The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  But there is a long way to go: a high proportion of English and American crime writers is translated into foreign languages, while the reverse movement is far from true. It might appear to the untrained eye that every single Scandinavian mystery writer is now available to us, when in fact we are still only seeing the tip of the iceberg. And from my own knowledge of the French, Italian and Spanish writing scene, I am painfully aware of how many major authors remain untranslated. There is a whole world of crime out there begging to be discovered by us. Which certainly whets the appetite.

  For several years, I have been editing an annual anthology of the best of British crime writing in this series, and I was delighted when Pete Duncan and Nick Robinson at Constable & Robinson invited me to edit this volume, and broaden the scope to international crime writing. I am often invited to crime writing festivals across Europe and have met many foreign writers on these occasions and this affords me a way to get some of them published in English for the first time. It has been a fascinating book to edit, in so far as I was naturally limited to reading stories in the handful of languages I knew, so I recruited a group of advisers, all wonderful writers in their own right, to recommend some of the best stories they had recently come across in their own language. I must therefore thank Juergen Ehlers in Germany, Camilla Läckberg in Sweden, Paco Taibo in Mexico who advised on Spanish crime writing, Hirsh Sawney in India, Carla Vermaat in the Netherlands, as well as Johnny Temple at Akashic Books, who provided contacts and encouragement and, of course, publishes an increasing number of foreign writers himself in his Noir Cities series. I’m also grateful to Trisha Telep and Helen Donlon for advice on translators and Janet Hutchings at Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Without all of them, this volume would not have been truly international.

  I am customarily reluctant to highlight any particular story in an anthology as part of the introduction, and even more so in the present instance. How can one compare a story from Italy to one written in Russian, one from New Zealand to another from India, a Canadian story to a British one? They all have one thing in common: they are excellent crime stories which will grip, fascinate, intrigue, often surprise and trick you … which is the virtue of the best of crime and mystery writing. You will also find here some British and American authors, many well-loved and familiar: how could an anthology truly be international if we didn’t include ourselves on the basis of the universality of crime writing? Some of the foreign authors I’ve been privileged to select have already had books translated, while as many others haven’t yet (but hopefully will). I hope this sampler of their immense talents will encourage readers to open their investigative nets even wider in times to come and help us make foreign crime authors even more widespread and popular.

  Maxim Jakubowski

  A Crime for a Crime

  Giorgio Faletti

  The station is the usual small town railroad stop.

  Tracks behind and tracks in front, cables striping the sky and rust-brown ties coloring the ground as far as the curve that can be pictured back there. Alongside, a long, low building which from its design and color could only be a station. The blue sign hanging there suggests “ASTI” to passengers going by on trains and inflicts it on those who stop there. The train’s brakes and iron screech until it grinds to a stop and the doors open.

  Passengers step off as a voice announces connections. Names that don’t arouse dreams, ordinary nearby towns, merely places to return to. The end of a journey which in places like this is hardly ever an adventure. They are simple everyday events that in recompense offer the rigid, ineluctable monotony of a pendulum.

  Tic, toc, tic, toc …

  One oscillation going and another coming, the same each day, until the momentum winds down and all that’s left to do is to ascertain if the final second corresponds to a tic or a toc. As he steps off the train, the man who made his decision thinks that fundamentally this is also his life, a train in the morning and one in the evening, uninterruptedly, until he is too tired to go on.

  Or until life decides that he is too tired to go on …

  In any case, the man who made his decision promised himself that today would be a special day. The day when tears would be justified and pain would find a semblance of payback. The day when he will go in search of a smile, not for himself but for someone who is dead. Or for everyone who is dead.

  If things were better, if things were just, if things came close to even a semblance of that law which should be the same for everyone, there would be no reason to do what he has decided to do.

  If things had been different …

  These thoughts are so powerful inside that he instinctively clenches his jaws. So clear are they, and so clear is his motivation, that he wouldn’t be surprised if it were stamped on his face. He’s amazed that his determination isn’t a color or height or size that would make him stand out among the people around him like an abnormal character in a grotesque cartoon.

  Instead his face, his expression and his height are what they always are, and he sails through the crowd like a tempest-free ship without a flag. No one pays any attention to him. They all have their minds on something they have found or are about to find at the beginning or end of their brief or long or easy or boring trip. To them he’s just another anonymous passenger grappling with time and space, who melts into the piazza outside the station.

  As soon as he steps out, he stops and with an accustomed gaze looks around at a town that he has seen numerous other times.

  There and elsewhere.

