Steal You Away (19 page)

‘Right.’

Max turned up the stereo.

Max and Martina had met for the first time that morning at the university, in front of the Modern History noticeboard. They had got talking about the imminent exam and the enormous tomes they had to study and about how if they didn’t get down to some hard work neither of them would be ready to take the exam this time round. Max had been rather surprised by Martina’s openness. So far in a whole year of university he hadn’t succeeded in talking to a single girl. Besides, all the girls on his course were plain, greasy-skinned and bookish. But this one was really pretty and seemed to be a nice person too.

‘Oh no … I’m never going to make it in time,’ Max had exclaimed, exaggeratedly anxious. In fact he had already made up his mind weeks ago that he was going to skip this session of exams.

‘Nor am I … I suppose I’ll have to give it a miss and try again in three months’ time.’

‘I think what I’m going to have to do is go to the seaside and study there. Hide away in some quiet place.’ After a carefully measured pause he had gone on. ‘Christ, it’s boring at the seaside on your own, though. It’s enough to drive you out of your mind.’

This was complete and utter bullshit.

Rather than go to the seaside on his own he would have cut off his own little finger, and his ring finger too. But he’d tossed out the remark rather as a fisherman trying his luck throws a piece of bread-and-cheese bait to the tuna.

You never know your luck
.

And sure enough the tuna had taken the bait. ‘Can I come too? Would you mind? I’ve quarrelled with my parents, I’m fed up with them …’ Martina had asked, straight out.

Max had been speechless with amazement but then, struggling to suppress his enthusiasm, had applied the finishing touch. ‘Sure, that’d be fine. We’ll leave this evening, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Okay. We will study, though.’

‘Of course we will.’

They agreed to meet at seven o’clock at Rebibbia underground station, near Martina’s home.

Max was as nervous as if he were on his first date. And in a sense he was. Martina was nothing like the girls he usually went around with. Two different breeds. The girls he knew wouldn’t have gone to the seaside with a stranger if you’d paid them two million dollars. Their lives revolved around the Parioli, the city centre and the Fleming, and they didn’t even know what Rebibbia was. Even Max, though he had a pony tail and five earrings in his left ear, wore trousers three sizes too big for him and hung around the communal squats, had had to look Rebibbia up in
Rome A to Z
.

Map 12, C2. A real suburban slum. Wow!

Max was convinced he could make a go of it with Martina. Even though he was rich and lived in the Parioli and had picked her up in a Mercedes worth a couple of hundred million lire and was taking her to a two-storey villa complete with sauna, gym and a fridge as big as a Swiss bank vault, he didn’t give a damn about any of that crap. His ambition was to be a drummer and he wasn’t going to slave his life away doing some crappy job like his boring old fart of a father.

He and Martina were on the same wavelength, he dressed scruffily as she did and they were similar even though they came
from two different worlds, this was proved by the fact that they both liked XTC, the Jesus & Mary Chain and Husker Du.

It wasn’t his fault if he’d been born in the Parioli.

So here they were, Max and Martina, racing down the slope at a hundred and eighty kilometres an hour in the Mercedes of Professor Mariano Franzini who at that moment was sleeping beside his wife at the Hilton Hotel in Istanbul where he had gone to attend an international conference on hip replacements, convinced that his new car was in its garage in Via Monte Parioli and not in the hands of that good-for-nothing son of his.

The lamps of the fishing-boats shining in the night. The warm air. The fishermen grilling your supper on the boat. Calamari at midnight. Walks in the tropical forest. The four-star hotel. The swimming pool. The two-day stopover in Colombo, the most colourful city of the East. The sun. The suntan …

All these images spooled like a film through the mind of police officer Antonio Bacci as he stood numb with cold in the icy rain at the roadside, in a soaking wet uniform, clutching his signal stick and fuming with rage and frustration.

He looked at his watch.

By this time he should already have been two hours into his holiday on the Maldives.

He could still hardly believe it. He stood in the rain, incredulous that his trip to the Tropics had gone up in smoke because of those layabouts.

