“All right,” Del Tacca said, stubbornly. “So?”
“Do you think that’s normal, Pilade?” Aldo picked up the cigarette he had put on the table and lit it. “You hit your head and you choke to death? What are the odds?”
“I don’t know what the odds are,” Massimo is watching the croissants get nice and golden in the discreet yellow light of the oven. “But the odds in here are that you shouldn’t be smoking.”
“Oh, come on, Massimo, it’s like Hurricane Katrina outside. There’s nobody about. Who do you think’s going to come in and say something?”
“I don’t think anyone’s going to come in. But you know how it is. We’re in a bar, and one thing you can’t deny about a bar is that it’s a public place. And in public places, you can’t smoke.”
“There’s something we could do about that,” Ampelio said. “We could make it a private club instead of a bar. Then it wouldn’t be a public place anymore, and we could all smoke in peace.”
“Don’t even think about it. Apart from the fact that if I started a private club, I’d join the Foreign Legion before I’d make you a member. Anyway,” Massimo turned back to Aldo, “right now, this is a bar. If they come in and catch you, we’ll both be fined. I don’t give a damn about you, but I don’t see why I should be involved. Do you smoke in your restaurant?”
“It’s already lit,” Aldo said fatalistically, as if it had been the will of Manitou that had lit the cigarette. “If a cop comes in, I’ll pay the fine for both of us. Just stop interrupting. Anyway, the doctor saw how the man had died and got suspicious. So he ordered a postmortem. To cut a long story short, the guy had a whole lot of Tavor in his system. That’s what caused him to stop breathing.”
“I see. So?”
“What do you mean, ‘so’? He’d been given a pile of Tavor and it had poisoned him.”
“Right.” Pilade, now safe in the immunity established by Aldo, picked up the pack of unfiltered Stop and took one out. “And who says he was given it deliberately to poison him? My poor brother Remo took Tavor for ten years, and nothing ever happened to him. Apart from the fact that he became senile, poor man, but that was age, not the Tavor.”
One basic technique, in the professional practice of bar talk, consists of objecting to a fact or an argument with an appropriate counterexample, all the better if it refers to events that happened to a close relative, preferably now dead. In some way that’s not quite clear, close kinship, according to the oral tradition prevalent in the town, guarantees the authenticity of what you’re saying, and at the same time the unavailability of the protagonist of the example due to death makes it hard to refute.
As it happens, Pilade’s example, unlike those generally used in bar discussions, was quite relevant. He could even have been right, which would have meant there had been no murder. What a pity, Ampelio’s face seemed to say, it was just starting to get interesting. Fortunately, Aldo knew his facts and came back to the attack.
“It’s the doctor that says it. The poor man was sick, and couldn’t take Tavor. For him it was like poison. From what Fusco told me, not even Dr. Mengele would have prescribed it. The doctor’s in no doubt. He was poisoned. Trust him.”
“Have trust and die poor,” Del Tacca retorted, magisterially exploiting another mainstay in the theory of barroom debate, that is, resorting to a proverb or a figure of speech, to be used, not just to grab attention, but as a lever to be inserted into the weak points of your opponent’s dialectical machinery and derail his arguments. “You don’t trust the doctor when he tells you you have high blood pressure, and you trust him when he tells you someone was poisoned. You remember what happened the last time we trusted a doctor?”
“It isn’t that I don’t trust the doctor, fathead. I don’t listen to him. It’s different.”
“I’m sorry,” Tiziana cut in, “but why—”
Here Tiziana would have liked to ask: Why use something as complicated as Tavor, when there are so many nice poisons to kill someone, especially in the middle of a conference where there are obviously lots of opportunities and lots of possible suspects? But at that moment, through the door and the rain, they caught a glimpse of a man in the blue K-Way of a municipal policeman, who immediately catalysed the attention. At least, the attention of Massimo and Aldo. Massimo glared at Aldo, while the latter dragged calmly at his cigarette as if to say: I assume full responsibility. In the meantime, the man had taken shelter from the rain under the arches and was attaching his bicycle to a lamppost.
“If that’s a policeman, I’ll pay the fine.”
“It isn’t a policeman,” Aldo retorted in a reassuring tone. “I know all of them.”
In the meantime, having finished anchoring his bike, the blue K-Way rubbed his hands and came into the bar.
