Rome Noir

For a Few More Gold Tokens by Antonio Pascale

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Quartiere Pigneto

The Architect

On May 20, 2006, a hot sunny afternoon, the young architect-in-training Riccardo Tramonti, thirty-one, was completing an exploratory tour of the Pigneto neighborhood. In a few minutes — at 4:10, according to the police report — and just a few steps away (around two hundred meters) from the café where he had stopped (he had felt himself becoming weak, and dizzy, and he wanted something cold), the crime would take place. Of what happened next, which he would witness as the involuntary protagonist, Riccardo knew nothing. At 5 in the afternoon the next day, which is when he woke up, after nearly twenty-four hours in a coma, the first thing the nurse said to him was: You’re in all the papers.

It was, in truth, the only sentence that impressed itself in his memory, at least until, finally, after seventy-two hours in intensive care, he was taken to a rehabilitation ward, where he could have visitors. The first people to cross the threshold of his room (his mother and father; his girlfriend came that evening, just before visiting hours were over) said to him, taking for granted that he was fine, You’re in all the papers. There are even television cameras outside.

Riccardo was supposed to draft a report on “structural changes in the Pigneto neighborhood.” The job had been commissioned by the City of Rome and was part of a larger project of assessing the redevelopment of outlying neighborhoods. The firm (quite a well-known one) where Riccardo had been working for three years now (without anyone having recognized his ideas, Riccardo claimed) had won the contract; as a first step, it was supposed to review “the anthropology of the neighborhood,” and the young architect-in-training had been sent there on this exploratory mission.

Riccardo’s first sensation, as soon as he set foot in the neighborhood, was that of belonging: His appearance was not at all out of place among the inhabitants. Riccardo was tall and thin. He always knew what to wear, how to dress, in order to emphasize the idea that he was an architect — that is, someone who could devote himself to the spaces of others because he was able to devote himself to (taking care of) himself. Although he had undergone a notable loss of hair while preparing for an exam (which covered engineering concepts through difficult and obscure applications of mathematics and physics), he had pretended not to be very concerned about this change in his physical appearance. The reaction to this unpleasant development had occurred in three stages: He had shaved his head, grown a beard, and bought some stylish nonprescription glasses with thin gold frames. He could see perfectly well but thought that the look he had created for himself more closely resembled what people expected to see when they shook the hand of an architect.

The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, this was the first thing he would have written in his report. What had at one time been a neighborhood on the outskirts, in every sense, was on the verge of becoming fashionable. There were fewer and fewer old men playing cards, cursing some saint because luck wasn’t on their side. Fewer and fewer old ladies sitting outside doorways on straw chairs, while hens pecked in the dirt nearby. And more and more young people like Riccardo.

Even if all of them hadn’t lost their hair (although a percentage that Riccardo estimated at between twenty-five and thirty-five resembled him in a striking manner), they could be defined in every respect as young people who were heading toward a rosy future. Young people with ideas, a little like Riccardo, who maybe struggled to express them completely, perhaps because (a little like Riccardo) they worked in cold and coercive structures (even if the furnishings of those structures conveyed the contrary). And yet these young people wanted to react to all this, to create an image of themselves that would nurture optimism. Therefore, the young people seemed truly young, and those who were forty or older did their utmost to seem like young people.

The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, so Riccardo would have written. The houses, built of mortar and stucco, without solid foundations, and once inhabited by poor people who got by as best they could, were gaining value in the real-estate market. Those poor people, since they had reached the age limit (approximately seventy) beyond which it is no longer possible to pretend that everything is all right, were selling (en masse) the houses they owned. With the money obtained they had (almost en masse) decided to move out of that neighborhood (or die in exotic places). The young people who bought (using in part the family inheritance) spent more than the value of the apartments (thus contributing to the distortion of the market) and proceeded to renovate them. Wealth was arriving and the pace of life was changing; the young seemed younger, hence with more future before them.

The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, so Riccardo would have liked to begin and end his report. It was, in fact, the last thought that his mind formed before he came out of the bar in a pitiful state, with his blood pressure falling rapidly and his legs trembling in a truly suspicious manner.

Francesco

The only thing Francesco, now nearly eighteen years old and a longtime resident of the Pigneto neighborhood, had understood in his life was: My father is a moron. This discovery had become a source of pride and power. His father was a moron because he didn’t understand anything, he wasn’t aware of anything, he didn’t look at anything: a moron, that was all.

Awhile back, Francesco had stolen a motorbike (Honda SH). Not that he needed it; he just wanted to go to the stadium. Since his motorcycle was broken, and since there are always people (Francesco said) who leave their bikes unlocked, hoping, therefore (not just unconsciously), that they will be stolen, Francesco, after seeing all the fans setting off for the stadium with their folded banners, was not overcome by fear (which a first theft generally involves) and, instead, inserted a screwdriver in the starter of the Honda SH, turned on the engine, and headed for the stadium on the stolen bike.

The motorcycle had to do with his father’s moronicness. It was really a perfect example.

His father was a moron, Francesco thought, on the way to the stadium, mounted on the stolen bike. Especially as Francesco considered him responsible for everything, even his own passion for the Rome team that he had transmitted at a tender age but then hadn’t known how to cultivate. Something that morons do in general — they open a pathway and are unable to follow it. Precisely because they are morons.

His father had in recent years suffered a financial collapse. It wasn’t that he had attempted to scale a significant height and, just before the peak, had fallen. In that case one might have appreciated his courage. No, he, the father, had had a financial collapse because he had fallen in love with someone else and had left the family: Francesco, his mother, and his sister. Not to say that the father had ever made a lot of money. Occasionally he wrote for television. They had come to live in Pigneto when it was not yet fashionable and prices were low. Francesco’s mother had repeated every other day that it was time to buy a house in this neighborhood, where houses were cheap. But he, the father, like the idiot he was, kept putting off the purchase: These houses are going to fall in on themselves soon, they’ll implode, they’re old, decaying. Let’s wait, when we have more money we’ll move to another neighborhood. Typical moron’s rationale. They continued to rent. Then he, the father, had the clever idea of falling in love with someone else. Another moron, worse than him. Of course, morons seek each other out, so to speak, they pair up. So the mother thought she’d better kick him out on his ass, and now he has to work double to pay two rents, for the house in Pigneto and for his own, practically a hovel, on the Prenestina. And this he does, the moron, a little to his woman and a little to the family. A little money here, a little there. Both women kick him in the ass, and he goes along like that, like the moron he is.

Now, Francesco thought, the day he went to the stadium on the motorbike, is it possible that a person never learns from his mistakes? Because his father was like that, someone who never learns. Even when Francesco was caught with the stolen motorbike and all hell broke loose, and he was taken to the police station in handcuffs, even then, when his father came to get him, the first thing he did was hug him, tight. In front of the cops, who looked on in embarrassment. They all expected his father to slug him, kick him in the ass or whatever, whereas he, on the contrary, in front of the cops, had hugged his son. Then, as if that were not enough, he said to the police captain: When your son steals something, it’s the time to give him a present. Like a moron, no? A father who quotes an old Zen saying, a saying that among other things he was using in a TV script. He says it in front of everyone. To explain that a son who steals is only asking for attention and affection, that’s why it’s a good time to give him a present. The captain had run his hands through his hair and said under his breath, How will we go on like this...

The Father... and His Lover

One morning, early, Mario Cirillo, motorman on the Metro, found a person locked in a car. There’s another one, he thought. He didn’t expect that there would be any further surprises. It can happen that a passenger doesn’t get out at the last stop. And then gets stuck. The train, at the end of its run, is taken to the local yards. The doors are closed, the electricity is turned off, and the train is abandoned. And then generally the locked-in passenger begins to yell like a madman and the motorman, hearing these shouts, thinks: There’s another one. Every year, at least one passenger, for one reason or another, forgets to get out at the last stop and finds himself alone, on the point of tears, on the edge of a panic attack, stuck in the car.

That morning, it happened that Mario Cirillo had found not one but two people locked in the train. A sign, said the motorman, that those two not only hadn’t realized that they were at the last stop; they hadn’t even noticed that the train was heading for the yards. They hadn’t realized anything, they hadn’t shouted, or begged, or stamped their feet. Nothing. Or maybe they had, but it was too late, the train had already been sitting for a while.

Francesco’s father, Carlo Chirico, was one of the two locked in the car. There’s another one, thought the motorman, not suspecting that there was a second person with him. A woman, Marta della Rosa. Two morons, the motorman had remarked to his friends while they were having coffee. Today I found not one but two morons.

At the beginning of that adventure, Carlo was in the next-to-last car, Marta in the last. Both were reading books: Carlo Asylum, and Marta Ocean Sea. In the grip of literature they hadn’t been aware of anything. Then, trying to get out, they had come face to face. Both were frightened, and screamed as if they’d seen a ghost.

What morons, Carlo said to Marta later, how could they not have noticed anything? For Carlo it was his first experience, so to speak, of being possessed by reading. In Marta’s case, on the other hand, it often happened that she didn’t get off at her stop. Now they were both locked in the metro. They couldn’t even inform the emergency services, there was no way. They spent the night together somewhat fearfully, they talked to each other about many things, and when, early in the morning, the motorman got them out, they began to laugh. The sort of laughter that covers embarrassment: at having been a bit foolish but, at the same time, at having said some important things. At having bared themselves, so to speak, in front of one another. An inversion: They had been underground together, and had been so comfortable that when the morning light illuminated them they were pained, as if they had been hurled out of the earthly paradise, which this time, however, was down below.

What a moron, Liliana, Carlo’s wife, said to him, when she saw him again. I’m here in this place working all night and you’re in a train reading Asylum. Practically the same thing that Liliana said again when, a few months later, she discovered that her husband not only was fucking Marta but was in love with her. Really, his wife said to him. In love? What a moron... I’m here in this...

Francesco and Cinzia

The boy had noticed awhile ago that there was something odd. If there was any value in what he did — that is, almost nothing, from morning to night — it was that he could look around. And looking around, Francesco had noticed the storefront. He had his girlfriend look, too, saying to her, There’s something odd. To this observation his girl, Cinzia, had replied: Right. A word that she repeated often, especially when Francesco commented on something he saw: Right.

Cinzia adored Francesco. She saw in him everything she didn’t see in her other contemporaries and schoolmates. Francesco was someone who got respect. He used his fists. That was how he resolved things, with his fists. And he was successful. He wasn’t like her classmates, all very polite and very fake, according to Cinzia. Francesco and Cinzia went to the French school, a private school. They were in the same class. What am I supposed to do? My father is a moron, he enrolled me in this school, so in his view I’m learning important things and hanging out with fancy people. But what can I learn from some filthy rich morons?

