“With women. I never let one get away. A waitress-I hit that. My secretary-I hit that. My friend’s wife-I hit that. Once even a nun. I was-what’s the word?-relentless.”
You’re still relentless, I thought to myself, thinking of the road still ahead and the fact that I would be spending at least the next four hours with him.
“It’s not like I’m not getting any now. I’m still hitting it regularly, but when I was younger…”
That’s a cleaned-up version of what he said. He was much more clinical, and he frequently gestured at his personal equipment. I nodded understandingly, with an idiotic, bland expression of tolerance painted on my face, while deep down I did my best to repress a vision of myself in my seventies with a dyed mustache, telling someone about how I still hit that.
“Are you married, Counselor?”
“No. I used to be, but not anymore.”
“So you’re a free man. Free and easy,” he said.
At this point, I was afraid he’d ask me whether I, too, was relentless. Whether I hit it with, say, my cleaning woman. In my case, the cleaning woman in question was Signora Nennella, a stout woman who stood four feet eleven inches in her stocking feet and was in her mid-sixties, to say nothing of sagging breasts that were barely contained by her D-cup bra.
The whole scene was disturbing. I tried to find refuge in a Zen place in the recesses of my mind where I could filter out the disturbing stimuli from the outside world. I told myself that if I found my Zen place, it would all be over before I knew it.
De Santis noticed my silence and assumed it must be due to a health issue. Something that might lead me to consult a urologist.
“What, you have some kind of problem?”
“Problem?” I was thinking the time had come to be a little more selective in choosing my clients.
He turned to look at me, completely ignoring the fact that the highway was hurtling toward us at one hundred ten miles per hour now. He looked down at my lap and winked. The melodic guitar and sappy vocals of the Teppisti dei Sogni filled the interior of the car like a mist of maple syrup.
“So, you’re okay down there?”
Pull over at the first rest area and let me out, you old psycho. After that, feel free to drive at top speed into a bridge or an oak tree, as long as you’re careful not to involve innocent third parties.
That’s not what I said.
“Just fine, thanks.”
De Santis didn’t seem to consider the answer satisfactory, so he kept up his questioning, pursuing the same line of inquiry.
“What about your prostate? You getting your prostate checked?”
“No, I’m not, to tell you the truth.”
“Have a doctor look at it, I’ll bet you anything he finds it’s enlarged. If you ask me, you don’t have it looked at because you’re afraid of what they do. The urologist puts on a pair of latex gloves and then he takes his finger-”
“I know what a urologist does.”
A few minutes of silence ensued. It seemed that our discussion of a visit to the urologist might have given my client pause. I hoped in vain that the silence would last until we reached Lecce. No such luck.
“Have you ever taken Viagra?”
“No.”
“I have some on me at all times, even though my doctor tells me not to overdo it, because it can be bad for the heart. But I say, what better way to die than to have a heart attack right in the middle of a good lay.”
And so it went, on and on, as we got to Lecce and entered the courtroom. Only when the trial actually got underway was De Santis forced to stop talking. We listened to the testimony of the prosecution witnesses. We listened to the analysis of the prosecutor’s expert witness, and then the court adjourned for another session to hear the testimony of the defense witnesses. By that point, if I had ever had any doubts, I was quite certain that my client would be found guilty. For the sake of my own mental health-we still had the whole return trip ahead of us-I decided that the better part of valor would be to keep that information to myself and not share it with the man who always hit it.
When we finally got back to Bari that afternoon, I asked him to drop me off in front of a travel agency across town from my office. This wasn’t the agency our law firm normally employed. I bought two round-trip tickets to Rome and I reserved two rooms in a hotel near Piazza del Popolo. I explained to the agent-and I’m pretty sure she could not have cared less-that I was going on a business trip with a colleague. It finally dawned on me that I was behaving as furtively as a criminal about to go on the lam.
As I was leaving the travel agency, Quintavalle called me.
“Counselor.”
“Damiano, any news?”
“I have some information that might be useful to you.”
“I’m all ears.”
After a couple of seconds of silence, I realized how stupid I had been. I thought back on all the times that I had laughed at the stupidity of people who said things on the phone they shouldn’t have, only to wind up in handcuffs.
“Or maybe we should meet to discuss it in person?”
“Shall I come to your office?”
“I’m on the street, over near Corso Sonnino. If it’s convenient to you, and you’re not too far away, maybe you could swing by and meet me in a cafe.”
“I’m on my Vespa. How about we meet in ten minutes at the Riviera?”
“Okay.”
24.
It only took me a few minutes to get to the Bar Riviera, which was virtually empty at that hour of the afternoon. I went upstairs to the terrace and took a table with an unbroken view of the Adriatic Sea. This was exactly where I used to sit when I was in college. I’d come here with my friends and spend endless, crazy, wonderful afternoons talking.
One of those afternoons in particular surfaced from my memory. We had just finished a seminar in political economics, and after wandering around town for half an hour we ended up at the Riviera. I’m pretty sure that, as usual, we started off talking about girls. Somehow, I’m not sure how, we wandered from that topic to characters from novels-with whom did we identify with most, who would we have most liked to be. Andrea said Athos, Emilio said Philip Marlowe, I said Captain Fracasse, and, lastly, Nicola said that he wanted to be Athos, too. There ensued a lively exchange of views as to which of the two-Andrea or Nicola-had a better claim to play the role of the Comte de la Fere. Andrea pointed out that Nicola-who made excessive use of cologne and aftershave-might realistically hope to be Aramis, but if the truth be told he really was perfect for the role of Milady. This piece of advice raised the volume of the debate, and Nicola allowed that expert testimony as to his personal virility could be provided, in considerable detail, by either Andrea’s mother or his sister.
If I half-closed my eyes I could still hear our voices, rendered up intact and authentic from the archives of my memory. Emilio’s deep tenor, Nicola’s nasal voice, the quick cadence of Andrea’s, occasionally rising to a shrill pitch, and my own voice-which I have never been able to describe. All those voices were there, hovering in the air of that big empty room, reminding me that ghosts exist and wander among us.
That memory could have triggered a bout of sadness. Instead, it gave me a faint, inexplicable sense of excitement, as if the past were suddenly no longer past and instead formed a sort of extended present, simultaneous and welcoming. Sitting in that cafe, waiting to meet with a coke dealer, I felt for an instant as if my mind had embraced the synchronic mystery of time and memory.
Then the coke dealer arrived, and that odd enchantment vanished as suddenly as it had arrived.
We ordered two cappuccinos and sat silently until the waiter brought them to our table and vanished down the stairs, leaving us alone. Only then did we begin talking.
“So, Damiano?”
“I asked around, and I may have found something.”
“Tell me about it.”