Steal You Away (15 page)

Italo hit it at top speed, bounced back like a rubber ball, fell to the ground and found himself flat on his back.

Anyone else, after a head-on crash like that, would have fainted, died, screamed with pain. Not Italo. Italo railed at the darkness. ‘Where are you? Come on out! Come on out!’

Who was he talking to?

The impact against the door had been so violent he was convinced
some Sardinian, lurking in the darkness, had hit him in the face with an iron bar.

Then he realised to his horror that he had collided with the door. He swore and scrambled to his feet, dazed. He didn’t know what was going on. Where was the shotgun? His nose hurt badly. He touched it and felt it swelling between his fingers like a crispy pancake in boiling oil. His face was wet with blood.

‘Shit, I’ve broken my nose …’

In the darkness he searched for the shotgun. It had slid into a corner. He retrieved it and set off again, even wilder than before.

What a bloody fool I am!
he reproached himself.
They might
have heard me
.

They’d heard him all right.

They’d jumped in the air, all four of them, like champagne corks.

‘What happened?’ said Ronca.

‘Did you hear that? What was it?’ said Bacci.

Pierini was disorientated too. ‘What could it be?’

Ronca, who was the first to regain his composure, threw aside his spray-can. ‘I don’t know. Let’s get out of here.’

Pushing and shoving, they piled out of the classroom.

In the dark corridor they stood in silence, listening.

Curses could be heard from the floor above.

‘It’s Italo. It’s Italo. Didn’t he go home?’ whimpered Bacci, addressing Pierini.

No one bothered to answer him.

They must get away. Out of the school. At once. But how? By which route? In the technical education room there was only a small skylight on the ceiling. To the left was the gym. To the right the stairs and Italo.

The gym
, Pietro said to himself.

But that was a dead end. The door onto the yard was locked and the windows had iron gratings.

Italo descended the stairs, holding his breath.

His nose was puffy and swollen. A trickle of blood ran down onto his lips and he licked it away with the tip of his tongue.

Like an old bear that has been wounded but not beaten, he moved warily and silently, flat against the wall. The shotgun was slippery in his sweating hands. From behind the corner at the bottom of the stairs a golden patch of light spread over the black floor.

The door was open.

The Sardinians were in the technical education room.

He must take them by surprise.

He flicked off the safety catch and took a deep breath.

Go! Now!

He made something resembling a bound and entered the room. He was dazzled by the neon lights.

Eyes closed, he pointed the shotgun at the middle of the room. ‘Hands up!’

Slowly he opened them again.

The room was deserted.

There’s nobody here
…

He saw the walls bedaubed with paint. Graffiti. Obscene drawings. He tried to read. His eyes were getting used to the light.

The … headmaster su … su … sucks the deputy headmistress’s
sock
.

He goggled in bewilderment for a moment.

What does it mean?

He didn’t understand.

What sock did they mean? He took his glasses out of his jacket pocket and put them on. He read it again.
Oh, I see! The headmaster
sucks the deputy headmistress’s cock
. He moved on to the next scrawl.
Italo’s got what? Feet! Fishy feet
.

‘You sons of bitches, I bet your own feet smell a lot worse!’ he roared.

Then he saw the other graffiti and on the floor, smashed to pieces, the television and the video recorder.

It couldn’t have been the Sardinians.

They didn’t give a damn about the headmaster or Miss Palmieri, let alone whether he had smelly feet.

All they cared about was stealing. It must have been some pupils who’d made all this mess.

So much for his dreams of glory.

He had already imagined the scene. The police arriving and finding the Sardinians bound hand and foot and ready for jail and he with his trusty smoking shotgun would have said that he had only been doing his duty. He would have received an official commendation from the headmaster, been patted on the back by his colleagues, stood glasses of wine at the Station Bar, awarded an increase in his pension for the courage and disregard for his own safety that he had shown in the field but now none of that was going to happen.

None of it at all.

This made him even more furious.

