13.7 Our plates, largely untouched, were lying in front of us. The waitress had skirted by a couple of times, to see if everything was all right. It was a good restaurant. Most other diners were on their dessert course, or their coffee. The ones paying their bills and leaving weren’t being replaced by others; it was well into mid-afternoon. What happened when you came inside the building? I asked Madison. Well, she said, everyone was singing. Singing? I repeated. Yes, she said. The police were singing? I asked. No, she said; mainly the demonstrators. Protest songs, you mean? I asked. God no, she answered: they were singing songs the police were making them sing. Someone in Madison’s group, an Italian guy, had whispered to her that they were fascist songs, from Mussolini’s time. The cops had been leading the singing, moving their batons like conductors do. If anybody didn’t sing, Madison explained, or didn’t sing loud enough, the police would jerk the batons’ ends into their midriffs, upwards, from below — which would knock the wind out of them, of course, but then they had to sing immediately afterwards, wind or no wind, or they’d get another jerk. What if you didn’t know the words? I asked. They taught us the words, she answered — like in nursery schooclass="underline" it was a sing-along. While it went on, they carried on dividing up the groups: breaking them down into smaller groups of about five people, then separating these out into clusters of two or three. We had to sing while they were doing this to us, she said. It was so strange. Eventually, I found myself with just one other woman. She was German, I think. She couldn’t really say much since her jaw had been all smashed up. And besides, we couldn’t talk: we had to keep on singing — singing Italian words. This woman couldn’t do this very well, of course; but since the cops would baton-jerk her if she stopped, she forced the words out somehow, without really shaping them properly in her mouth. I got the sense that she was German all the same, said Madison, just from the way the sound came from her throat.
13.8 She paused, and took a big bite of her duck or chicken. I watched her mouth chewing. Then I looked down at my plate, and pushed a vegetable around for a few seconds. After a while I asked: What happened next? Well, Madison continued, this girl and I were taken through a door, and down a corridor, and down a set of stairs and up another one, and down another corridor, then through a final door that led out to a car park. We were taken to this car, she said — an unmarked one. There were two guys in the front, in plain clothes; and the guy in the passenger seat turned round and stared at us both for a while, looking us up and down; then he pointed to the other girl and said something in Italian to the uniformed cops who’d brought us there, and they removed her from the car again.
13.9 And you? I asked. Me they drove off, she said. It was dawn, and we were driving through the streets — but the guy in the passenger seat told me not to look outside. I understood he meant that, since he kind of barked the same instruction at me every time I turned my head to one side or the other. So I just looked forwards, at his seat’s back. These plain-clothes guys drove me around for a long time, she went on; when they eventually stopped, I looked out, finally, and saw another courtyard — a cobbled one, with some kind of villa curving and jutting all around it. The villa was pretty, she said: an old house of several floors, with ivy climbing up the walls and wooden shutters on the windows. They brought me from the car, and led me to this villa. Inside, it was like a big family house — either that, or some kind of institution. There was a big reception area with a marble floor; and there was a desk here, with a receptionist behind it. The plain-clothes policeman, the passenger-seat guy, told me to empty out my pockets, and he put my keys and passport and whatever else I had there in a tray that the receptionist slid onto a shelf behind her. Receptionist? I said. You’re checking into a hotel now? That’s the thing, said Madison: it didn’t feel like another police station. It wasn’t a police station. I don’t know what it was. This receptionist was perfectly polite — not friendly exactly, but courteous. Even the plain-clothes passenger-seat guy wasn’t barking at me anymore. The lady handed him a receipt for my things; then he escorted me across the marble floor, and gestured, with politeness also, for me to go through a wooden door with stained-glass panels in it, that he held open for me. And we walked down another long corridor, and down some steps again, until, eventually, we came to a plain white door, which he knocked on quietly. A voice answered; my guy opened the door and, standing back once more, ushered me in.
13.10 She paused again. Well, what was in the room? I asked her. A man, she said. A man? I repeated. Yes, she said. What kind of man? I asked. I don’t know, she said: a man. How old was he? I asked. About sixty, she said. What did he look like? I asked. He was smartly dressed, she said; quite portly; he had grey hair that was turning white, combed neatly back. He was sitting in a red leather armchair in the middle of this room. He asked my escort something, and my escort answered very deferentially; then he dismissed the escort with a wave, and we two were alone. What type of room was it? I asked. I couldn’t really say, said Madison; it looked a little like a doctor’s room or a laboratory. There was this strange contraption at the far end, past the armchair: it was like a chair as well, but with appendages and segments that looked as though they could be manipulated and adjusted — kind of like a dentist’s chair, an old one. Everything in the room was old; I don’t know why I said it looked like a laboratory. Maybe I meant an old laboratory, where you’d see thick jars of chemicals lining the shelves. But there were no chemicals, and no shelves. There was a small window. A few feet from this there was a drape that hung along the walclass="underline" this big, wrinkled curtain. I don’t know why it was there — maybe for warmth; behind it there was just a wall, as far as I could tell. But the curtain gave the room the look of a theatre, or an auditorium — or maybe a recording studio, with the drape there for muffling. The place seemed pretty quiet and isolated: there was no background noise or anything like that. Apart from, Madison continued, that there was this kind of gizmo on a table not far from this man’s red chair. What do you mean, a gizmo? I asked. A thing, she said. A piece of electronic hardware. Maybe a receiver, a detector, wavelength modulator, I don’t know. It was old too: the kind of thing they’d have used twenty years ago, perhaps more. It made an electronic noise. When I came in, said Madison, this man was fiddling with this thing, as though he were tuning it.
13.11 She picked a caper from her plate. Then what happened? I asked. Madison held the caper up, as though inspecting it, then set it down on her plate’s side. Eventually, she said, the smartly dressed man in the room turned round to face me. He beckoned me over and told me to turn around in front of him: revolve, rotate. I had a scrape on my neck, which he looked at closely, holding my hair back. He asked me, in English, where else I’d been injured, so I told him: Here, above the hips; and here, just on the elbow (Madison pointed to these spots now, in the restaurant, as though I were this man) — and I thought for a moment that he was a doctor. Or maybe a lawyer, with his expensive suit. But he wasn’t. He reached down behind the red armchair and picked up, first, a black wand. A wand? I repeated. Yes, she said: a plasticky-metallic kind of pointer. Then, she carried on, a glove — a thick one, like a gardening- or oven-glove. He slipped the glove onto his right hand; and, holding the wand in this, he touched the thin end to my midriff. Then the glove twitched, and I felt a huge electric surge run through me. What the fuck? I said to Madison. It was a cattle-prod I guess, she told me. Did it hurt? I asked her. Yes, U., she replied, it hurt. It hurt more than anything I’ve ever felt before or since. But it was over very quickly; and I was too startled to shout or scream or anything. After he’d zapped me with his prod, this man just stood beside me, calmly, seeing what I would do. What did you do? I asked her. Nothing, she answered. I just stood there. Where would I have gone? He watched me while I stood there. He still had the prod, down by his side. I somehow knew, though, that he wasn’t going to keep on zapping me: he just wanted me to know that he could, if he wanted to — and wanted me to show him that I understood that. Which I did, by standing still. Once this understanding had been reached, we could begin.