I Am God by Giorgio Faletti

results before deciding on a plan of action.
    She went back the way she had come, until she reached the site entrance. The workers watched her with a mixture of admiration and awe. She set off for the precinct house to pick up her car. She needed to think.
    Bellew hadn’t assigned her to an easy case. He presumably considered her capable of solving it, but what he was asking her to do was equivalent to pulling chestnuts from the fire. And from the facts that had emerged so far, these chestnuts had been in the fire for at least fifteen years and had been burned to a cinder.
    She passed a bar and instinctively looked through the window. Sitting at a table, talking to a girl with long blond hair, was Richard. The way they were looking at each othersuggested they were more than just friends. She felt like a voyeur, and hurried away before he could see her, although he seemed to have eyes only for his companion. She was not surprised to find him there. He lived nearby and they’d been there together several times.
    Maybe a few more times would have been better.
    She’d had a relationship with Richard that had lasted a year, full of laughter, food and wine, and tender, gentle sex. A relationship that had been one step away from being love.
    But, what with her work and the situation of Sundance and her sister, she had found it more and more difficult to devote herself to the two of them. In the end, the affair had ended.
    As she walked, she realized that she had the same problem as all the people moving on that street and in that city. They all assumed they would live and knew they would die.

CHAPTER 10
    Ziggy Stardust was good at camouflage.
    He was capable of being a perfect nobody among the millions of New York nobodies. He was a perfect example of neither-nor: neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither handsome nor ugly. He was the kind of person you didn’t notice, didn’t remember, didn’t love.
    The king of nobodies.
    But he had turned being a nobody into an art. In his own way he considered himself an artist. In the same way as he called himself a traveller. On average he rode more miles on the subway every day than most passengers in a week. In Ziggy’s opinion, the subway was a place for suckers. Which made it the ideal place for one of his many activities: bag snatching. Another of his activities, more of a fringe activity but no less important, was being the dealer of choice for those who loved white powder but didn’t like risks or problems.
    With Ziggy, they never had any problems.
    He wasn’t a big time dealer, but the income, though small, was regular. All these grand ladies and gentlemen had to do was call a safe number and they’d get a home delivery of whatever they needed for their parties or be given an address to go to for fun and games. They had the money – he had what they were willing to pay for. This meshing of supplyand demand was so natural, it wiped out any possible scruples – not that Ziggy had ever had any.
    Occasionally, when he was able to, he also sold information to anyone who needed it. Sometimes even to the police, who in return for a few useful tip-offs – strictly confidential, of course – turned a blind eye to Ziggy’s frequent subway trips.
    Obviously, that wasn’t his real name. Nobody remembered what his real name was. Even he forgot it sometimes. The nickname had been given him, when someone had remarked on his resemblance to David Bowie at the time the record Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars had come out. He couldn’t remember who it had been, but the name had remained.
    It was the only thing that removed him a little from the anonymity in which he had always tried to live. He never walked in the middle of the sidewalk, but always hugged the walls and kept to the most shadowy areas. If he could choose, he preferred to be forgotten, rather than remembered . In the evenings he went back to his hole in Brooklyn, watched TV, surfed the internet and only