It was the kind of scene that ordinarily would have occupied me for a reflective hour, but this morning I was restless, impatient to get on to Sicily. I jumped up after a few minutes, went to a telephone, and called the airport. Yes, I was told, there was an earlier Aer Mediterranea flight to Catania, departing at 10:15 A.M., and yes, they would be happy to reassign me to it.
That left an hour. I walked quickly back to the hotel, picked up my bags, and got the desk clerk to get me a taxi. I was at the Borgo Panigale Airport at 9:45, which left barely enough time, because security precautions in Europe, and in Italy in particular, are painstaking. If I'd been on an international flight, or had had anything but carry-on luggage, I wouldn't have had a chance to make it. As it was, I had to stand in a men-only line (the women had their own) to enter a booth where I was patted down and gone over with a metal-sensitive wand. Then I was directed to another line, this one heterosexual, first to have my bags go through the X-ray scanner, and then to put them on a counter where they would be opened like everyone else's and meticulously gone through.
Almost. I got as far as the X-ray machine. My suit bag had just come through the scanner without incident, and I was waiting for my old red duffel bag, when the conveyor belt stopped moving. A few seconds passed.
"C'è una problema?" I asked the woman behind the machine.
She stopped her whispered conference with a guard. "No, davvero, " I was told with a cheerful smile. "Va bene."
All the same, the conveyor wasn't moving. I checked my watch, wondering if I'd make the flight after all. Well, no real problem if I didn't. I'd just catch the one I'd originally planned to take. I realized I'd forgotten to call Ugo about the change, so it might not make a difference anyway. Still, I would have preferred to be up and away rather than waiting around the airport.
My thoughts were going along in this lazy manner when the area erupted into noise and activity.
"Everybody out!" one of the nearby guards shouted suddenly in Italian. "Hurry, back to the lobby!"
Travelers in this part of the world do not need to be told such things twice. The orderly line flew apart as people scrambled helter-skelter for the main terminal. The woman behind the X-ray scanner turned and fled with the rest of them. I started to do the same thing but found myself tangled up with my neighbors, as did many others. There was quite a bit of yelling going on now as people tried desperately to unsnarl their arms and legs from other people's luggage straps.
"Scusi, " I shouted above the noise, and tugged hard to free my arm. It didn't budge. The grip on it tightened. So did the grasp on my other arm. Startled, I glanced around and found a uniformed guard, a big one, on either side of me, holding tight.
"Che c'è? " I stammered. What's the matter?
For answer I was pulled roughly out of the line and pushed down the passageway in the opposite direction from everyone else.
"Faccia presto! " I was told. Hurry up.
It wasn't as if I had any choice. They had never let go of my elbows, and now they hustled me down the aisle between them. I can't say my heels were actually dragging on the floor, but if I'd tried to hold my ground they certainly would have been. These were big men, and they meant business. I could see two other uniformed guards trotting close behind us with semiautomatic weapons unslung and at the ready. Not teenagers this time, but grown men, square jawed and intense. Their eyes roved nervously, looking for—what? Fellow terrorists trying to rescue me?
Another guard, a senior officer from the look of him, also moved grimly along with us. Five armed men, for God's sake, and all of them convincingly out of sorts. A bomb, I thought dazedly. Somebody's planted a bomb in my duffel bag.
"Che c'è?" I pleaded again. I tapped my chest. "Sono americano! "
This had all the effect it deserved, which was none, except possibly to increase the tempo of the quick-marching. At such times one's life flashes before one's eyes. In my case it was the previous two hours, starting with the request from Mr. Marchetti that I leave early. Even at the time, it had struck me as unusual, and now all I could think about was how my bags had lain in the packed lobby for almost an hour, nominally under the supervision of the bell captain, but in reality available to anyone who chose to tinker with them. The duffel bag would have been especially easy prey. I'd lost the key to the tiny padlock years ago, and had never bothered to get another. I used the bag for underwear, socks, and shoes; nothing valuable.
I was brought to a jolting stop in front of a gray metal door that said PRIVATO on it, then made to wait while one of the guards unlocked it, and then shoved roughly inside. The older officer and the guards with the semiautomatics crowded into the bare little room with me. There was only a metal table in the center with a couple of battered chairs around it. These were not put into immediate use. Instead, I was jammed up against a wall and patted down again, this time more harshly.
"Il passaporto," the officer said and stuck out his hand.
I handed it to him. He barely glanced at it before putting it in his pocket. He was a bulky man of about fifty, tense and breathing hard.
"Parla italiano?" he asked. His lips barely moved when he spoke. He was keeping a tight rein on his anger. With each breath his nostrils flared.
I nodded. I was feeling less flustered, more pointedly frightened. The room was very small and private, the guns very big, the men hard-bitten and tough-looking. I knew that one of the reasons the police forces of Italy had put together their admirable record against terrorists was that they did not always observe the same niceties of behavior toward accused or suspect persons as did, say, the police in America.
If you had asked me how I felt about that a few minutes earlier, when I was just another passenger at an airport in a city that had suffered more than its share of terrorist horrors, I would have told you I felt just fine about it; no problem. But now that I appeared to be a suspected terrorist myself, I seemed to have developed a finical concern for the civil rights of detainees, or prisoners, or whatever it was.
"I don't know what you found in that bag," I began in Italian, "but—"
Sit down, I was told.
I sat. One of the guards moved behind my chair, out of my sight. The other continued to watch me coldly from across the table. I could smell the oil from the guns.
"This morning," I said, "my bags were left in the lobby—"
Abruptly the senior officer took off his cap and slammed it on the table. I jumped.
"I want to know what activates that bomb," he said tightly. "I want to know how to dismantle it."
So there actually was a bomb. In my old red duffel bag, traveling companion since my college days. I'd understood that, of course, yet I hadn't really believed it. I still didn't really believe it. A single, cold drop of sweat rolled down my side.
"I don't know anything about a bomb," I said numbly. "All I know—"
He leaned forward suddenly and twisted the collar of my jacket in his hand. "You bastard, I've got two good men on that thing, you understand?" He was a squarish man with close-cropped gray hair that grew low on his forehead, and thick, curled ears. When he spoke, knobs of gristle shifted and crackled in his cheeks like lumps of tobacco. He gathered more material into his fist and twisted, hurting my neck, forcing my face closer to his. "Do you have any idea what's going to happen to you if they get hurt?"