He remembered hearing that in England, during those bloody bank holidays, the motorways in and out of London each carried between six and seven thousand vehicles an hour. He wouldn’t be surprised if this autostrada to Venice was now log-jammed with as many as ten thousand, with more piling up behind him with the afternoon traffic arriving from Milan.
He thought: if the average Italian car does twenty-five miles to the gallon, how many gallons do 10,000 cars burn over eighty kilometres, or exactly fifty miles, of autostrada? The puzzle at least passed the time.
One car burns two gallons per fifty miles, ergo, 10,000 cars an hour would burn 20,000 gallons — and at approximately 300 gallons to a tonne of crude oil, that worked out at just over 66 tonnes per hour, on the short stretch between Bologna and Venice.
For the four days of the Ferragosto, with the traffic almost as dense at night as by day, and taking a mean average of 50 tonnes per hour, the total could be as high as 4,800 tonnes. Even if he halved the figure, to account for the average day in summer, it would only cover a fraction of the thousands of miles of Italian autostrada, not including Italy’s secondary roads.
As a journalist, Hawn considered statistics the necessary grist to the greater drama of things. His mind now seized on the enormity of these figures, and while bogged down on this fifty-mile stretch of shimmering concrete, he let his imagination take flight over thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of kilometres. How many millions were there in Western Europe alone? How many million cars doing twenty-five mpg over an average twenty-four hours?
Since working on the Rhodesian sanction-busting story, Hawn had come to know quite a lot about the oil industry. It was fascinating and formidable. But until now he had never considered it in its entirety; he merely knew of what had found its way ‘illegally’ up from South Africa, and that had been a dribble in the ocean of the world market. If his present, rough calculations were anything like correct, the total world consumption of oil on any one day — let alone year — must run into millions of tonnes.
The largest supertanker can carry a quarter of a million tonnes of crude: and he knew that approximately four thousand tankers were at sea at any one time. An industry operating on that scale would have to be more powerful than any government — as the sanction-busting fiasco had so hilariously, miserably proved. Any one of the major oil companies would have to have the resources and organization which only the super powers, and certain Arab states, could hope to rival. Yet a handful of peasants, working a few dozen pumps in Northern Italy, had managed to bring this corner of the country to near standstill.
He thought what fun one of those Soviet subs would have off the Gulf or round the Cape.
Perhaps the story was there — though it was not a new one. Nor did it help the traffic on the autostrada. The crippled Lamborghini had been shifted; but over the last few kilometres past Padua the going was painfully slow.
It was early evening when he at last came in sight of the ugly sprawl of Mestre, with towers of burning waste-gas flapping in the thick, damp air. The oil refineries had been built up to the limit of the water where the causeway runs across to Venice. There was a smell of unrefined fuel.
Helmeted leather-caped police stood at the head of the causeway, slowly processing each car. Hawn was warned to proceed at no more than five kilometres per hour. The police carried submachine pistols, with the safety catches off. With the Red Brigades still at large, these lads from the peasant South were taking no chances. Nor was Hawn. He was a careful journalist who knew when to play the odds. To be shot in the back by a trigger-happy Italian policeman would be a poor epitaph.
With some difficulty, he left the Fiat in one of the multi-storey car parks behind the station; then carried his scarred leather holdall down to the jetty. There were more police here and, at a distance, crowds of demonstrators — men with beards and slogans and pretty girls in raincoats who chanted a dismal litany which sounded like ‘ABCO fuori! La Nazione per il Popolo!’ (Shades of Mussolini here? he wondered maliciously.) Then occasionally a voice, less timid than the others, would call out, ‘Death to the imperialist Industrial Military Fascist Complex! Death to ABCOF’ — like a street vendor hawking his wares to an uninterested crowd. Some of the police would spit and rock back on the heels of their boots; and a few of them would smack their rolled-up caps into the palms of their gloves.
It was small beer for Hawn, with his blasé memories of Hué and Paris and Prague and Teheran. This was not so much an event, more a tiresome Italian ritual, a demonstration of thwarted machismo that was almost burlesque. There was not even a whiff of CS gas to wipe away the green stench of the canals; but at least it was a change from the arid stillness of those hills, with his textbooks and sheets of foolscap curling up in the heat. He wanted Anna badly.
The police here stood in a double row, looking menacing only on account of their guns and shiny black uniforms and visored helmets, and because they were unshaven and red-eyed with exhaustion. Hawn knew at once that they didn’t have the stomach for a fight, and the demonstrators were too innocent, too idealistic to give them one.
He became more concerned that there was no vaporetto, no motorscafo, to take him to his hotel. His reunion with Anna was now well overdue.
A gondolier finally sidled up beside him and negotiated an
