“I do understand,” I assured him. “Of course I understand. I’m a computer geek myself.”
“You know who designed that memristor chip, Luca? You did it. You. But not here, not in this version of Italy. Here, you’re just some small-time tech journalist. You created that device in my Italy. In my Italy, you are the guru of computational aesthetics. You’re a famous author, you’re a culture critic, you’re a multi-talented genius. Here, you’ve got no guts and no imagination. You’re so entirely useless here that you can’t even change your own world.”
It was hard to say why I believed him, but I did. I believed him instantly.
Massimo devoured his food to the last scrap. He thrust his bare plate aside and pulled a huge nylon wallet from his cargo pants. This overstuffed wallet had color-coded plastic pop-up tags, like the monster files of some Orwellian bureaucracy. Twenty different kinds of paper currency jammed in there. A huge riffling file of varicolored plastic ID cards.
He selected a large bill and tossed it contemptuously onto the Elena’s cold marble table. It looked very much like money-it looked much more like money than the money that I handled every day. It had a splendid portrait of Galileo and it was denominated in “Euro-Lira.”
Then he rose and stumbled out of the cafe. I hastily slipped the weird bill in my pocket. I threw some euros onto the table. Then I pursued him.
With his head down, muttering and sour, Massimo was weaving across the millions of square stone cobbles of the huge Piazza Vittorio Veneto. As if through long experience, he found the emptiest spot in the plaza, a stony desert between a handsome line of ornate lamp-posts and the sleek steel railings of an underground parking garage.
He dug into a trouser pocket and plucked out tethered foam earplugs, the kind you get from Alitalia for long overseas flights. Then he flipped his laptop open.
I caught up with him. “What are you doing over here? Looking for wifi signals?”
“I’m leaving.” He tucked the foam plugs in his ears.
“Mind if I come along?”
“When I count to three,” he told me, too loudly, “you have to jump high into the air. Also, stay within range of my laptop.”
“All right. Sure.”
“Oh, and put your hands over your ears.”
I objected. “How can I hear you count to three if I have my hands over my ears?”
“Uno.” He pressed the F-1 function key, and his laptop screen blazed with sudden light. “Due.” The F-2 emitted a humming, cracking buzz. “Tre.” He hopped in the air.
Thunder blasted. My lungs were crushed in a violent billow of wind. My feet stung as if they’d been burned.
Massimo staggered for a moment, then turned by instinct back toward the Elena. “Let’s go!” he shouted. He plucked one yellow earplug from his head. Then he tripped.
I caught his computer as he stumbled. Its monster battery was sizzling hot.
Massimo grabbed his overheated machine. He stuffed it awkwardly into his valise.
Massimo had tripped on a loose cobblestone. We were standing in a steaming pile of loose cobblestones. Somehow, these cobblestones had been plucked from the pavement beneath our shoes and scattered around us like dice.
Of course we were not alone. Some witnesses sat in the vast plaza, the everyday Italians of Turin, sipping their drinks at little tables under distant, elegant umbrellas. They were sensibly minding their own business. A few were gazing puzzled at the rich blue evening sky, as if they suspected some passing sonic boom. Certainly none of them cared about us.
We limped back toward the cafe. My shoes squeaked like the shoes of a bad TV comedian. The cobbles under our feet had broken and tumbled, and the seams of my shoes had gone loose. My shining patent-leather shoes were foul and grimy.
We stepped through the arched double-doors of the Elena, and, somehow, despite all sense and reason, I found some immediate comfort. Because the Elena was the Elena: it had those round marble tables with their curvilinear legs, those maroon leather chairs with their shiny brass studs, those colossal time-stained mirrors… and a smell I hadn’t noticed there in years.
Cigarettes. Everyone in the cafe was smoking. The air in the bar was cooler-it felt chilly, even. People wore sweaters.
Massimo had friends there. A woman and her man. This woman beckoned us over, and the man, although he knew Massimo, was clearly unhappy to see him.
This man was Swiss, but he wasn’t the jolly kind of Swiss I was used to seeing in Turin, some harmless Swiss banker on holiday who pops over the Alps to pick up some ham and cheese. This Swiss guy was young, yet as tough as old nails, with aviator shades and a long narrow scar in his hairline. He wore black nylon gloves and a raw canvas jacket with holster room in its armpits.
The woman had tucked her impressive bust into a hand-knitted peasant sweater. Her sweater was gaudy, complex and aggressively gorgeous, and so was she. She had smoldering eyes thick with mascara, and talon-like red painted nails, and a thick gold watch that could have doubled as brass knuckles.
“So Massimo is back,” said the woman. She had a cordial yet guarded tone, like a woman who has escaped a man’s bed and needs compelling reasons to return.
“I brought a friend for you tonight,” said Massimo, helping himself to a chair.
“So I see. And what does your friend have in mind for us? Does he play backgammon?”
The pair had a backgammon set on their table. The Swiss mercenary rattled dice in a cup. “We’re very good at backgammon,” he told me mildly. He had the extremely menacing tone of a practiced killer who can’t even bother to be scary.
“My friend here is from the American CIA,” said Massimo. “We’re here to do some serious drinking.”
“How nice! I can speak American to you, Mr. CIA,” the woman volunteered. She aimed a dazzling smile at me. “What is your favorite American baseball team?”
“I root for the Boston Red Sox.”
“I love the Seattle Green Sox,” she told us, just to be coy.
The waiter brought us a bottle of Croatian fruit brandy. The peoples of the Balkans take their drinking seriously, so their bottles tend toward a rather florid design. This bottle was frankly fantastic: it was squat, acid- etched, curvilinear, and flute-necked, and with a triple portrait of Tito, Nasser and Nehru, all toasting one another. There were thick flakes of gold floating in its paralyzing murk.
Massimo yanked the gilded cork, stole the woman’s cigarettes, and tucked an unfiltered cig in the corner of his mouth. With his slopping shot-glass in his fingers he was a different man.
“Zhivali!” the woman pronounced, and we all tossed back a hearty shot of venom.
The temptress chose to call herself “Svetlana,” while her Swiss bodyguard was calling himself “Simon.”
I had naturally thought that it was insane for Massimo to denounce me as a CIA spy, yet this gambit was clearly helping the situation. As an American spy, I wasn’t required to say much. No one expected me to know anything useful, or to do anything worthwhile.
However, I was hungry, so I ordered the snack plate. The attentive waiter was not my favorite Elena waiter. He might have been a cousin. He brought us raw onions, pickles, black bread, a hefty link of sausage, and a wooden tub of creamed butter. We also got a notched pig-iron knife and a battered chopping board.
Simon put the backgammon set away.
All these crude and ugly things on the table-the knife, the chopping board, even the bad sausage-had all been made in Italy. I could see little Italian maker’s marks hand-etched into all of them.
“So you’re hunting here in Torino, like us?” probed Svetlana.
I smiled back at her. “Yes, certainly!”
“So, what do you plan to do with him when you catch him? Will you put him on trial?”
“A fair trial is the American way!” I told them. Simon thought this remark was quite funny. Simon was not an evil man by nature. Simon probably suffered long nights of existential regret whenever he cut a man’s throat.
“So,” Simon offered, caressing the rim of his dirty shot glass with one nylongloved finger, “So even the Americans expect ‘the Rat’ to show his whiskers in here!”
