I Am God

by Giorgio Faletti

  Firstly: he was running the risk that this was a dangerous guy. Secondly: there might be something valuable in the bag the guy wasn’t too eager for the police to clap eyes on. And if this second point turned out to be correct, then Ziggy’s interest in the contents grew considerably. But at the same time it made the guy very dangerous.

  That feeling he’d had that he’d found the right target was turning sour. He went down to the lower level, which was packed with ethnic restaurants. The huge space was full of signs, colours, food smells and a sense of hurry. And it was the last of these things that was communicating itself to him, even though he was forcing himself to walk at a normal pace.

  He got to the other side and as he was climbing the stairs again he turned to check out the street behind him. Nobody suspicious. He started to relax. Maybe it had only been an impression. Maybe he was starting to get too old for this work.

  He followed the signs and went back into the subway, heading for the purple line, which went north into Queens. He waited until the train arrived and followed the stream of passengers getting on. A necessary precaution. If what he’d been thinking earlier was right, the man in the green jacket, assuming he really was following him, would never try anything against him in a crowded place. He waited nonchalantly until the usual voice announced that the doors were closing.

  Only then did he rush out and go back to the bench, like a passenger who suddenly realizes he has got on the wrong carriage. He waited for the clatter of the departing train to fade, then changed back to the green line, which would take him downtown and then on to Brooklyn.

  He did the journey in several stages, waiting at each stop for the next train, continuing to glance around him with a nonchalant air.

  When he decided that everything was OK, he got on another train and found a place to sit. He made himself comfortable and waited, with the bag in his lap, overcoming the impulse to open it and find out what there was inside. Better to do that at home, where he’d be able to examine everything calmly and unhurriedly.

  Ziggy was good at waiting.

  He had done it all his life, ever since he was a boy and had started hustling every which way he could think of to make ends meet. He had carried on in the same way, never making the mistake of getting too greedy, contenting himself with what he had, but always with the unshakeable certainty that one day everything would suddenly change. His life, his home, his name.

  Farewell Ziggy Stardust, welcome back Mister Zbigniew Malone.

  He changed lines again before arriving at a station near home. He lived in Brooklyn, in a neighbourhood with the largest concentration of Haitians in New York, where even the signs on some of the restaurants were in French. A multiethnic world – women with huge asses and shrill voices and young guys who shuffled as they walked and wore their caps with the peak turned to the side. Bordering that area, the Jewish neighbourhood, houses with well-tended lawns and Mercedeses in the drives. Silent people, who moved like dark shadows, faces serious beneath their black hats.

  But he liked things that way. In expectation of the day when he’d be able to say, That’s enough of that, and choose for himself.

  On the wall of the building where he lived, the windowless wall facing the street, someone had painted a mural. The artist was nothing special, but the colours, in a place so faded, so washed out, had always cheered him up. He went in through the front door and descended the steps that led to the basement where he lived. A single room with a tiny bathroom, worn, second-rate furniture and the smell of exotic cooking wafting down from the upper floors. The unmade bed was against the wall opposite the door, beneath the high window that let in a dim light. Everything seemed to belong to a bygone time, even the few modern touches: the high-definition TV, the computer and the all-in-one printer/copier, which were covered with a layer of dust.

  The only surprising thing was the bookcase against the left-hand wall, filled with volumes neatly arranged in alphabetical order. Others were strewn about the room. There was even a pile of books on the night table to the right of the bed.

  Ziggy placed the bag on the table, which was cluttered with old magazines, took off his jacket, and threw it on an armchair. He took the bag and went and sat down on the bed. He opened the bag and started emptying it onto the sheet. There were two newspapers, the New York Times and USA Today, a blue and yellow plastic box that turned out to be a small toolkit, a roll of copper wire and one of grey adhesive tape, the kind electricians used. Then he pulled out the heaviest thing in the bag, the thing that really weighed it down: a photograph album with a brown leather cover and pages of rough paper of the same colour, full of black and white images of people he didn’t know in places he didn’t know. All the photographs were quite old. From the clothes, he guessed at the 1970s. He leafed through a few pages. An image caught his attention. He removed it from the adhesive tabs that held it to the page and looked at it closely for a few moments. A young man with long hair and a smile on his lips that didn’t quite reach his eyes, holding a big black cat. The snapshot, quite by chance, had managed to capture a strange resemblance, as if those two living beings, although of different species, were mirror images of each other.

  He slipped the photograph into his shirt pocket and continued to explore the contents of the bag. He extracted a black plastic object, rectangular in shape, slightly longer and narrower than a cigarette pack, with adhesive tape around the middle to stop it from opening. At one end was a series of buttons of different colours.

  Ziggy looked at it for a moment, bewildered. It was like a home-made remote control. Rudimentary maybe, but that seemed to be what it was. He put it down next to the other things and took the last object out of the bag. It was a large, slightly crumpled brown envelope with a name and address written on it, the words already partly faded. The size of it suggested it had been used to send the photograph album.

