such as "inspector" and "Verano".
Riccardo grabbed Alida's hand and told her what he had in mind; they would follow the policemen to the exit, before more agents flooded the cemetery and started to comb it.
"What if they already called?" Alida asked.
"We can’t know and we can’t stay here to find out."
They moved at once. Within ten minutes, taking advantage of the noise of the rain that muffled their footsteps, and keeping a considerable distance, they let the cops escort them to the metal door that the old man had not locked.
The police turned onto Via Tiburtina in the direction of San Lorenzo. When they were far enough, Riccardo and Alida scampered off as well.
"Let's move," Riccardo said, taking cover behind the trunk of a tree.
"You came with public transport?" Alida asked, her voice broken by fatigue. She had run all the time crouched behind Riccardo, and the muscles in her legs ached. The wound must have been reopened.
"Yes"
"What do we do?"
"We go on foot, and we’d better not see each other for a few days."
Alida nodded.
"Were you able to do what you had to?"
Alida patted the pocket of her coat, containing the piece of ear.
"I think so."
They separated in Piazzale delle Province. Alida went along Via Morgagni and arrived home half an hour later. Riccardo waited for the dawn, stopping at the bakery of an old friend, who owed him a few favours from the days when he worked for the Pelican. Then he took the subway to Piramide and the 280, which left him a few steps from Piazza Trilussa.
He reached home at 07:12. The storm had moved away and the heat was back sticking to the skin with suction cups. Riccardo’s aunt was sleeping. He entered the small, shadowy living room smelling of old magazines, picked up the phone and called Alida. She answered at once.
"Were you sleeping?"
"No, I couldn’t sleep."
"I'm collapsing. I'll call you later, okay?"
Alida looked at the kitchen table where, on a handkerchief, Luca’s earlobe was lying. It was a little bigger than a bean, and the same colour.
"Alida?"
"I'm here, sorry, call me anytime."
"Sure you're OK?"
"I'm fine. I want to see you."
"Me too."
Alida put the cordless phone down and looked at the earlobe. She had not yet found the courage to swallow it.
She took a bottle of gin from the living room cabinet, poured two fingers in a glass and drank it in one gulp. Then, like a macabre Addams-family-version shot of tequila salt and lemon, she gulped the lobe down without chewing. The gin took the piece of earlobe down, burning her throat. She felt her guts twist. She placed her palms on the table and closed her eyes, trying to control herself. Now that she had found the courage to swallow it, she could not afford to be sick. She rinsed the glass, filled it with water and drank until the burning was gone. Her head was spinning. She went into the bedroom, lay down on the bed and immediately fell asleep.
August 14 – 22:58
Iamiglio realized that the man in front of the entry phone was headed to the apartment of the widow Menozzatti when the light of the top floor suddenly came on.
Mancuso had fallen asleep and, when Iamiglio turned on the radio of the patrol car stationed in Viale Romania, turned his head towards the window snorting, dejected. They had been sent back to surveillance after the reported desecration of the tomb of Menozzatti.
The inspector answered with annoyance, and Iamiglio gave him a concise account of what had happened. It might have been nothing, but it had seemed to him a good idea to notify the boss.
"Listen to me," the inspector started, busy coordinating the team sent at Verano," I thought I told you to inform me only in case of interesting facts concerning the investigation, not every time the lady flushes the toilet!"
Mancuso opened one eye and choked back a laugh.
"Excuse me inspector, I thought..."
"You did a good job so far, try not to spoil it now, okay? And call me only if it’s absolutely necessary... What the fuck are you doing! Stop!" Brembati started to rant against other agents. Iamiglio kept listening, but the voice of the inspector became increasingly distorted.
When he closed the communication he realized that Mancuso was grinning like a schoolboy at break time.
August 14 – 23:02
Alida awoke with a start at the sound of the entry phone and got out of bed. She belched, and her mouth filled with a horrible taste.
"Who is it?" she asked.
"It's me. I'm sick."
Alida opened without thinking twice.
"What happened?" she asked, concerned, when she saw Riccardo cross the landing with uncertain steps. She sustained him and helped him inside.
"I don’t know."
