Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  Nobody speaks for a minute or so. “Thank God Elf took the early flight,” says Dean. “Thank God for that.”

  “You’re not wrong,” says Griff.

  The police van thumps over a pothole.

  “Money’s only money,” says Jasper. “We’ll make more.”

  “Could Ted Silver get the two thousand back?” asks Griff.

  “This is Italy,” states Levon. “Our case might get to court by nineteen seventy-five, if we’re lucky. Seriously. No, the best scenario is a swift deportation.”

  “What’s the worst scenario?” asks Dean.

  “Let’s not think about it, but unless someone from your embassy is telling you it’s safe, sign nothing. Remember. The Italians invented police corruption.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FOUR STEP out of the van, blinking and dazzled, in the walled yard of a police station. It’s an ugly one-story building with a flat roof. Dean stumbles. Griff steadies him. Beyond the barbed-wire-topped wall they see a motorway bridge, a factory chimney, and a housing block. A guard shoos them inside. Every last person in the waiting area, from ten-year-olds to priests to pregnant women to the desk sergeant is puffing on a cigarette. Conversation ceases and heads turn to look at the exotic foreigners. The party is led through a blast-proof door into a processing room. Captain Ferlinghetti awaits. “Allora, you like my hotel?”

  “It’s a shithole,” says Dean, fake-amiably. “D’yer know that word? ‘Shithole’? Full of shits. Like you lot.”

  “Cool it, Dean,” mutters Levon. “Just cool it.”

  “You all is held for violations of currency, and you”—he smirks at Dean—“for assaulting police officers.”

  “Piss off. You assaulted me.”

  “Who believe a criminal, thief, liar? Empty pockets here.” He indicates four shallow wooden boxes on the counter.

  “You’ve already stolen two thousand dollars off us,” says Griff. “How do we know we’ll ever see our stuff again?”

  “No. You steal from the people of Italy.”

  “Captain Ferlinghetti,” says Levon, “please call Enzo Endrizzi. He’ll explain the misunderstanding.”

  Ferlinghetti displays a weakness for gloating. “Who is ‘Enzo Endrizzi’?” His grin says, I’m lying and I don’t give a shit that you know I’m lying—which means, Dean guesses, that their promoter set them up. Levon, Griff, and Jasper, meanwhile, have emptied their pockets as instructed. Dean asks, “How’m I s’posed to empty my bloody pockets with my hands tied, Captain Genius?”

  “Is true. So, I empty the pockets.” The captain comes around to Dean’s side of the counter via a liftable flap.

  “Yer could just take the cuffs off,” points out Dean.

  Ferlinghetti turns Dean’s jacket pocket out over the tray. A few coins rattle out—and a misshapen lump wrapped in tinfoil.

  What the bloody hell’s that? “That ain’t mine.”

  “Is from your pocket. I see it fall. My sergeant see, also.”

  The desk sergeant juts out his lower lip. “Sì.”

  Ferlinghetti unwraps the tinfoil. Inside it is a lump of hash. The chief’s eyes widen like a bad actor’s. “Cannabis? I hope is not.”

  Now Dean’s worried. “Yer put it there yerself!”

  Ferlinghetti sniffs the lump. “Smell like cannabis.” He scrapes it with his thumbnail and dabs his tongue. “Taste like cannabis.” He shakes his head. “Is cannabis. Is bad. Very bad.”

  “We demand a lawyer,” states Levon, “and consular access to the British and Canadian embassies. Immediately.”

  Ferlinghetti scoffs, “Pfff. Is Italia. Is Sunday.”

  “Telephones, lawyers, ambassadors. We know our rights.”

  The captain leans over the counter. “Here is not London, is Roma. I decide ‘rights.’ I say”—he flicks Levon’s nose—“no.”

  Levon jerks his head back at the oddness of the attack. The deputy starts to prod Dean down a corridor.

  “Oy!” Dean realizes that there may be worse things in store than indignity. “Where’re yer taking me?”

  “Private suite,” the captain tells him, “in the Hotel Shithole.”

  “Sign nothing, Dean,” Levon yells after him. “Nothing.”