Right, Cinzia answered. She found herself in the same situation. Her father and mother had a lot of money and could afford to have all sorts of luxuries. And they had them. And in having them, according to Cinzia, they contributed to the devastation of the world. Cinzia detested people who were devastating the world. They got on her nerves. She bought clothes from street vendors without worrying about the label or the quality. She didn’t even worry when her mother borrowed her clothes. Cinzia’s mother, in fact, considered her daughter a born style-maker. Someone who wherever she shopped would buy the right thing. In fact, Cinzia created trends. So her mother said. Right, Cinzia commented, my mother doesn’t understand shit about anything. You should see my father, Francesco added. As a matter of fact, the two had become acquainted talking about their fathers and mothers. Then they had gotten together when, during a discussion about pacifism, the girl had seemed to go crazy because her interlocutor, according to her, not only underestimated the problem of imperialism but also made some out-of-place remarks, partly to undercut Cinzia, the style-maker, and partly to tease her. The discussion ended when Francesco got involved and started punching the boy. Every time he hit him he said: What’s the matter? You’re not laughing anymore.

Right, said Cinzia, some time later, when they kissed for the first time. From then on no one wanted to have a discussion with Cinzia the pacifist or her warrior companion, Francesco. And the two formed a close, intimate couple. But isolated.

Now, this storefront which had something odd about it was actually a warehouse: Twice a week a van arrived and unloaded refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines. And on an almost daily basis, these household appliances, one by one, left the place. The operations occurred in a regular, straightforward fashion. Matteo Cosentino, the owner, waited in the doorway of the store for the arrival of the van and helped unload it. His wife, Daniela Lo Prete, came out and handed over the receipt. The business was repeated in the opposite direction immediately afterward, in the sense that Matteo loaded into his minivan, a Fiat Ducato, a television, a refrigerator, but also a chair, a lamp. His wife gave him a packing list, and then every other time, according to her mood, she said goodbye to her husband, who, every other time, according to his mood, departed saying goodbye to his wife with a wave of his left hand.

These were all simple operations that went on without any interference. The neighborhood was in the process of changing, it’s true; for much of the day someone with a truck was loading or unloading goods, but there were no traffic jams or parked cars that got in the way of movement. Matteo loaded up and left.

There was something odd, however.

Matteo and Daniela (and Little Giulia)

Once a week, Matteo and his wife, Daniela, lowered the metal shutter halfway. This happened when the gold tokens arrived. Matteo and Daniela had the job of counting them and delivering them to the winner. There was no danger as long as the whole operation unfolded in low profile, so to speak. It shouldn’t attract attention. To keep the operation’s profile low, the gold tokens, placed in a canvas sack decorated with a red ribbon, were put in a gym bag and loaded into the back or, sometimes, left on the rear seat. What in the world could there be of importance in a gym bag? Not to mention the fact that the gold tokens were not a very desirable haul; even people who received them as a prize had to exchange the gold for money. In this exchange the tokens lost twenty percent of their value — imagine if you’d stolen them.

For two years Matteo and Daniela had managed the franchise for third-party delivery of prizes won on television.

It was a modern business, certain to expand. Television will give away more and more prizes (of all varieties), and there will have to be agencies to handle the delivery, at least one in every major city, to reduce the costs of transportation. Anyway, if you won a television, it did not reach the winner directly, by courier. From the factory it went to the agency and the agency took care of delivering it to the home.

Matteo and Daniela, who had been married for three years, had decided to take this job. They had also decided something else: to have a child. The truth is, Daniela had made (and imposed) the decision. Matteo temporized. Now that the business was about to get going, a child could slow its progress. You had to take care of a child, Matteo always said; we can’t leave it to grandparents or babysitters. Let’s wait. We’re just getting going and then we bring a child into the world. If we wait for the right moment, Daniela answered, it will never arrive. There are no right moments. Since Daniela believed in what she said, one fine day she simply informed her husband that the right moment had arrived: in the sense that she was pregnant. Nine months later Giulia was born. Adorable, happy, healthy, good-natured. If only she had slept at night, it would have been perfect — the right moment, so to speak. But she was a child who liked to be up, maybe she was already immersed in the sweet nightlife of the Pigneto neighborhood. Matteo rocked her whenever he could. In brief, the matter stood like this: Matteo no longer slept. And the work suffered from it. I told you so, he said to Daniela. She put up with it; she had to devote herself to the child, she couldn’t worry about her husband’s sleep. It will pass, calm down, that way you’ll calm Giulia as well.

So Matteo also had to take on the guilt of the child’s insomnia. It was a vicious circle: He was sleepy, in the morning he was irritable, and because he had to do all that unloading, his irritability was passed on to the child, who wouldn’t go to sleep at night, etc., etc. The fact is that Matteo simply kept repeating to Daniela: I told you so. He got more irritable, because Daniela didn’t listen to him or even offer a nod of comprehension. Indeed, some time ago Daniela had even stopped saying: It will pass, calm down. She limited herself to accusing her husband directly of being a weakling. Of giving way for so little: Is there time to sleep or not? All this tension had dug into Matteo’s face and his constitution. One day, after a sleepless night, he left a refrigerator on the sidewalk. He forgot to load it into his van and just drove off. Luckily, Mario, the bartender, immediately informed him on his cell phone. When Matteo returned, Mario offered him a coffee. He needed it. And as long as he was there, Matteo vented a little: himself, Daniela, the child, the job. He also said: I’m glad it was a refrigerator, imagine if I’d left the gold tokens on the sidewalk. Francesco, since he did nothing from morning to night, heard (and understood) everything, and a thought flashed in his mind: That’s what’s odd about that place. Right, Cinzia had responded when Francesco told her about it. When, however, he confided to her what he wanted to do, that is steal, without spilling any blood, a bag of gold tokens and move to a tropical island, far from that moron his father and all the rest of the disgusting world — when Francesco confided all this to Cinzia, she didn’t say, Right. She said nothing.

Peppe

For three weeks Peppe had said nothing to anyone. He withdrew into himself. Things were not going well, a brain tumor had been diagnosed. How long did he have left to live — a month, three months? Peppe was spending all his savings, spending it on crazy things. A month, three months of life. Peppe no longer had a family. His wife was dead. His son didn’t want anything to do with him. He had gone away. He had even sold his house in Pigneto, bought by his father with many sacrifices. Once he had the money in his pocket, he had flown to England. To be a baker, an honest job with a good income. Unlike his: Peppe, for his whole life, had been a pusher, drugs and other such substances. He had even smuggled Viagra. Now that he was about to die, a single thought tormented him: not to be able to hand over his knowledge to someone. All that criminal experience would be lost like tears in the rain. If only he had had a different son, more inclined to humbly learn the job, rather than be a baker. In England, worse. Knock himself out from morning till night. Why? A life of sacrifices for what? The two-family house, the family, the lousy pay? Was this the life his son wanted? Come on. His work required skill. Now the contacts, the friendships, the relations he had built, had managed, and had been able to exploit would no longer have meaning. That thought tormented him more than the brain tumor.

Peppe, Francesco, and Cinzia

It was in the grip of this obsession that Peppe began to look around. And he found Francesco and Cinzia. Almost as if someone on high or down below had heard his prayers. What more could one ask? Two aimless kids hanging around the neighborhood, with an obvious desire (especially the boy) to learn. When Peppe got in touch with him to arrange a quick sale of amphetamines, Francesco let him know immediately how he saw things: It’s better to sell drugs than to use them. Morons use them. If it wasn’t for the morons, there wouldn’t be so much money around. Once the three agreed about the inexorable presence of morons in the world, they became conspiratorial and exchanged confidences. Peppe said that he was about to die, Francesco that he wanted a life different from the one he had lived up to now. Rather than continue like this, he preferred to be like the old residents of the neighborhood — get some money in his pocket and go to a tropical island. They would open a bar, far away from the morons. At least from the ones he knew. And here came Francesco’s bright idea: the gold tokens. An easy job. After listening to Francesco, Peppe agreed. The problem was not so much that of taking the tokens as of converting them to money. Of finding a fence. Peppe knew someone who might be just what they needed: Tonino. Right, said Cinzia.

Tonino

Tonino had a problem: He spent everything he had on high-class whores. On Saturdays, on one pretext or another, he headed toward the Marche. He knew certain Ukrainians who worked in private brothels. Fabulous. He took care of everything, even the cocaine. Three hours of luxury. Of unrestrained vice. Then the return home, without a euro in his pocket. Too many gifts, handouts, tips, and little somethings for everyone, whores and friends of the whores. Tonino was old and when he turned sixty he had been seized by this mania: to fuck without limits. For a man like him, shut up in a shop for almost fifty years, there was only one thing to do: spend, throw away money. What use was it to him? His children already had money. They, too, were jewelers. Besides, his children were morons.

It can be done, Tonino said to Peppe. I know where to sell them; you bring them to me and I’ll pay you half the value. How many can you bring?

Carlo and Marta

Although Carlo occasionally worked in television, he didn’t know that the gold tokens awarded as prizes had different values: thirty, fifty, a hundred and fifty, two hundred and fifty, five hundred thousand euros. He discovered it by chance on May 18, 2006, because the mother of Marta (his new girlfriend) had won gold tokens as a prize. A hundred and fifty thousand euros. A twofold fortune. Marta’s mother was up there in years and so, apart from using some of the money to pay her caretaker, she wouldn’t have known what to do with that sum. She had decided to give it to her daughter, and the daughter wanted to divide it equally with Carlo. The two had shared a night on the train, they were in love, and after that night they had to share any fortune that might come to them. Carlo inquired about collecting the prize and found out it was the agency in Pigneto that would deliver the money. So, since Carlo knew the owner by sight, one day he went to see him. When Carlo came in, Matteo was sleeping in a chair (in fact, a prize to be delivered). It was Daniela who shook his hand first and asked him not to make any noise, her husband slept whenever he could, because the child mistook night for day. When Carlo left the agency he knew more about his life: (a) the gold tokens would arrive on May 20 at Matteo and Daniela’s agency, and would be delivered to his house directly; (b) Carlo was so fascinated by the business of the gold tokens that he asked the couple if he could see how the job was carried out, and sooner or later he would find a way to tell their story; and (c) with his portion he would give his children a present, especially his son Francesco. The boy needed a gesture of affection. Maybe a motorcycle.

