowly, from the feet to the head covered with what, not long ago, was the face of another man.

His heart aches.

Nothing lasts for ever. The mask is showing the first signs of decomposition. The hair is dry and dull. The skin is yellowed and shrinking. In a little while, in spite of his care, it will be no different from the skin of the face it is hiding. He looks at the body with infinite tenderness, eyes softened by the affection he cannot erase. He darkens and clenches his jaw in defiance.

It isn’t true that fate is unavoidable. It isn’t true that you can only watch as time and events occur. He can change; he must change that eternal injustice. He can fight against the mistakes distributed by fate with open hands in the snake pit that is the life of man.

Obscurity means darkness. Darkness means night. And night means that the hunt must continue.

The man smiles. Poor, stupid bloodhounds. Baying with bared teeth to hide their fear. Night-blind eyes searching in the dark to discover where the prey turned hunter will come from. When will he strike, and where?

He is someone and no one. He is the king. The king has no curiosity, only certainty. He leaves curiosity to others, to all those who ask, to all those who show it in their eyes, in their erratic gestures, in their apprehension, their anxiety that is sometimes so thick you can touch it, smell it.

Those two eternal questions. When and where? When will that last breath come, held in with the growl of an animal, kept inside with clenched teeth, because there will never be another? When, at what hour of the day or night, at what tick of an unwinding clock, will there be that last second and no other, leaving the rest of time to the world as it continues in other directions and along other routes? Where, in which bed, car seat, aeroplane lavatory, beach, armchair, hotel, will the heart feel that sharp pain, the interminable, curious, useless expectation of another beat, after an interval that becomes longer and longer, growing infinite? Sometimes death comes so quickly that the last flash is a final calmness, but not an answer, because in that blinding light there is no time to understand it, nor even, sometimes, to feel it.