“You’re an idiot,” said Massimo,“but I don’t care much. I’ve got a big appetite for sweets. Why don’t you bring me an entire chocolate pie?”
The waiter shrugged and left us.
“So,” Massimo resumed, “I wouldn’t call myself a ‘God’-because I’m much better described as several million billion Gods. Except, you know, that the zeropoint transport field always settles down. Then, here I am. I’m standing outside some cafe, in a cloud of dirt, with my feet aching. With nothing to my name, except what I’ve got in my brain and my pockets. It’s always like that.”
The door of the Elena banged open, with the harsh jangle of brass Indian bells. A gang of five men stomped in. I might have taken them for cops, because they had jackets, belts, hats, batons and pistols, but Turinese cops do not arrive on duty drunk. Nor do they wear scarlet armbands with crossed lightning bolts.
The cafe fell silent as the new guests muscled up to the dented bar. Bellowing threats, they proceeded to shake-down the staff.
Massimo turned up his collar and gazed serenely at his knotted hands. Massimo was studiously minding his own business. He was in his corner, silent, black, inexplicable. He might have been at prayer.
I didn’t turn to stare at the intruders. It wasn’t a pleasant scene, but even for a stranger, it wasn’t hard to understand.
The door of the men’s room opened. A short man in a trenchcoat emerged. He had a dead cigar clenched in his teeth, and a snappy Alain Delon fedora.
He was surprisingly handsome. People always underestimated the good looks, the male charm of Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy sometimes seemed a little odd when sunbathing half-naked in newsstand tabloids, but in person, his charisma was overwhelming. He was a man that any world had to reckon with.
Sarkozy glanced about the cafe for a matter of seconds. Then he sidled, silent and decisive, along the dark mahogany wall. He bent one elbow. There was a thunderclap. Massimo pitched face-forward onto the small marble table.
Sarkozy glanced with mild chagrin at the smoking hole blown through the pocket of his stylish trenchcoat. Then he stared at me.
“You’re that journalist,” he said.
“You’ve got a good memory for faces, Monsieur Sarkozy.”
“That’s right, asshole, I do.” His Italian was bad, but it was better than my French. “Are you still eager to ‘protect’ your dead source here?” Sarkozy gave Massimo’s heavy chair one quick, vindictive kick, and the dead man, and his chair, and his table, and his ruined, gushing head all fell to the hard cafe floor with one complicated clatter.
“There’s your big scoop of a story, my friend,” Sarkozy told me. “I just gave that to you. You should use that in your lying commie magazine.”
Then he barked orders at the uniformed thugs. They grouped themselves around him in a helpful cluster, their faces pale with respect.
“You can come out now, baby,” crowed Sarkozy, and she emerged from the men’s room. She was wearing a cute little gangster-moll hat, and a tailored camouflage jacket. She lugged a big black guitar case. She also had a primitive radio-telephone bigger than a brick.
How he’d enticed that women to lurk for half an hour in the reeking cafe toilet, that I’ll never know. But it was her. It was definitely her, and she couldn’t have been any more demure and serene if she were meeting the Queen of England.
They all left together in one heavily armed body.
The thunderclap inside the Elena had left a mess. I rescued Massimo’s leather valise from the encroaching pool of blood.
My fellow patrons were bemused. They were deeply bemused, even confounded. Their options for action seemed to lack constructive possibilities.
So, one by one, they rose and left the bar. They left that fine old place, silently and without haste, and without meeting each other’s eyes. They stepped out the jangling door and into Europe’s biggest plaza.
Then they vanished, each hastening toward his own private world.
I strolled into the piazza, under a pleasant spring sky. It was cold, that spring night, but that infinite dark blue sky was so lucid and clear.
The laptop’s screen flickered brightly as I touched the F1 key. Then I pressed 2, and then 3.