Peppe, Francesco, Cinzia, and a Mysterious Man

Peppe had taken care of all the details of the heist. His brain still functioned, and as long as it functioned (time was running out, another month), he wanted to use it to make the kids happy. For himself he asked nothing — no money, no benefits, no percentages... nothing. What would be the use? To pay for more treatments and live a few more days? All pointless. Better to do something useful for the kids, his two godchildren.

There would be no bloodshed, no gun or other weapons. The mysterious man would come with them. Actually, his name was Ugo. A stout clerical worker who had two hobbies: he was a practitioner of judo and a fan of bondage. He liked to tie people up and watch their contortions. Some time ago, Ugo had entered the world of clandestine films; in particular, he produced films in which acts of violence were simulated or reenacted. Ugo wouldn’t know anything about the gold tokens; besides, all he cared about was tying people up and filming the scene. The plan, then, was simple. Peppe had persuaded Ugo to set up a real snuff movie, to sell later on the clandestine market. Peppe and Ugo would go into the agency, and tie up Matteo and Daniela. The whole thing would be filmed by a small camera. After that, while Ugo was preparing to film the two of them, bound and gagged, Peppe would hit him on the head, tie him up, grab the gold tokens, and deliver them to the kids. Francesco agreed to everything except one small detail: He wanted to take part in the robbery. Peppe insisted that he shouldn’t. Why take that risk? Francesco was ready for a risk. Francesco trusted Peppe only up to a certain point; he liked him but felt that basically Peppe would always be a piece of shit. Yet Francesco didn’t consider him a moron. Peppe, on the other hand, had understood Francesco’s doubt. More than legitimate. Good sign, Francesco was right not to trust him. Smart, that kid. He would let him come. The robbery couldn’t be fully set up in advance, they would have to act on the moment. When the storefront’s metal shutter had been lowered halfway. There, that was the signal. Ugo would be ready, he lived just across from the place. They would wait at his house for the right moment. There were plenty of films for diversion. Right, said Cinzia.

Peppe

On the morning of May 20, shortly before going to Ugo’s house as he had for the previous three days, to check on the activity at the agency, Peppe received a phone call. A kind, solicitous voice told him that he had better sit down. At the end of the call, Peppe said to himself: What do I do now, I don’t have a cent.

Ugo

Ugo had all the equipment ready.

Francesco

Around 11 in the morning, through a window at Ugo’s house, he thought he saw his father walking around the neighborhood. Odd, he said to himself, this isn’t his day to visit.

The Agency

Matteo lowered the shutter halfway down around 3. About a minute earlier two private guards had delivered several bags. Matteo seemed to be asleep on his feet.

The Architect

At 3 he had arrived in the neighborhood to begin his exploratory tour.

Peppe, Francesco, etc., and the Final Unfolding of Events, According to the Police Report

The three of them, Peppe, Francesco, and Ugo, entered the agency. The plan had been organized this way: Right after the robbery, Peppe and Francesco, on the motorcycle, would head for Tonino’s. The important thing was to deliver the gold tokens, get them to a safe place right away. Peppe and Francesco had discussed who should drive. Francesco wanted to drive, because, as he reminded Peppe, his brain, unfortunately, played nasty tricks. Peppe himself had told Francesco about the time he thought he was braking and accelerated instead. The first terrible symptom of the brain tumor. Peppe, however, insisted on driving: With him driving, they would seem a pair, father and son, and would attract less attention. And after that one day, it had never happened again. When he had to brake he braked, and when he had to accelerate he accelerated. That type of symptom had disappeared. In the end, the older man’s wish was respected.

Wearing ski masks, the three entered the agency at 3:50 p.m., and the first person they came across was, unexpectedly, Carlo, Francesco’s father. He was trying to take notes, in a notebook. Carlo, seeing the three in their ski masks, and imagining that they were there to grab the gold tokens, did something that he had never in his life done before and would never repeat: He violently struck the first man he came to — his son Francesco. Who, after the blow, stood absolutely motionless, as if he had received an order to stand at attention. Carlo stopped, in turn, because the blow seemed to have paralyzed his hand. At this point Ugo intervened and, with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform, immobilized Carlo, then knocked him out, while Peppe flung himself on Matteo, using the same approach. It didn’t take much; Matteo was already asleep on his feet and expected it. The only problem was Daniela, who started screaming, but she was immediately restrained. Once this was done, Peppe — while Ugo, already excited, began to tie up the three and film them — glanced at Francesco. The boy was staggering about the room, as if stunned. Peppe immediately grabbed the bags. They were very heavy. He put them in a gym bag, then made a sign to Ugo, who immobilized Francesco too. Francesco put up some weak resistance before the chloroform knocked him out. When he came to, he found himself in an embarrassing position: He was in his underwear, and his legs were tied together with his arms — like a salami. His father was next to him, bound in the same position. For all practical purposes, they were two morons. In front of them was Ugo, tied to a table. The camera was shooting him, half-asleep. Peppe went up to Francesco and said: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go like this. I found out a little while ago about a miracle — they made the wrong diagnosis. I’m not going to die, and that is good news; the bad news is that I didn’t have a cent — I’ve spent everything, and I’m desperate. I need money. I’m taking it all and getting out. When they find you, you’ll be able to say you were the victim of a robbery. Or confess everything, including my name. But don’t do that. First of all, because it will be too late, I’ll already be gone. Second, because if you become known at your young age, then you’re finished in this line of work. And you have the stuff. Don’t waste your talent.

After which Peppe got on the motorcycle and sped off in great excitement, the wind cooling his sweat.

It Was an Instant

The first symptom hinting at a brain tumor had been difficulty walking. Peppe had wanted to accelerate and instead he braked. It was an instant, then he retook control of the situation. When, shortly before the robbery, the doctor, a woman, in tears, apologizing over and over again, explained about the mistake — a simple, stupid, imbecilic mixup of X-rays — Peppe felt as if he had been reborn. And as a result of that sensation, he was like a child who has not yet learned to walk. For long minutes, in fact, he couldn’t remember how to walk. Now, on the motorcycle, with the gold tokens, he felt that he had regained full control of his faculties. He was happy. The horizon was clear.

He certainly didn’t expect a drunk to cross the street like that. Obviously Peppe tried to brake, but because of a sort of strange, unexpected symptom, he accelerated and hit the man.

The Architect

Riccardo came out of the bar and realized that he was about to faint. A classic drop in blood sugar. Riccardo often watched the TV show Paperissima, which featured people caught at embarrassing moments, and laughed heartily when he saw couples passing out at the altar from emotion. He couldn’t understand how it was possible to lose your strength like that, so that you seemed like a sack of potatoes left to itself, or someone who, given a push, staggers slightly, then, taking a dozen steps forward, falls flat on his face, powerless, like a dead man. He had the thought that the neighborhood was in the process of being renovated, before his sight darkened; and in spite of the blackness into which he was plunged, he took five steps, like a drunk, right into the middle of the street, and was violently struck by a motorcycle proceeding at high speed. When, after seventy-two hours, Riccardo finally regained consciousness, he realized, reading the newspaper, that he had been an involuntary hero, one who brings about the arrest of the foolish old protagonist of a comic heist of gold tokens, because, having fainted, he ends up under the motorcycle and flies forward a few meters. Every article he read emphasized the fact that the gold tokens, scattered all over the street, had been set upon by the neighborhood residents. Of every age, old and young, new arrivals and longtime inhabitants.

Silence Is Golden By Boosta

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Tangenziale

The sports car speeds along the asphalt ribbon. The last mechanic who worked on it said that a car that low brings bad luck; the mechanic is a Jehovah’s Witness and he’s convinced that the closer you are to the ground the farther you are from the grace of God.

He drives looking straight ahead, she tilts her head slightly to the right; her forehead, hidden by blond bangs, hits the window at every bump. An almost constant noise, monotonous, grating.

Jolt.

Thump.

Jolt.

Thump.

He would like to tell her to move, to pay attention, but all he manages to do is grunt. He opens his mouth as if to speak but remains suspended between the last thought and the first word, in apnea. She won’t help; she watches the unbroken stripe that marks the emergency lane and remains silent. At the interchange for the Castelli Romani he takes the ring road; the car points south.

Signal, a glance in the rearview mirror, the engine grinds as he slows down and lets himself be swallowed up in the darkness by the broad asphalt ribbon filled with tires and metal plates.

He’s trying for the fourth time — he’s begun to count the number of times he tries.

He does it partly to occupy his mind and partly to make sure that everything is really happening and that it’s not the fault of some nausea-inducing systemic bug in the universe that spits us out by the billions onto earth.

How are you? he manages to say.

Then, again, there’s that pale forehead knocking against the glass, and the silence.

For one, three, ten interminable seconds.

She opens her mouth, parts her crimson-painted lips, and says, in a very distant singsong, Look out, you should be in the right-hand lane.

Suddenly he feels a crash beneath his breastbone, the collision between a raging and unsustainable irritation and the knowledge that you need patience if you want to be the superman of a woman like this.

For an instant he hates her.

For an instant it seems to him that two yellow eyes are approaching in the rearview mirror and he feels like laughing and shouting in fear.

He doesn’t need a reason to hate her.

He doesn’t need a motive to kill her.

He would give an arm to have her again the way she was at the beginning.

He brings a hand to his heart and feels nothing.

He lowers the volume on the radio with the index finger of his right hand and sighs loudly.

Again he tries to say something, I... but she interrupts him.

Shut up. Shut up. I’ve never seen anyone act as ridiculous as you so many times in a single evening. Why can’t you leave me alone, let me live and breathe? Why are you so incredibly insecure?

Tonight? he asks as if he hadn’t been aware of a thing.

Yes, tonight. Always trying to find my hand, hand, hand. As if you were a five-year-old child looking for his mother... Will you get it through your skull that I’m not your mother? I need a man, a real man, who gives me security but doesn’t suffocate me. You suffocate me, you’re like a murderer strangling his victim. I can’t breathe anymore...

He watches the knuckles of his fingers turn white, he feels the grip of his hands crushing the leather steering wheel. He accelerates, now the car is pressed tight to the road, aggressive and fast.

She continues, Always whining, demanding. First you don’t want me to talk at all and you’re insulted by everything I say, then I mingle at the party and your eyes are following me like radar. I don’t recognize you anymore...

She knows that to end the sentence properly she has to take a long pause and say...

I don’t know.

He brakes in order to avoid hitting a truck that’s traveling as slowly as an elephant.

