Black Run

by Antonio Manzini

  “What else have you found out about me?” Rocco asked in the silence of the night, broken only by the rustling of the trees. Italo turned to look at him. The deputy police chief, his eyes focused on the road, spewed the white smoke from his cigarette together with the condensation of his breath.

  “That you’re suspected of a couple of deaths and something that has to do with a politician.”

  Rocco took another drag on his cigarette. “Ah. And what do you think happened?”

  “Me? No idea. Or rather, I’ve got a few thoughts about the two deaths. Did they have names?”

  “Sure, they did.”

  “But was it you?”

  Rocco flicked the cigarette away. “You want to know something? Revenge is good for nothing. Or really, it’s good only for making you think you’ve taken care of everything, that you’ve reassembled the mosaic. But the truth is, all you’ve done is vent your frustration. Understandable, but still, it’s about frustration. But here’s the problem: until your vendetta is done, you’re blind to these things. It’s pointless to eliminate someone who’s hurt you. You just perpetuate the same mistake. And I’m going to die with that mistake.”

  “Is that why they sent you here?”

  Rocco smiled. “No. That’s an old story. From four years ago. No, I’m here for another reason. You don’t know anything about it because it was kept very quiet.”

  “You feel like telling me about it?”

  “A thirty-year-old asshole who was raping young girls. I caught him, and instead of handing him over the way I should have, I broke him down and rebuilt him, so to speak. Now he walks with a crutch and can’t see out of one eye. Is that enough?”

  “Jesus . . . And they reported you?”

  “No. This guy’s the son of someone powerful enough to fix me good. And he fixed me good.”

  “How many young girls did he rape?”

  “Seven. One of them killed herself six months ago. You know where I went wrong? I went to talk to them, to the girls’ parents—I saw them and I got a clear picture of just how much damage he’d done. Never let yourself get sucked in emotionally, Italo. It’s a mistake. A big mistake. You lose objectivity and self-control.”

  “And where’s the guy now?”

  “I told you: out on the street. Though hobbling around on a crutch. And sooner or later he’ll do it again. Nice, no?”

  Italo shook his head. “And that’s why they transferred you from Rome?”

  “Would you believe it? For that. And it’s one of the truly just things I’ve done in my life.”

  “I’d have killed him.”

  “Don’t say that, Italo. Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Don’t do it. Because then you get used to it.” Rocco looked at the sky. Then he smiled faintly. “You can see the stars. It’ll be a sunny day tomorrow.”

  Italo looked up. “Not necessarily. In ten minutes the sky could cloud over.”

  A dog barked in the distance. A sheep bleated in response. Then there was a distant roar. A continuous subterranean rumble. It could have been a river overflowing its banks or an avalanche tearing downhill toward them.

  But it was the sound of horsepower under the hood of a truck. Rocco stepped away from the Volvo. “Go on, Italo, it’s time.”

  Italo spat on the ground, stiffened, and grabbed the traffic paddle in one hand.

  “Click off the safety,” the deputy police chief suggested.

  Italo undid the automatic holster lock and gave his pistol a tug. “Are you packing?”

  Rocco nodded. He walked toward the road. The noise grew louder. The truck was coming closer. It wouldn’t be long before the behemoth’s headlights came around the curve, illuminating the asphalt and the woods lining the road. Italo gulped. Rocco tossed his cigarette onto the muddy snow.

  “Let me do the talking. Just follow me.”

  The young policeman nodded edgily.

  “Keep cool, Italo.”

  The noise came closer and closer. Rocco sniffed, and suddenly, as if by enchantment, the wind stopped slapping people and things. Then, from around the curve, eight blinding headlamps appeared, along with the screaming roar of many hundreds of horses of internal combustion engine. The truck, an enormous, smoking metal dragon, seemed bent on devouring the valley and all its inhabitants. Italo promptly lifted the traffic paddle. Rocco broke away from his car. The behemoth’s engine jerked, the sound of downshifting came through the air, and the vehicle lost speed as it gradually approached the two policemen. It was a truck without a trailer. On the side, clear and unmistakable, was written KOONING N.V.

