What We Become

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

“This is a good place. We’ll be here all night, waiting. And there’s a telephone in the bar downstairs. One of us can stay there until it closes, in case there’s a change of plan. . . . Will you be able to get into the house without any problem?”

  “I imagine so. There’s a dinner party at Cimiez, near the old HÔtel Régina. Susana Ferriol is one of the guests. That’ll give me plenty of time.”

  “Do you have everything you need?”

  “Yes. The keys Fossataro brought are perfect.”

  Tignanello slowly raised his eyes, fixing them on Max.

  “I’d like to see how you do it,” he said unexpectedly. “How you open that safe.”

  Max arched his eyebrows, surprised. A flash of interest seemed to light up the swarthy southerner’s taciturn face, making him look almost friendly.

  “So would I,” Barbaresco said. “Fossataro told us you were good at it. Cool, calm, and collected, he said. With safes and with women.”

  Those two made him think of something, Max told himself. He associated them with an image he couldn’t quite visualize. Which mirrored their appearance and manner. But he couldn’t pin it down.

  “You’d be bored watching,” he said. “In both cases, it’s slow, routine work. A question of patience.”

  Barbaresco grinned. He seemed to like Max’s reply.

  “We wish you the best of luck, Costa.”

  Max gazed at them at length. He had finally found the image that had eluded him: two soaking wet dogs in the rain.

  “Yes,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his cigarette case again, and offering it them, open. “I expect you do.”

  She shows up in midafternoon, while Max is preparing the equipment for his nocturnal foray. Hearing the knock he looks through the peephole, slips on his jacket, and opens the door. Mecha Inzunza is standing there, a smile on her face, hands in the pockets of her knitted cardigan. A gesture which, as though time had stood still (although it could be Max confusing the past and the present), reminds him of that distant morning, almost forty years ago, at the Caboto boardinghouse in Buenos Aires. When she went to see him on the pretext of picking up the glove she herself had tucked into his top pocket, like some strange white flower, before he danced a tango at La Ferroviaria. Even her manner as she enters the room and walks around (calm, curious, slowly glancing about) resembles that other way she once had: tilting her head in order to survey Max’s simple, orderly world; pausing in front of the open window with its view over Sorrento; or suddenly losing her smile as she glimpses the objects which he, with the meticulousness of a soldier preparing for combat (and the ambivalent pleasure of reliving, through that old campaign ritual, the thrill of uncertainty in the face of his imminent mission), has laid out on the bed: a small rucksack, a flashlight, a thirty-meter length of nylon mountaineering rope, already knotted, a tool bag, some dark clothes, and a pair of sneakers, which he has dyed with shoe polish that afternoon.

  “Good Lord,” she exclaims. “You’re really going to do it.”

  She says this pensively, with admiration, as though until that moment she hadn’t quite believed in Max’s promises.

  “Of course,” he says simply.

  There is nothing artificial or forced about his tone. Nor is he seeking that day to cover himself in glory. Ever since he made his decision, and found a way of implementing it, or thought he had, he has found an inner calm. A professional fatalism. His old ways, the gestures that before were a sign of youthful vigor, have in the last few hours restored an astonishing sense of self-assurance. A past, renewed feeling of pleasurable peace, where the risks of the exploit, the dangers of a blunder or a stroke of misfortune, dissolve in the face of the intensity of what is to come. Even Mecha Inzunza, Jorge Keller, or Mikhail Sokolov’s chess book aren’t in the forefront of his mind. What matters is the challenge Max Costa (or whoever he was in the past) has thrown down to the aging man with gray hair who gazes back at him occasionally from the mirror.

  She is still watching him intently. With a different kind of expression, Max thinks he notices. Or perhaps one he had considered impossible.

  “The game starts at six,” she says at last. “If all goes well, you’ll have two hours of darkness. More, with any luck.”

  “Or less?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Does your son know I’m doing this?”

  “No.”

  “What about Karapetian?”

  “He doesn’t know, either.”

  “How are things with Irina?”

  “They’ve prepared an opening gambit with her, which Jorge won’t use, not all of it anyway. The Russians will think he has changed his game plan at the last moment.”

  “Won’t that make them suspicious?”

  “No.”