He sees himself reflected in the sloping windshield of his car.

Thin, tan, curly hair mussed, white shirt at least as tired as he is.

Why do you talk to me like that? he asks, defenseless.

But he knows perfectly well why she talks like that.

Because he’s been transformed into a coward.

Because together they’ve completely destroyed the monument of their story and he can’t bear it.

For months he’s been crying at night, secretly, drowning his sobs in the pillow and getting up every five minutes.

He signals right, he needs gas.

The station is deserted, the self-service pumps work twenty-four hours a day. On the automatic cash register there’s a flyer, the face of a smiling young man in an IP cap. He reads the caption while he inserts twenty euros in the slot. It’s a newspaper clipping.

The boy was a gas-station attendant.

He worked at that station.

He was killed three weeks ago in a robbery, by thieves after the cash.

Two hundred and forty euros.

And so?

And so? she asks.

Let’s get going, I’m tired and my contact lenses are getting dry...

He finishes reading quickly, chooses a pump, and thinks that the kid didn’t deserve it.

Maybe no, maybe yes, but not like that, and anyway he feels bad for him.

He feels bad.

He thinks that she, lustful and fierce as a mantis, would have deserved it much more.

For what she’s doing to him, to them, to the monument of the two of them.

To die a terrible death, the death of a woman who leaves her man instead of caring for him through hard times.

A few drops on the side of the car, if he had a match it would all be easy.

He gets in and drives off, now she’s staring at him.

I don’t know... I think we should talk about it.

He thinks that with a little luck he could make the car crash against the guardrail in just the right place so that the window would shatter and the corner of the trailer would pass right through her without leaving even a scratch. A couple of spins and he’d come to a stop there, straddling the lanes, in a state of confusion. Ready to start again.

He doesn’t want to listen and raises the volume on the radio, she turns and looks silently at the dark outline of the hills, the fires burning on the smaller parallel roads, the shadows of the whores running along and jumping in cars like theirs.

He passes the truck without signaling, locks his jaw, one step away from cramping his facial muscles.

The radio is playing The Police.

This is the song you need. Learn to leave me alone, learn, she says, happy and exasperated at the same time.

Don’t stand, don’t stand so close to me.

He shakes his head. He’d like to have cascades of words ready to pour out of his wounded mouth, legions of truth endowed with conviction, like Christians in the middle of a crowded arena. But not a thing, he can’t say a thing because grief strangles him, and to have imagined her dead has upset him even more.

Weak, he feels weak, and the light of the dashboard projects an orange stigmata on his shirt.

Finally he manages to mutter, Then why are you still with me?

His eyes are shining.

Again she pauses for a long time while she pretends to hum. She knows it, the why, but she says, I don’t know.

He accelerates.

He thinks about jerking to a sudden stop while she’s unbuckling her seat belt: She would hit her head and with a little luck some interesting scenarios might open up.

But he repents.

There is no revenge, there is no redemption, only tears.

You’re driving worse than a blind man, watch out.

She is so beautiful that looking at her makes him feel terribly immoral, like someone spying through the chinks of a confessional.

She shouldn’t exist.

That old adage that the higher you go the harder you fall sounds more and more real.

He thinks of his friends, all absent spectators at this farce. They, too, are ready to stab him, because basically it couldn’t last.

Life is a serious business — if you start thinking about how much pain, you risk swerving off the road. If he weren’t crying silently he would have thought he’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

Five hundred meters to the Autogrill on the ring road.

He downshifts and with his left ring finger engages the right turn signal. He goes into neutral for a moment in the emergency lane because he’s always liked hearing the wheels spin freely, out of control, for a few seconds, it lets him breathe.

He steps on the clutch and puts the car in gear, takes his foot off, and the engine screeches while the revolutions get slower and the wall approaches a little too quickly.

It could end like this. She’s right, everything is unfolding badly, tiredly, for the worse.

He heard her say to a friend, Do something for him, he’s gotten heavy and boring.

He saw her smile several times at another friend.

Friends, how many infiltrated in the ranks of the good...

An abrupt turn of the wheel, and he is calmly controlling the approach to the brightly lit bar.

They get out of the car and separate.

He leans on the hood, which is hot, and peers at the sky; she heads, hips swaying, in the direction of the rest room.

She walks the way princesses of ancient Egypt must have walked.

Slow, sinuous, she glides over the asphalt without touching it, without hurrying. You need nobility of soul or an extreme lack of control to walk like that.

The same voice from before tells him that now, right now she can’t see him, he could take off and leave her there.

Or he could set fire to everything, run away, and let her burn. It would be the bonfire of vanity, the fire of catharsis.

Would a fabulous cunt like her be transformed into a phoenix as she runs maddened into the night, he wonders.

Would the gas station explode?

Would he die too?

Would the poor attendant survive or join his former colleague of a few kilometers and a few minutes earlier?

Would there be a big bang?

And what if he were saved but disfigured for life?

He doesn’t have the stuff of a pyromaniac, not him.

He turns on the engine while she touches up her makeup in the passenger-side mirror.

He puts it in first, drives off with a little jerk, and brakes suddenly after a dozen meters.

She screams.

A deafening, terrifying sound, like a trumpet. A noise not human stops his heart while a divine light floods the car’s interior.

The biggest truck in the world passes by with its horn blasting a few centimeters from his door.

Then it grows distant in the night.

Her makeup is all smeared and she is weeping hysterically, out of fear.

Sometimes it simply happens that the whole universe plots against you.

He is silent, dazed, the car stops along the edge of the road, clouds of gnats in the headlight beams and brave crickets singing of lovely death.

The silence hurts more than death’s scythe.

It’s toxic and humiliating, terminal.

Sorry, sweetheart, he stammers.

Shut up and take me home, she says.

The words bounce first against the window on the passenger side, reaching him only on the rebound.

But they are faraway words, he is alive and this for now is enough. Fear, the sudden terror has distanced him from her. Now it’s as if he has grasped the good and the bad, the drama and the farce. His love finished, and his love with makeup smeared like a clown or a whore at the end of the night.

He scratches his nose.

He starts off again.

He turns up the music a little and, out of the corner of his eye, lets himself glance at the cheap imitation of the woman he’s in love with. He hums, he tries to stay in tune to show that he can do something well.

You lousy shit, you practically got me killed. I can’t deal with you anymore, I’m not happy.

She says she’s not happy and he somehow understands.

To be in love does not imply being completely stupid.

In his new privileged position he manages to feel opposing feelings at the same time, the joy of survival and the torture of abandonment.

He struggles to swallow the knot that rises in his throat, he would like to be able to tell her that everything’s fine, that they’ll be happy, that there won’t be any room for sadness between them.

But again nothing comes out.

He would like to tell her that he’s been struggling for a lifetime, that he’s felt bad for a lifetime, that the only time he feels good is when he sleeps with her, tightly embraced.

If he took the key out of the ignition while they’re hurtling toward the curve they could talk about it in the afterlife.

Now he has so much darkness in his head, so much that she wouldn’t be able to find his face to hit him.

Sweetheart, I’m doing everything and the opposite of everything to make you happy, but it’s so complicated, it’s incredibly painful to never see you happy, I don’t know what to do, he says all in one breath.

She laughs in his face.

Now he stops talking.

Homicide can also be an evolved feeling of mercy, even if he’s not thinking about it anymore.

He downshifts, puts on the turn signal without listening to the music anymore, and musters courage.

Why are we stopping?

She might have said it, he doesn’t know with certainty because he’s not listening.

The place is completely deserted.

He pulls up to the most invisible point and turns the key. The engine sighs and then is silent, only the fan whirs loudly.

What the fuck are we doing here? Now she’s definitely said it.

You know that I love you? he says, staring at her.

Now she’s worried, she gets out of the car, dark and aggressive, so that she seems as never before a dangerous animal, well camouflaged.

Why don’t you accept this very simple, very beautiful thing? I love you and I don’t want to be forced to pursue, to suffer, to always ask...

Now she looks behind him, as if hoping for the arrival of someone, something.

Please, let’s go, she says.

He puts a hand in his pocket and she starts to back up.

I could never treat someone the way you do, I could never humiliate you the way you humiliate me, I couldn’t hate you...

Suddenly the wind rises, strong, violent.

His shirt, open to the second button, swells. She backs up some more and in spite of that his eyes seem to approach, burning.

All I ask is to be able to love you.

She continues to look at his right hand in the wide pocket of his pants.

All right, but you scared the hell out of me and...

He brings his left index finger to his lips, making a sign for her to be silent.

They go on this way a little longer, one step after the other, she retreating and he advancing slowly.

She glances back and notices that she’s getting close to a billboard, the ad pasted to it promoting the wine of the Castelli, a wine that’s good for your blood.

He sees it too.

Blood.

The highway, in the distance, begins to grow light.

On the slight incline the headlights of a truck appear, bright and powerful.

I’ve done everything for you, forever, I can’t understand what I could have done wrong this time. Every time! he shouts.

She stumbles and ends up on the ground, her hands reaching forward, her voice strangled by fear.

Listen, I can’t do it, I didn’t think you would...

The lights are getting closer, and he stops.

This is the scene of the moment when it’s all over.

She is sitting.

He is standing.

The car is far away.

The car is low.

God is distracted because the car is low.

The truck is arriving swiftly.

The truck proceeds toward them, facing him. He takes a step forward.

She cries out desperately.

He takes a step sideways.

The truck hits him directly.

He knows he has always loved her.

She didn’t know that another she hadn’t loved him.

To the police, while the emergency workers scoop up the last shreds of white shirt off the asphalt, she says absently that it was the first time.

That he had paid in advance.

That she had never seen him before.

That he had told her what to do, how and when.

That he had told her what to say.

A policeman gives her his wallet.

Inside is a photograph, there she is.

Another she.

A she who didn’t love him.

Caput Mundi by Giuseppe Genna

Translated by Anne Milano Appel

Montecitorio

Rome, early, brisk May morning. The sky is clear and the air surprisingly chilly. Tension converges in the frigid sunshine, an unperceived tension. Humans, tourists and natives, walk along Via del Corso in dense throngs, their clothing vivid, smiling, thinking about what they have to do, where they have to go, the office, monuments to visit: everyday banalities. What is commonly called happiness. What others more warily call serenity — or indifference. Everyday life: banal, feverish, cheerful, Roman...

