CHAPTER 1
Perhaps it was the car radio which first implanted in Tom Hawn the seed of the whole outrageous, perilous idea, on that fifty-mile stretch of autostrada between Bologna and Florence. At any rate, it laid the topsoil in which the idea could find refuge, sprout, and later flourish.
It was a news flash — the first news which Hawn had heard or read since arriving from England in early summer. A Greek supertanker, under a flag of convenience, had rammed a ferry off Ancona and spilled its cargo of oil — an estimated 200,000 tons — which was now despoiling the entire Adriatic coast, threatening Venice’s Lido and its fetid canals.
The commentator spoke with a shrill note of artificial urgency and outrage: the Government, as usual, was under attack for inactivity; the ecological lobby, in holy alliance with the Communist Party and other benefit groups, was continuing to stage demonstrations ‘of a serious nature’ in Venice, where the owners of the spilt oil — ABCO, the America-Britannic Consortium, the largest oil company in the world — were hinted to be in corrupt confabulation with local officials within the sumptuous fastness of the Hotel Danieli Royal Excelsior, which appeared to be under some sort of siege. One policeman had been shot in the arm (apparently by mistake); and a Molotov cocktail in a Coca-Cola bottle had been thrown without effect at Quadri’s, on the Piazza San Marco.
Hawn heard the news with divided enthusiasm. He was driving to Venice to rejoin his girl, Anna, after four months’ exile, alone, in a farmhouse in Tuscany where he had been working on his opus about the Medicis. His mind, like his body, felt parched: he wanted to be enlivened, exhilarated, but not just by Anna — beautiful, practical, gentle Anna who cared about seal culling and extinct whales and the sacking of our ancient heritage by big business. (The reported state of Venice today would be leaven to her soulful bread, Hawn reflected gloomily.) But as a journalist at the end of a sterile sabbatical, he wanted to get his teeth into something — something harder than just a worthy mob of Italian Friends of the Earth, and their docile Communist comrades, shouting rude things about the abominable ABCO outside the Danieli.
Still, any story was better than none. Hawn had little empathy for ecopneuma: by both inclination and the nature of his trade, he had a touch of the romantic about him: but a robust, destructive romanticism. An unkind observer might have called him Philistine, war-lover, voyeur. He liked to see history being made. Secretly, the spectacle of an ancient city, tranquil and splendid under a peaceful moon, was less to his taste than that of the same city being put to the sack by mobs of crazed fanatics, so guaranteeing Hawn — providing the telex still worked — a front page lead in tomorrow’s paper.
However, the news bulletins were not entirely without hope. He rather warmed to the idea of riot police and bombs in San Marco. It made a difference from Ruskin and Peggy Guggenheim and all those German tourists trying to civilize themselves. But perhaps the seed had already taken root, to be nurtured in these first hours by a circumstance that had nothing to do with the scrappy radio bulletins.
Hawn had been hidden too long on his dusty perch in the Tuscan hills to have remembered that he was beginning his holiday on the worst day for motorists in the Italian calendar — the start of the Ferragosto, when the entire middle class migrates by car from the industrial suburbs to the coast.
On this steaming first day, the country’s petrol station attendants had declared one of their regular lightning strikes. Hawn had collected his hired car from Siena that morning, with a full tank, and reckoned he had just enough to make it up this last eight-mile leg of the journey to Mestre.
Just north of Bologna one filling station was open; and already the queue of cars stretched back nearly a mile, clogging both emergency and slow lanes. The heavy traffic — mostly tankers bound for the oil refineries of Mestre and the port of Trieste — was being forced into the centre lane; and before the turning off to Mantua the traffic was moving at walking pace.
At Padua it stopped altogether. Men got out in shirtsleeves and stared impotently ahead. Rumour passed down the queue that a Lamborghini had blown up several kilometres further on. Hawn looked anxiously at his watch. It was now past three o’clock, and he had been allowing himself four comfortable hours for the drive, arriving in Venice by five at the latest. Anna had few obvious faults, but she did not like being kept waiting; and Venice in the tourist season is not a convenient place for a foreign girl to be left on her own.
Not that Hawn had anything to fear: he accepted her loyalty without question, and had himself never given her true cause to distrust him. But their four months’ separation, aggravated by the chronic Italian postal service, would have opened a distance between them; and if he was now going to be late, he imagined her keeping to that scruffy hotel she had chosen, alone, biding her impatience, quietly, imperceptibly resentful.
Hawn was going to be late, and there was nothing he could do about it. She could hardly blame him for the tantrums of Italian industrial relations. And as he sat in the hot airless car, stopping and starting every few yards, he forced him to stop fretting over this temporary fuel crisis, and began — idly at first — to consider its broader,