  “This is it,” shouted Rocco.

  The behemoth was slowing down. A blinker started to flash on the right side of the vehicle as it slowly rolled past the policemen. The interior of the cab was dark. As it went past him, Rocco managed only to glimpse a couple of little flashes of light on the dashboard. Puffing and rattling, the truck came to a halt fifty or sixty feet past the two policemen. The monster stood there, its brake lights glowing, exhaust pouring from the rear pipes. Waiting. The driver’s-side door remained shut.

  “Let’s go!” said Rocco. And he started toward the truck. Italo set the traffic paddle on the Volvo’s roof, checked to make sure that the pistol was where it was supposed to be, then followed the deputy police chief.

  Rocco had reached the truck. The chrome glittered in the light of the one distant streetlamp that illuminated the intersection. The engine puttered in neutral, rhythmically tapping at the night. The deputy police chief knocked three times and then heard the sound of the window being lowered. The driver’s face emerged. Blond, with a flattened nose, light-colored eyes, covered with pimples. Not much older than twenty. He looked down at the deputy police chief and smiled. He was missing at least three teeth.

  “Ja?” he said.

  Ja, thought Rocco. “Open up, idiot!” he shouted.

  The man gesticulated to show that he didn’t understand the language.

  “Open and come down!” shouted Italo, who had just come up, in English, with a timbre and tone of voice that was very convincingly authoritative.

  The door swung open, and the driver hesitantly set foot on the first step of the ladder. “Am I to come down?”

  “Yes! Now!” Italo replied.

  The man obeyed. He climbed down the steps and leaped to the pavement. Rocco signaled to him to come toward him. The driver obeyed calmly, still with a smile on his lips. Then Italo climbed up onto the truck. He leaned into the cab: “You!” he shouted in English. “Come down. Documents!”

  Rocco couldn’t see whom he was talking to. But clearly there had to be two drivers. Officer Pierron pulled back from the cab and climbed back down the steps. After a short interval, a second man came out of the cab, with the look of someone who’d just woken up. He was big and black, with Rasta dreadlocks. He had a plastic bag in one hand.

  The two truck drivers stood side by side, dressed only in sweaters, apparently indifferent to the cold, steady and untrembling. They just stood there as if it were springtime and the cherry trees were already blossoming. They were both a good four or five inches taller than Rocco, and their biceps bulged almost indecently.

  “Biggish, eh?” Italo said, then addressed them in English. “Stay quiet and calm down, okay?”

  “Okay,” the two truck drivers replied in chorus while Rocco opened the folder with the documents. He feigned interest, but he really didn’t give a damn about the customs stamps and notations.

  He was hardly surprised to find two banknotes concealed in the registration. Two hundred-euro bills. He smiled as he looked at the two truck drivers. They smiled back at him, winking cunningly. Rocco took out the two green banknotes and showed them to Italo, asking in Italian, “Look what I found in the bills of lading. Is this yours?” Rocco held out the money, but neither driver gave any sign of being about to take the money back. “Is this for me? What is it? A tip? Translate for me, Italo!”


  Italo said in English, “It’s a tip?”

  The black driver smiled and nodded.

  “Ah, grazie, grazie, thanks very much. You understand, Italo? This is an attempted bribe. According to these two pieces of shit, you and I are worth two hundred euros. Doesn’t seem like quite enough, does it?”

  “Not really,” Italo replied, poised with one hand ready to draw his gun.

  Rocco slowly crumpled up the banknotes and slipped them into the young blond man’s jeans pocket. “You can understand me, right?” he said, and the man’s eyes opened wide in fear. “You can take this money and stick it up your ass.” Then he reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out some folded sheets of paper, slapping them right under the blond fellow’s nose. “Italo, tell him that this is a search warrant!”