I’d succeeded in organising everything
.

He’d requested holiday leave. Antonella, his wife, had also taken ten days off work. Andrea, his son, would go and stay with his grandmother. He had even bought a silicone underwater mask, flippers and a snorkel. A hundred and eighty thousand lire down the drain.

If he couldn’t come to terms with this he would go mad. The holiday he had dreamed of for five years had vanished in five minutes, the duration of a single phone call.

‘Good morning, Mr Bacci, this is Cristiana Piccino from
Francorosso. I’m calling to say that we’re awfully sorry but your trip to the Maldives has been cancelled owing to circumstances beyond our control.’

Circumstances beyond our control?

He’d had to get her to repeat it three times before it sunk in that the holiday was off.

Circumstances beyond our control = strike by pilots and cabin crew.

‘You bastards, I hate you!’ he howled despairingly into the night.

They were the human category he hated most of all. More than the Arab integralists. More than the Northern League. More than the anti-prohibitionists. He had hated them with tenacity and determination ever since his childhood, when he had first begun to watch the TV news and to understand that in the world the worst are always the ones who come out on top.

A strike every week. What have you got to strike about?

They had everything life could offer. A salary he would give his eye teeth for, plus the chance to travel, screw air hostesses and pilot a plane. They had it all and they went on strike.

What kind of protest should I make, then?

What kind of protest should officer Antonio Bacci make, he who spent one half of his life in a layby on the state highway freezing his balls off and fining truck drivers, and the other half quarrelling with his wife? Should he go on hunger strike? Let himself die of starvation? No, better shoot himself in the mouth and have done with it.

‘Fuck it!’

Besides, it wasn’t himself he was worried about. He would survive somehow even without the bloody Maldives. With a broken heart, but he would keep going. Not his wife. Antonella wouldn’t let the matter rest. With that brooding nature of hers, she would take it out on him for the next millennium. She was already making his life hell, as if it were his fault the pilots had gone on strike. She wouldn’t speak to him, treated him worse than a stranger, she’d slam his plate down on the table and sit in front of the TV all evening.

Why was he so unlucky? What had he done to deserve this?

Stop it. Drop the subject. Don’t think about it
.

He was torturing himself pointlessly.

He huddled his raincoat round him and moved closer to the road. Two headlights appeared round the bend, Antonio Bacci raised his baton and prayed that this Mercedes contained a pilot or a member of the cabin crew, or better still, both.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, you’ve just been flagged down by the police,’ Martina announced, taking a drag on her joint.

‘Where?’ Max slammed his foot on the brake.

The car skidded and swerved along the wet road. Max tried in vain to control it. Finally he pulled the handbrake (never pull the handbrake in a moving car!) and the Mercedes did two pirouettes and finally came to rest with its nose half a metre away from the roadside ditch.

‘Phew, that was close …’ Max gasped, with what little breath he had left. ‘We nearly went over the edge.’ He was as white as a sheet.

‘Didn’t you see them?’ Martina was perfectly calm. As if they had just spun round in a fairground dodgem and not at a hundred and sixty kilometres per hour on a state highway where they could easily have broken their necks.

‘Yes … Well, no, actually.’ He had seen a blue glow, but had taken it for a pizzeria sign. ‘What shall I do?’ Through the rain-streaked rear window the police car’s flasher looked like a lighthouse in the storm. ‘Go back?’ He couldn’t speak. His throat had gone dry.

‘I don’t know … if you don’t.’

‘I reckon we should drive on. They can’t have read the number plate in this rain. I reckon we should go on. What do you think?’

‘I think that’s a fucking stupid idea. They’ll chase you and beat the shit out of you.’

‘Shall I go back, then?’ he turned off the stereo and put the car into reverse. ‘Yeah, why not, all our papers are in order. Fasten your seat belt. And throw away that joint.’

He didn’t even slow down
.

He had come round the bend at a hundred and sixty at least and gone roaring on by.

Officer Antonio Bacci hadn’t even had time to write down the number.

CRF 3 … then what?
He couldn’t remember.