  She runs her fingers over the mountaineering rope, as though it suggested unusual situations she hadn’t thought of before. All of a sudden she seems anxious.

  “Listen, Max. It’s true what you said just now. The game could finish sooner than we envisage—if there’s an unexpected stalemate, or one of them resigns. In which case, you run the risk of still being there when Sokolov and his people return.”

  “I understand.”

  Mecha seems to hesitate further.

  “If things go wrong, forget about the book,” she says at last. “Just get out of there as quickly as you can.”

  He looks at her gratefully. He likes hearing her say that. This time, the old fraud in him can’t resist adjusting his lips into an appropriate, stoical smile.

  “I trust it will be a long drawn-out game,” he says. “Complete with postmortem analysis, as you call it.”

  She looks at the tool bag. It contains half a dozen implements, including a diamond glass cutter.

  “Why are you doing this, Max?”

  “He’s my son,” he replies without thinking. “You said so yourself.”

  “You’re lying. You couldn’t care less if he’s your son or not.”

  “Perhaps I’m indebted to you.”

  “You? Indebted?”

  “I may have loved you back then.”

  “In Nice?”

  “Always.”

  “You have a strange way of showing it, my friend . . . then as well as now.”

  Mecha has sat down on the bed, next to Max’s equipment. All of a sudden, he feels the urge to explain once more what she already knows full well. To let some of his old bitterness float up to the surface.

  “You never wondered how those without money see the world, did you? What life looks like when they open their eyes in the morning.”

  She gazes at him in surprise. There is no trace of harshness in Max’s tone, more a certain coldness. Detachment.

  “You were never tempted,” he goes on, “to wage a private war against those who sleep peacefully without worrying about what they will eat the next day. Against those fair-weather friends who come to you when they need you, flatter you when it suits them, then don’t let you hold your head up high.”

  Max has stepped over to the window and is pointing at the view of Sorrento and the luxury villas dotted over the green slopes of Punta del Capo.

  “I was certainly tempted,” he goes on. “And there was a time when I thought I could win. That I could stop being buffeted about in this absurd carnival . . . and feel the touch of real leather in luxury cars, drink champagne out of crystal glasses, embrace beautiful women . . . Everything you and your two husbands have enjoyed from the beginning, due to simple, stupid chance.”

  He pauses for a moment, turning to look at her. From there, in that light, sitting on the bed, she looks almost beautiful again.

  “That’s why it never mattered in the slightest whether I loved you or not.”

  “I was willing to give you all that.”

  “Yes, you could allow yourself that luxury, a
s well. But I had other, more pressing things to attend to. Love wasn’t at the top of my list.”

  “What about now?”

  He walks over to her with an air of resignation.

  “I told you two days ago. I failed. I’m sixty-four now, I’m tired, and I’m scared.”

  “I understand . . . yes, of course. You’re doing this for yourself. For the same reasons that brought you to this hotel. Not even because of me.”

  Max has sat down beside her, on the edge of the bed.

  “It is because of you,” he says. “Although in a roundabout way. Because of what you were and what we became. What I was.”

  She looks at him almost tenderly.

  “How did you live during those years?”

  “Those years of failure? . . . By withdrawing gradually to where I am now. Like a defeated army that keeps fighting even as it slowly is routed.”

  For a moment, out of simple habit, Max feels the urge to accompany his words with a heroic half-smile, but he stops himself. It’s not necessary. Besides, everything he has said is true. And he knows she knows that.

  “The postwar years were good to me,” he continues. “Everything then was about business, reconstruction, fresh opportunities. But it was an illusion. Other people arrived on the scene. A different kind of scoundrel. Not better, but more uncouth. Rudeness even became profitable, depending on where you were. I found it hard to adapt and I made a few mistakes. I trusted the wrong people.”

  “Did you go to jail?”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t the problem. My world was disappearing. Or had already disappeared, when I had scarcely touched it with my fingertips. And I didn’t realize.”

  He talks about this for a while longer, sitting very close to Mecha who is listening attentively. Ten or fifteen years summed up in a few words: the brief, unbiased chronicle of a downfall. The communist regimes put an end to his old stomping grounds in Central Europe and the Balkans, he explains, and so he tried his luck again in Spain and South America, without success. He had another chance in Istanbul, where he entered into a partnership with a man who owned bars, cafés, and cabarets, but that also ended badly. Then he spent some time in Rome, as a sort of elegant hustler, an older escort for American tourists and two-bit foreign screen actresses, accompanying them to Strega and Doney on Via Veneto, the restaurant Da Fortunato next to the Pantheon, Rugantino’s in Trastevere, or shopping on Via Condotti, on commission.