  He opened it to look inside and there he found sheets of paper covered in rough but fairly legible handwriting. The handwriting of a man who was probably not very used to words, either spoken or written.

  Ziggy started reading. The first pages were quite boring, filled with a life story expressed in a crude and sometimes disjointed way. He was a reader of books and knew when he was reading something by someone who had studied and could write. This wasn’t it.

  But he became aware that the text was not without a certain fascination, even though the prose was certainly not a writer’s. It was what it said that mattered, not how it was written. He continued reading with increasing attention, and gradually the attention turned to interest and finally a kind of frenzy. By the time he reached the end of the letter, he couldn’t help leaping to his feet. He felt a slight shiver down his spine and the hair on his arms stood on end, as if he’d had an electric shock.

  Ziggy couldn’t believe his eyes. He sat down again slowly, with his legs open and his eyes fixed on some undefined point. A point in time rather than in space.

  The great opportunity had arrived.

  What he had in his hands might be worth millions of dollars to the right people. He felt dizzy at the thought of it. The possible advantages for him made him forget the definite consequences for others.

  He put the pages down on the bed with exaggerated care, as if they were fragile. Then he started thinking about how to take advantage of this unexpected piece of luck. What to do, how to distil this material in such a way as to arouse the greatest interest and get the greatest advantage.

  And above all, who to contact.

  All kinds of thoughts moved through his brain at speed.

  He switched on the printer/copier and put the sheets of paper on the table next to the computer. The first thing to do was make photocopies. A copy would be enough to arouse someone’s interest and that someone would have to be willing to pay a tidy sum just to get hold of the original. Which had to remain in his possession until the deal was done. The original he would put in an envelope and send to an anonymous postal box he sometimes used.
There it would stay until someone gave him a reason to go and get it out.

  And that reason could only be a substantial sum of money.

  He started the copying, placing the original of each page next to the copy as he did so. When it came to work, Ziggy was a meticulous person. And this was the most important work he had ever done in his life.

  He placed one of the last sheets of paper on the glass of the scanner, lowered the lid and pressed the start button. The scanning light moved through the machine until it had the whole page in its memory. As it was about to print, the sensor warned that there was no more paper and an orange light started flashing on the left-hand side of the machine.

  Ziggy went to get some sheets from a ream on a shelf of the bookcase and put it in the tray.

  At that moment he heard a noise behind him, a slight metallic click, like a lock snapping. He turned in time to see the door open and a man in a green jacket come in.

  No, not now, not now that everything was within reach …

  But what he saw in front of him was a hand holding a knife.

  It was clearly that knife that had been used to force the lousy lock. And from the look in the man’s eyes he realized that wouldn’t be the only use for it.

  He felt his legs give way. He didn’t have the strength to say anything. As the man advanced on him, Ziggy Stardust started crying. He cried because he was afraid of pain, and afraid of death.

  But more than anything, he cried with disappointment.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Volvo moved smoothly through the traffic drawing it towards the Bronx. At that hour, going north could be a real journey. But once she left Manhattan, Vivien had found that the traffic was flowing smoothly. Since she had terrible the Triborough Bridge on her right, she had driven the length of the Bruckner Expressway in a relatively short time.

  The sun was sinking behind her and the city was getting ready for sunset. The sky had a dark blue luminosity, so clear that it seemed to have been hand painted – the colour that only the New York breeze could offer, when it managed to blow clean that small stretch of infinity that everyone deluded themselves they had above them.

  The car phone interrupted the music coming from the radio. She activated the speaker.

  ‘Vivien?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hi, it’s Nathan.’

  He hadn’t needed to say his name. She had recognized her brother-in-law’s voice. She would have recognized it even in the clamour of a battlefield.

  What do you want, you son of a bitch? she thought.

  ‘What do you want, you son of a bitch?’ she said aloud.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘You’ll never forgive me, will you?’

  ‘Nathan, forgiveness is for people who repent. Forgiveness is for people who try to repair the harm they’ve done.’

  The man at the other end waited a moment, in order to let those words vanish into the distance that separated them.

  ‘Have you seen Greta lately?’

  ‘And you?’ Vivien rounded on him, feeling the desire to hit him rise in her, that desire she felt every time she found herself in his presence or even just heard his voice. At that moment, if he had been sitting beside her, she would have smashed his nose with a dig from her elbow.

  ‘How long is it since you last saw your wife? How long is it since you last saw your daughter? How much longer do you think you can hide?’

  ‘Vivien, I’m not hiding. I—’

  ‘Spare me your crap, you son of a bitch!’

  She had shouted those words. And she had been wrong to do so. The contempt she felt for the man should not be manifested with a roar. It should be expressed with the hiss of the snake.

  And a snake was what she became.

  ‘Nathan, you’re a coward. You always have been and you always will be. And when things got too tough for you, you did the one thing you know how to do: you ran away.’

