The Break Read online

  Cirillo nodded, too, then, as he put his cigar down on the edge of the table and was just about to stretch out again to shoot, he wondered once again if he had done the right thing, sending Dino into that slaughterhouse.

  The next morning, after spending half-an-hour longer than usual in bed with Sofia, feeling the dome of her belly pressing on him and finding a whole new order and system of numbers and proportions in which to fit things, Dino got up and set off unhurriedly for the site. He waved to Carlo and Johnny from a distance, embraced Blondie, telling him he was really sorry, and then, very calmly, went to see Giani. He stood in the door of the office without even going in and looked Giani in the eyes. Giani put down the phone, saying that he would call back.

  “I’m quitting,” Dino said, still with one hand on the door.

  “Dino, don’t talk crap,” Giani said, already looking down in the mouth.

  “I’m not talking crap, I quit.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Giani said. “There’s no need.”

  “Yes, there is a need,” Dino said, giving him a last wave and closing the door behind him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THEY HEARD THE NEWS one day towards the middle of the afternoon, while Dino was helping Cirillo with the accounts. Dino was spending all day at the billiard parlour now, helping out, sorting a few things that had needed sorting for a while now. From time to time, he would go out with his Arlecchino—which still wasn’t actually his—and win a tournament and make a bit of money. He’d bought Sofia some new clothes, and had even had her shop repainted. The dome of Sofia’s belly was growing before their very eyes, and she carried it around with her as if it had always been there, with the same ease with which she cut material for a dress or a skirt.

  Whenever Dino played a tournament, he would leave as silently as he had arrived, muttering a quick thank you if he had to and lowering his head when those damned cameras started flashing. But someone had found out where Dino played, and every now and again a journalist would show up and ask after him.

  “He isn’t here,” they would always say at the bar or the entrance.

  The journalist would look around. “That’s not possible. They told me he’s always here.”

  “He isn’t here,” the barman, Sandro, would say, shaking his head.

  “What are you talking about?” the journalist would continue, looking around. “There he is. Over there.”

  He would make a move in that direction, and whoever was there would put a hand out to stop him.

  “Maybe we haven’t understood each other,” the person would say, looking him straight in the eyes. “He isn’t here.”

  Usually the journalist would give up almost immediately. Just once, Sandro and Mori had had to grab one of them, lift him bodily and march him up the stairs, while he went on about freedom of information and threatened to report them to the authorities.

  That afternoon, though, everything had been quiet. Dino had sat at the bar counter, with a large exercise book and a few sheets of paper in front of him, trying to explain to Cirillo how to turn around the fortunes of the billiard parlour, although without making much headway. The idea had hovered there for a moment, only to be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders, as if nothing was wrong, and everything had gone back to the way it was.

  Dino never read the newspapers. Even after the ingot tournament it had been another customer of the billiard parlour who had brought in a whole lot of cuttings, saying that it had been thirty years since billiards had last featured on the front page, and giving Dino unexpectedly mixed feelings.

  “They planted another bomb in the town hall,” a man drinking a glass of soda at the bar suddenly said. He was a short, skinny man who moved like a salamander.

  For a few seconds, Dino continued pointing to numbers in the big exercise book in front of him, then both he and Cirillo turned towards the skinny man with the soda.

  “What are you talking about?” Cirillo asked, with a frown.

  The skinny man put his glass down on the counter and stared at them for a moment. “There’s been another explosion at the town hall,” he said. “This time apparently it’s bigger.”

  “Who says so?” Dino asked, his pen in mid-air over the numbers in the big exercise book.

  “People,” the skinny man said. “They also say they know who it was.”

  Cirillo and Dino looked at the man again.

  “Who?” Cirillo asked.

  “I don’t know. Apparently, an old lady saw something.”

  Dino and Cirillo looked at the man, then exchanged glances and went back to the exercise book with the numbers.

  “People never understand a damned thing,” Dino said.

  “Wise words,” the skinny man said with a nod, taking a last sip from his soda. He threw a note down on the table and headed for the exit saying, “See you.”

  “See you,” Cirillo said, and for a moment Dino watched the man walking to the stairs, then went back to the exercise book.

  In the end, with a lot of patience, Dino managed to drill something into his friend’s stubborn head. Later, as he was going back home after stopping at the butcher’s to get two slices of meat for himself and Sofia, he told himself that life was a funny thing, but if you really thought about it and tried to find a logic in it, however obscure that logic was, you almost always found it.

  But the funniest thing was that this new balance which Dino had seen taking shape in front of his eyes, and which was really quite solid, was only to last a few moments. For the rest of his life, Dino would have given any sum of money, would have given up part of himself, to go back to that moment, to stop on the pavement, perhaps with the key already in the door, and close his eyes and contemplate one last time that precise, orderly system, made up of perfect geometries which, out of the emptiness of sidereal space, had forged themselves a place in his universe of stones. He would have liked to turn back to that moment, if only for a second, to hear his own breathing and the beating of his heart and lose himself one last time, as if in the greatest of masterpieces, in that system of trajectories shining in space like rays of light. But for the rest of his life, he would see that damned key enter that system like a scythe cutting through those rays and those trajectories which were like threads of illuminated crystal, leaving only gleams of darkness as sharp as blades.