He had hurt his knee and broken his nose, and all because of a couple of little hooligans.

They were going to pay dearly for this little stunt. So dearly that they would describe it to their grandchildren as the most traumatic experience of their lives.

But where had they got to?

He turned round. He switched on the lights in the corridor.

The door of the gym was ajar.

An evil smile curled his mouth and he began to laugh, louder and louder. ‘Oh well done! What a clever idea to hide in the gym. You want a game of hide-and-seek? All right then, let’s play hide-and-seek!’ he shouted with all the breath in his body.

The green high-jump mattresses were leaned one against the other and tied to the wall-bars.

Pietro had slipped in between them and was standing still with his eyes closed, trying not to breathe.

Italo hobbled round the gym.

Tm ssssssssss tm sssssssssss tm sssssssssssssssss.

Footfall and drag, footfall and drag.

I wonder where the others are hiding
.

When they had entered the gym, he had hidden in the first place he had found.

‘Come on out! Come on! I won’t hurt you. Don’t worry.’

Never. Never trust Italo
.

He was the biggest liar in the world.

He was a bastard. Once, when Pietro was in the first year, he had slipped out of school with Gloria and gone to the bar across the road to buy some croissants. It had taken them a minute, no more. When they came back with their little bag, Italo had caught them. He had confiscated the croissants and dragged the two of them into class, pulling them by the ear. And for two hours afterwards his ear had remained as hot as a radiator. And he was sure Italo had eaten the croissants in the porter’s lodge.

‘I swear I won’t hurt you. Come out. If you come out of your own accord I won’t tell the head. We’ll wipe the slate clean.’

What if he found Pierini and the others?’

They would be bound to say Pietro was with them and would swear blind that he’d forced them to come in and that it had been him who had smashed the television and written the graffiti …

A host of distressing thoughts whirled around in his head and weighed him down, not least the thought of his father, who would flay him alive when he got home (
but will you ever get home?
) because he hadn’t shut Zagor up in his kennel and hadn’t taken the rubbish to the bin.

He was tired. He must relax.

(
Sleep
… )

No!

(
Just for a little while … a little while, that’s all
.)

How wonderful it would be to go to sleep. He rested his head against the mattress. It was soft and a bit smelly, but that didn’t matter. His legs sagged. He could sleep standing up, as horses do, he was sure, squeezed in between those two mattresses. His eyelids drooped. He let himself go. He was on the point of collapsing when he felt the mattresses shaking.

His heart leaped to his mouth.

‘Come out! Come out! Come out of there!’

He bit on the filthy material and stifled a scream.

He couldn’t understand it.

The gym was empty.

Where had they gone?

They must be there, hiding somewhere.

Italo shook the mattresses and used his shotgun as a carpet-beater. ‘Come out of there!’

There was no escape for them. The door onto the volleyball court was locked and the door of the equipment room was also lo …

Wait a minute, let’s see if it really is
.

cked.

The wood by the lock was splintered. They had forced it.

He smiled.

He opened the door. Darkness. He stood in the doorway and put in his hand, groping for the light switch. It was just round the corner. He pressed it. Nothing. The lights weren’t working.

He stood there for an instant, undecided, then walked through the doorway, plunging into the darkness. He heard fragments of the neon light crunch under his feet.

‘I’m armed. Don’t try any tri …’

He was struck on the back of the head by a medicine ball, one
of those ten-kilo ones full of sawdust. Before he’d had time to recover from the surprise, another ball hit him on the right shoulder, and then another ball, a basketball this time, thrown with deadly force, hit him smack on his swollen nose.

He squealed like a pig in an abattoir. Sharp spirals of pain radiated all over his face, wrapped round his throat, strangling him, and bit his stomach. He fell to his knees, and brought up the sea-and-mountain pappardelle, the crème caramel and all the rest.

They ran past him, clambered over him, as black as shadows and as quick as arrows, and he tried, God did he try, while he was vomiting, to reach out and grab one of the little buggers, but all his fingers grasped was the useless consistency of some jeans.