Riccardo was drenched in sweat. He was panting.
"Sit down." They went to the kitchen and Riccardo slumped in a chair.
"What time is it?" Alida asked, more bewildered than before.
"When I left home it was a half past ten."
Alida immediately touched her face. It was smooth, soft skin. She stared at her hands. Graceful and elegant woman hands.
Normal woman hands.
Sustaining herself on the door frame, she left the kitchen and entered the room. She brought her hand to the switch, but withdrew it immediately. There was no need to turn the light on, as the light of the checked moon, sly and already high in the sky, had invaded the floor to the opposite wall.
The spotted-head rabbit jumped on her foot. She picked it up and approached the bars. For the first time she felt as powerful as the moon. Her skin wasn’t burning. No torment was ravaging her limbs. The studies of Seda had been confirmed. She felt the desire to undress, lie down and let the full moon dress her up with its fresh silver coat.
"Alida," The voice of Riccardo made her turn abruptly. "Don’t come in!" she shouted, but Riccardo had already turned the light on, freezing on the door, eyes wide open moving from one side of the room to the other.
The chains, the clotted blood, the tanks of the rabbits.
"What is this room? My God, Alida..." he said in a whisper. Strength was leaving him. He collapsed to the floor. Alida helped him.
"Riccardo, open your eyes, open them..."
Riccardo opened them, and in them Alida saw evil.
His pupil had a diameter of a pinhead and the irises had taken on a yellowish amber hue, like the eyes of animals used to see through the darkness.
"The wound..." Riccardo whispered, clinging to Alida’s dress, "burning."
Alida helped him up, led him to the bedroom, took his shirt off and made him lay on his stomach. Under the right scapula Riccardo had applied a makeshift bandage. Alida removed the gauze and for several seconds she forgot to breathe. If she remembered well, he had mentioned a scratch, but that in front of her was a purulent laceration that needed immediate attention, perhaps even stitches. From the folds of the flesh, tufts of dark hair stuck out, like the hair on the lips of a carnivorous plant.
"How did you get it?" Alida asked.
"It was a scratch..."
"Riccardo, how did you get it?" she asked again, trembling with fear.
"In prison, in the showers. It was an accident, a man slipped on the floor and clung to me. His nails were sharp, I didn’t notice, then it began to worsen."
Alida shook the quilt until her fingers ached.
There was no doubt that it had been Manuel to scratch Riccardo, who was still in Rebibbia before Bracconieri turned into a werewolf and was killed by the guards.
One in a thousand.
Not all was lost.
Manuel Bracconieri had turned into a werewolf too, and he had been buried. They only needed to know where. They could think about it at a later time. Now they had to defeat the moon.
"You must come with me," Alida said, lifting Riccardo, who was shaken by the first heat waves. He pushed her hands away. Eac
h touch burned him like embers.
"You must come, or it will be too late!"
Riccardo, skin burning, thrashed like a maniac, taking advantage of the springs of the mattress to make leaps that made it impossible to hold him down.
Then he suddenly froze in a trance, his eyes wide open toward the ceiling and his breathing heavy.
Although his skin was getting darker, veins stood out dramatically and it almost seemed possible to see the blood flowing in them. His ears had taken a pointed shape, and a thick hair stuck out from the auricle. Alida lifted his lips. His teeth were sharp. She had to use all of her strength to move him from the bedroom to the room of the rabbits, where she laid him next to the chain that had been Luca’s.
The spotted rabbit left the room and slipped into the hall, hopping merrily.
Riccardo gasped as if wanting to awaken from a nightmare. He opened his jaws and blew a foul stench of death. With a stroke of his arm he sent Alida flying to the centre of the room and tore off his shirt, showing the signs of metamorphosis.
Standing, trembling and sore due to his cartilage subjected to the new arrangement of the bones, he stared at the body of Alida, who had lost all meaning, having become a single, living, piece of meat.
"Listen, you have to try to fight not to be overwhelmed... you have to tie yourself to a chain..." Alida said, moving backwards towards the wall, then she roared at the top of her lungs, "Riccardo, don’t look at it!"