  * * *

  —

  THE ITALIAN PROMOTER was not waiting for the band at Arrivals, so Levon went off to find a telephone kiosk to call the Endrizzi office. Dean’s first impression of Italians was that they smiled more often and more brightly than the British. Their hair was better, their clothes more stylish, and they spoke with hands, arms, and eyes as well as words. He watched two big macho guys greet each other with a peck-kiss, peck-kiss on either cheek. “On the bright side,” Griff muttered, in a voice too low for Elf to hear, “if Italian men are mostly gay, it leaves the field wide open, like.”

  Dean’s pores inhaled the warm air. “I love it here.”

  “We haven’t even left the airport yet,” said Elf.

  “The one, the only—Utopia Avenue!” A man approached with open arms, with a silver tooth, a cream shirt, and a booming voice that needed turning down from ten to three or four. “I am”—he put his hand over his heart—“Enzo Endrizzi, your promoter, admirer, friend. And you”—he chose Jasper first—“are Jasper de Zoet, il maestro.”

  “Mr. Endrizzi.” He offered a hand.

  The promoter clasped it in both of his. “Enzo, always.” He turns to Dean. “Dean Moss, il cronometro.”

  Il what? “Cheers for bringing us over, Enzo.”

  “Is your fans who bring! They write, they telefono me, they crazy for ‘Purples Flames’! You write this song, Dean, yes?”

  Dean swells a little. “As it happens, yeah, that’s one o’ mine.”

  “A song stu-pen-doso. We make gigs, do interviste, and next week we go up, up, up to number one in Italia. And you, Elf ’Olloway, la sirenessa.” He raised Elf’s hand to his lips.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Endrizzi. Enzo.”

  “You break ten thousand hearts this week, in Torino, Napoli, Milano, Roma.” He turned to Griff. “So you are…not Levon? No no. You is ‘Greef Greefin’ because you do a lot of ‘grief’ for me, is right?” Enzo made a pistol of his hands and cackled. “ ‘Stand and deliver! Your money and your life!,’ eh?”

  “Levon will be back any minute,” said Elf. “He went to phone you. There was a little confusion over the arrival time.”

  Enzo sighed. “For Anglo-Saxons, time is a master. For Mediterraneans, time is a servant.”

  * * *

  —

  ENZO’S FIAT MINIBUS thumped along the Italian highway at twice the top speed of the Beast. Driving was a big silent bruiser whom Enzo introduced as “Santino, my right-hand man and left-hand man.” The highway cut through hills of beige and heat-proof green. Suburbs emerged from bomb-site rubble. Cranes reached halfway to heaven. Tall dark trees corkscrewed upward. Traffic swerved, lawlessly. People honked horns instead of signaling, and traffic lights appeared to be ornamental. Jasper retained his sickly pallor from the flight. “Were you born in Rome, Enzo?” Elf asked.

  “Cut my arm, the Tiber River flows out.”

  “Where d’yer learn yer English?” asked Dean.

  “From GIs, from Tommies, in Rome, in the war.”

  “Weren’t kids evacuated to the countryside?” asked Elf.

  “No place is safe. All Italia a battlefield. Certo, Roma was magnet of bombs, but so is other cities, and if you at wrong time, wrong place, boom! In July in 1943, biiiiiig raid destroyed San Lorenzo. Royal Air Force. Three thousand dead. My parents also.”

  “That’s horrible,” said Elf.

  “Is twenty-four years ago. Many water under bridge.”

  “London had the shit bombed out of it too,” said Dean.

  Enzo flashed
his silver tooth. “By Italian Air Force?”

  “Mussolini was on Hitler’s side, right?”

  “Certo—Mussolini’s men killed my uncles and cousins, who was partisans in the north. A movie, a story, is simple: good contro bad. Reality is”—his fingers waggled and interwove—“così.”

  Dean wondered if European history might be more complicated than in the war films he’d seen growing up.

  “Disaster is the mother of opportunity,” said Enzo. “GIs arrive, they give Marvel comics, I learn English, they had dollars, I get things they need, I take commission, I eat that night. Black-market people, they help me, I help them. Is Italian way. To be young was protection. If military police catch a man, they shoot. If they catch a boy, usually no. Was my university of the life. I learned to ’uss-ssel.”

  “What was that, Enzo?” asked Griff.

  Dean worked it out. “ ‘Hustle’?”