He fell face down in the vomit and splinters of glass.

He heard them run, bang into the door and race out of the gym.

Pietro quickly slipped out of the mattresses and dashed after them towards the corridor.

He was almost safe when suddenly the big window by the door exploded.

Pieces of glass flew into the air and fell around him, disintegrating.

Pietro stopped short, and when he realised he’d been shot at, he pissed himself.

He parted his lips, his spine slackened, his limbs relaxed and a sudden warmth spread through his groin and thighs and ran down to his shoes.

I’ve been shot at
.

The fragments that were still imprisoned behind the grating continued to fall.

He turned round very slowly.

On the other side of the gym he saw a figure lying on the ground,
dragging itself out of the storeroom on its elbows. Its face was painted red. And it was pointing a gun at him.

‘Stop. Stop or I’ll shoot you. I swear on the head of my children I’ll shoot you.’

Italo.

He recognised the caretaker’s deep voice, though it sounded different. As if he had a heavy cold.

What had happened to him?

He realised that the red on Italo’s face wasn’t paint but blood.

‘Stay there, boy. Don’t move. Do you hear? Don’t move.’

Pietro stood still and just moved his head.

The door was there. Five metres away. No, less than five metres.

You can do it. One jump and you’re out. Run for it!
He couldn’t let himself be caught, that was out of the question, he must flee at all costs, even at the risk of being shot in the back.

Pietro wished he could do it but didn’t think he could move. In fact, he was sure he couldn’t. He could feel the soles of his shoes glued to the ground and his legs made of jelly. He looked down. A pool of urine had formed between his feet.

Run for it!

Italo was laboriously trying to get to his feet.

Run for it! It’s now or never!

And he found himself in the corridor running for all he was worth and he slipped over and scrambled to his feet again and tripped on the stairs and got up again and ran towards the girls’ toilets and freedom.

And meanwhile the caretaker was shouting. ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! It makes no difference … I recognised you … Don’t kid yourself!’

Who could he ring to ask about Erica?

Of course, her agent!

Graziano Biglia picked up his address book and called Erica’s
agent, the son-of-a-bitch who had made her go through that pointless farce. Predictably he wasn’t in, but he managed to speak to a secretary. ‘Erica? Yes, we saw her this morning. She did the audition and left,’ she said in a flat voice.

‘Oh, she left …’ breathed Graziano, and felt a sense of relief spread through him. The cannonball he had swallowed had suddenly disappeared.

‘With Mantovani.’

‘Mantovani?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Mantovani? Andrea Mantovani?’

‘That’s right.’

‘The presenter?’

‘Who else?’

The cannonball in his stomach had been replaced by a gang of hooligans who were trying to break into his oesophagus. ‘Where did they go?’

‘To Riccione.’

‘To Riccione?’

‘To Channel Five’s Grand Gala.’

‘To Channel Five’s Grand Gala?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s right?’

He could have gone on like that all night, repeating what the secretary said and adding a question mark.

‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to hang up … There’s someone on the other line,’ she said, trying to get rid of him.

‘But why has she gone to Channel Five’s Grand Gala?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea … Now I’m sorry, but …’

‘Okay, I’ll hang up now. But first, could you give me the number of Mantovani’s mobile?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m not allowed to. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really must answer …’

‘Wait a minute, pl …’

She had hung up.

Graziano stood there holding the receiver.

For the first twenty seconds, strangely enough, he heard nothing. Only the vast, unfathomable void of sidereal space. Then his ears were assailed by a loud buzzing noise.

The others had gone.

He leaped on his bike and sped away.

He went out onto the road.

And away towards home, riding through the deserted village and taking the short cut behind the church, a mud track that ran across the fields.

It was pouring with rain. And you couldn’t see a thing. The wheels skidded and slipped in the mud.
Slow down, you’ll fall off
. The wind chilled his wet trousers and underpants. He felt as if his willy had hidden away between his legs like a tortoise’s head.