  ‘I’ve always provided for their needs. Sometimes, there are choices—’

  ‘You didn’t have choices,’ she interrupted him sharply. ‘You had responsibilities. And you should have assumed them. That lousy cheque you send every month isn’t enough to compensate for your absence. Or even to soothe your conscience. So don’t call me now to find out how your wife is. Don’t call me to find out how your daughter is. If you want to feel better, get off your fucking ass and go see for yourself.’

  She pressed the button so angrily to end the call that for a moment she was afraid she had broken it. For a few moments she looked straight ahead of her, driving and listening to the furious beating of her heart. A few ragged tears of anger ran down her cheeks. She wiped them with the back of her hand and tried to calm down.

  To forget the place she had been that morning and the place she was going now, she took shelter in the one safe place she had: her work.

  She tried to leave every other thought behind her and ordered her mind to concentrate on the new case. She recalled that arm emerging from the gap in the wall, the desolation of that shrivelled head resting on a shoulder that was only a residue of skin and bone.

  Even though experience had taught her that everything was possible, that same experience made her fear that it was going to be very difficult to establish the dead man’s identity. Construction sites were much favoured by the underworld as places to hide the victims of mob hits. When it was done by professionals, bodies were often buried naked or with all the labels torn off their clothes in case they were found. Sometimes the fingerprints were erased with acid. Examining the body today, she had noticed that this hadn’t been done and that the labels were in their places, even though fairly deteriorated. That meant that this probably wasn’t the work of a professional, but had been done by someone without the cool head or the experience to eliminate all traces.

  But who could have hidden the body in a block of concrete? It wasn’t an easy thing to do, unless you had expert help. Or maybe the culprit was an expert himself. Someone who worked for a construction company. Whatever the motive, the crime could have been the isolated act of an ordinary man.

  The only lead they had was those photographs, especially that strange black cat with three—

  ‘Shit!’

  She had been so absorbed in her thoughts, she hadn’t noticed that the junction with the Hutchinson River Parkway was blocked by a line of cars. She braked abruptly, swerving left in order not to bump the car in front. The driver of a big pick-up behind her sounded his horn loudly. In her rear-view mirror Vivien saw him leaning forward and showing her his middle finger.

  She usually hated resorting to certain things when she wasn’t on duty, but this evening she decided she was in a hurry. Her own distraction, more than the man’s gesture, had made her nervous. She took the flashing light from behind the seat, opened the window, lit it and placed it on the roof.

  With a smile, she saw the man abruptly lower his hand and back down. The cars in front of her, in so far as they could, pulled over to make it easier for her to get through. She made her way toward Zerega Avenue, and a couple of blocks after turning onto Logan she reached the church of Saint Benedict.

  She parked the Volvo in a free space on the other side of the street and sat for a moment looking at the light brick facade, the short flight of steps that led to the three entrance doors surmounted by pointed arches, the columns and the friezes with which they were decorated.

  It was a recent building. Vivien would never have thought that a place like that could one day become so familiar to her.

  She got out of the car and crossed the street.

  The semi-darkness that makes it hard to tell the colour of cats was already in the air, but there was still enough light to recognize a person. She was about to head for the priory when she saw Father Angelo Cremonesi, one of the priests attached to the parish, come out through the central door with a man and a woman. Confessions were usually heard on Saturdays from four to five, but nobody stuck rigidly to the rules, which in
practice were quite flexible.

  Vivien climbed the few steps and joined him. The priest stood waiting for her and the couple with him moved away.

  ‘Good evening, Miss Light.’

  ‘Good evening, father.’

  Vivien shook his hand. He was a man in his sixties with white hair, a vigorous appearance and gentle eyes. The first time she had met him he had reminded her of Spencer Tracy in an old movie.

  ‘Have you come for your niece?’

  ‘Yes. I spoke with Father McKean, and we both think it’s time to see if she can spend a couple of days at home. I’ll bring her back here on Monday morning.’

  Uttering the name of Michael McKean reminded her of him. He had an expressive face and eyes that gave the impression he could look through people and walls. Maybe it was because of this ability of his to see beyond things that he was always there when he was needed.

  Father Cremonesi, who was docile but somewhat fussy, insisted on explaining the situation. ‘Father McKean isn’t here today, and he asked me to apologize. The kids are still at the pier. A kind person whose name I can’t remember offered them a trip in a sailboat. John just called me. He knows about your agreement with Michael and told me to tell you that they were just getting their things together and that they’ll be here soon.’

  ‘That’s all right’

  ‘Would you like to wait in the priory?’

  ‘No thanks, father. I’ll wait for them in the church.’

  ‘I’ll see you later, then, Miss Light.’

  Father Cremonesi walked away. Maybe he had taken her intention to wait in the church for devotion. All she wanted for the moment was to be alone.

  She pushed open the door and walked through the lobby with its light wood panelling, past the statues of Saint Teresa and Saint Gerard that stood in a niche in the wall. Another door, a less heavy one, led into the interior of the church itself.