  “Exactly. ’Uss-ssel. Is a skill I use still, as promoter.”

  The Fiat was cut off by a school bus. Santino beeped his horn, leaned out his window, and yelled, never mind that at the speed they were traveling his words couldn’t possibly reach the offending driver. Kids leaned out of the bus windows and made a stabbing hand gesture at Santino, with the index and little fingers pointing straight, like a pair of horns. “What’s that about?” asked Dean.

  “Is cornuto. Horns of man of wife who go with other man.”

  “A cuckold,” said Elf. “Folk songs are full of them.”

  A farmhouse flew by. A shallow-angled roof, narrow windows, biscuit-colored stone walls. Sloping fields were cultivated with rows of what looked to Dean like Kentish hops.

  “Is a vineyard,” said Enzo. “Grapes, for the wine.”

  Dean wondered who he’d be if he’d been born in that house and not in Peacock Road, Gravesend. He wondered if identity is drawn not in indelible ink, but by a light 5H pencil.

  * * *

  —

  THE GRIDDED HIGH window is no more than a foot wide and six inches in height. A head might fit through but never the body. A blade of dusty sunlight falls on the rusty bed frame and crusty mattress. A shit-spattered porcelain hole in the corner exhales evil vapors. The floor is clammy concrete. The graffitied walls are blotched with mold. The steel door has an eye-slot and a floor-level hatch. Nowhere to sit but the mattress. Now what? He hears the muffled din of the motorway, scraps of distant Italian, and the drip, drip, drip of a cistern.

  Hopefully Ferlinghetti only wants to scare us into forgetting the two thousand dollars.

  Dean has no idea about drugs penalties in Italy. The Rolling Stones had their drugs charges overturned recently. But they’re the Stones, and that was England.

  Minutes creep by. Dean’s indignation is cooling. The beating he took is starting to hurt. He wonders how Elf’s doing, and how Imogen’s holding up. The death of an infant puts his predicament in perspective. Levon, Jasper, and Griff know he’s here. He wasn’t abducted without witnesses. He’s British. Italy’s not Russia or China or Africa, where they could take me round the back and put a bullet in my head. Dean’s trial—if it comes to that—would be a drawn-out, costly headache. Why bother when they can just deport him? Last, Dean is not a nobody. He’s a somebody with a song in the Italian Top Five. Last night Utopia Avenue filled a two-thousand seater in Rome…

  * * *

  —

  “TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE!” Griff half shouted into Dean’s ear over the din in the wings of the Mercurio Theatre. “From Archie Kinnock to this in fourteen months! Am I fookin’ dreaming?” Sweat-drenched, Dean squeezed Griff’s shoulder as he drank. Dean was hoarse, wrecked, jubilant, and temporarily indestructible. This last round of roars and whistles was for the band, but also for Dean’s new song, “The Hook,” a work in progress. The Mercurio Theatre liked it just as much as “Darkroom” and “Mona Lisa.” The applause settled into a marching giant’s clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap…

  Levon appeared. “A third encore? They want it.”

  Elf glugged from her water flask. “I’m game.”

  “I never turn down two thousand Romans,” said Griff.

  “Seems rude to say no,” agreed Dean. “Jasper?”

  “Sure.”

  Enzo appeared, smiling like a promoter on the last night of an amply profitable tour. “Friends, you is all fantaaaaaastici!”

  “So’s this crowd,” said Dean. “They’re mental.”

  “In England, you…” Enzo mimed zipping his lips. “In Italia…” he posed operatically, “…we show! This noise is noise of love.”

  “We’re singing in a foreign language too,” said Elf, wonderingly. “Imagine a British audience going this crazy”—she gestures out through the wings—“for an Italian act.”

  “They study the lyrics,” explained Enzo, “they feel the music. Your songs, Elf, they say, ‘Life is sad, is joy, is emotions.’ Is universal. Jasper, your songs say, ‘Life is strange, is wonderland, a dream.’ Who does not feel so, sometimes? Dean, your songs say, ‘Life is a battle, is hard, but you is not alone.’ You, Greef, you is a drummer intuitivo. Also, your Italian promoter is a genius.”

