The Crossroads Read Online Free Page A

keeping the gun trained on the animal.
    The mouth open. The froth. The tongue hanging to one side like a bluish slug. The eyes rolled back and on the neck a red hole among the black hairs and the snow swirling lazily in the air, burying the corpse.
    One fucking mongrel less in the world.
9
    Cristiano returned home and ran to his father to tell him how he had killed it first shot, but Rino was stretched out on his bed fast asleep.

BEFORE
    You are too just, Lord,
    for me to dispute with you,
    but I would like to talk with you about justice.
    Why do the ways of the wicked prosper?
    Why do all the treacherous live at ease?
    You have planted them and they have taken root;
    they grow and bring forth fruit.
    You are near to their mouths
    but far from their hearts.
    Jeremiah 12, 1–2

Friday
10
    An open cluster is a group of stars held together by gravitational forces. The number of stars can be in the thousands. Their low attraction favours a chaotic arrangement around the centre of the system.
    This untidy formation resembled that of the thousands of little towns, villages and hamlets which dotted the vast plain where Cristiano Zena and his father lived.
    The snow that had fallen all night on the plain had whitened the fields, the houses and the factories. The only things it had not covered were the thick, incandescent cables of the power stations, the lamps on the billboards, and the Forgese, the big winding river which linked the mountains up in the north with the sea down to the south.
    But at the first light of dawn the snow changed to a thin, persistent drizzle which in less than an hour melted the white mantle that had momentarily made the plain as beautiful as a cool albino model wrapped in an Arctic fox fur. Varrano, San Rocco, Rocca Seconda, Murelle, Giardino Fiorito, Marzio, Bogognano, Semerese and all the other towns and villages re-emerged with their dingy colours, with their small or large areas of urban sprawl, with their modern two-storey houses surrounded by frost-browned lawns, with their prefabricated industrial buildings, their credit institutions, their flyovers, their motor showrooms and forecourts, and with their vast expanses of mud.
11
    At a quarter past six in the morning Corrado Rumitz, commonly known as Quattro Formaggi because of his consuming passion for the pizza of that name, his staple diet for the best part of his thirty-eight years, was sitting on a shabby, flower-patterned sofa having his breakfast.
    He was wearing his home clothes: dirty underpants, an ankle-length tartan dressing-gown and a pair of battered Camperos boots, a relic of the old millennium.
    With his gaze fixed on the little area in front of the kitchen, he took a biscuit out of a packet, dunked it in a bowl of milk and shoved it whole into his mouth. He repeated the action with metronomic regularity.
    When he had woken up he had seen from the window of his room, in the pale light of dawn, an expanse of gentle hills and white valleys, as if he was enjoying the view from a mountain lodge. If he avoided looking at the walls of the building opposite he might even have imagined he was in Alaska.
    He had sat in bed, huddled up under the blankets, watching the snowflakes fall as light as feathers.
    It hadn’t snowed like this for ages.
    Almost every winter, sooner or later, there was a sprinkling, but before Quattro Formaggi had time to go out for a walk in the countryside it had always melted.
    But that night at least twenty centimetres must have fallen.
    When Quattro Formaggi had been small and lived in the orphanage run by the nuns it had snowed every winter. Cars would stop, some people would even put on cross-country skis and the children would make snowmen with branches for arms, and would slide down the garage ramps on old car tyres. What incredible snowball fights they’d had with Sister Anna and Sister Margherita. And there had been sleds drawn by horses with jingling bells …
    At least, he thought there