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.