But Riccardo had already turned his gaze beyond the bars, where a huge silver platter gleamed under the light of a thousand candles. Its charm, however, was disturbed. The iron bars ruined the beauty of the that cream-filled moon, to which the beast felt wildly attracted.
He walked over the grid and, clinging to it, attempted to remove it.
He wanted to enjoy it, dip his eyes into the pristine surface of the moon, and those bars prevented him from doing that.
Alida wasted no time. She rose from the floor, slipped out of the room and locked the door, sure that the hinges would hold for a handful of seconds.
A moment later a loud crash shook the whole house and the wood began to break as if it were plywood.
Alida recoiled. The door was only a step away, but what would happen to Riccardo if she ran?
The door came down with a thud and the creature jumped to the middle of the corridor, splintering the wooden floor with his claws.
Ravenous, Riccardo walked toward Alida and took a leap forward, harnessing the power of his new and perfect muscular structure.
Alida was very fast too. She opened the door and threw herself on the landing, then flung herself back with her full weight against the door, closing it again on the fingers of the creature, who had been able to stick a paw through the gap.
She slammed the door a couple of times until the monster flinched in agony.
August 14 – 23:40
In the living room of the house, the creature was stirring like a rabid gorilla in a cage too small. He scratched the walls until his claws cracked, bit the upholstery as if it were meat, tore the curtains, slashing them from top to bottom.
Barking his frustration, he left the living room and froze a few steps from the kitchen.
On the ground, with its ears folded back and its pink nose that had stopped trembling, the spotted-head rabbit wiggled a couple of times its fluffy tail.
Riccardo did not fly into a rage, did not howl, did not foam litres of saliva and did not gnash his teeth. He opened his mouth a little, took the rabbit between his fangs and gently tasted its meat, barely piercing it with his canines, just to taste a few drops of blood before tightening the jaws that would break that delicate spine like a twig.
A silver light hit him in full.
He opened his mouth in ecstasy. With a trout-like flick, the rabbit slipped out of his mouth, fell on the floor and sheltered under the sink. The moon floated like a ghost ship behind the kitchen window, no clouds decorated it, no stars dared to compete with the lustre of its immaculate skin. No bar bothered it. It seemed that the sky had room only for it. Riccardo went to the window, stretched the muscles of his legs and prepared to jump.
He wanted to go into the moon.
August 14 – 23:58
The glass exploded when Alida threw the palace gates open.
"Son of a bitch!" Iamiglio shouted, bouncing on the seat of the patrol car as if someone had stuck a pen in his ass.
Mancuso, who had fallen asleep again, mumbled something unintelligible and shot forward, but the belt sent him back against the seat. When he managed to free himself from it, Iamiglio had already jumped out of the car to reach the point where he had seen falling what had seemed to him like...
an Alsatian of abnormal size?
As he approached the sidewalk with extreme caution, he thought of the story he had heard repeated ad nausea by his colleague Romano D'Abbagli about the creature that had appeared in the cell of Bracconieri. Even if he believed that it was a shitload of crap, and did not understand why Romano and the other agent had not made up something better, he still pulled out his gun from its holster.
Where the fuck was Mancuso?
Then he noticed the woman.
"Stay back!" he ordered her, approaching the point where the thing had landed.
Alida did not obey the officer and reached him near the corner of the building, where Riccardo had fallen between a motorcycle and a car. The body was crushed, limbs twisted like those of a mannequin mounted upside down. His clothes, torn and soaked with blood, gave the impression that, before jumping out the window, he had been on a tour through a meat grinder. His head was facing upwards. His eyes, wide open, were staring at the sky, and an ecstatic expression of bliss was drawn on his face, as if he had crossed the eyes of an angel during the flight.
Even Iamiglio turned his eyes to the sky.
All he saw was the moon.
August 15 – 03:15
The investigations and forensics observations in the apartment of Alida – who had been taken to the police station to testify about the events – took place under the supervision of inspector Brembati. Consumed by doubt, he had seen too many deaths not to know that, behind the most trivial cases, the opposite of what appeared used to be hiding.