  “My last relatively lucky stroke was a few years back, in Portofino,” he concludes. “Or that’s what I thought it was. I got my hands on three and a half million lira.”

  “From a woman?”

  “It doesn’t matter where. I had it. Two days later, I checked into a cheap hotel in Monte Carlo. I had a hunch. That same evening I went to the casino and filled my pockets with chips. I started off winning, and decided I was on a roll. I lost twelve bets in a row and left the table quaking.”

  Mecha is staring at him. Astonished.

  “You lost everything there, just like that?”

  Max’s old-man-of-the-world smile comes to his aid, knowing and accepting.

  “I still had two chips of fifteen thousand francs each, so I went to a roulette table in another room to try to win some of it back. The ball was already rolling, and there I was, clutching my chips, unable to decide. Finally, I did, and I lost it all. . . . Six months after that I was in Sorrento working as a chauffeur.”

  His smile has gradually faded. Now his lips are set in an expression of infinite desolation.

  “I told you I was tired. But I didn’t say how tired.”

  “You said you were scared as well.”

  “Less so today. I think.”

  “Did you know that your age corresponds exactly to the number of squares on a chessboard?”

  “I hadn’t realized.”

  “Well it’s true. That could be a good sign, don’t you think?”

  “Or a bad one. Like the story of my last roulette game.”

  Mecha remains silent for a moment. Then she cocks her head, staring down at her hands.

  “Once, fifteen years ago, in Buenos Aires, I saw a man who looked just like you. He had the same walk, the same gestures. I was sitting in the Alvear bar with some friends, and I saw him come out of an elevator. . . . Much to the astonishment of my friends, I grabbed my coat and ran after him. For about fifteen minutes I genuinely thought it was you. I followed him all the way to La Recoleta, and saw him go into La Biela, the automobile club café on the corner. I went in after him. He was sitting by one of the windows, and as I walked past, he looked at me . . . and I saw that it wasn’t you. I kept walking, left through the other door, and went back to my hotel.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Except that I thought my heart was going to explode.”

  They look at each other closely, with a calm intensity. In the past, in another life, he thinks, leaning on the bar in an exclusive cocktail lounge, this would be the time to order another drink or to kiss. She kisses him. Very softly, moving her face slowly toward his. On the cheek.

  “Take care tonight, Max.”

  The arc of electric street lamps along the Promenade des Anglais was gradually disappearing in the rearview mirror, encircling the hazy darkness of the Bay of Nice. Having passed Le Lazaret and La Réserve, Max stopped the car at the coastal viewpoint and switched off the windshield wipers and headlights. The rain falling through the pines drummed onto the hood of the Peugeot 201 he had hired that afternoon. He checked his watch in the light of a match and sat smoking a cigarette while his eyes grew accustomed to the dark. The road skirting Mont Boron was deserted.

  Finally he was ready. He discarded the cigarette and climbed out of the car, the heavy tool bag slung over his shoulder and a package under his arm. His hat was dripping as he did up all the buttons on the dark, oilcloth raincoat he wore over all-black clothes, a sweater and slacks, apart from a pair of canvas, rubber-soled Keds, usually comfortable, which became sodden after only a few paces. He made his way along the road, hunched beneath the rain, and when he reached the first villas, barely visible in the dark, he stopped to get his bearings. There was a single, misty circle of light nearby from an electric street lamp opposite a house with a high wall. Max avoided it by leaving the road and following a winding path below, feeling his way through the agaves and bushes for fear he might lose his footing and plunge into the water, which the tide was casting onto the rocks below. Twice he pricked his fingers on some briars, and when he sucked the wounds, he tasted blood. The rain was hindering him, but by the time he left the path to climb back up to the road, it had abated. The light was behind him now, faintly illuminating the corner of a stony wall. And thirty feet away, Susana Ferriol’s house loomed, ominously.

