There were polite murmurs and handshakes all round.
‘What was it you wanted to inspect again, professor?’ the director remarked. ‘Those pinakes whose authenticity and origin are still in dispute, I believe.’
‘Exactly,’ said Pancrazi. He shrugged with a certain embarrassment. ‘I’ve been asked to give a paper about that type of artefact in Stockholm next weekend and I realised yesterday that the topic of your recent find is almost certain to come up, so I’d better have another look to be sure I know what I’m talking about.’
‘Of course, of course. Marco will show you where they’re currently being stored. And then I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave you to find your own way out. Shame you couldn’t make it down here in time for lunch.’
One of the workmen led Pancrazi along the racks to a section where the thin terracotta votive tablets dedicated to the cult of Persephone in the Greek city of Locri were stored.
‘Listen,’ Pancrazi whispered conspiratorially. ‘This may take some time, and of course smoking is not allowed in here. Is there somewhere I might go and have a puff if the need arises?’
‘ Ma certo, professore!’
The man led him over to a door in the outer wall. Above it was a lighted sign reading ‘Fire Exit’.
‘Just push the bar and you’re standing in the loading dock area,’ the workman said. ‘Mind you hold the door open, though. Otherwise you’ll have to go all the way round to the front to get back in.’
‘But doesn’t the alarm sound when the door’s opened?’ Pancrazi asked.
The caretaker gave him a knowing smile, as between two addicts.
‘Supposed to, but we disable it during the day. As long as you don’t let the door close behind you while you’re out there, there’ll be no problem.’
He returned to join his fellows, and the whole group started to move off in the direction of lunch. Achille Pancrazi tracked their voices across the open space of the basement until they dwindled away up the staircase. After that, it took him about fifteen minutes to search the storage area and locate the items he was seeking, and another five to pack the ones he selected to serve as a suitable ransom for his son Emanuele in layers of newspaper and a further layer of bubble-wrap. He slipped them into the large briefcase he had brought with him and left the premises through the door that the workman had pointed out to him.
By the time his modified 737 finally touched down at wherever the fuck it was, Jake felt pretty well bummed. It wasn’t about the facilities. The Boeing Business Jet was a beauty, and having it all to himself was way cool. There was a regular king-size bed, a humungous TV with wrap-around sound, a flight attendant who wasn’t Jake’s type but was there when you needed her, plus satellite internet connection so he could keep up to speed with his online gaming. He’d even got to ride up front with the pilots for a while. But eleven hours was way too long to spend cooped up in a pressurised tube five miles above the ocean. Towards the end, Jake had found a leaflet that one of the cleaners must have left in a drawer of the desk in his living quarters. It was entitled Rectal Carcinoma and God’s Plan for You, and by then he was so bored that he’d read the whole freaking thing from start to finish. Linear reading! In treeware format! It was just too weird.
Then there’d been Madrona. As soon as she heard where he was going, she was like, ‘Iddly? I’ve always wanted to go to Iddly! It’s so romantic! Can I come, Jake, can I, can I?’ Luckily he’d been able to call her on the passport angle. Like three-quarters of her fellow citizens, Madrona didn’t have one, but it was still tough to convince her that that meant she couldn’t come along. Actually, Jake kind of agreed with her. The US was the only global superpower left in the game. If that didn’t mean Americans could go anywhere they damn well chose, showing up with a wad of dollars and everyone pleased to see them, what was the point? As his plane taxied to a halt on a stand away from the terminal, he wondered how much it would cost to just buy Italy and then lease it back to the Italians as a franchised vacation facility. That would solve a lot of problems.
No sooner had the metal staircase docked with the plane than up rolled some classy European saloon from which Martin Nguyen emerged, looking even more desiccated and reptilian than usual.
‘What’s new, Jake?’
‘Not much. Feeling kind of pixellated.’
Martin ushered him into the back of the car while the driver put his overnighter in the boot. Then they sped over to a gate in the perimeter fence, where the uniformed official barely glanced at the cover of Jake’s passport before waving them through.
‘How d’you manage that?’ asked Jake wonderingly.
‘VIP pull,’ Martin returned in a tight, brisk tone. ‘Getting back into the States is going to be a whole lot harder, but that’s the price we pay for honouring freedom and keeping our homeland secure from terrorists.’
‘I guess.’
A couple of minutes later, they were on the autostrada. The airport had been built on an area of flat ground — as they so often were — but pretty soon the highway started to climb up into some spectacular scenery, different shades of green over some nice chunks of rock and not a building in sight. Jake just knew there had to be some great hiking, camping and off-road trails up in there. Plus this driver could really drive! Martin was yakking away in that clipped tone of his about how the Aeroscan data looked promising, there was definitely something in the Busento riverbed that couldn’t be any kind of geological formation, he’d inspected the site that morning and it was really isolated, they should be able to get to work tonight without being observed, the machinery had been hired and the Iraqi labourers were good to go -
‘Hey!’ said Jake.
The monologue ceased.
‘How long from here to the hotel?’
‘Fifteen minutes?’ said Nguyen. ‘Twenty max, then at least six hours before we get moving. Get some sleep, Jake. You’ll need it.’
‘Bullshit. I’ve been stuck on that goddamn plane for what feels like my whole life. Now I’m here, I want to play. Tell this guy to get off the interstate, head up into the hills, and show me what this baby will do.’
‘But Jake — ’
‘Hey, it’s on my tab! Why can’t I have a taste of what I bought?’
So Martin calls Tom Newman and passes on Jake’s instructions, then Tom calls the driver and tells him what the guys in the back want, and the driver confirms that several times just to make absolutely sure that whoever’s nuts around here it’s not him.
‘Fast for fun?’ he says in porno English.
Martin slips him a fifty-euro note.
‘ Mas rapido possibile.’
‘Huh?’ says Jake.
‘I’m a whore for languages.’
And then they’re off the gentle gradients and cambered surface of the autostrada, plunging through dense thickets of chestnuts and oaks and maples and beeches on a narrow track that looks like it was built some time back in the Stone Age, rough-surfaced a century ago and then left to rot, up impossibly steep inclines and round reverse curves tight enough to fit in your pocket, using the whole road, horn blaring, astonishing views of the valley below and the mountains opposite snatched away in an instant, a controlled four-wheel skid every twenty seconds to position the car for yet another gut-wrenching acceleration, the engine finally getting into its stride after all that tootling around town, and Jake laughing like a maniac.
‘Forget the goddamn treasure, this is worth the trip right here!’
And Martin goes to reply, only his mouth is filled with something he thinks is vomit and hopes isn’t blood.
The Italian Republic — res publica, public stuff as distinct from family and personal concerns — may be compared to the planet upon a small portion of whose surface it is located. Superficially all is flux and flow, evolution and extinction, crisis and catastrophe, but this flashy biosphere amounts to no more than an infinitesimal fraction of the entire mass. People talk loosely about saving the earth, but that celestial body is at no more risk from the worst that man can do than is its metaphorical equivalent from the whims and wiles of whichever species currently occupies top spot in the political food chain. Immutable, inaccessible and to all intents and purposes eternal, the vast deadweight of Italian bureaucracy goes spinning blindly on its way with utterly predictable momentum, indifferent to the weather outside.
In his private life, Aurelio Zen had often had cause to bemoan this fact, after being brought to the brink of tears or fury, or both, by the time and effort required to obtain — always in person at the anagrafe office of the local