  A small town, a railroad station panorama: trees, taxis, buses, a fountain, shops on either side. The coolness of an ice cream parlor for summer days. A spurious population that is the sum of that station and of all the stations in the world. At the other end of that daily trip which for years has been his life lies a scene just like that one. The name on the sign where the train pulls in changes, the theater changes, the actors change, but not the characters. All it takes is a minute or so to figure out who’s who, if one has the desire or will to do so. He shrugs faintly and starts walking, unhurriedly because he has no deadline to meet, only a result to accomplish. As he crosses the piazza, the town his sole objective, he thinks that the following day, when he will again board that train, he will leave behind a stopped clock. He doesn’t know how his stride will be and what his breathing and his thoughts will be like, but he is certain that they will not be the same. He moves off, his anonymity protected by the unremarkable overcoat he’s wearing, though it does not manage to enliven his step or conceal his slightly curved back.

  In the right-hand pocket of that coat, the man who made his decision is hiding a gun.

  1

  The Sloth had two voices.

  One was for everybody, the one he used when speaking to the world: he called it the Good Voice. It was the voice that discussed, that greeted people and said thank you and excuse me, but was nothing more than a kind of sonorous mask, a screen to hide behind during those times when he had to go out among people. And then there was the voice reserved for him alone, the one he heard inside him, which argued and talked as if it came from an autonomous part of his brain. In all that time he had been so good at hiding it that no one suspected it existed. That was his real voice.

  It was the Bad Voice.

  The one that was now moving wordlessly on his mouth, as he watched the girls and licked his lips.

  He left the car in the parking lot behind the hotel and emerged from the dark on foot along the tree-lined avenue in front of the stadium. He turned right and left the hotel behind him, the glare of the lights from the salons like a stamp on his leather jacket. Walking slowly and staring straight ahead of him, he crossed the street and approached the mesh fencing only when he was away from the fire house.

  He wasn’t doing anything wrong but, given his prior record, he wanted to avoid attracting attention in any way. The fire house was still, but the station might come to life at any moment, and then, too, there was always some bo
red fireman glancing out the window once too often. They were people trained to see, as well as watch. And he didn’t want to be either watched or seen.

  Not in that place and at that hour, at least.

  He crossed the street only when he reached a clump of oleanders that marked the boundary between the fence and the wall, where the avenue curved and the wall became the archway of the stadium’s service entrance. He hunkered down in such a way that those shrubs found in the brief grassy stretch that bordered the pavement would protect him as much as possible from the eyes of anyone who happened to be passing by, on foot or by car. Even though it was no longer the season for going out for walks. And at that hour of the evening cars drove straight ahead, square bodies and round wheels carrying people home to dinner. He turned up the collar of his leather jacket and leaned his hands on the wire-mesh coated with green plastic. With hooked fingers he clung to the fence like a parasite to its host. On the other side of the fence was the bright green grass of a soccer field, glittering with moisture under the lights. On the other side was the world that each day populated his fantasies. In front of the door nearest to him, the members of a female soccer team were training under the lights of the reflectors. Almost all of them wore tracksuits but a few, despite the cool evening, had on shorts, and their firm, naked legs shone under the almost brash glow of the scoreboards riddled with floodlights, high above.

  There was one in particular, taller than the average height of her companions, with a sweet face and a lean, lithe body that was more reminiscent of a model’s figure than an athlete’s. At that moment she moved off from the group which stood listening to the coach’s words, accompanied by lots of gestures. She was a few yards away and was dribbling the ball with amazing skill, bouncing it easily from her left foot to her right, to her knee and back to her foot, with a movement which lent that technical action a strange sensuality, the color of a dance beneath the white light.

  She was still tan, though summer was by now a memory, and the Sloth thought she must go under a sunlamp in a tanning salon every so often to maintain that amber color. He imagined her taking off her clothes and entering the tanning booth naked, her firm tits and unripe buttocks open to being frisked by the violet fingers of the UVA rays.

  The Sloth ran his tongue over his lips again. He got no relief from it, because his mouth was dryer than his lips. He felt the bulk of an erection swell his pants. He would have liked to enter the tight space of that booth with her, naked and furtive, and talk to her with the Bad Voice while he shoved it in her. The sudden thought that she might be a virgin made a hot flush rise from his stomach to his temples. It would be even more satisfying to take her feverishly, without any regard for her, knowing that the rough act would cause her a little bit of pain …

  Jerk off, the Bad Voice said.

  Not here, he answered in a half-hearted murmur using the Good Voice.

  He barely resisted the urge to unzip his pants, pull out his prick and masturbate to the rhythm of the girl’s dribbling. What the Bad Voice said shouldn’t always be done. He had already gotten into too much trouble because of it and had had to learn to restrain it.

  At least a little. At least in public.

  On the field the girl stopped dribbling, as if rousing herself from an intimate moment, from that exclusive dialogue with a ball which in that situation perhaps represented more than what it should logically represent. With a nimble flick of her foot she lifted the ball off the ground and squeezed it between her hands. Tucking it under her arm she turned her back to where the Sloth was stationed and went back to the group, which hadn’t noticed her absence.

