A further silence ensued.
‘As it happens, Roberto is willing to meet you in person, subject to stringent conditions.’
‘Name them.’
‘First, that the meeting be here in Rome. How do you propose to arrive?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes.’
‘When would this be?’
‘Tomorrow at the earliest.’
‘Then tomorrow. I’ll take the night train.’
‘Very well. Please ask Dottor Sforza to contact me with the estimated arrival time and other details in due course. You will be met at the station and conveyed to the meeting place. A medical orderly will be present to ensure that the correct procedures for taking the DNA samples are observed. Following that, you may speak to Roberto for a limited period, on condition that his refusal to respond to any given question is accepted as binding, and that no record of your conversation with him — whether written, electronic or in any other medium — is made. Do you agree?’
‘I don’t appear to have any option.’
‘Correct. I hope the results of your visit prove helpful, dottore. Buon lavoro.’
Splayed out on the bed behind two layers of closed curtains, with CNN murmuring from the television, Martin Nguyen devoured the club sandwich that he’d ordered up from room service. It didn’t look like a club sandwich, being layered on slices of a freshly baked roll, but it tasted better than any he’d ever had. Even the fries were great. They were nicely crisp but dense inside, and tasted earthily of potato. Martin had kind of forgotten that fries were made from potatoes, but when you had to chew on them a little the whole process became clear. Al dente, he thought.
He had been forced to listen to a lot of Italian since his arrival, and found that he understood it perfectly. Not so much the content, although he was picking up quite a bit of that too, but the form. This was atavistically familiar to him, unlike the incoherent lexis-free mumblings he had to deal with back on the West Coast, where the key point of the exchange often seemed to be the speaker’s appeal to anyone present to give him a helping hand with the almost impossible task of articulating whatever banal thought had sparked and then immediately died in his brain. Every utterance ended up as a collaborative effort, like raising a barn. It was tough, backbreaking work, but it brought the community together. Italian, on the other hand, was a language much like Martin’s own lost Vietnamese: pure, plain and declarative. In neither tongue was there even an approximate equivalent for such phrases as ‘So I was, kind of, like, you know?’
Martin had necessarily learned to speak that dialect on demand, but he also had a number of other registers at his disposal when the need arose. He had been acutely aware of such a need many times that day, but all he had to fall back on were Tom Newman’s translations. The loss of his verbal karate skills had been the greatest trial during an incredibly long working day which had left Martin feeling exhausted, baffled and all the more foreign for the apparent similarities to his own native culture. First there had been the crack-of-dawn meeting at the Aeroscan base, followed by an unpleasant encounter with the local police chief, who had turned out to be both tough and intelligent, qualities which Nguyen respected but preferred not to encounter in opponents in a position of power.
Then after lunch, during which Tom and the waiter had made the simple transaction of ordering a goddamn meal sound like the finale of some Three Tenors extravaganza, he had spent hours in a dingy, stifling office with the notary that Newman had hired as a fixer trying to figure out the current state of play plus how the hell anything got done in this Latino dump, if it ever did. Throughout, he had been dependent on Tom’s translations of what was said on either side. The kid’s English was way more sophisticated than Jake’s, but Martin had no way of knowing what his Italian was like, and hence of how he, Martin Nguyen, was coming across.
To cap it all off, on the way back to the hotel Tom had blurted out the news that his father was dead. Here was cause for genuine grief. In Martin’s view, there was a time and a place for homicide. Plumb in the middle of the stealth-bomber strategy he’d devised for this project, with the victim a declared Rapture Works contractor, was just totally inappropriate. He was furious that his hefty incentive bonus had been put at risk by a bunch of peasant bandidos with more balls than brains. This one was going to need heavy spin on it. It was essential that Aeroscan’s operations continued as smoothly and invisibly as possible until the mission had been accomplished.
His mobile phone burbled into life. Martin didn’t want to answer it, but he could no more ignore a ringtone than a mother could her crying baby.
‘Yo.’
‘Hi, Jake.’
‘We’ve got issues, dude.’
‘No fucking kidding!’
‘The guy called you too?’
‘What guy?’
‘That big kahuna director we hired for the movie cover.’
‘Aldobrandini? We spoke after I arrived here.’
‘I mean real time. Like, you know, now.’
‘I’ve been totally slammed, Jake. It’s all swimming upstream here. What’s new?’
‘Aldo left a message. He somehow found out the whole thing is a scam. Said a lot of stuff about creative property rights and shit. Plus he’s threatening to get on TV and expose us, then sue our asses. What a shitty break! If Newman doesn’t get kidnapped, this never happens.’
Martin Nguyen took a moment to savour this, the longest discourse he had ever heard Jake pronounce. Then he turned his boss’s habitual brevity against him.
‘Newman’s dead.’
‘Huh?’
‘Murdered. They dressed him up as a corpse, made him walk to an old village someplace, then blew his head off.’
‘Fuck.’
After a long silence, Jake laughed.
‘Well, I guess the game’s hotting up.’
Like much of what Jake said, this didn’t make any sense to Martin, so he decided to ignore it.
‘I’ve refocused the search according to the parameters suggested by that team of consultants I told you about. The Aeroscan guy figures they can cover the area in three or four more days.’
‘Yeah, but if Brandini goes on TV and tells everyone there isn’t going to be any movie, we’re screwed.’
‘Chill, Jake. It’s just the flying permits at risk. I can stall the authorities that long.’
‘Okay, but if we get lucky, call me immediately. I’ve got a jet on standby.’
‘Well, that’s great, but it’s going to take you half a day to get here and the time difference screws up the scheduling. Plus I don’t know if you remember, but I just said that Pete Newman has been brutally murdered. That means that the cops here have a homicide investigation under way, and anyone associated with the victim — like me, for instance — is a potential witness, if not suspect. The police chief made that very clear to me today. So what with the threat of Aldobrandini going nuclear, I’m under a lot of pressure. Now Aeroscan might just come through tomorrow, in which case I’ll have to move fast without you around or maybe even in touch, because it’ll be the middle of the night over there. So it would help a lot if you told me what we’re actually looking for.’
There was a long pause.
‘It’s kind of hard to explain over the phone, plus I’ve got to go. Let me shoot you a couple of URLs. Think you have problems? Madrona went out and bought this designer dog. It’s like a total bitch.’
The line went dead. Martin felt rage coil up within him like a thwarted orgasm. For a moment he was tempted to hurl the phone at the wall, but in the end he tapped into his rage and used it to dissipate his earlier tiredness and sense of passive helplessness. He called room service and told them to remove his dirty dishes and bring a bottle of their best cognac, a soda siphon and a bucket of ice. Martin’s father had started his career as a waiter at one of the most exclusive clubs in the French colony of Cochinchine, so he had been in a position to pass on to his son a few tips about the good things in life.