Steal You Away (21 page)

Bingo. And that fool Bacci wanted to let them go
…

Not just a lot, heaps of the damn things. The stubs were overflowing from the ashtray. They hadn’t even bothered to get rid of them. Either they were two mental retards or they were too high to carry out even such a simple operation.

Stan Laurel opened the drawer in the dashboard and gave him his road tax booklet and insurance form.

‘And your licence?’

Stan Laurel’s real name was Massimiliano Franzini. He had been born on 25 July 1975 and his residence was in Rome, in Via Monti Parioli, 128.

His licence was in order.

‘Who does the car belong to?’

‘My father.’

He checked the registration documents. The car was registered in the name of Mariano Franzini, resident in Via Monti Parioli, 128.

‘And your father can afford a car like this?’

‘Yes.’

Miele reached out and with the tip of the torch touched the girl’s thigh. ‘Take off those headphones. Let’s see your papers.’

Pretty Hair shifted one earphone, made a face as if she’d swallowed a dead rat, took her identity card out of her bag and handed it to him with a truculent gesture.

Her name was Martina Trevisan. She, too, was Roman and her address was Via Palenco, 34. Miele wasn’t very expert in the place names of the capital, but he seemed to remember that Via Palenco was near Piazza Euclide. Parioli.

He handed back the documents and looked the two of them over.

Two snotty little Parioli kids playing at being punks.

Worse than car thieves. Much worse. At least thieves risked their own arses. These didn’t. These were spoiled brats dressed up as tearaways. Born with silver spoons in their mouths and brought up on hundred-thousand-lire handouts and with parents who told them that they were the lords of the universe, that life is a bowl of cherries and that if they wanted to smoke pot it was fine and if they wanted to dress like bums it was no problem.

A broad grin spread across Miele’s face, revealing a full set of yellow teeth.

That ‘A’ for anarchy written with marker pens on their jeans was an affront to someone who slaves away in the icy cold rain to uphold the rule of law, those joints chucked in the ashtray were a slap in the face to someone who once inadvertently took a drag from a joint and spent a whole week of his life in mortal dread of being a drug addict, those Coca-Cola cans contemptuously thrown under the seats of a car that no normal human being could afford even if he scrimped and saved all his life were an insult to someone who owns an Alfa 33 Twin Spark and washes it on Sundays at the drinking fountain and scratches around for second-hand spare parts. Everything those two represented, in short, was a raised middle finger to him and the entire police force.

Those sons of bitches were taking the piss out of him.

‘Does your father know you’ve taken his car?’

‘Yes.’

Making a show of checking the insurance form, Miele went on in a casual tone: ‘Do you like smoking?’ He glanced up and saw Stan Laurel nearly have a fit.

This galvanised him.

The cold had vanished. The rain no longer made him wet. He felt good. At peace with the world.

It’s a thousand times better being a cop than a footballer
.

He had them in the palm of his hand.

‘Do you like smoking?’ he repeated in the same casual tone.

‘Sorry, officer, I didn’t quite catch that,’ stammered Stan Laurel.

‘Do you like smoking?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘What do you mean, what?’

‘What do you like smoking?’

‘Chesterfields.’

‘Not joints?’

‘No.’ Stan’s voice, however, quivered like a violin string.

‘No? Why are you trembling, then?’

‘I’m not trembling.’

‘Oh, I see. You’re not trembling, I do apologise.’ He smiled contentedly and shone the light in Pretty Hair’s face.

‘The young man says you don’t like hash. Is that so?’

Martina, shielding her eyes with her hand, shook her head.

‘What’s up, are you too strung out to talk?’

‘We smoked a couple of joints, so what?’ replied Pretty Hair in a voice as shrill and grating as a fingernail on a blackboard.

Ah … so you’re a tough one! Not a little wimp like Flappy-
Ears
.

‘So what? You may not be aware of the fact, but in Italy that constitutes an offence.’

‘It’s for personal use,’ retorted the little bitch in a schoolmistressy tone.

‘Oh, for personal use, is it? Well, just watch. Watch this.’

Max found himself in the water.

