“He’s here. He’s just come in,” she said into the receiver.
The clock read twelve past ten. She hung up the phone. “Minister, we’ve been trying to reach you and have looked for you everywhere. The hotel in Bergamo—”
“Call the consortium together, my surveyors, and the Colonel.”
His risk assessor walked in. “Minister, we’re all in the conference room. Waiting for you.”
Angelo ran a hand through his hair and followed his man. “Brief me.”
“Six thirty this morning, the buttress of the dam cracked and subsequently failed. We’re estimating that about four and a half million cubic metres of water spilled out into the valley within minutes. The rains—”
“Yes, I know. The elevation above sea level is just over one thousand five hundred, is that right?” He started calculating.
“That’s correct, sir. They estimate that there was a breach of about eighty metres in the central portion of the S-shaped planimetry. The village of Bueggio was flooded first.”
Angelo had booked his hotel nearby until Gina had seduced him, had convinced him to return to Bolzano. She had said that they would be safe at the Laurin. Protected, was the word she had used.
“Damn it to Christ.”
“Minister?”
“Sorry. Where are the maps?”
“Just here, sir.”
They moved down the hall towards the conference room. Two men were holding the corners of the map up on the wall and conferring over it. They stepped aside for him.
“Continue,” he said.
“Dezzo is partially flooded.” The risk assessor’s voice betrayed his stress. “And Azzone as well. I’m afraid that the flood propagation along the downstream river were catastrophic. It took the flood wave about forty-five minutes to flush through to as far as Darfo.”
Angelo shook his head in disbelief. “That’s over twenty kilometres.”
The assessor swallowed. “Three villages and five power stations have been completely wiped out, sir.”
Chills rippled down his whole body. “Are our people accounted for? Our chief engineer, Stefano? And all the others who were at the opening?”
The man swallowed. “Some left, the chief engineer among them. He’s here in the conference room. Others were staying the weekend. We thought you might have…”
Angelo felt his eyes stinging. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Christ!” He paused at the door of the meeting room. He saw Stefano, and Pietro was also in there, as if ready to take charge again. Angelo knew all the people in that room. He knew every single one of them, and he turned to look down the hallway because the Colonel was missing. The doors swung open at the end of the hall, and there he was, in military dress. He too had left the area then.
When he reached Angelo, they looked gravely at one another before Angelo turned to the risk assessor. “Casualties? The numbers?”
The risk assessor glanced nervously at the Colonel. “Umm, sir…we are still calculating—”
“I’m aware of that.” Angelo would fire the risk assessor later. He held his father’s gaze. “What’s the number so far?”
“Over two hundred, Minister.”
“Right. Order the car. We’re going there as soon as we’re finished here.” To his father, he asked, “Army mobilized?”
The Colonel nodded. The risk assessor hung his head.
Angelo opened the way into the meeting room. “We are keeping this meeting brief. You’re both coming with me.”
***
“S top the car,” Angelo told the driver.
They were trapped behind a convoy of military trucks trying to make it up the icy road. He, the Colonel, Stefano, and the risk assessor stepped out onto the road some ways away from the dam break. Stefano started taking photographs. Angelo saw that the road was about a dozen metres lower than it had been a few days before and pointed it out to the Colonel. He went to the edge and nearly stumbled backwards. Below him, the valley had been laid to complete waste, the walls of the canyons scoured by the water. Some of the pylons were twisted, the lines dangling like useless, broken limbs. He could make out the debris piled upon a black muddy bed that was now the valley. Not far below him, a horse lay on top of a cart, angled and bent in death. Against the rock wall below, four dead goats.
“Give us the field glasses,” Angelo said to Stefano.
Stefano put the camera aside long enough to fetch the glasses, and when Angelo had them, he adjusted his, then made sure the Colonel was lifting his set to his face.
Angelo eyed the risk assessor. “Stefano, have him take the photographs.” He glared at the man. Let the bastard see what his bribe payments had paid for. “You, keep your hands from shaking.”
Angelo lifted the field glasses and scanned the valley. The first thing to come into view were the piled-up trees, then the flattened wooden boards of houses that had once stood on stone foundations. Those foundations were nowhere to be seen. He scanned the floor and saw what looked like a body of someone on a trunk. He looked closer. It was a naked man, slumped over a chest that had lodged into the mud, the water over the man’s ankles and wrists, the body limp and grey-blue. He heard the Colonel make a guttural noise and looked over to where he pointed. More bodies, this time a woman and two children twisted amongst a debris of trees. Above them, like a world on its head, a straw mattress.
The water had already begun receding, but Angelo could imagine the snake of mud carrying carts and houses, the bodies of people and their animals slithering through the valley. A wall of water, someone had reported, a wave as tall as ten or fifteen houses had preceded the mud. He could imagine the sound of it, like a cyclone or a hundred locomotives. He lowered his glasses.
“This may be the greatest
