Though, once he got here, he was totally confused, like he didn’t know the next step.”
“That’s not what I got,” I said and suddenly they were all staring at me.
“What did you get?” Max asked.
“What you sent! Wait-you mean you weren’t sending out his thoughts? For us to pick up?” Max shook his head immediately. “Then what was I getting?”
“What did you read?” he repeated and the sound of his voice reverberated inside my head.
“ Get there. Too soon. He was panicked about being early — and, once he got here, to this corner, he was satisfied. He’d done it-reached his goal. He knew it-it was very clear to me.” Kate shook her head, listening and all I could do was shrug. “I’m probably wrong, I don’t have the power like you guys. In my head, he kept thinking about jewelry.” Every eyebrow went up. “Big red stones.”
“I didn’t get anything about jewelry,” Kate offered.
“Ruby Red,” Tauber said but it was a question and I nodded. He turned to Max immediately. “It’s a control- rubies. Like the lapel pins.”
Max stared, mulling for another moment-then he wheeled on Kate. “Could you see his face?”
“What do you mean?”
“The image you got from him. Was the camera on him-or was he the camera?”
“Oh, he was the camera, for sure. I saw what he was seeing, the street in front of him.”
“And you?” he turned on me next, fierce and rushed. “What did you see?”
“I saw his face, sometimes,” I answered. “Sometimes closer, sometimes further. Sometimes from the side, sometimes from behind.” I panicked a little, replaying it all in my head. “I must have got it wrong. How could he see the back of his own-?”
I didn’t get the chance to finish the sentence.
“Come on!” Max cried, jumping against the flow of the crowd, leading us at a tear away from the terminal.
We rushed headlong toward the outer edge of the square. As we went, Ciampino’s exit gate opened and the first motorcycle came through, siren wobbling. A solid row of caribineri took up positions alongside the gate and another motorcycle followed. That was when the chant started, voices rising from every part of the courtyard. “Pace” and “Friede,” “Paix,” “Paz” “Peace” and other variations, one chanted after the next, call and response like gospel church.
This was not the roaring crowd demagogues (and most politicians) hope for-this was a strong, individual voicing, quiet, respectful, gaining strength with every repetition, with the power of the same idea in fifty languages in close proximity. Scanning the faces as we ran past, I couldn’t say that these were really hopeful faces. Mournful seemed more accurate. Maybe they just hoped to be hopeful, hoped for the chance someday to feel hopeful again.
And then the gate opened and the motorcade came through, four Mercedes limos followed by two more rows of motorcycles. One flipped its siren, a momentary honk and the crowd hushed for a second but the chant continued immediately, almost a whisper. And, a moment later, a hand extended from the rear window and waved a thumbs up.
“This way!” Max said. He led us across a blinding marble courtyard and through the echoing lobby of an office building onto the street beyond. He hailed a cab and gave the driver an address and some directions. We hurtled off as soon as the doors closed behind us.
“Where are we going?”
“To the bomber’s apartment,” Max whispered.
“How do you know where he lives?” I asked. He just shot me a look like Have you been paying attention the last week? and I moved on. “Why are we going there?”
“Because of what you saw.”
“I probably saw it wrong.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Let’s find out.”
It took us fifteen minutes in traffic to get where we were going. Rome is a beehive-the traffic moves slowly but comes from everywhere, cars feeding in from sidestreets, alleys, driveways and thoroughfares built on twenty separate levels, buses and cars crowding through insanely small openings and motor scooters like mosquitoes buzzing around everything else at random. Traffic lights were obeyed as much by coincidence as duty. Blocks of buff-colored sixteenth-century apartments nestled between sleek glass office towers curving around an arch built in the year 2 (II) to honor the Roman Conquest of the Week.
At one point, the wide shopping thoroughfare we were on, lined with cypress trees in neat rows, sidewalk cafes and leather and haute couture boutiques, changed without warning or transition to a one-lane brick shelf descending three stories across the face of an ancient stone wall, dropping to a narrow cobblestoned roadway twisting through the middle of a pruned, manicured park-all in the space of a quarter mile-before dumping us in the midst of a working-class neighborhood filled with grimy apartment houses, trattorias and a spectacular domed temple built before Christ to a God I’d never heard of and restored later by a Pope I’d never heard of in commemoration of an apostle I’d never heard of.
All this to reach a pretty ordinary-looking block of apartments built above a Laundromat, an electronics store and a local flea market offering sheets, plumbing supplies and live ducks and pigs for on-the-spot slaughter.
“We’ve got a problem,” Max said as the cab stopped. A pair of carabinieri stood all puffed-up outside the front door. We loitered, stymied, wandering into the stores to keep from being too obvious.
“We’ve got to find a way in,” Max said as we lingered among the IPods and laptop computers, electric pasta makers (in Italy?) and the latest digital cameras. “The caretaker’s in the basement. He’s already trying to figure out how to turn this unfortunate boarder into cash.” He pulled a couple of hundred-Euro notes out of his pocket. “But we need an excuse to get in there without alarming the cops. You know, normal everyday graft.”
“You couldn’t just suggest they leave us alone?”
“Suggestions are short-term; when they remember, they get very pissed. Not good pissing off cops, especially if you need them later.”
I’d been admiring a really nice digital video camera behind the counter, sizing up the detachable microphone and the very nice zoom lens. That’s when I had one of those cartoon moments, the thought balloon with the exclamation point going off right over my head. “It’s a story!”
“What is?”
“The apartment-the bomber. Billy asked me if I was covering the summit. I’m a reporter, remember? At least I was. We got this guy’s address from a source and we’re checking it out.”
“If you’re the reporter,” Kate demanded, “who are we?”
It took a two-second glance at this group to answer the question. “ You’re the reporter,” I told her. “I’m your producer, Max is cameraman and Mark is audio.” I pulled Max’s bogus credit card out of my back pocket, gesturing at the counterwoman and the video camera.
Five minutes later, we tramped around the back of the apartment house, skirting the edges of a deep pit covered by heavy planks and rubber sheeting. The pit filled the space between the rear walls of several adjoining houses. Kate threw a curious look at the spades and brushes stacked against the outer wall as we went by.
“Keep the lens on wide-angle,” I told Max. “It’ll keep the picture from shaking too much. Get as close as you can to your subject. If you want a wider shot, back up but remember, it’s TV-closeups still read better across the room.” I knocked on the door several times before a slightly feral face appeared, bearing that universal hungry look. That hunger was a great reassurance.
“GNN,” I told him in English, assuming like an arrogant American that he could speak it. “We want pictures. Video. TV.” I held out my bogus passport without actually giving him time to read it. That’s all the look he’d have gotten if I’d had real ID. We tried to dance past him through the door but he stepped over to block it. He wasn’t big but he was built like an oak tree.
“Polizia is coming,” he said in accented but reasonable English.
“We want pictures,” I said. “ Before the polizia come.”
“Polizia statale,” he clarified. “Especiale. They want everything very clean. Nobody sees nothing.”
His words said good citizen, his eyes read hungry. I pulled out 200 Euro and kept adding 50 Euro increments (slower and slower each time) until we reached 450 and he grabbed for the money. I pulled it back. “Fifteen minutes,” I told him.
