The Crocodile Read Free Page B

else’s.
    Your letters told me everything I needed to know: names, dates. And the computer did the rest. While she was struggling for death and waiting to die, I was finding addresses, locations, and timetables. You know you can find anything on the web, my darling. Anything. All you need is patience and determination; and you know how patient I can be.
    It won’t be long now. And I’ll have finally done what needs doing if I hope to wrap you in my arms again, to stay with you, this time for good, without obstacles. It won’t be long.
    I never had time to tell her, you know. And maybe I wouldn’t have, even if I had had the time. Why give her an extra cause for concern, or even a cause for sorrow? You know how emotional she could be.
    Finally, I’m ready now. And I’m eager to get to work, immediately. Starting tonight, the hunt is on.

CHAPTER 5
    Mirko is smoking in front of the mirror. He’s checking his hair; he has a brand new Mohawk. He likes it. Nothing overstated, he knows it’s not a good idea to stand out in people’s memories; he’s smart, he thinks about this kind of thing, he’s not a child anymore. He’s sixteen years old now.
    He can still feel the thrill that ran through his body a month ago, when Antonio first approached him. Antonio: a living legend to all the kids in the neighborhood. Antonio, who dates all the prettiest girls around. Antonio, who two years ago was a
scazzottiello
like the rest of them, just another punk kid playing football late at night in the Galleria, but now he’s got an enormous motorcycle with chrome-plated exhaust pipes that makes the shop windows rattle when it goes by.
    So Antonio comes over to him, while he’s sitting on the wall with his friends talking about girls, and says to him: “
Guagliò
, come here, I want to talk to you.”
    Mirko can still remember the look on his friends’ faces: surprise, envy, even concern. And the sound of his heart pounding in his ears as he broke away from his group and walked towards his destiny.
    Antonio had locked arms with him. The way he would with a friend, with a peer. And he had told Mirko that he struck him as better than the others, smarter, wider awake. That he’d seen him on his motor scooter, and that he’d made a good impression. “You’re not the kind of guy that’s going to pull
strunzate
; you’re not a fuckup,” he’d said to him. “You’re chill, you just hang. That’s what we like. That’s what you need to be one of my guys.”
    “One of your guys?” Mirko had asked, and his voice had barely squeaked out of his mouth.
    Antonio had put Mirko to the test. One beep on his cell phone and Mirko came running. He’d carried a few packages around the city; one time, he even had a passenger, a young guy he’d never seen before, and he’d taken him from one neighborhood to another on the far side of town. Then, finally, Antonio had assigned him a couple of street vendors, black African immigrants who peddled CDs, and told him to make sure they didn’t pull anything slick, like pretending the police had confiscated their merchandise.
    For the past few days now, though, he was finally working for real. He’d pull up outside the rich kids’ school, up in the nice part of town, and sit there on his scooter, off to one side. When school let out, he’d mingle with the students, and someone would approach him with a folded bill in their hand; they’d shake hands, and he’d palm him a baggie. Just another kid surrounded by kids like him. Dressed like them, with a scooter just like theirs. It was easy, so easy.
    And Mirko had received, directly from Antonio’s hands, two fifty-euro bills. “But you need to be careful,” Antonio had told him.
    Mirko looks at himself in the mirror again, suddenly slightly worried: this Mohawk isn’t too showy, is it? It’s not like someone’s going to recognize him, is it? Some sharp-eyed high school teacher who doesn’t know enough to mind his own fucking