It was hard to keep in check his annoyance with the futility of the last half hour. But he made an effort and went on driving with calm control. Twenty minutes later the elegant villas of Chiávari came into view, and he hadn’t seen a single suitable spot: either the road had too many twists and turns or you couldn’t stop; or there were houses, time and again there were houses. Perlmann drove to the first parking lot on the edge of Chiávari and got out. Half-past three. His stomach was cramped with hunger and tension. He took the few steps to the nearest bar, ate a sandwich and asked the surprised waitress for a large glass of lukewarm water.
The tunnel. I’ve got to do it in the tunnel. The thought came to him after he had stood there for a while with his head completely empty, and had plainly even ignored the request for a light that had been uttered right next to him. He hastily laid some money on the counter, ran to the car and drove off. I didn’t notice, but the tunnel must have passing places where you can stop; all tunnels have them, it’s the law, he thought again and again as he drove back at breakneck speed. pian dei ratti. He slowed down, turned round and looked up at the house: everything unchanged, a single shutter pulled up. At the last ascent, where the road widened, he drove at over seventy and only stopped at the entrance to the tunnel. Yes, there were several passing places on both sides, he saw that straight away.
Back outside, he drove on another stretch, and only turned then. Here, too, he wanted to memorize the things that announced the spot. But it was actually quite easy: first of all there was a sign showing that the road climbed towards Piacenza on the left, and on the right on to Chiávari and then, just before the tunnel, came the crossing with the individual arrows. Perlmann drove on to the patch of gravel to the right before the tunnel entrance and turned off the engine.
At the touch of a button the tinted window slid down with a quiet hum. He rested his elbow on the frame and lit a cigarette. When he had quite recovered after a brief pause for exhaustion, he stubbed out the cigarette and took his arm off the window frame. Here, outside the tunnel of death, his comfortable, sloppy attitude struck him as obscene. It was a feeling like the one yesterday morning on the handrail behind the rocky spur. Except now everything’s worse, much worse. Now all of a sudden he no longer knew what to do with his hands. Finally, he pressed them between his knees and, crouching there, stared for a moment beyond the steering wheel, into the tunnel.
It was long enough, perhaps two kilometers. Of course, he couldn’t begin his approach out there. If you stood on this patch of gravel, you couldn’t see far enough in, and if you wanted to improve your view, you had to adopt an unnatural and conspicuous position, halfway into the road. It could take quite a long time tomorrow, and hereabouts there were also houses where people would lean out their windows and watch the expensive limousine. Perlmann felt generally drawn to the tunnel because it meant that everything – the waiting as well as the collision – could happen in secret.
He drove in and stopped on the bright mud with which the first passing place was covered. Now he could see to the end of the tunnel, and in the side-view mirror, without conspicuously having to turn his head, establish whether the road was clear behind him. There was comfortable room here for a second car. Tomorrow he would have to stop in such a way that no one would think of stopping and offering him help. The best thing to do would be to park at an angle to the mud-pile with the shovel sticking in it. He could only hope that the police didn’t come by. At that thought he gave a start and went on driving. He didn’t dare turn into the tunnel, but drove out and then back to the patch of gravel. As before, he crouched down and rested his forehead on the steering wheel.
The first thing he would see of the truck would be its lights, bigger than those of a passenger vehicle, and fixed higher up. He wouldn’t set off until the driver’s cab was clearly visible, so that he could be sure that it was a big, stable vehicle. Ideally, it would one of those American trucks that were proper great fortresses. What he would have to do, down to the individual movements, was much less clear than he had previously assumed. In order to ensure that they were both killed, he would have to hit the truck head-on. In order to do that, he would have to switch to the opposite lane early and completely, as if he were trying to overtake. But that would make it clear to anyone who saw it – at least to the truck driver – that it was intentional. And, of course, during those horrifying seconds in which the front of the truck came hurtling towards them, Leskov would recognize that he had a murderer beside him, a murderer and a suicide. He might grab the wheel, and there would be a struggle, a struggle with an uncertain outcome. Again, as if in a dream.
On the other hand, if he pulled the wheel round just before the collision, if he did it a moment too late the truck’s bumper would only hit the left-hand side of the Lancia. He might be killed, but Leskov would stay alive, and perhaps be able to testify to attempted murder. If, on the other hand, Perlmann did it a bit sooner, so that the whole length of the Lancia ended up in the opposite lane, diagonally in front of the truck, the right fender and then the right door would be crushed. Leskov would be killed and pressed against him. His fat body would be the protective shield that saved his life and so, buried under Leskov’s corpse, he would feel the truck shoving the crumpled Lancia in front of it for a while, before coming to a standstill with a snort of its hydraulic brakes.
Perlmann was shocked by the macabre precision of his fantasy. He tried to resist the pull of the imagined details and turned on the radio to break the power of his visions. When that didn’t help, he got out and walked mechanically up and down on the gravel, sometimes stopping at the edge, staring blankly at the rubble and blowing his cold hands.
If only he knew what the traffic here was like on working days. The fact that there were only a few cars on the road today – and so far not a single truck – didn’t mean anything. What if there were traffic jams tomorrow, so that it couldn’t be accomplished without putting other people’s lives at risk? But this is the only possibility. And I can’t give it all up. I can’t walk into the university every day as an unmasked fraudster, an ostracized man.
Twenty to five. It was still light down at the coast, but here in the valley it was already starting to darken. They would be here tomorrow around about now. By the time Leskov had got through customs with his luggage it could easily be as late as half-past three. They could drive more briskly than today; there was nothing more to be sought and memorized, and in Genoa there would be far more traffic than today. He had seen that when he was buying his CDs. It would hardly be possible to get here in less than an hour. A shocking, endless hour, during which he would have to talk to Leskov as if everything was fine and he was delighted by his arrival. Before pelting, foot to the floor, into the glowing white headlights of a truck.
More traffic could also be a help, he thought, back behind the wheel. Rather than just driving along the line that you make when overtaking, he could make it look as if he had really been overtaking. That often happened: someone swerving and colliding head-on with the vehicle coming in the opposite direction. To make it believable, the driver of the swerving car would have to have his vision of the oncoming traffic obscured. As the traffic in this instance was a big truck, there couldn’t be a car in front of him. He would have to be driving behind another truck or a bus, then pull out of its wake and on to the other side, at full speed and at precisely the moment when the truck in question appeared. The whole thing would have to be calculated in such a way that the truck or bus driving ahead, if it were to remain unaffected, was already past the oncoming vehicle when the collision took place. No, it couldn’t be a bus, at least not one with passengers. So that’s the last thing I’m going to do in my life: gauge the speed of physical bodies moving towards one another.