Police cars are packed tighter than usual around Montecitorio. Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies: the political heart of the nation. The old, yellowish Baroque building, which the genius Bernini distilled from an incubus of the imagination, twisting and bending the forms in dizzying abysses, complicating the internal labyrinths, widening the staircases, violating the door of the guarded entrance that faces the hunchbacked piazza. Here there are soldiers everywhere. And near the hotel to the left of the Chamber’s façade as well. This is the hotel where uniforms of American pilots were stolen in 2001, along with their badges: the access source for the terrorists who brought about September 11. It came out in subsequent investigations: a robbery in Rome for the attack in New York.

A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can become a tornado in New York, according to fractal theory. A banal theory, a serene butterfly. Don’t trust butterflies, or serene banality.

Montecitorio surrounded by soldiers: Inside, there’s no one. The sessions are adjourned.

Evidently, not all of the sessions are adjourned. The Premier, pale, rushes out of the smaller side door, not intended for television cameras, which for that matter are absent. What is he leaving behind on a chilly, luminous day of adjournment like this one? A rare chat with some listless deputies in the Transatlantico, the excessively Baroque hallway called “dei passi perduti,” the corridor of “lost footsteps,” where the Republic’s intrigues, both transparent and obscure, are hatched.

Outside, the chill does not seem to ease up. The Italian flag, limp in the cold air, hangs over the main door of Montecitorio along with the blue European one: bright in a cloudless sky.

In the narrow streets around Montecitorio: centuries-old dampness, the reek of cat piss, of animal piss. Gaps in the bricks, irregularly set. Some pigeons hunker in the cracks of the wall to protect themselves against the cold: They coo. Cats cross paths with one another. People walk along, some toward the Pantheon.

Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte. Two hundred meters from Montecitorio as the crow flies.

The surreal atmosphere of this cold spell. An imperceptible tension glances off the walls encrusted with nineteenth-century plaster, the old niches of the masters, the rust-brown paint of the closely set buildings. Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte: its strange, not-quite-right opening. Abnormal, narrow, difficult, yet expansive, forcing all eyes to the church, which dominates the street and the opening. The church’s façade is a flat barrier, peculiar, it seems to bear down on the back of the skull. It is naked, pure masonry, the color of tufa almost. A further work of the architect Bernini, a bell tower that impresses tourists, though Romans have grown accustomed to the sight of that anomaly. The bell tower is indescribable: It is a small temple, joined to the ground by an unreal masonry volute. The main entry of the church is a door: a plain door. There is no rose window; there is just a window.

In front of the entrance: armored cars and a doubled guard. The Italian Premier is very Catholic and prays here every day.

Now he is inside.

Inside the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte there is an explosion of gold. Periodically, the Santissimo, the consecrated Host of the body of Christ, is exposed, and for this reason one must kneel upon entering. It is a scene that is enthralling for tourists, customary for Romans. Only a few faithful come here. Right now there are four of them. They are praying to the monstrosity of the Santissimo, the walled altar, the worked gold. The small shrine in which the body of Christ is exposed to view: a masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art and faith. Wherever you are, inside the church, you see the Santissimo, you look at Christ. The church is very small, with one nave. There are four rows of benches for the faithful, very close together.

The Premier is kneeling down in his dark overcoat, his over-sized glasses smudged with fingerprints and dust, his head bent, his eyes shut tight, his hands joined at his breast.

This is the part that makes your head spin.

A small gold almond appears.

The Madonna appeared here in Rome in 1820, and two Jewish bankers of the Ratisbonne family were instantly converted.

The small gold almond quivers and expands.

It appears to stream forth from the altar, it instantly inflames the altar’s gold like an ultra-body, a blazing spirit.

It is the void exploding.

The void explodes and grows larger, the flame is hungry for air, it mushrooms.

The Premier of Italy only has time to be astounded, to raise his bent head.

The church collapses in a roar.

The bodyguards are killed in the blast.

When the attaché, former FEMA, of the United States third intelligence service in Rome, the real secret agency, arrives at the scene of the devastation, the disaster has not been reconstructed: Italians, those clever people, spaghetti-eaters good for patting him on the head or endlessly running around behind the bench of the Court of New York, in perpetual trials against the Mafia. Clever guys good for Scorsese. The attaché who arrives at the “scene of the slaughter” (the dirge, repeated over and over, audible above the dense ring of reporters droning on like automatons in front of their cameramen) has the advantage of language: He is a fourth-generation macaronic and knows how to listen, knows how to speak Italian, and knows what the Italians are hiding under this language that is the oldest and most ambiguous modern tongue in the world, intact for eight hundred years, from Dante’s Inferno through to today.

What Joe Spiazzi sees, zipping his jacket up to his neck, occasionally flashing an embassy badge, is an inferno of concrete and centuries-old beams of moth-eaten wood, the remains of an unseemly bell tower, a few meters from the political heart of the nation that generated, digested, and excreted its great-grandfathers to the New World. The church is no longer there. The bodies have been extracted from the rubble. The cars are ulcerated scrap iron.

A sublime country, Italy, for those who adore ruins: These are new ones. It’s a nice place to visit: The food is good. But right now the scene is nauseating. The beauty of Italy, not understood by those who come from outside, lies in its complex, esoteric mysteries, in its architectural heights that radiate age-old struggles: stone gargoyles and demons directed toward Saint Peter’s, the perennial clashing ground between one Spirit and another: The first speaks Latin, the second English.

Joe Spiazzi has the nerve to smile. He shakes his head. His cream-colored jacket matches the extreme hue of his wrecked incisors, his salt-and-pepper hair, his almost jaundiced skin, despite his excessive body bulk: He adores suckling pigs...

He despises Rome. He is fifty-two years old and his family is miles and miles away, an astronomical distance away, in a city with a name that eternally recalls Italy, Assisi, where Saint Francis spoke to and tamed the wolf: Ciudad de la Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles sobra la Porziuncola de Asìs — otherwise known as Los Angeles. Or better yet, to teach a lesson to the Spirit who speaks convoluted Latin: L.A. Where his wife, on the West Coast, at this hour, 1 in the morning, having put the two kids to bed, is studying the sparkle in Jim Morrison’s eyes in the mural in front of their house, in the neighborhood of Venice — built to imitate the network of Venetian canals, Italian hydraulic and urban engineering exported to the world: Made in Italy. A little like Joe Spiazzi’s family bunch: wacky in Italy, reborn in the American dream.

Just a short time left now before he returns home. He’s served two years in this Muslim crossroads, central to the geopolitics of U.S. intelligence only because the Polish Pope was suffering from Parkinson’s and the next Pope would be a German to be controlled and tamed as Saint Francis did with the wolf. This country is shaped like a boot and, as everyone knows, boots sink into mud. This peripheral mud that for years now has been outside any borders that matter. This city that calls itself eternal and proclaims itself to be the second Jerusalem, with its bell towers that are better suited to postcards than the heart of a dying faith.

Checks on the Muslims: routine. In actuality: to ascertain destination routes. Those shits from al Qaeda don’t plan anything in Italy: Italy doesn’t exist, it’s just a channel to move through — an empty boot. There is nothing critical here. Joe wasted his time on satellite surveillance, the monitoring of subjects by SIGINT, SIGnals INTelligence, even old-fashioned tailing. He hates the black terrorist bombers, the young guys in Iraq should do what nobody has the guts to say: drop the Bomb and so long to everyone — Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, imams. He voted for Bush Jr. in the embassy ballot box. He hates the Democrats: ticks who feed on blood indiscriminately, who don’t even know what and where Rome is, sucking Joe Spiazzi’s blood and that of his family.

It’s almost over, not even a month left until his return to L.A., and this mess erupts. The Italian Premier killed and dismembered by an exceptional explosion, in the very heart of Rome. Fuck. There’s now a chance his boss might keep him here. All of a sudden, Italy becomes a boiling point — and not because it’s sunny here.

He looks around: It’s a shambles. Italian police, colleagues of Joe dressed as Italian policemen: This is, after all, the fifty-third state. Firemen. Scientific teams. Dogs. Tape to cordon off the area.

It’s pointless to stay here. Better to return to headquarters. Behind Palazzo San Macuto, a building of gray ashlar where the Italians form their governmental commissions, endlessly discuss attacks and massacres, and struggle like ants to bring home a crumb of power that comes from above — never reaching any conclusion. The Palazzo that should solve Italy’s mysteries: All they’d have to do is call him, Joe Spiazzi, he would teach a class to the commission members for a couple of hours, and they would go home with three-quarters of the solutions that they stopped seeking years ago.

Time to go. Leave the “scene of the slaughter.” He crosses Via del Corso, obviously closed to traffic. He sees two bums passing a bottle of liquor back and forth, laughing obscenely.

Obscene. He swerves away from them. And suddenly he hears... in the immense din of the excavation, in the jumble of acute siren wails, he hears... one of the two tramps. Who shouts: “Hey, Joe!”

Joe Spiazzi turns, he doesn’t know where that call is coming from, whether it’s even directed at him. A 360-degree scan in a few fractions of a second and he intercepts one of the two bums who raises the bottle to him and shouts again: “Hey, Joe!” Nobody pays any attention to those two bums, nobody notices the anomaly, and with his hands in his pockets he clutches the two Beretta Px4 Storms, feels the technopolymer grip of the two semiautomatics. Thirty shots available. And the bum approaches swaying, smiling...

“Joe...” he murmurs, smiling, bottle in hand.

Joe smiles back, twisting his neck to the right, and in his slow Italian, devoid of inflection, he says: “Move and you’re dead.”

“You too,” and the bum keeps smiling. “My companion shoots if you shoot. We don’t want to shoot. You don’t want to shoot.”

Joe smiles.

The bum is motionless, bottle raised in the air. “It’s just to talk. We won’t move. There’s nothing we’re supposed to do to you, just something we have to tell you. If you call your colleagues disguised as Italian cops, we’ll shoot. We’ll shoot everywhere. We just want to talk. Briefly...”

Joe smiles and has time to think about the sparkle in his wife’s pupils; his wife, who is now, in the Los Angeles night, staring at the sparkle in the pupils of that two-dimensional, faded Jim Morrison on the wall at 17th Place.

“In less than fifteen minutes you’ll get a call on your cell phone. It’s your boss at the Third Service. He will inform you that the perpetrators of the massacre, four Arabs belonging to al Qaeda, have been caught. Within an hour the TV networks will go crazy. Your president will go crazy. All this is fake. The church blew up, and you don’t know a thing.”

Joe stops smiling and asks: “What should I know?”

“You, nothing. That’s why we’re using you as a contact. We know and we want those who know to know that we know.”

“And who knows?”