  Actually, they were the expense accounts for their activities at Champoluc.

  “I don’t know how to say that in English.”

  “Perquisizione!” shouted Rocco, using the Italian word for “search.” “Understand?”

  The truck driver turned pale. “Perquisition?” he asked.

  “Bravo. That’s right. Open up,” Rocco said, pointing to the back of the truck.

  “But . . . Polizia italianna good! Forza l’Italia! Cannavaro!”

  “What the fuck is this mental defective trying to say?” Then the deputy police chief leaned forward until his face was an inch from the fair-haired young man’s nose. “Open up immediately or I’ll beat you down!”

  The truck driver said: “I have to get the keys . . . May I?”

  Italo translated for Rocco.

  “Tell him I’ll get the keys.”

  Rocco stepped up onto the first step and hauled himself into the cab.

  The dashboard was a sea of lights big and small, of all colors. Stuck to the windshield was a GPS, and it was working. Rocco turned the key and switched off the engine. He pulled out the set of keys. Then he showed them to the driver. “Are these the right ones? This?”

  The driver nodded.

  As Rocco and the blond driver headed toward the rear of the truck, the other driver, the black man, stuck close to the truck, with a slightly frightened expression on his face. Italo looked at him, his hand on the holster that held his pistol. The man noticed and smiled. One of his eyelids was twitching, and from time to time he licked his lips.

  “This guy is shitting himself!” Italo shouted.

  “Bring him here!” Rocco replied. “And pull out your gun. Things are getting intense here.”

  Italo drew his pistol and looked at the young Rasta, whose eyes got big at the sight of the weapon. “C’mon, let’s go . . .” And the two men moved off together.

  They were all clustered around the truck’s rear doors. The driver was inserting a key from the ring into the container’s double door lock. The guy was taking entirely too much time, as far as Rocco was concerned. So he grabbed the keys out of the driver’s hands and opened the lock himself. The tumblers clicked and the handles turned freely. Italo, pistol in hand, never took his eyes off the two truck drivers. The container’s two large doors swung open. Inside the truck, instead of boxes or crates, was another container.

  “What the fuck? A container inside a container?” said Rocco. “Let’s climb in and open this one too.”

  The noise of an approaching vehicle made Italo turn around. It was a dark blue Fiat Ducato delivery van, slowing to a halt right next to the truck.

  “What now?” asked Italo.

  “Relax,” the deputy chief replied just as Sebastiano opened the driver’s-side door and got out of the van. Italo smiled. “I’d forgotten about him.” And he snapped a sharp military salute. Sebastiano, fully immersed in the role of a cop, saluted back. The two truck drivers silently observed the new arrival. Sebastiano glared menacingly back at them. He stood six foot four, making him the same height as the two young men. Then he spat on the ground and sized up the truck’s contents.

  “Well, well, well. What have we here?”

  “A container inside a container,” Rocco replied as he gestured for the young blond man to follow him. They climbed in.

  The smaller container was red and had a lock on the two rear doors. The deputy police chief looked at the set of keys. He held them out to the pimply truck driver. “Which one?”

  He took the key ring in hand and started sorting through them in search of the right one. Then it all happened in an instant. The pimply blond driver hurled the keys at Rocco’s face, and Rocco, caught off guard, stumbled and fell backwards, just far enough to allow the driver to leap out of the truck and take to his heels. The black man, quick as a bolt of lightning, unleashed a straight-armed punch at Italo, who slammed to the ground; his pistol went spinning away from him. Sebastiano was just in time to turn around and see them both running away down the road. Rocco leaped off the truck and went over to Italo, who was holding a hand to his lip and grimacing with pain. He picked up his pistol and took off after the two fugitives. Sebastiano, by contrast, shrugged and gave up the chase even before starting.

  The bastards were running hard. At the crossroads for Chenoz, the two went in opposite directions. Rocco decided to follow the white driver. Too many cigarettes and too much time spent without exercise were already leaving him out of breath. The young blond man was pulling away. The deputy police chief’s knee was screaming in pain. He could have shot him, knocked him down, and taken him in. But then his professional instincts vanished all at once.