Giving chase wasn’t an option. It was the last thing he felt like doing at that moment.

It would mean getting into the car, persuading that idiot Miele
to shift his arse out of the driving seat, you’d have to quarrel with
him because he wouldn’t want to, finally you’d get going, you’d
set off hell for leather in pursuit, but by the time you caught up
with them you’d have gone at least as far as Orbano, and at the
risk of ending up wrapped around a tree. And for why? All because
some stupid idiot didn’t see a roadblock
.

‘No. Not tonight, thank you.’

In an hour’s time I’ll knock off, go home, have a nice shower,
make myself some packet soup and go to bed and if my damned
wife won’t speak to me, so much the better. If she doesn’t talk at
least she won’t be moaning
.

He glanced at his watch. It was Miele’s turn to stand outside. He approached the police car, dried the window with his hand and peered in to see what his colleague was doing.

He’s asleep. Fast asleep!

He had been standing in the rain for half an hour and that piece of shit had been snoring away happily. According to regulations, the man in the car had to listen to the radio. If there was an emergency and he didn’t reply, there would be hell to pay. And because of that damn fool, he would be for it too. The guy was irresponsible. He’d only been in the force for a year and he thought he could have a snooze while Bacci did all the work.

It wasn’t the first stupid thing he’d done. And he was such a bastard. Bacci couldn’t stand him. When he had told him he had missed his holiday because of the pilots’ strike and that his wife was livid, the guy hadn’t had one kind word for him, one friendly gesture, he’d said that he would never have let the travel agencies
mess him around and that he always went on holiday by car. Smart arse! And what a moronic face he had! With that squashed nose and those bulging eyes. With that blondish hair plastered down with gel. And he smirked in his sleep.

I stand in the rain like an idiot and he sleeps
…

The anger he had repressed with such difficulty till that moment began to press like a toxic gas on the walls of his oesophagus. He tried counting, to calm himself down. ‘One, two, three, four … Oh, to hell with it!’

A crazed grin distorted his face. He started hammering on the windscreen with his fists.

Bruno Miele, the officer inside the car, wasn’t really asleep.

Head back, eyes closed, he was musing that although Graziano Biglia couldn’t be blamed for bedding Marina Delia, he’d have done much better to go for a showgirl.

You can keep your actresses, I’d take a showgirl any day
.

And what turned him on, if possible, even more than showgirls was showgirls who presented sports programmes. It was an odd thing, but when those tarts talked about soccer and made predictions about the league table (invariably wrong) and gave analyses of team tactics (invariably ludicrous), it gave him a hard-on.

He’d figured out what those shows were really for. They were for getting those girls into bed with footballers. It was all set up for that purpose, the rest was just a sham. You only had to look at how many of them intermarried.

The club chairmen organised the shows so that the players would get laid, and consequently feel indebted to them and go and play in their teams.

If he hadn’t chosen a police career, that’s what he would have liked to be, a footballer. He shouldn’t have stopped playing so early. Who knows, if he’d worked harder at it …

Yeah, I’d love to be a footballer
.

Not just any old footballer, mind you, if you’re a run-of-the-mill player the showgirls don’t give you a second glance, no, he’d have to be a top striker like Del Franco. Then he’d be invited to
appear on the shows and would get to screw them all: Simona Reggi, Antonella Cavalieri, Miriana … ? Miriana whatshername, Luisa Somaini when she still worked for Telemontecarlo, and Michela Guadagni. Yes, every one of them, the more the merrier.

He was beginning to get horny.

Michela Guadagni. Man, does she turn me on. Underneath that
peaches-
and-
cream exterior there’s a slut just waiting to get out. Only
you have to be a fucking sports star to get anywhere near her
.

He began to imagine himself engaged in an orgy with Michela, Simona and Andrea Mantovani, the presenter.

He smiled. With his eyes closed. As happy as a little child.

Bam bam bam bam
.

A violent burst of knocking made him jump in the air.

‘What’s going on?’ He opened his eyes and screamed. ‘Ahhhh!’