I Am God by Giorgio Faletti

men he had been ordered to hate and kill. After what had happened, the roles had been reversed.
    He had come home, and now he was the enemy.

CHAPTER 6
    He was sitting in the dark, waiting.
    He had been waiting so long for this moment and now that it had come, he didn’t feel any nervousness, any sense of hurry. It seemed to him that his presence in this place was totally normal, planned, thought through.
    Resting on his knees was a Colt M1911, the army’s regulation weapon. Good old Jeff Anderson, who might have lost his legs but hadn’t lost his talent for pulling strings, had got him that pistol, without asking any questions. And, perhaps for the first time in his life, he hadn’t asked him for anything in return. He had kept it in his bag, wrapped in a cloth, throughout the journey.
    The only light thing he had with him.
    The room he was in was a living room with a couch and two armchairs in the middle, arranged in a horseshoe around a TV set against the wall. Clearly a place where one man lived on his own. A few mediocre paintings on the walls, a carpet that didn’t look very clean, dirty plates in the sink. And the smell of cigarettes.
    In front of him, on the right, the door to the kitchen. On the left, another door leading to a little lobby and then the door out to the garden. Behind him, hidden by part of the wall, the stairs that led to the upper floor. When he hadarrived and realized that the house was empty, he had forced the back door and quickly searched the interior.
    As he did so, he had the voice of the drill sergeant at Fort Polk in his ears.
    Before anything else, reconnoitre the area.
    After familiarizing himself with the layout of the rooms, he had chosen to wait in the living room because from there he could keep an eye on both the main door and the back door.
    Choose a strategic position.
    He had sat down on the couch and released the safety catch on his gun. The click sounded as dry as his throat.
    Check the condition of your weapons.
    And while he was waiting, his thoughts had returned to Ben.
    He could still see his expression when he had threatened him. No trace of fear, only disappointment. He had tried in vain to wipe out the effect of those few words by changing the subject, asking what he actually would have liked to ask from the start.
    ‘How’s Karen?’
    ‘Fine. She had the kid. She wrote you about it. Why didn’t you get in touch with her?’ Ben had paused, and then lowered his voice. ‘When they told her you were dead, she cried all the tears she had in her.’
    There was a hint of reproach in the words and in the tone of voice.
    He had got quickly to his feet, pointing at himself with both hands. ‘Do you see me, Ben? You see these scars on my face? They’re all over my body.’
    ‘She loved you,’ Ben had said, then immediately corrected himself. ‘She loves you.’
    He had shaken his head, as if to brush away a troublesomethought. ‘She loves a man who doesn’t exist any more.’
    ‘I’m sure she—’
    He had stopped him with a gesture of his hand. ‘Nothing’s sure in this world. The few things that are, are all bad.’
    He had turned to the window, so that Ben couldn’t see his face. But above all so as not to see Ben’s face.
    ‘Oh yes, I know what’d happen if I went to see her. She’d throw her arms around me. But for how long?’
    He turned again towards Ben. If his first instinct had been to hide, now he knew he had to look reality in the face – and make sure reality looked him in the face.
    ‘Even if all the other problems between us were solved, her father and all the rest, how long would it last? I’ve been asking myself that over and over since the first time they let me look at myself in a mirror and I saw what I’d become.’
    Ben had seen tears welling in his eyes. Diamonds of little price, the only ones he could afford on a soldier’s pay. And he realized Little Boss must already have repeated these words in his head hundreds of