Flat on his face, arms outstretched, like a lion skin.

He hadn’t had time to react, defend himself, do anything.

The door had opened and that bastard had grabbed his ponytail with both hands and yanked him out. For a moment he had feared he meant to tear his hair out by the roots, but the son of a bitch had swung him out into the middle of the lay-by as if he were a weight tied to a rope. And Max had flown forward, head down, and fallen nose down in a puddle.

He couldn’t breathe.

He pulled himself up to his knees. The impact on the asphalt
had compressed his sternum, making his lungs collapse. He opened his mouth and emitted some guttural sounds. Nothing. He tried to breathe, but couldn’t suck air. He gasped, bending forward in the rain, and around him everything evaporated and became darkness. Black and yellow. Yellow flowers blossomed in their hundreds before his eyes. In his ears he heard a low throbbing buzz like the distant engine of an oil tanker.

I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m dying. Shit, I’m dying
.

Then, when he was sure he was a goner, something opened in his chest, a valve perhaps, something relaxed, anyway, and a thin stream of air was sucked voraciously into his thirsty lungs. Max breathed. And breathed and breathed again. His face turned from puce to scarlet. Then he started coughing and spluttering and was again aware of the rainwater running down his neck and drenching his hair.

‘Get up. Come on.’

A hand seized him by the collar. He found himself on his feet.

‘Are you all right?’

Max shook his head.

‘Of course you are. I’ve cleared away that haze that had descended over you. Now I bet you understand me better.’

Max looked up.

That piece of shit was standing in the middle of the lay-by, soaking wet, and opening his arms like a crazed preacher or something. His face concealed in the darkness.

Martina was there, too. Standing. Legs spread apart. Hands against the door of the Mercedes.

‘Even though what you people have consumed was, as the young lady quite rightly informs us, for personal use, we must now make quite certain that there aren’t any drugs hidden somewhere, because then it would be more serious, much more serious, do you want to know why? Because then it would be illegal possession of drugs for the purpose of dealing.’

‘Max, is everything all right? Are you okay?’ Martina, without turning, called to him anxiously.

‘Yes. How about you?’

‘I’m okay …’ Her voice was broken. She was on the point of tears.

‘Wonderful. I’m okay too. That makes three of us who are all okay. So now we can devote our attention to more serious problems,’ said the policeman in the middle of the lay-by.

He’s mad. Raving mad
, Max said to himself.

Maybe he wasn’t even a policeman. Maybe he was a dangerous psychopath disguised as a policeman. Like in
Maniac Cop
. What had happened to the other one, the officer they’d seen before, the one with the gun? Had he killed him? The light inside the police car was on, but the rain on the windows made it impossible to see in.

He was dazzled by the policeman’s torch.

‘Where’s the stuff?’

‘What stuff? There isn’t a … ny … stuff.’
Oh shit, I’m starting
to cry too
. He felt the emotion wrapping its merciless coils round his Adam’s apple and windpipe. And an uncontrollable tremor shook him from head to foot.

‘Strip!’

‘What do you mean, strip?’

‘Strip! I’ve got to search you.’

‘I haven’t got anything on me.’

‘Prove it.’ The policeman had raised his voice. And he was losing his temper.

‘But …’

‘No buts. You have to obey. I represent the established order and you represent anarchy, and you have been caught in the act of violating the law, so if I order you to strip you strip, do you understand? Do I have to draw my gun and insert it between your tonsils? Is that what you want me to do?’ He had regained that calm tone, that tone which presaged disasters and violence.

Max took off his checked shirt and laid it on the ground. Then he took off his fleece and his T-shirt. The policeman watched him with folded arms. He nodded to him to continue. He undid his belt and his three-sizes-too-big trousers, which slipped down like a torn curtain, leaving him in his underpants. His legs were hairless, white and twig-thin.

‘Take everything off. You might have hid …’

‘Here! Here it is! He hasn’t got it, I have,’ shouted Martina, who was still standing with her hands against the car. Max couldn’t see her face.

‘What have you got?’ The policeman went over to her.

‘Here! Look.’ Martina opened her bag and took out some pot. A tiny amount. A couple of grams at most. ‘Here it is.’