“Nothing will happen to you. It’s just a short time before you go back to where you came from. Venice is a very nice area, you have a very nice family...”

Joe’s index fingers squeeze the triggers, the triggers are at the halfway point of their short arc. “What do you want?”

“For you, who don’t know anything, to know. That you make it known. And to give you some advice. Take your family and move them. Not because we have any intention to do anything to you. You understand. The important thing is now, Joe. Joe Spiazzi, when he receives the telephone call from his boss, won’t be here: He’ll be a few hundred meters away from here. Piazza Minerva. The Minerva Obelisk. The one in front of the Dominican church. Designed by Bernini. The one with the elephant whose ass faces the entrance to the church, as an affront to the Pope. You know the one?”

Joe knows it. A hundred meters as the crow flies. “And why should I go there?”

“Because the tapes will be handed over to you. You’ll take in as much as you want to take in, but it’s important that you see them and then report to your boss. Your boss knows, but he doesn’t have the tapes. He knows what they were up to, but he isn’t clear on how and why.”

“What who was up to?”

The bum falls silent, takes a slug, moving the bottle cautiously.

Joe: “And if I don’t do it?”

“No big deal. We’ll find other channels. You, however, will stay in Rome. For sure: How could four shitty Arabs who blew up the Italian Premier in a centrally located church have escaped you? It’s your problem. And your family’s. I think it’s essential that you move them. To understand what I mean, you have to see the tapes.” Ipse dixit. Another slug of liquor. “Only twelve minutes until your boss calls. You should go. You can turn your back on us, there’s nothing more we have to do, we won’t do anything to you.”

Joe Spiazzi is motionless: human granite compressed at the moment of decision.

He turns his back on the bums.

He trusts them.

He goes to Piazza Minerva.

He photographed the two men. What service are they agents of? As soon as he gets back, digital images of their features: They’ll be entered in multiple databases. Joe will know who the players are. And what the game is.

There it is. The elephant designed by Bernini supports a pointed obelisk, dazzling in the chilly morning. The dust of the blown-up church covers everything. He has left traceable footsteps on his way here.

Six meters of monument — faded red granite. An obelisk erected by a pharaoh. Joe remembers when he dealt with sculpture and esotericism in Rome, when there wasn’t a thing to do all day except locate Arabs and blacks in bubu outfits; it was interesting. The elephant, exotic and adorned with hallucinogenic fabric, has a significance: It supports the obelisk.

... a robust mind is necessary to support solid wisdom...

A time when stones radiated, spoke. Even now those stones radiate — the late Italian Premier knows something about it.

The cell phone rings. Fourteen minutes have passed since the bum called out to him.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Robert. Come back to headquarters, it’s urgent. We’ve been hit by an earthquake. You fucked up. Our men have intercepted and captured the four guys who committed the massacre. They say they belong to al Qaeda. Saudis or something like that. We have to plug the leaks. You should have stayed on top of them. They’ve confessed. In less than an hour the news will be given to the press.”

Joe swallows a filament of gastric acid. “I’m coming. I need some time. It’s chaos here.”

Robert cuts off the call.

What’s going on? Joe leans against the elephant: the resistant granite eaten away by weather which erodes everything, which turns everything into excrement. Metabolism: this superhuman, temporal force. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: even that of a church blown sky high.

“Stay there. Leaning like that. It’s perfect.” The voice, Italian, is deep and penetrating. From under the elephant’s belly, Joe glimpses only an abdomen and the crotch of the man’s Prada pants. The man who is speaking, his voice calm, not commanding. “With your hand propped like that, I can see that you’re holding only one of the Berettas in your pocket. Fifteen shots. There’s no reason to use it. You should know, however, that you are in someone’s sights. The building to your left, third window on the right, on the second floor.”

Joe moves his head with infinitesimal caution. He sees the glitter, guesses that it’s an altered AK-47. He cannot guess who is behind the weapon.

Joe returns to his position. “What do you want?”

“They already told you. Watch the DVD before going back to Third Service headquarters. Turn everything over to Robert Mc-Intire, the section head. You will be given an immediate transfer. Home. They will know that we know. We want one more thing: for you to say that it is now too late. It has begun. It’s already done. Think about your family, Spiazzi. Stay where you are, in that position, for another two minutes, and don’t take your eyes off the DVD that I will now place on top of the monument, here, under the elephant’s belly.”

The hand sets down a small unlabeled DVD case.

The man goes away.

Joe continues leaning against the elephant designed by Bernini: a strong mind, supporting wisdom.

He turns cautiously to the window on the second floor: Nothing glitters anymore, the room is empty.

Two minutes. He grabs the DVD case, opens it: an unlabeled disk.

He looks for an Internet café.

It is not a wise choice, but since it isn’t, it is: an Arabic Internet café. Outside the walls of San Giovanni. Appia Nuova. The opposite direction from his agency’s headquarters. There would be a saturation check on all Arabs. In a few minutes the Italians would be able to raid and inspect. If the DVD was risky for him, the Italian police would nonetheless provide a delay to plot his next moves.

He is the most out-of-the-way customer. No one can see the screen of the computer he’s using. He has the headphones half on, so he can hear what’s happening in the place and at the same time listen to the audio of the DVD.

Twelve files. Twelve film clips. He double-clicks on the first.

Images shot from a video camera outside Palazzo Montecitorio. There is a date and time: an evening twelve weeks earlier. The view shifts, scanning the way to the service exit. A car. Political figures get out. Here is the slain Premier. Leaders and representatives of the opposition. Last: a cardinal. The one most cited for the next Consistory, after the brief parenthesis of the German Pope who won’t last long: He has already had two strokes.

A cardinal at Montecitorio?

The number of guests: eleven.

Change of scene. An interior. Joe recognizes it. The main room of the President of the Chamber. There he is, the President. Bugs everywhere in that place. Joe himself had been there, to replace someone who didn’t show up, passing himself off as one of the Italian Services. The image is blurry, the lighting dim. The President. The Premier. The Cardinal. They are all seated at a large, round table: twelve of them. A table of the Basile school, the Masonic architect who designed Montecitorio’s interiors. Esoteric symbols on the table’s Baroque legs.

They begin. Is it a séance?

The audio jumbled: “... so then let us concentrate, and together, through the visualization taught to us by the Masters, take action on the weak point, which will not give way unless we intervene... Let us invoke the Great One...”

Obsessively they invoke the Great One. It is the Masonic god, the Great Architect of the Universe... Joe wonders what it means. What does it have to do with the massacre on Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte? They continue invoking the Great One, hands linked to form a chain.

The image shifts. The group emerges from Montecitorio. First to go, the Cardinal with his retinue.

Joe Spiazzi doesn’t understand. He clicks on the remaining eleven clips. The same scenes, few variations, the same participants.

The last one: the date and time: today, an hour before the explosion. The President releases the chain ahead of time, prompted by the Cardinal, who says: “Done. The process is irreversible. Rome is triumphant once again. I must thank all of you. The head of the world will be beheaded. Caput Mundi for eternity: It comes back to right here, it is we...”

Joes sees the Premier stand up.

A gap. The Premier leaves by the side door of Montecitorio. The escort speeds up, passes through the piazza, the camera follows the guard up to the church, visible on Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte.

The blast.

Fade.

Joe Spiazzi is baffled. There is still a snippet of video file left. The same camera. It’s night. The time in liquid display, the time when his wife gets bored at the desk of the advertising agency in Santa Monica. Here come some men. A van. Joe knows that van perfectly well. Four men get out. Joe knows those agents personally: They are his agents. They unhinge the door without making a sound. They come back out after a few minutes without a case they had taken in. Joe knows exactly what it contained.

They did it. Not the four from al Qaeda. Them. The Third Service.

Why? Joe checks the urge to vomit, his stomach shaken by a seismic shock.

The trip on a subway: slow, everything is blocked because of the massacre. He comes out of the metro’s dark hole, looks for a taxi, it’s hopeless.

He’s at the gate of San Giovanni. He looks around, ponders whether to call someone out from the agency. The agency... The agency perpetrated the massacre, he was not informed — has he been cut out of the loop?

A car, a Fiat, slows down, stops alongside Joe. A tourist leans out, seems to ask him something. Joe grips the Beretta in his right pocket. His left hand is in a nervous contraction, clutching the DVD case. He approaches the Fiat. And from the rear window, which is slowly lowered, the face of Robert, head of the Third Service in Rome, leans out.

Joe’s jaw drops.

“Joe — the DVD.”

“You did it, Robert, the massacre...”

“It’s something that doesn’t concern you, yet you’ve already seen the files.”

“But...”

“You have no way of knowing. The stakes are high. You aren’t aware of everything. It’s as if they launched ten atomic bombs on American soil. You don’t realize what they’ve done...”

“Pray for the Great One?”

“Yes. Not God. The Big One. There are techniques for remote viewing, and there are techniques for moving objects from a distance. They moved the fault... mentally. Let’s hope we intervened in time, before they were able to finish the job. We don’t have tapes.”

The Big One. The San Andreas fault. Not Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, another San Andreas. The Big One: the greatest earthquake the human race will ever experience in the technological era. California destroyed, seismic waves reaching as far as Canada. The San Andreas fault runs in a north-south direction along almost all of western California, passing through two major cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, to then merge with another one farther south, the San Jacinto fault. The crustal plate that lies west of the fault moves northward, while that which lies to the east moves south, a phenomenon that gave rise to the term “transcurrent” or “strikeslip” fault. The friction between the two giant plates of rock builds up large amounts of energy which, when released, produces violent earthquakes.

Venice reduced to a Pleistocene landscape.

A tsunami that returns from the Pacific, while the West Coast is in flames.

The Americans, from what is gathered from the movies they export all over the planet, value the family a great deal.

Joe leans close to his boss and whispers: “It’s already too late. They did it. They moved the fault.”

“Get in the car, we’ll see what we can do.”

They begin shooting, thirty shots from the Beretta Px4 Storms riddle the car and the car is bulletproof. It’s all over in an instant, in a few seconds the Third Service Italian ambulance is on the scene: It was ready and waiting a hundred meters back. There’s a street accident to be cleaned up, an Italian-American tourist killed by Roman bandits.

In Venice, as the widowed Mrs. Spiazzi finally conquers her insomnia, a slight chink makes the pupils of the mural appear walleyed: Jim Morrison’s gaze slips, but keeps staring long after he’s gone.