  The door opened slowly. In front of him was the stone staircase that led to the first-floor landing. He did not even have time to put his foot on the first step.

  “Boss,” he heard a voice say behind him.

  Peering into the dark corner next to the door, he saw the thin, narrow face of Blondie.

  “Blondie,” Dino said, “what are you doing here?”

  “I need help,” Blondie said, in that deep voice that seemed to belong to someone much older.

  “What’s wrong?” Dino asked, with a frown.

  “What’s wrong is, I have to go. Put bomb.”

  For a moment still, Dino stood there looking at that thin boy with the voice of a man, trying to grasp those two words that bounced around in his brain and sent a shiver down his spine. “What have you done?” he said, frowning again.

  “I put bomb,” Blondie said, without showing any emotion.

  Dino looked at him in silence, hoping for a moment that this boy as hard as cast iron would disappear and the one he knew from work, who laughed as he splashed water on Duilio, would return.

  “Are you crazy?” Dino asked, raising his voice. “What the hell do you mean, ‘I put bomb’?”

  “I keep eye, Dino, on your … how you call him? … councillor. He buy new car, find bigger house. Johnny right, Dino—black asphalt shit is kickback. Shit people in your town hall.”

  “And you think that’s a good reason to plant a bomb?” Dino screamed.

  “Speak quiet, please,” Blondie said, with no change in his tone of voice.

  Dino stared at him for a few seconds, then collapsed onto the second step of the stone stairs, p
ut the meat he had bought for dinner down by his side, and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

  “You help me?” Blondie asked.

  Dino raised his eyes and stared at him for a moment. “Fuck off, Blondie,” he said.

  Blondie stared back at him. “If you not want to help, you say. I go away right now.”

  Dino was silent for a while, screwing up his eyes, perhaps unconsciously wondering if a crack had not already started to appear in the system. Then he looked at Blondie again.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  Blondie stared at Dino for a moment without saying anything. “I need to escape. Old woman say she saw tall thin guy with long hair climbing gate of town hall.”

  “Is it true?” Dino asked, looking Blondie up and down.

  “Don’t know, but I tall, thin and with long hair.”

  Dino looked gravely at Blondie, wondering if he should laugh or punch him.

  “They say police put roadblocks everywhere,” Blondie said.

  “Quite right, too,” Dino said, giving a last glance at Blondie, then he looked down again and fell silent. For a moment, his eye fell on the bag with the meat, which he should have taken upstairs for dinner, and he thought of his wife and child upstairs calmly waiting for him to return.

  Dino passed a hand over his face one last time, and when he opened his eyes again he looked back up at Blondie. “All right,” he said getting to his feet. He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and walked to the other side of the banisters. “Come.”

  He went to the end of the little corridor between the wall of the entrance hall and the flight of stairs, turned left and opened a little door, painted white like the wall so that it was hard to see from a distance. He reached an arm inside and switched on a light. A little narrow stone staircase descended steeply between half-peeling walls.

  “Wait down there, I’ll see if I can think of something,” Dino said without even looking Blondie in the eyes. Blondie stepped forward and started walking down, taking care not to bump his head.

  “Oh,” Dino said as he was about to leave. “This is the cellar of the building. At this hour, nobody should come down here, but if somebody does come, do me a favour, make up some excuse, and don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Don’t worry,” Blondie said, laughing. “I not kill.”

  “All right,” Dino said, switching off the light and slamming the door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  SO DINO FOUND HIMSELF out on the street, in the evening, with a bag of meat in his hand and only one dumb idea in his head about what to do.

  He walked across the centre of town as fast as he could, already feeling the sweat forming on his forehead, sure it would pour down him as soon as he stopped. He came to the big grey apartment blocks that filled the southern outskirts of the town, and stopped outside one of them. A group of boys passed on the other side of the street, and Dino wondered if he should feel worried, then for some reason, as he rang one of the bells, it occurred to him that the friend of a bomber had nothing to worry about, as if some of Blondie’s gunpowder had started circulating in Dino’s veins.

  The entryphone beside the little iron gate crackled. “Yes?”

  “Saeed, it’s Dino. Come down here a minute, please, it’s important.”

  There was a sharp noise from the entryphone, then silence, and after a minute or two Dino saw the dark figure of Saeed emerge out of the darkness of the stairs.

  “Hi, boss,” Saeed said when he was closer.

  “Hi, Saeed. Something’s happened, I need help.”

  Saeed gave Dino a worried look. “Sure, boss. Anything you want. What happen?”

  “Did you hear about the explosion in the town hall today?”

  “Yes, they say another bomb.”

  “Yes, Saeed. Blondie planted it.”

  Saeed’s face grew, if possible, even longer than usual. “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Blondie planted the bomb. I’ll explain later. Right now, though, the idiot’s in my building. He says he has to get away, an old woman saw him and everyone’s looking for him and he needs help.”