  As she walked away, the jiggle of her buttocks under the light fabric of her white shorts was almost hypnotic to the Sloth’s rapt eyes.

  She spotted you and wants to get you aroused, that bitch the Bad Voice said, screaming and silent.

  The Sloth was undecided. Maybe this time the Bad Voice was right. Maybe that young girl possessed the cunning naughtiness and provocation of a grown woman. Of one of the prostitutes whom he managed to fuck occasionally, when he had the money to afford it. The Sloth was plagued by a series of problems when it came to satisfying his various lusts: he was ugly, he didn’t have a cent and he liked beautiful women. His face with its protruding, watery eyes, pronounced incisors and almost no chin had earned him the nickname that he now bore like an epitaph. As far as everyone was concerned, Lucio Bertolino had died on that cursed day when he was in prison and someone said he looked like the three-toed sloth in the cartoon, the Ice Age.

  He entered prison as a man, and came out a caricature.

  This hadn’t changed his life, at least not in any official sense. Just as before, whether he was Lucio or the Sloth, the only women with whom he managed to have relations free of charge revolted him. And he was revolting to the ones he really wanted.

  The only way he could get laid was to pay. Whores were the only women capable of satisfying his desires and realizing his fantasies. He sought them on the Internet, on the numerous sites full of suggestive photos, bare buttocks and breasts displayed for the viewing, and sometimes faces, slightly blurred in an attempt to disguise features which could be surmised all the same and were even more exciting because of this. They were young girls, high class call-girls, and the fee was often beyond the Sloth’s means. Sometimes, when his pockets were empty, he made do with watching those illuminated images on the screen and masturbated while letting his imagination run wild, creating in his head a film of what he could do with any one of them.

  The next time he would choose a girl who looked like the one who, shortly before, had been bouncing the ball around on her foot with that hypnotic movement, almost a sexual allusion.

  Up, down, up, down, up, down …

  He would buy the right clothes and ask her to dress up like that girl, and he would make her undress in the bathroom and take a shower, like all athletes do after training. Then … The lights on the field went out, at the same time turning off the mental screen on which he was projecting his images. The woman stripping for him dissolved and was left floating in a yellowish spot before his eyes.

  The Sloth was left alone in the dark, as always.

  He stayed clinging to the fence for a few more seconds, as if electrified by his excitement. Then he let go, left the protection of the shrubs and crossed the street to go back to his car. As he walked he thought about what he could do to get some money. At that moment he was broke, but he would think of something. He always managed to get by somehow and he would do so this time as well. A friend of his had just introduced him to some guys who assured him that there was money to be made in drug peddling, that drugs were now a universal commodity with a market open to all social classes.

  Weed, coke, heroin, ecstasy …

  A guaranteed high for every budget and every type of addiction.

  He had always stayed out of that circuit, not because of any moral compunction but simply because he had never had the opportunity to break into it. He had always made do with small apartment robberies, dismal muggings of retirees outside the post office, purse-snatchings and stuff like that. Little things for which he had hardly ever been caught. The major thing that had brought him to the attention of the police had been the complaints of harassment by some girls, complaints that had come to nothing when he stopped haunting them.

  The only time he attempted something big, it went as expected. Maybe he and his friends bit off more than they could chew. As a result they ended up in the slammer with more counts against them than fleas on a dog.

  And yet everything would have been smooth as butter, if only there hadn’t been that damned curve and that damned car …

  Nevertheless, in prison the Sloth had learned how the world works. A certain world, at least. The real guys in the know had explained to him how money is made. And he had learned that the law is a net with rather large meshes. According to the code he should have stayed inside for a number of years. But what with plea bargaining, c
lemency, and reduced time for good behavior he got away with less than three.

  And now he decided to get serious about it.

  To pay for all the whores he wanted and for all the good lawyers he needed, the kind who make it possible to go to jail in the evening and get released the next day.

  Step by step he was back in front of the hotel. From inside the brightly lit reception hall came the sound of voices and the clink of china. Maybe it was one of the numerous social affairs sponsored by the Rotary, Lions or other such organizations. Rich people, rolling in dough, the kind that didn’t have any problems and maybe had never had any. The ones who drove by Praia, the disreputable neighborhood where he lived, in their shiny, polished cars, glanced around appalled or preoccupied, and continued on toward their fine houses on the hills or in the historic center.

  Bastard dickheads, the Bad Voice said.

  He left the Bad Voice looming over the windows shouting out his fury. As he turned the corner, his mind erased what he was seeing and went back to what he had just witnessed. His renewed arousal obliterated that inkling of rage. Now he would go home, turn on the computer and go trolling on the Internet to find a girl who looked like the unknown soccer player. Once he found her, he knew his Bad Voice would be there intact so he could talk to the image on the screen, while waiting to talk to her in person.

  Maybe he might even phone her, to hear her voice and find out how much she wanted to satisfy his fantasies.