It was all they had.

Only half an hour earlier, on a planet light-years away from there, a planet with adjustable heating, the music of REM and leather seats, Martina was talking. ‘I tried to buy some more. I rang Pinocchio’ (and Max had thought to himself, pushers always have the same corny nicknames) ‘but he wasn’t in. It’s not much, but never mind. We’ll make do. Besides, if we get smashed we won’t be able to study …’

‘Give it here.’ The policeman took the piece of hashish and held it to his nose. ‘Don’t make me laugh. These are the crumbs, where’s the main stash? In the car? Or has one of you got it on you?’

‘I swear, I swear to God it’s all we’ve got. There isn’t any more. It’s the truth. Fuck you. You son of a bitch. It’s the tru …’ Martina stopped talking and began to cry.

She seemed smaller now that she was finally crying. The snot ran down from her nose and the eye-shadow had dissolved under her eyes and the blue brush she wore on her head had wilted, sticking to her forehead. A little teenager sobbing her heart out.

‘Is it in the car? Tell me, have you hidden it in the car?’

‘Go and see for yourself, you bastard. There isn’t a fucking thing in there,’ Martina screamed and then flew at him with clenched fists and the policeman grabbed her wrists and Martina growled and cried and the policeman shouted. ‘What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? You’re only making things worse for yourself’ and he twisted her arm behind her back, making her shriek with pain. Then he handcuffed her wrist to the window frame.

Max, with his trousers down, watched his fellow student and future girlfriend being manhandled, without lifting a finger.

It was the policeman’s tone that prevented him from reacting. It was too calm. As if to him it were the most normal thing in the world to grab a guy by the hair and hurl him on the ground and then beat up a girl.

He’s completely nuts
. This thought, instead of throwing him into an absolute panic, calmed him down.

He was crazy. That was why Max must not do anything.

Some people have had the experience of dying and being brought back to life. A matter of a few seconds, during which the lungs are immobile, the electrocardiogram is flat and there is no sign of life. They are clinically dead. Then the efforts of the doctors, the adrenaline, the electric shocks and the cardiac massages revive the heart, which gradually starts beating again and these lucky people revive.

On reawakening, if we may call it that, some have reported having the impression, while they were dead, of seeing themselves on the operating table surrounded by doctors and nurses. They had watched the scene from above, as if a TV camera (the soul, others say) which had been ballasted down in their mortal remains, had broken free and tracked away backwards and upwards.

A feeling similar to that which Max was experiencing at that moment.

He saw the scene from afar. As in a film, or rather on a set where a film was being made. A violent film. The blue light of the police car. The headlights of the Mercedes glaring in the puddles. The darkness lashed by the rain. The cars racing by on the road. The distant chimes of a bell.

I hadn’t noticed that bell, till now
.

And that phoney policeman and, on her knees, a thin girl

who I only met this morning

who was sobbing, handcuffed to the door of the car. And then there was him, in his underpants, shivering, teeth chattering, helpless.

It was perfect. Just like a film script.

And the most absurd thing was that it was true and that it was happening to him, the great action-film fan, who had seen
Duel
dozens of times,
Deliverance
four times and
The Hitcher
at least twice, and who, if he’d been sitting in the second row of the Embassy with a packet of popcorn in his hand, would have revelled in such a hardhitting scene. He would have delighted in its realism. In the unusual violence that the director had succeeded in putting into it. How strange that he, who would have applauded so enthusiastically, should now be on the receiving end …

Does not try hard enough and does not join in
.

How often had they written that crap on his school report?

‘
LEAVE HER ALONE
!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. At vocal-chord-breaking pitch. ‘
LEAVE HER ALONE
!’

He charged like a wounded animal at that bastard motherfuckingsonofabitch but fell flat on his face after barely taking a step.

He had tripped over his trousers.

And he lay there in the cold night, crying.

Maybe I’m being a trifle heavy-handed
.

It was the sight of Stan Laurel tripping over his trousers and falling in a puddle squealing like a stuck pig that caused this moral doubt to form in the mind of officer Bruno Miele.