  A somber man spoke into Enzo’s ear. Enzo translated, “He ask, ‘Please play a song before they break his theater.’ ”

  “We’ve done the whole album,” said Griff.

  “And all our stash of covers,” said Dean.

  “Jasper’s new one,” said Elf. “All those in favor?”

  The band plus Levon said, “Aye.”

  “I’ll introduce it,” said Dean. “Enzo—how do yer say ‘We love you too’ in Italian?” He had Enzo repeat the phrase until he had it by heart. They filed back onto the stage to be greeted by a Godzilla-size roar. Jasper strapped on his guitar. Griff took his place. Elf sat at the piano. Dean leaned into his mic: “Grazie, Roma—anche noi vi amiamo…”

  A woman shrieked, “Dean, I want you, baby!” or possibly, “Dean, I want your baby!”

  “Grazie tutti,” said Dean. “One more song?”

  Rome howled, “Sìììììììì!” and “Yeeeeeesss!”

  Dean cupped his hand to his ear. “Che cosa?”

  The answer was louder than a Comet 4 taking off.

  This is a drug, Dean realized, and I am an addict. He looked at Elf. Her look back said, You charmer. “Okay, Roma. You win. This next song really is our very last song tonight…”

  A giant groan of disappointment fell to Earth.

  “But, I promise, we’ll come back to Italy very soon.”

  The groan pulled out of its dive into a cheer.

  “This is by Jasper. It’s called ‘Nightwatchman.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  CHAMPAGNE CORKS POPPED. The perfume of lilies was giddying. Very good friends of Enzo flowed in. Half the city appeared to be a very good friend of Enzo. One of them met Dean in the bathroom and gave him a long line of superb cocaine. A galaxy exploded in Dean’s brain. The champagne turned into purple wine. The changing room became a VIP enclosure in the kind of nightclub Dean once fantasized about, with huge chandeliers, women dripping diamonds, fresh from a scene in a James Bond film. Men chortled over cigars and talked in huddles. An Italian guy from a fresco was whispering into Elf’s ear. She was smiling. Dean posted her a look that said, Someone’s on the pull, I see. Elf’s look back said, What can I say? Enzo’s very good friend with the cocaine took Dean to another bathroom for another bump. A jazz trio was playing “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” when Enzo and Levon appeared. They both wore grave expressions. They crouched by Elf and spoke. Elf’s face changed. Her hands covered her mouth. Levon looked sick and haggard. The handsome suitor vanished.

  Dean guessed someone had died. He went over. “What?”

  Elf opened her mouth but couldn’t yet say it.

 
“Elf’s nephew,” said Levon. “Imogen’s baby, Mark. A cot death. He died sometime yesterday night.”

  The club frolicked on as if none of this had happened.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Dean. “Twenty-four hours ago?”

  “My assistant she tell me only now,” insisted Enzo Endrizzi. “The telefono between England and Italy, not is good…”

  Elf was shaking and breathing heavily. “I have to go home.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow afternoon,” Levon reminded her.

  “The first flight in the morning,” Elf told Dean.

  Levon looked at Enzo, who nodded. “Is possible. My very good friend, he’s the brother of a boss of Alitalia…”

  Elf was looking about her, unable to process anything.

  “Let’s get yer back to the hotel,” Dean told Elf. “Yer’ve got to pack ’n’ everything. I’ll sleep on yer sofa, too…”

  * * *

  —

  EVENING ENTERS THE cell. The slatted rectangle of sky turns orange, then plague-brown. Dean’s body is aching and sore from his beating. A sickly lamp, bolted to the wall above the door, flickers on. Eight o’clock? Nine o’clock? They took Dean’s watch.

  Looks like I’m in for the night, thinks the prisoner.

  Dean wonders if the others are in solitary, too. The flight the band were due to have boarded will have landed at Heathrow.

  Elf will be at Imogen’s house in Birmingham.

  I’m in trouble, thinks Dean, but Imogen must be in hell…

  Neither Elf nor Dean slept much last night. Elf talked about her three visits to see her tiny nephew, and how Mark gurgled at his aunt on her last visit. She wept. Dean offered to leave, worried that she might prefer to be alone. She asked him to stay. They dozed for an hour or so. Then the taxi arrived.

  She’ll think they’re back in London now.