  Saeed looked Dino straight in the eyes. “Why you come to me?” he asked, gravely.

  “Because apart from Duilio you’re the only person who knows Blondie and who I could imagine would help me. But if you don’t want to, Saeed, that’s all right. I don’t know if I want to either, but it’s different for me.”

  Saeed and Dino looked at each other for a while, each man probably thinking about what he should do, trying to find some kind of common position without weighing it down with too many words. Saeed was wearing a tight white T-shirt that made his muscles bulge even more than usual and in the evening light made his face look even blacker.

  “What you thinking?” Saeed asked, lowering his voice slightly.

  Dino was motionless for a few more seconds, wondering if their silent conversation had led to something good. “I was thinking of the three-wheel van you use for the site.”

  Saeed nodded a couple of times. “What if they stop you?”

  “If they stop me, tough. I’ll tell them I had to work late on the site and that I’m going to unload the rubble now because I need the three-wheeler first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Is total bullshit,” Saeed said.

  “Yes, Saeed, it’s total bullshit. But what do they know? They’re policemen, not bricklayers. Plus, I can’t think of anything better. Can you?”

  Saeed was motionless for a moment, looking at him as if suspending judgement, then shook his head.

  “Is there any rubble on the site?” Dino asked.

  “Yes,” Saeed said in an almost thin voice, without taking his eyes off Dino.

  “Good,” Dino said.

  Saeed stared at Dino some more, then turned his head aside and said something angry-sounding in his own language.

  “Yes, I know,” Dino said when Saeed turned to look at him again, even though he had no idea what he had said.

  “Boss,” Saeed said, “I take you to site. I open gate and fetch three-wheeler. But I not coming. I spend ten years here, trying to live regular life. I have family, and family not agree with bombs. I open gate and you go, and if something happen, you stole three-wheeler because your idea and because you know where I keep three-wheeler because you my friend. I tell my wife I never left home, all evening with her, she do this. Don’t do something stupid. If they stop you and Blondie, is your business. Him terrorist and you thief who help terrorists.”

  Saeed and Dino looked each other in the eyes for another second, gravely, like two soldiers fighting a war that wasn’t theirs.

  “All right,” Dino said, “that’s only fair.”

  Saeed nodded and drew an unusually deep breath. “Wait here,” he said, going back towards the big grey building and disappearing again into the darkness of the stairs.

  Dino looked up at the sky and gazed at the few stars visible between the tall buildings and the thunderclouds. He would have given anything at that moment to be in front of a billiard table, right here in the middle of the street. Just to be able to take a few steps, grab his Arlecchino, lean across the baize and make a good shot, not too much force, starting from an angle, first cushion, thump, second cushion, thump, third cushion, thump, opponent’s ball, splat, pins, flop, cover. To be back, if only for a moment, in that world where things went as they were supposed to and there were specific rules, a world where chaos and bad luck had no place.

  After a few minutes, Saeed came back down, wearing a jacket. “Let’s go,” he said, with a nod of the head, without stopping.

  They started walking fast, and their steps struck the stones of the street like horses’ hooves. From time to time they passed someone, and each time Saeed sank down behind the collar of his jacket.

  “You should have put your hat on,” Dino said in a whisper as they passed the umpteenth person.

  “White people not recognise black people in darkness.
But everyone recognise black man with hat.”

  He had said it without turning a hair, Dino thought, and immediately wondered how it was possible that everyone always seemed to know more about things than he did. Every now and again, he had the feeling that whoever was responsible for the ingredients of life had given him only a third of what the other people had, or had forgotten to pass on some of the recipes, and actually this was something that bothered him quite a bit.

  Fortunately, the place where Saeed was working turned out to be fairly close. A long, high wall of corrugated iron surrounded the site, an old farmhouse on the outskirts of town that was being renovated. Dino had always heard that it was an old ruin which had been sequestrated because of some terrible event that had taken place there and which was the source of a dispute involving lots of people. Apparently, the whole thing had now been cleared up and someone had bought the house, which was actually a fairly decent piece of property.

  “Do you know anything about this house?” Dino asked as Saeed fiddled with the padlock of the big steel chain on the corrugated iron gate.

  “What I supposed to know?” Saeed asked, glancing quickly at Dino.

  “I don’t know,” Dino said. “I heard there was a big court case with a whole lot of people.”

  Saeed gave Dino another, almost irritable glance, then took the padlock off the chain and with a great clatter of metal ran the chain through one hole and left it dangling from the other.

  “Boss,” Saeed said, with a resigned, almost exasperated sigh, looking Dino right in the eyes and holding the gate half-open with one hand. “I hear someone in town hall buy this house. I hear many things, but I don’t give shit, I forget, because I family and want to live peaceful.”

  “Ah,” Dino said, as Saeed, a touch irritable now, finished opening the gate and disappeared inside. Again he had the unpleasant sensation that everyone knew more about everything than he did and once again that something was cracking, spilling acids that, in all probability, would gradually corrode whatever they met.