1988 by Nicola Lagioia

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Via Appia Antica

Saverio Candito, Giancarlo Colasanti, Danilo Giovinazzo. My best friends. We grew up together in the flamboyant prosperity of the last economic miracle. Out of an absurd desire for revenge, or maybe because we were imbeciles, we decided at a certain point to vex our parents by devoting ourselves to an activity that at the time, 1988 more or less, around Rome and all over Italy, still represented a real scandal. And this is our epilogue.

The police cars arrived, sirens off, around 4 in the afternoon. They circled in vain a few times, cleaving the banks of hot air in which the neighborhood languished. Then, by dint of trial and error, they turned onto the right street. The roadway narrowed, forcing them to go single file. They downshifted to second gear near a villa surrounded by plaster discus throwers and other travesties of good taste that even the ignorance of our professors of design would have called “an obscenity.” They slowed further and turned off their engines. Now they were stopped behind a Testarossa, each of whose wheel rims was worth the annual salary of the ten men in uniform who, with the excuse of cutting short a crime, did the same thing to my adolescence.

The Ferrari Testarossa was not the only plow tracing the furrow that separated the lovers of excess from the rest of the world: those without significant desires, high-school teachers, family men who month after month put away the leftovers of other people’s revelries in the furnace of health insurance. Driving along the main avenue, the five white-trimmed blue Alfettas of the cops had already come up against similar metaphors. For example, the other villas. They were almost all illegal. They rose two or three stories, taking their cues from the fake lawns littered with mountain bikes, yellow and red T-shirts signed with felt-tip pens by Bruno Conti or Falcao, half-empty champagne bottles. Every villa culminated in a terrace overflowing with ornamental plants, and two out of three had a pool. They were what’s called a slap in the face of poverty, but they stood out in the splendor of the summer light — the blinding white of the stucco against the blue of the sky — so as to make you think that a pardon had already been granted in the parliamentary wings of the Almighty.

The first to notice the arrival of the law were the Saggese twins. But it’s also likely that the men in uniform, just getting out of their cars, managed to extract from the background music of the cicadas the unmistakable signs of a tennis match. Dunlop ball against synthetic string — squeak of sole on Mateco concrete — rubber against racket accompanied by the typical “huh!” with which athletes emphasize the heave of their chests — silence — net — curse. The tennis courts were confined to the southern part of the residential area, well hidden by the pines near the Appia Nuova, and on one of the two rectangles Cristiano and Stefano Saggese lived in voluntary exile. They shared thirty-two years, perfectly divided between them, in addition to a low forehead and a particular mixture of prudence and lack of imagination that, if I had been able at the time to play with words, I would certainly have called homozygous idiocy.

Michele Saggese, the boys’ father, was the only one in the neighborhood who in his youth had frequented the halls of the university, the only one who used an accountant to pay his taxes, the only one who was seriously tormented by the thought that his children might hang out with those of the neighbors. That is, us. He lost sleep at night over it. Cristiano and Stefano, in turn, believed that a journey through the urethra of an individual convinced that government securities and the separation of garbage for recycling were the basis of civilization deserved to be repaid in the coin of obedience. As a result, they stayed clear of us. And, given that the southernmost reaches of the neighborhood gave us a sense of melancholy (we couldn’t bear the sober schematicism of the courts), the Saggese twins made tennis the St. Helena of those who have never passed through Waterloo. How many matches did they play thanks to us? Hours and hours of perfecting their technique, entire afternoons of following the ball. Every so often their father showed up too. He watched them with satisfaction, nursing the impossible dream of a Davis Cup win in doubles. But in general the only difficult finish line that losers manage to cross has to do with logic: They are capable of reaching excellent levels of mediocrity. In fact, at the time there was talk everywhere of Serena and Venus Williams. But of the Saggese twins at Wimbledon, only the intimation of a study vacation.

Thus, when Stefano Saggese went to retrieve a ball that had ended up outside the fence, the scoreboard with which he mentally covered the distance that separated him from match point shattered in the face of a different sort of calculation. One, two, three, four, five police cars... He raised his head and shared with his clone the same conclusion that receivers of stolen goods come to before vanishing silently through one of the many service doors available to those who — in an immense kingdom of speculators, small-town whores, and drug addicts such as Rome was in the ’80s — appreciate a certain discretion along with the flow of cash.

“Something is happening...” Stefano Saggese said.

Since at a certain point the number of kids with no police record was not sufficient even for a bridge tournament, I never really understood the procedure. Ten cops surround a neoclassical-style villa full of expensive junk. While two or three approach the gate, two more take down the license number of the Ferrari, one maybe communicates with headquarters, but who is authorized to talk to the passersby? Whoever this nameless man is, his job is even more monotonous than that of the person playing the role of the herald in a Shakespearian tragedy. Two lines and exit: Usually passersby haven’t seen anything, and the cop has to let them go.

But this time the script was twisted. The cop who was assigned to interview the passersby, and whose gaze up to that point had been drifting among high-cylinder still lifes, saw the sunny desert of the street disintegrate because of two figures in movement. Spontaneously they advanced toward him. Neither was more than five-six: red Lacoste shirt, blue shorts, each holding a Maxima Corrado Barazzutti racket. If you looked closely — the herald in uniform was tempted to squint — it was the same person.

“Need help?” asked the optical illusion.

It wasn’t curiosity that impelled the Saggese twins toward the police cars. They were not fans of adventure, and they would not have approached the Canditos’ house even if they had found out that a UFO had landed on it. Another force was pushing them, an impalpable feeling of rancor nursed for years, serve after serve after volley after serve, a grudge fueled by the hypnotic monotony of white stripes on a red background, a revenge that the cowardly little twins could satisfy only with the weapons of an informer.

“Yes,” the policeman smiled. “Does the Candito family live here?”

“This is their house,” one of the boys confirmed, coming dangerously close to the first orgasm of his life.

Then love of pedantry overcame love of betrayal. Stefano Saggese felt compelled to add: “But Mr. and Mrs. Candito aren’t home. They’re on vacation in the Canaries.”

“We aren’t looking for Mr. and Mrs. Candito,” the policeman explained. “We’re looking for Saverio, one of the kids. Do you know him?”

Stefano Saggese turned pale, and from that moment he was unable to distinguish the explosion of joy from an abortive experience. His twin lowered his eyes and assumed the thoughtful expression of one who can never enjoy a victory. If it had been Pippo Candito, Saverio’s father, who in a few minutes was to come down the steps of the villa with handcuffs on his wrists, his face swollen with shame, the Saggese twins would have received living proof of that maxim which their father would never tire of repeating with stylized gravity, even if it had concerned a Pilgrim just off the Mayflower: the same maxim that the fruit of those loins believed to be confirmed when, shut in their room, they read comics whose every detail — including the name of whoever did the lettering — they grasped, except for the subtle ironic streak (“Crime doesn’t pay,” Dulls reflected, behind bars at the end of an episode of Alan Ford, only to be found, a few issues later, safe, relaxed and smiling, in a presidential suite surrounded by women in leopard-skin jackets). But the police wanted Saverio. Which, logically, should have made the Saggese twins even happier: Up to a certain age a sense of competitiveness emerges only between contemporaries. But the thought that someone their age, in fact someone who, along with five or six others, had been able to win for himself a disproportionate amount of chaos and diversion, had now used that same mysterious magnet to attract to the driveway of his own house five police cars — well, that was a very complicated thought to come to terms with: The Saggese twins felt the dizzy sensation of envying even the downfall of their bitterest enemy.

“We know him,” Cristiano Saggese confirmed. “What do you want him for?” he added, his cheeks completely red.

“Pushing heroin. Is this him?” The policeman showed them a small salmon-colored rectangle.

The twins nodded. The cop asked if they had seen him in the past hour, hour and a half, and the two boys shook their heads no. At that point they were dismissed, and they vanished obediently into the haze, just as, probably rightly, they exit from this memoir as well. I don’t know what happened to them. Usually, small concentrations of rancor and servility condemned to burning defeat on the playing field of youth re-ascend the slope, with the passing of time, to discover a tenacity, a sense of struggle... they find themselves with the entire armamentarium needed for nursing what the MBAs call “ambition.” So I can imagine them in the role of financial consultants, as, in their office in Prati watched over by images of the Pope and fake Campbell’s soup can silk screens, they inundate a potential client with patter. Neither debilitating tumors nor fifteen months in jail for price-fixing: My only wish for them is that at some point during one of these informal encounters — in order to hook the wallet of their prey, the postgraduates cunningly offer some sort of anecdote — the potential client feels free to depart from the subject long enough to ask: “And how was your adolescence?”

“Good, thanks,” one of the Saggeses would answer.

Then he would go out to dinner at the Cavalieri Hilton, return home, and wake up in the middle of the night covered with sweat, believing that he still has in his ears the sounds of a hundred thousand tennis balls that won’t stop rebounding off the walls of an empty room.

The plaster discus throwers were nothing. After having made vain use of the intercom and then the doorbell, the police went over the gate, slid a thin object very much like a credit card along the front door lock, and faced the semidarkness of a hall tiled in pink marble. One of them loosened the cord of a curtain. The spectacle that met their eyes outdid the murkiest fantasies of a prop man with an unlimited budget.

The shutters let in thin streams of light that would be transformed into clouds of multicolored dust when they touched the peacock feathers that, grouped in bunches of ten, greeted the visitor, peeking out from the mouths of amphoras as tall as a standing greyhound. Not that real dogs were lacking: Ten examples of an eccentric dog lover’s passion in white porcelain, five on one side of the room, five on the other, exchanged aquamarine glances, thanks to large turquoise gems embedded at nose level. First Communions at the church of San Giovanni in Laterano and other sacraments were guaranteed remembrance in massive silver frames, just as an unintentional colonial tribute was given life on the ceiling (white tiger skin) and on one of the carpets (stuffed crocodile). It was as if two irreconcilable images had found a point of contact: The humor of a Barberini tormented by vice and bombast matched the happiness, the innocent exultation of joy, the expressive apex of one who, stuck until the day before among anonymous ragpickers, could say to himself, Now I am a rich man.

The police looked around and split up. One to check the garden, one in the kitchen, four upstairs, the others to the basement.

I spent a lot of time in that villa over the years. And its layout is still vivid to my eyes: I can remember perfectly the tables, the brocades, the big jukebox with Claudio Villa always in pole position. I can visualize every inch of those rooms and, wonder after wonder, despite all the time that has passed, I can, in lucky moments, touch the jugular, recalling, with great precision, the cardiac tumult of a pusher on the run. But I cannot enter into the minds of the enforcers of order. So, really, I couldn’t answer the following questions:

What did policeman number 1 think when he turned his back on the veranda — two large palms arching over his head, gaze driven beyond the slides, the bushes, the swing, and onward, as far as the gladiolus that beautified a stone wall crowned by the opaque sparkle of shards of glass?