  What am I doing? he asked himself. Fuck this. And he slowed to a halt. “Go on, handsome, go ahead! Run all the way back to Rotterdam, you asshole!” he shouted after him.

  Bent over double and heaving from the exertion, he spit a gob of saliva onto the asphalt. Then he pulled himself erect with both hands flat on his lumbar muscles and tried to stretch, an exercise as pointless as it was painful. He felt his spine pop a couple of times. At last he turned around and made his way back to the truck.

  Italo had a split lip. Sebastiano had put a little snow on it. Nothing serious. Rocco picked up the truck keys from the pavement. “Better this way, if you ask me. It gives us more time to work, no?” Sebastiano nodded. Italo smiled. “But they made complete fools of us,” he said, “and I don’t like that.”

  “No, we made fools of them,” Sebastiano replied. “Come on, Rocco, let’s go—open up.”

  Rocco climbed back onto the truck and went over to the lock on the interior container. He tried the first key. Then the second. Finally, the third key turned in the lock. The doors swung open with a metallic screech.

  Eyes.

  Dozens and dozens of eyes looking at them. Rocco stepped back and almost fell out of the truck.

  The container was full of people.

  “Holy shit!” said Rocco in a faint voice, little more than a whisper. From the darkness of the container inside the truck emerged eyes, teeth, and faces. “Who are they?”

  Sebastiano shook his head. Italo cautiously came forward, one hand on his aching lip. “Indians?” he asked in an undertone as Rocco got down off the truck. The truly weird thing was the absolute silence that reigned inside that surreal cubbyhole. None of the inhabitants of the metal cavern emitted so much as a peep.

  “Let’s get them out of there. Out!” he started shouting in English. “Out of here!” And together with Italo and Sebastiano, he started gesticulating to get the people to leave the truck.

  Slowly the dark mass produced a tangle of arms, legs, and heads. And teeth. These human beings were smiling, and whispering something in a distant language that sounded like a prayer. Italo started lining them up along the side of the road. “One, two, three . . .” And women started climbing out of the truck, some with children in their arms, and there were young men, and boys and girls of all ages.

  Italo went on counting: “Fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight . . .” They practically overflowed the roadside by now. “And fifty-nine . . . Rocco, what are we going to do?”

  Rocc
o stood staring at the truck as it went on vomiting out people. A cornucopia of human misery.

  Italo stopped when he got to eighty-seven. They were all out. And there they stood, eyes wide with fear. Terrifyingly skinny, shivering with the cold. One of them extended a hand gripping a passport. Sebastiano leaned toward him and took the document. “Acoop Vihintanage . . . They’re from Sri Lanka.”

  The man’s head wobbled from side to side. “Ah!” he said. Then he threw his arms around a man to his right and a woman on his left. “Amma . . . akka!”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying,” said Sebastiano.

  “Brother . . . sister . . . mine.”

  “He says that these are his brother and sister,” Italo translated.

  “Well, who the fuck cares,” said Sebastiano, handing back the passport. Then he went over to Rocco. “What now?”

  “What do I know? Let’s try to understand where they were going. Italo? These people speak English—find out more or less where they were heading.”

  “Right away.” Italo went over to the man who had handed over his passport. Rocco climbed back into the rear of the truck.

  “What are you doing?” Sebastiano called.

  “I want to take a look around. Figure out what’s inside.”

  “Here,” said his friend, tossing him a pocket flashlight. Rocco switched it on and walked into the truck.

  A stench of sweat and massed humanity assaulted him with the ferocity of a starving wild animal. He was forced to run back out, coughing. “Holy shit . . . There must be an outbreak of cholera in there!”

  “Who knows how long they’ve been locked up in that container. Put a handkerchief over your mouth.” Now Sebastiano tossed him a white handkerchief.