‘Watch out, they may turn off,’ Duca said. He should also have said, watch out, they may open fire, but he didn’t: if they opened fire they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
The Mercedes did turn off, in fact, in order to avoid being boxed in on the main road, they must be intending to jump out and set off at a run across the fields, and if they did that it meant they weren’t armed, and if they weren’t armed they were dead, because the road they had been forced to turn onto was a mere hundred metres long and ended up in front of a big farmhouse.
Hens flew up into the air, a dog tied to a long chain howled and tried to fly, too, a countrywoman in shorts, bra, and straw hat stood there petrified with a kind of pitchfork in her hand when she saw the two cars explode in front of her, and they really did explode rather than just brake. The four doors of the two cars opened simultaneously, but Duca and Davide were faster on their feet, Duca grabbed the man, the sadist, before he had taken more than a few steps and before he realised that he had been caught, he gave him a kick in the stomach which laid him out flat in the dust in front of the farmhouse, howling and abject.
Davide had taken the other man and was holding him by one arm, without doing anything to him, because he was good, but the photographer was screaming hysterically, ‘Help, help!’ and it wasn’t as stupid as it might seem to cry for help: if he managed to create confusion, if he could make the people here believe, if only for a minute, that he was an honest citizen being attacked, he might be able to get away.
Then Duca left the sadist moaning on the ground, unable to get up-if he hadn’t smashed his stomach in it was pure chance, because that had been his intention-and passed on to the other man: he didn’t yet know that he was a homosexual, but the way he was screaming aroused his suspicions and when he saw him up close his suspicions were confirmed.
‘Look down, you bastard,’ he said.
This unexpected request made the photographer fall silent for a moment, then he raised his head a little more and screamed even more loudly, ‘Help!’ That was all Duca needed: he hit him on his Adam’s apple. Not even as a doctor had he ever been curious to know what happened to an Adam’s apple if you hit it like that, for a moment all that happened was that the photographer fell abruptly silent and collapsed against Davide.
‘Police,’ Duca said.
A robust old countryman had suddenly appeared. Duca flashed his medical registration card at him: he was a romantic, he still kept it in his wallet.
‘These two are murderers, they’ve killed two women, is there anywhere we can keep them locked up?’
Then a young man came out, then an old lady, then two boys. They weren’t quite sure what was going on, but they all recognised the word ‘police.’
‘The stable,’ the old man said.
‘The stable will be fine.’
There was only an old carthorse there, it really was a stable, not one of those gleaming air-conditioned hostels you saw on television. They threw the two men down in the mire, one of them was moaning with his hands on his stomach, conscious but powerless to do anything, the other had fainted, or had he choked to death? Duca didn’t think it was urgent to find out.
‘Davide, go back to the Ulisse Apartments, find Livia, see what’s happening, then phone Carrua, tell him everything and ask him to come here immediately.’ This was urgent, Livia was urgent. ‘In the meantime I’ll talk to these two. Go.’
It isn’t all that hot in a stable, in summer the smell is stronger than the heat. The light came from two round holes high in the walls, but it was sufficient. Once he had heard Davide drive off, he forbade himself to think about anything apart from the two men. He stood in front of the one who was holding his hands on his stomach and had stopped moaning: his fear was greater than his pain.
‘What did you do to the girl?’
‘What girl?’ He tried to pull himself up, because he could feel that muck which covered the floor of the stable like a Persian carpet seeping through his shirt.
With his foot, but without kicking him, only pressing, Duca forced him to lie down again in the mire. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘and I’m pleased to see that you’ve woken up, too,’ he said to the other man who had opened his eyes and was gasping, ‘that way you’ll both hear my proposition. I ask questions and you answer. If your answers are the right ones, you’ll just go to prison. If they’re wrong, you’ll go to the cemetery, I’ll pull you to pieces, bit by bit, bone by bone, the police will have to call an ambulance with a waterproof tarpaulin. Do we agree? Just now, I asked you what you did to the girl. You answered, what girl? That’s not the right answer. Now I’ll ask you again, and try to answer correctly, it’ll be in your best interests: What did you do to the girl?’
Silence. The horse didn’t even turn its head, it seemed to be made of wood.
‘I realised she’d been sent there by the police, I had my suspicions, so I had to make her talk.’
‘What did you do to her?’
The sadist retched a bit, his body contorted by the pain in his stomach, then he told Duca what he had done to her. And Duca did nothing, he stood there motionless, trying not to think about Livia.
‘And did she talk?’ he asked.
No, the sadist replied, she had continued to take those cuts on her face and continued to make it clear to him that she had nothing to say, and after a while he had almost been convinced that she hadn’t come there to spy on him, so he had let her go and they had left.
‘Why didn’t you kill her? She has a lot to say now.’
‘I’m not a murderer.’
‘That isn’t the right answer.’ He kicked him hard with the heel of his shoe, almost on the temple, where it joined the jaw. He heard a groan, but the man didn’t lose consciousness, which was just the way Duca wanted it: he would tear him apart, pull him to pieces, but wouldn’t knock him out. ‘You are a murderer, and if you didn’t kill her you must have had your reasons. It’ll be better for you if you tell me.’ The man thought he was being clever, he closed his eyes and pretended he had fainted, he didn’t know he was out of luck: his interrogator was a doctor. ‘You can’t fool me, I know you haven’t fainted. Answer, or I’ll continue.’
The man immediately opened his eyes again. ‘They told me to do it, it’s not up to me, I have to do what they tell me.’
‘Yes, I know what they told you. Sometimes you kill and sometimes you scar. It’s an old system. You’re not in the Mafia, but you’ve been trained by Mafiosi, you must have taken a crash course in how to scar someone’s face. Or am I wrong?’
The man said nothing.
‘Answer me.’
He looked at the heel of the shoe one centimetre from his nose. ‘In Turin I met two men from the south, but I was young, I did it almost as a game.’
‘Of course, they taught you the anatomy of the facial muscles, the place to make the incision and the type of incision to make, an M-shaped incision, for example, can’t be mended with plastic surgery.’ These were things his father had explained to him, when he had started wearing long trousers and his father had finally been able to talk to him about the Mafia. He wouldn’t have devoted a single minute to this whole business if he hadn’t sensed the ruthless, violent hand of the Mafia behind it. No, these two louts weren’t in the Mafia, nor was their local boss, or even their national boss, probably, but the theoretician, the mastermind of the whole system was certainly in the Mafia and took fifty per cent.
‘Leaving a woman who’s been scarred like that in circulation is good publicity, almost better than a woman who’s been murdered. The papers talk about it, the girls get scared, if they don’t behave the same thing will happen to them. When you have hundreds and hundreds of women who know a lot, and who’d like to go back to their previous lives, it isn’t easy keeping them in their place, but with the methods your instructors from the Mafia have taught you, you can deal with them. And now tell me about the man with the grey moustache who picked up the girl last night. Who is he?’