  He squatted at the foot of the brick wall, beneath the dark shadows of some palm fronds. Inside the package was a blanket, and, hugging it and the bag to him, he scaled the slippery tree trunk. The distance between the trunk and the wall was less than three feet, but before making the leap, he folded the blanket in two and threw it on the top of the wall, which was lined with shards of glass. He felt the now-harmless pieces of glass underneath the blanket as he landed, letting himself drop to the other side, rolling to minimize the force of the impact and to protect his legs. He stood up soaking wet and brushed off some of the water and mud. A distant speck of light glowed amid the trees and shrubs in the garden, illuminating the main gates, the porter’s lodge, and the circular driveway leading up to the front door. Steering clear of the lighted area, Max made his way around to the back of the house. He stepped cautiously, not wanting to make too much noise splashing in puddles or walking into flower beds and flowerpots. With the rain and the mud, he thought, he was going to leave tracks all over the place, inside and outside the house, including those of the Peugeot 201 at the nearby viewpoint. He was still brooding about that,
as he removed his raincoat and hat in the shelter of a small porch, beneath the window he was planning to force open. It didn’t matter how late Susana Ferriol returned from her dinner party in Cimiez, she was bound to notice the intrusion. Even so, with any luck, by the time the police arrived and saw his trail, he would be far away from there.

  Night has just fallen over Sorrento. The moon isn’t out yet, and this facilitates Max’s plan. When he comes down from his room at the Vittoria with a large travel bag, wearing an evening jacket over his dark clothing, the concierge, busy sorting correspondence and putting it into the various pigeonholes, scarcely notices him. The foyer and steps leading to the garden are deserted, for everyone is attending the Keller-Sokolov game in the main hall. Once outside, Max passes a van belonging to the Italian state television, and casually walks down the path through the garden toward the main gate on Piazza Tasso. Halfway along, when he can see the traffic lights and street lamps in the square, he veers off to one side, and heads for the pavilion where a few days earlier he had been spying on the apartments occupied by the Russian delegation. The building is in darkness, save for the lamp above the main entrance and a single lit window on the second floor.

  Max is aware of his heartbeat. It feels too fast. Racing as if he had swallowed ten cups of coffee. In fact, what he took half an hour earlier—convinced that in the next few hours he would need something to boost his energy and help clear his head—was a couple of Maxiton tablets, purchased without a prescription but with a suitably respectable smile at a pharmacy on Corso Italia. Even so, as he takes deep breaths and stays still, trying to calm down, the enveloping night, the challenge he has set himself, inescapable age tightening his chest and hardening his arteries, he is seized by an almost unbearable anguish. An anxiety bordering on panic. Now, amid the lonely shadows of the garden, each stage of his plan seems like an act of folly. He pauses for a moment, overwhelmed, until the riot of heartbeats appears to calm a little. He must decide, he thinks at last, whether to turn back or press ahead. Because he hasn’t a lot of time. With a sigh of resignation, he unzips the bag and takes out the rucksack; he opens it, slipping off his outdoor shoes and replacing them with the sneakers colored with black polish. He also takes off his jacket, and together with the shoes bundles it in the bag, which he hides among some bushes. Now he is dressed entirely in black, and he ties a dark silk scarf around his head to cover the lightness of his gray hair. He then fastens a loop of rope around his waist with a snap hook and harness in case he feels weak during the ascent. How ludicrous I must look in this getup, he thinks to himself, frowning ironically. Playing the cat burglar at my age. Good God. If Dr. Hugentobler could see me now, his esteemed chauffeur, scaling walls. Then, resigning himself to the inevitable, Max slings the rucksack over his shoulders, looks right, then left, steps out from behind the pavilion, and heads for the building, keeping to the darkest shadows cast by the lemon and palm trees. All at once, the beam from the headlights of a car that has just driven through the main gates toward the hotel illuminate him among the bushes. This makes him withdraw to the safety of the shadows. A moment later, when the light has died away, and he has calmed down, he emerges from his hiding place and reaches the Russians’ building. There, at the foot of the wall, everything is pitch-black. He gropes for the first rung. When he finds it, he checks the rucksack is secure on his back, hoists himself up, gaining a purchase on the wall with his feet, and extremely slowly, pausing on each rung to conserve his energy, he begins his ascent to the roof.