How did policeman number 2 kill time, left alone in the kitchen among unknown appliances (many imported from America) for the entire duration of the search?

What was the reaction of numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6, who, moving up to the second floor, found themselves facing a ten-million-lire Steinway whose only purpose was to be stroked by a dust cloth? Above all, what did numbers 5 and 6 feel — not those who searched the bedroom of the Candito spouses but the other two, the ones who entered a room with peach-colored wallpaper, a space saturated with the fruit-flavored oiliness of lip gloss and populated by life-size stuffed animals, necklaces, posters of Jennifer Beals in Flashdance in track suit and leg warmers? What did numbers 5 and 6 feel: the reproof that certain adults reserve for spoiled girls or, on the contrary, the hot, suffocating sensation of vice imprisoned in a cotton camisole, the violent ambiguity of bitter fruits and little girls that lead men to ask forgiveness for crimes that we might all be driven to commit? Silvia Candito, sixteen years old in 1987, now married with two children: one of the few to be saved.

What was to be found was found by policemen numbers 7, 8, 9, and 10. They signaled quickly to one another and took the stairs that led to the basement. It was one big space, without dividing walls, set up as a game room: billiard table, jukebox, strobe light, a long stone bench that stretched around the entire perimeter of the room. Two boys were squatting under the billiard table. Their calves had been straining for who knows how long, their bottoms a few inches from the floor. Both with arms around their knees.

“Saverio Candito,” said one of the policemen.

The boy hugged his knees tighter behind the reddish down of his forearms and gave his notorious look of surrender. If he had stood up it would have been immediately obvious that he was extremely short for a seventeen-year-old. He had a stocky body, muscular arms and shoulders, a small belt of blubber around his hips, that copper-colored hair, curly, very short. When he was in trouble he fixed his adversaries with a harsh look of capitulation, the sort of look that a boxer might be facing who has dominated the entire match and who now, in the last round, wants to satisfy his desire for a knockout: a look that didn’t say, simply, I’m yours. It said: I’m in deep shit, and if you want me you’ll have to come in and get me.

But the cop couldn’t be intimidated by this boy’s code, whose nuances he barely grasped. He reformulated the question.

“Saverio Candito. That’s you, right?”

“No,” said Saverio.

They were used to more complex situations. This type of emergency was kids’ stuff, you could handle it by following the rules in the manual, step by step. Lately, they had been dealing with men who cursed saints and madonnas while with one hand they grabbed another man by the hair and with the free hand shoved a gun in the guy’s mouth. Thus, a second policeman decided that he could make a little scene. He raised a hand toward his colleagues, as if to say, Leave it to me, now let’s have some fun. So he took a salmon-colored, plastic-covered rectangle and threw it in the boy’s face without saying a word.

Saverio caught it. There he found his name and surname and date of birth and all the rest, and a photo from two years earlier in which he was smiling with half-closed eyes. He wondered how the police could possibly have his ID. For an instant he entertained the completely absurd hypothesis of a forgery. Then he realized that he had simply lost it in the wrong place. He emerged from under the billiard table, giving himself up to the cops.

At that point the second boy also came out. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt with blue writing in swirling rodeo-type letters: Country by the Grace of God.

“Don’t tell my parents,” Danilo said with a sad smile.

“The third one’s missing” was policeman number 7 or 8’s sole response.

The two boys, who were now standing with their heads down, and practically on the point of holding each other by the hand, said nothing.

“There were three of you,” the man explained. “We know, they saw you. Come on, where’s the other boy?”

Maybe at this point the two kids felt challenged. Something was rekindled in their eyes. They were coming from two years of confrontations that were like jumping into rings of fire, and that invitation to betrayal was like an injection of hope. They continued to say nothing, but suddenly, in their looks, things seemed okay in this world.

“Listen,” said the man, and from his tone it sounded like the standard speech in which one says how you should and shouldn’t behave to avoid compromising an already very delicate situation. But one of his colleagues didn’t let him get started.

“Shh... quiet... wait.”

On the opposite side of the basement, to the left of the big window that looked onto the garden, there was a door lacquered in white, one of those coffer doors that never close perfectly. It was water. When, growing silent, they tried to focus their hearing in that direction, they realized that strange but indisputable aquatic noises were coming from beyond the door, a choof-choof of bodies forcefully moving in a pool, a regular sound that had, however, nothing mechanical about it — it wasn’t a mill or a washing machine, it was someone playing with water, a dimension like rocks thrown in a pond, like water polo, shipwreck and premeditation at the same time.

“That’s me,” said the man, placing the glass with the Bellini on the parapet of the balcony. An umbrella with a rice-paper shade was sticking up out of the mixture of champagne and peach juice. He covered the convex surface of the receiver with the palm of his right hand and threw his left back: “And goddamn it, be quiet!”

His daughter snickered without taking her eyes off the small mountain of summer dresses thrown on the bed. His wife peered heavenward. She rose lazily from the wicker chair, slipped her enameled toes one after another into her sandals, and closed the sliding glass door that divided the hotel room from the balcony.

He took the receiver and put it back to his ear. Now he was alone before the ocean. What in the offices of police headquarters might be perceived as interference was, to the eyes of Pippo Candito, the watery wake raised by two motorboats challenging each other a few yards from the shore.

“Fucking hell, go to hell!” he said.

He was silent for a few seconds. Maybe someone was suggesting that he calm down. But at some point his daughter stopped playing with the summer dresses bought in the market in Las Palmas: The shouts had penetrated the barrier of glass. His wife again left the wicker chair, and she, too, headed for the balcony.

The policemen slid open the door through which the noises could still be heard. They found themselves looking at a small horseshoe-shaped room from which a stairway led down, curving to the right. Meanwhile, the men who had searched the bedrooms without finding a soul had also descended to the basement. Four to keep an eye on Saverio and Danilo. The others ventured over to the stairs that led down another level. The stairwell was a sort of narrow tube with white walls, onto which at a certain point a luminescent wave was projected, a pale-blue spot waving like a flag, giving a slap in the face to anyone who thinks that certain kinds of ambience can be experienced only in movies.

At this point the Heavenly Father was called in. Or rather a silent widening of the eyes, hands groping for support. I wasn’t there with the police but I was familiar with the reactions of people arriving for the first time in the underground part of the villa. In the shouts of boys there was astonishment; adults, on the other hand, wondered how much money it must have taken to set up something like that. With their eyes they measured the ceiling, then gazed along the surface of the water for more than twenty-five meters.

It wasn’t an Olympic-sized pool. An Olympic pool would have been twice as long. It was a hymn to waste in four lanes separated by the typical floating ropes, with overflow grating and backstroke turn indicators. Along the right wall were the doors leading to the bathrooms and changing rooms. On the side opposite the diving board was a piano bar: a half-circle of concrete livened by tiny glass tiles, behind which an old mirror retrieved from some second-hand dealer gilded the reflection of the whiskey bottles. On either side of the diving board stood two monsters: enormous papier-mâché statues taken from the carnival in Ronciglione that were supposed to represent the grandeur of ocean divinities. Scattered around the PVC-vinyl floor was everything that could further subvert the cold sobriety of indoor sports into the no-holds-barred games of an opium smoker: leopard-covered sofas, old pendulum clocks, miniature galleons, and so on.

The underground pool was something new. They had seen Mercedes cars transformed into mobile discotheques, ox quarters filled with video recorders, but not this thing here. Yet there was no time to be amazed. The policemen surrounded the pool and stood staring, without saying a word, because what was happening in there surpassed in strangeness the entire scenic display.

A human figure. The body of a boy. He was swimming. The small atoll of a back emerged, a portion of flesh illuminated by neon lights that ran in long tubes forty-five feet up, a burnished oval that broadened and then offered itself to the flow of the water. One arm after the other cut the blue field as a pin suspended above a dead swamp would have done, leaving behind a ripple that disappeared in a dawnlike silence.

They were used to men who, to avoid capture, threw themselves into the Tiber and then, undone by panic, floundered, begging for help amid the tracery of foam. This boy was something else. It was impossible that he could be unaware of their arrival, but he swam as if he would continue infinitely: His style didn’t reveal the least disturbance the whole time they watched. They probably wondered if it was the expression of a particular form of fear, a panic that instead of exploding in every direction was compressed into a single obsessive gesture. (Once, they had raided the office of a city councilman who hadn’t deigned to look up, but had remained bent over his desk, writing; when they got closer, they noticed in the registry he was holding a series of calculations that at a certain point came to an end in incomprehensible scribbles similar to the product of a seismograph.) Or maybe it was a strategy of desperation: As long as I keep swimming, no one will catch me.

They didn’t know, they couldn’t know, that Giancarlo Colasanti, that was the boy’s name, had an infernal brother. Not a blood brother or, worse, a twin: something more intimate and at the same time more distant. They were in constant contact. They were aware of each other’s presence, they talked to one another in their sleep. Every action undertaken by Giancarlo was a challenge, a mutiny, and a desperate attempt to gain the approval of this presence. He paid attention to no one else, nothing mattered to him that did not have to do with the pursuit of this relationship that we all knew about. They never made peace but they never separated. And in particularly difficult moments they entered the arena as adversaries and, fighting, became a single thing.

He reached the edge of the pool, executed the turn, and continued in the opposite direction. To swim so well, and so long, he must have had tremendous physical strength and perfect control of his breathing. But he couldn’t stop, because someone else was doing the same thing in the waters of the Styx, surrounded by volcanic vapors and the sound of drums. He completed another length, and another, and still another. It was something more than a simple contest with himself. And at the same time, the sound of his passage, amplified by the resonance chamber of the enormous subterranean structure, was a distillation of rage and starlike solitude.

When the contest was over, the policemen saw a shockingly thin, sensual body climbing up the ladder. And, amid the streams of water descending from his curls, a smile that spoke of illness and contagion. They covered him with a bathrobe, as if it would serve more than anything else to protect him. They led him upstairs.

I arrived later, when it was all over. Simply, a girl had kept me all morning and so that day I hadn’t gone with them to sell. One might say that in this way I was saved. But time is a master capable of destroying even its favorite students, and the slender profile of the ’90s was ready to spring the trap. I didn’t see them again for some years, my best friends. And when I did see them again we were no longer us.