“The Elena does pull a crowd,” I agreed. “So it all makes good sense. Don’t you think?”
Everyone loves to be told that their thinking makes good sense. They were happy to hear me allege this. Maybe I didn’t look or talk much like an American agent, but when you’re a spy, and guzzling fruit brandy, and gnawing sausage, these minor inconsistencies don’t upset anybody.
We were all being sensible.
Leaning his black elbows on our little table, Massimo weighed in. “The Rat is clever. He plans to sneak over the Alps again. He’ll go back to Nice and Marseilles. He’ll rally his militias.”
Simon stopped with a knife-stabbed chunk of blood sausage on the way to his gullet. “You really believe that?”
“Of course I do! What did Napoleon say? ‘The death of a million men means nothing to a man like me!’ It’s impossible to corner Nicolas the Rat. The Rat has a star of destiny.”
The woman watched Massimo’s eyes. Massimo was one of her informants. Being a woman, she had heard his lies before and was used to them. She also knew that no informant lies all the time.
“Then he’s here in Torino tonight,” she concluded.
Massimo offered her nothing.
She immediately looked to me. I silently stroked my chin in a sagely fashion.
“Listen, American spy,” she told me politely, “you Americans are a simple, honest people, so good at tapping phone calls… It won’t hurt your feelings any if Nicolas Sarkozy is found floating face-down in the River Po. Instead of teasing me here, as Massimo is so fond of doing, why don’t you just tell me where Sarkozy is? I do want to know.”
I knew very well where President Nicolas Sarkozy was supposed to be. He was supposed to be in the Elysee Palace carrying out extensive economic reforms.
Simon was more urgent. “You do want us to know where the Rat is, don’t you?” He showed me a set of teeth edged in Swiss gold. “Let us know! That would save the International Courts of Justice a lot of trouble.”
I didn’t know Nicolas Sarkozy. I had met him twice when he was French Minister of Communication, when he proved that he knew a lot about the Internet. Still, if Nicolas Sarkozy was not the President of France, and if he was not in the Elysee Palace, then, being a journalist, I had a pretty good guess of his whereabouts.
“Cherchez la femme,” I said.
Simon and Svetlana exchanged thoughtful glances. Knowing one another well, and knowing their situation, they didn’t have to debate their next course of action. Simon signaled the waiter. Svetlana threw a gleaming coin onto the table. They bundled their backgammon set and kicked their leather chairs back. They left the cafe without another word.
Massimo rose. He sat in Svetlana’s abandoned chair, so that he could keep a wary eye on the cafe’s double- door to the street. Then he helped himself to her abandoned pack of Turkish cigarettes.
I examined Svetlana’s abandoned coin. It was large, round, and minted from pure silver, with a gaudy engraving of the Taj Mahal. “Fifty Dinars,” it read, in Latin script, Hindi, Arabic, and Cyrillic.
“The booze around here really gets on top of me”, Massimo complained. Unsteadily, he stuffed the ornate cork back into the brandy bottle. He set a slashed pickle on a buttered slice of black bread.
“Is he coming here?”
“Who?”
“Nicolas Sarkozy. ‘Nicolas the Rat.’”
“Oh, him,” said Massimo, chewing his bread. “In this version of Italy, I think Sarkozy’s already dead. God knows there’s enough people trying to kill him. The Arabs, Chinese, Africans… he turned the south of France upside down! There’s a bounty on him big enough to buy Olivetti-not that there’s much left of Olivetti.”
I had my summer jacket on, and I was freezing. “Why is it so damn cold in here?”
“That’s climate change,” said Massimo. “Not in this Italy-in your Italy. In your Italy, you’ve got a messed-up climate. In this Italy, it’s the human race that’s messed-up. Here, as soon as Chernobyl collapsed, a big French reactor blew up on the German border… and they all went for each other’s throats! Here NATO and the European Union are even deader than the Warsaw Pact.”
Massimo was proud to be telling me this. I drummed my fingers on the chilly tabletop. “It took you a while to find that out, did it?”
“The big transition always hinges in the 1980s,” said Massimo,“because that’s when we made the big breakthroughs.”
“In your Italy, you mean.”
“That’s right. Before the 1980s, nobody understood the physics of parallel worlds… but after that transition, we could pack a zero-point energy generator into a laptop. Just boil the whole problem down into one single micro- electronic mechanical system.”
“So you’ve got zero-point energy MEMS chips,” I said.
He chewed more bread and pickle. Then he nodded.
“You’ve got MEMS chips and you were offering me some fucking lousy memristor? You must think I’m a real chump!”
“You’re not a chump.” Massimo sawed a fresh slice of bad bread. “But you’re from the wrong Italy. It was your own stupid world that made you this stupid, Luca. In my Italy, you were one of the few men who could talk sense to my Dad. My Dad used to confide in you. He trusted you, he thought you were a great writer. You wrote his biography.”
“‘Massimo Montaldo, Senior,’” I said.
Massimo was startled. “Yeah. That’s him.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not supposed to know that.”
I had guessed it. A lot of news is made from good guesses.
“Tell me how you feel about that,” I said, because this is always a useful question for an interviewer who has lost his way.
“I feel desperate,” he told me, grinning. “Desperate! But I feel much less desperate here than I was when I was the spoilt-brat dope-addict son of the world’s most famous scientist. Before you met me-Massimo Montaldo- had you ever heard of any ‘Massimo Montaldo’?”
“No. I never did.”
“That’s right. I’m never in any of the other Italies. There’s never any other Massimo Montaldo. I never meet another version of myself-and I never meet another version of my father, either. That’s got to mean something crucial. I know it means something important.”
“Yes,” I told him, “that surely does mean something.”
“I think,” he said, “that I know what it means. It means that space and time are not just about physics and computation. It means that human beings really matter in the course of world events. It means that human beings can truly change the world. It means that our actions have consequence.”
“The human angle,” I said, “always makes a good story.”
“It’s true. But try telling that story,” he said, and he looked on the point of tears. “Tell that story to any human being. Go on, do it! Tell anybody in here! Help yourself.”
I looked around the Elena. There were some people in there, the local customers, normal people, decent people, maybe a dozen of them. Not remarkable people, not freakish, not weird or strange, but normal. Being normal people, they were quite at ease with their lot and accepting their daily existences.
Once upon a time, the Elena used to carry daily newspapers. Newspapers were supplied for customers on those special long wooden bars.
In my world, the Elena didn’t do that anymore. Too few newspapers, and too much Internet.
Here the Elena still had those newspapers on those handy wooden bars. I rose from my chair and I had a good look at them. There were stylish imported newspapers, written in Hindi, Arabic and Serbo-Croatian. I had to look hard to find a local paper in Italian. There were two, both printed on a foul gray paper full of flecks of badly- pulped wood.
I took the larger Italian paper to the cafe table. I flicked through the headlines and I read all the lede paragraphs. I knew immediately I was reading lies.
It wasn’t that the news was so terrible, or so deceitful. But it was clear that the people reading this newspaper were not expected to make any practical use of news. The Italians were a modest, colonial people. The news that they were offered was a set of feeble fantasies. All the serious news was going on elsewhere.
