The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

He marvelled at his boss's ability to do this. He was on – what was it? – his fourth meeting of the morning, listening, nodding sagely, offering rounded little aphorisms for each occasion, leaving each person he met convinced that the great statesman had focused on his or her problem at the exclusion of all else. No one would have had a clue that the great man was, in fact, distracted beyond measure, that he was thinking throughout of a topic a world away from the one under discussion. His face could continue making all the right expressions, his mouth forming the right words, entirely on automatic. Meanwhile, like a computer programme running behind the screen, his brain was processing a different issue entirely. Compartmentalization, the business magazines called it, the psychological state required for high-powered, CEO multi-tasking. But that was far too mechanical a description for the magic this man was able to pull off. This was not compartmentalization. This was sorcery.

In the intervals between meetings – the ‘bilaterals’ that always took place in the margins of any international pow-wow, with UN General Assembly week no exception – the boss would turn to his aide, letting his rictus smile disappear and pick up the conversation they had been forced to abandon some twenty or forty minutes earlier. Always, the aide noticed, at the exact same point, as if there had been no interruption.

‘There's no point waiting for definitive proof,’ he said, pushing back to the junior official the exact phrase he had used before the half-hour discussion with the President of the World Health Organization.

‘Why not, sir?’

‘Because if you're able to get definitive proof it usually means you've left it too late. An example: if you're worried I'm going to kill you, then a bullet in your chest is definitive proof.’ He smiled a laughless smile. ‘But you wouldn't want to wait that long, would you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No. So we don't wait. If we even suspect-’

Instinct made him stop even before he could have heard the light knock on the door of the suite. It opened a crack to reveal the pretty assistant who was handling logistics. ‘The Italian foreign minister is here, sir,’ she said.

He showed her the hand gesture, peculiar to his country, that indicated she would have to wait a moment. She closed the door, taking care to pull it to quietly.

‘If we even suspect they are getting close, then we will have to act. No point waiting.’

‘Act?’

The boss inspected his counsellor, his eyes scoping upward, starting with the younger man's shoes. His manner was less regimental colonel reviewing the troops than high school girl checking out a rival. His mouth curled in derision. Could now be the moment, the aide wondered. Would the double-fucking strike, apparently unprovoked and when it was least expected?

‘Try not to make your squeamishness quite so obvious. A man of your age should not reveal his fear quite so easily.’

‘It was just that I didn't-’

‘When I say act, I don't mean anything rash. Nothing hasty. I mean only that we should,’ he paused, the ostentatious searching for the right word that was part of his standard performance. ‘We should open up a dialogue. How's that?’

The aide knew better than to ask how he was meant to do such a thing. Perhaps the phrase was simply a euphemism deployed by the old guard to cover up heaven knows what ghastly practice from the early days. Interpreting it literally was bound to be a schoolboy error, for which he would receive another scalding reprimand. But he could not think about that now. He would get through the next meeting and find a way to ask after that was over, some form of words that would not expose his own uncertainty, one that would not reveal what he felt most intensely in the company of his boss: his sheer lack of worldliness.

So he got up, opened the door and gestured at the neatly moustached man waiting, with leather portfolio case on his lap and comely interpreter at his side, to come forward. He gestured him into the room where the boss, the elder statesman, was already standing, his arms outstretched in readiness for a politician's hug:

‘Signor Ministro degli Esteri!’