He could not believe that Riccardo, who had been in prison for a long time, had committed suicide that way as soon as he had regained freedom. Yet, the state of the facts seemed to leave no other option.
Agent Iamiglio, although at first he had mistaken it for something else, perhaps misled by the dim light, had seen a figure jump from the top floor. While it was falling, there was nobody at home, as the woman was leaving the building at the same moment when the man had thrown himself in the void. The police version was confirmed by the testimonies of a couple who was coming home after spending the night out.
In the flat in Viale Romania three types of fingerprints were found; those of the widow Menozzatti, those of her former husband and those of the man that the woman had described as a friend of when she was at the orphanage. The traces of blood on the glass shards fallen on the street and on the kitchen floor matched with the samples taken from the body of Riccardo as well. So far nothing unusual, except that also the saliva found on the furnishings and the destroyed furniture belonged to Riccardo.
It was as if, before killing himself, the man had been prey to a fit of rage and had ragged the upholstery of furniture and chairs, but not with his teeth, since he should have had fangs or pincers instead of jaws to cause that kind of damage.
The picture became even more bleak when the door of the rabbits room was opened.
Brembati arrived immediately, but from his look the agents knew that it would take time and hard work to unravel the mystery of the chains and the blood on the walls.
The inspector cursed himself. Having Alida sent to the police station to wait for him had been a mistake. He would have swallowed his badge to have her there now and drown her in questions. For the time being, he had to make do with va
gue hypotheses and gather as much information as possible, to be used when he would finally put her under pressure.
Entering what seemed like the perfect location for a Cronenberg movie, he mentally retraced the events of the last eight weeks.
The lawyer Luca Menozzatti had been killed with a gunshot by Manuel Bracconieri, a man with a clean record who, after a conversation with the victim's wife, had beaten his cellmates up in order to be put in solitary confinement, and had in turn been killed by two jailers who had mistaken him for something else. Two months later, a former inmate of Rebibbia, he too mistaken for some kind of large animal, had jumped from the building where the first victim lived, in a flat in which a slaughterhouse-room with blood-smeared walls was found. In all this, Mrs. Menozzatti went unnoticed like a nun in church, and even managed to be pitied for what she went through.
If that day that demented Mancuso had remembered to turn the voice recorder on...
"Inspector, we are done, we’ll be waiting for you downstairs," the last forensics agent still in the apartment said.
Brembati, standing motionless in the middle of the kitchen, nodded with a mumble and lit a cigarette.
There were other things he could not shed a light on. First, the tremendous furrows running horizontally along the walls of the corridor. Forensics had found in them shards of nails belonging to the victim, and was sure that the scratches had been made simultaneously, going from the end of the corridor to the kitchen. A completely inexplicable fact, given that the man's arm span did not exceed four feet and the walls were spaced one foot more than that.
The other doubt, although it left several possibilities open, disturbed him even more; why a man who chooses to commit suicide by jumping out a window does not check that it is open?
Everything suggested that he had been running away from something, perhaps the same thing that had led the woman to rush out of the house.
The inspector breathed a puff of smoke, walked to the sink to put the cigarette out, and with the tip of his foot he touched something soft that immediately withdrew. He bent down, and found himself face to face with a cute white rabbit with a dark spot on its head. He grabbed it, lifted it up and looked at it carefully, while the insistent voice of his daughter returned to ring into his ears like the sound of a shattering glass, "Daddy, I want a rabbit, when are you going to buy me one, uh? When are you going to buy me one?"
For months, since when she had been at the home of one of her schoolmates, Silvia had been begging him to have one. Not a day passed without her asking for it again. At breakfast, at dinner. Good thing there was a refectory at her school, at least he could have lunch in peace. Who are those crazy parents who agree to keep a rabbit in the house? How do you find the time to buy one if you don’t even have that to find a murderer?
He put the pet on the table. It did not seem scared. It stood still, breathing rhythmically. If Mrs. Menozzatti asked, he could always say that the door had been left open, since the agents were coming and going; most likely it had gone out on the landing, and ended up who knew where.
Silvia's birthday was on the 12th of September. He would hide the rabbit in the garage, in a cage covered with a cloth, and give it to her the day she
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