“Hi,” he said, removing his hood. He wasn’t a policeman. Massimo also knew all of them. But there was something vaguely familiar about him. While Massimo was trying to think where the hell he could have seen this guy, if he really had seen him, the man took off the K-Way and Massimo’s doubts vanished. With that creased orange T-shirt, the potential customer could only be the loquacious and friendly Professor A. C. J. Snijders.
“A lungo, please. And . . . do you have croissants?”
“They’re just coming out. You did say a lungo?” Tiziana asked, not because she hadn’t heard him but because she hadn’t heard anybody order a lungo since 2002, when her employer had made an extremely pedantic as well as unrequested speech to an improvident Piedmontese tourist about the inherent barbarity of drinking coffee that was too diluted. Making a show of having understood, the tourist had then ordered a ristretto and a glass of mineral water, poured the coffee into the glass, and immediately knocked it back in one go before leaving without paying.
“Yes, please. And three croissants.”
“God help us!” Ampelio said, leaning forward on his stick. “Haven’t you been home yet today?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Massimo said in the hope of reasserting that the bar was his. “This three-legged old man was wondering if they were all for you. You know, people here don’t mind their own business even if you kill them.”
“Oh, I get it,” Snijders replied, completely unfazed. “Yes, they’re for me. I need to have a good breakfast. I was thinking of visiting Pisa and not stopping for lunch. It’s a tourist city. That means it’s expensive.”
“And how are you getting to Pisa?” Pilade asked.
“With that,” Snijders replied, pointing to the bike. “I hired it at the hotel.”
“All the way to Pisa by bike?” Tiziana asked incredulously. “In this rain?”
“Why not? I’m not made of sugar.”
“Amazing!” Ampelio said approvingly, clearly satisfied to see that, in this era of vices and perversions like traveling by car, someone still used a bicycle as a means to move around. “It’s not even six miles, and flat all the way. You’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Half an hour. Yes, that’s easy. Thank you,” Snijders said, taking the first croissant. “I hope to see at least the square and the cemetery this morning. This afternoon I have to go back to the conference.”
“Oh, have you come from the conference?” Ampelio asked with a knowing air. “The one where that Japanese man was killed?”
It’s not possible. I don’t believe it. An hour has gone by. One hour. I found out about this business an hour ago, and I swore to Fusco that I wouldn’t say anything. Now my grandfather’s passing the news across the Iron Curtain. I give up.
“Killed, that’s right,” Snijders replied, then thought for a moment. “I mean, no. Not that man. He died, yes. But it was an accident.”
“In the newspaper it’s an accident,” Ampelio replied. “Taccini’s fiancée said it was an accident too, when she became pregnant while he was a
soldier in Greece. I have to say, some accidents happen if you make them happen.”
“No, excuse me, I think you’re mistaken,” Snijders tried to argue, probably wondering all the while who Taccini was. “It was an accident. The poor old man hit his head.”
“Oh, yes,” Massimo said bitterly, trying to dilute his dismay in his beloved iced tea, “it’s always the wrong old man who bangs his head.”
“What the gentleman means,” Del Tacca cut in with the politeness that the residents of Pineta reserved exclusively for strangers and those who were slow on the uptake, “is that the poor man died from respiratory arrest. A rather unusual respiratory arrest. At least so it seems.”
“I don’t understand,” Snijders said, groping for a chair, an obvious clue that even though he didn’t understand, it was his intention to stay there until some light was thrown on the matter.
“If you want to get to Pisa,” Massimo said, “I think you ought to set off now. Not that I’m trying to interfere . . . ”
I just want to carry on minding my own business. If Fusco finds out, he’ll arrest me and put me in prison with all the rest of the retirement home. Which is why, kind and friendly professor, if you stopped asking questions and just got the hell out of here, I might still have a slim hope that all this could remain confined to the inside of this bar for the half day required before the news becomes official.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Snijders said with a smile, glancing outside at the rain that continued unperturbed to drum on the roofs of the cars. “I don’t think the Leaning Tower is made of sugar either. It should still be in the same place if I go there this evening. Could I have a cappuccino please?”
“It’s quite incredible,” Snijders said, playing with the crumbs of the croissants (five of them) remaining on the plate.
It had taken about twenty minutes, subdivided into two of introductions, five of actual narration, and thirteen of extra time during which the old-timers bickered with one another to make sure of the right to speak, to explain the facts—and above all what had been said about the facts—to the attentive and very curious Dutch professor. Now, while Snijders was observing how incredible it all was, Massimo was thinking more or less the same thing.
Incredible.
I attract gossips like flies. From all over Europe they come. I should start putting it on the menu. Espresso, 80 cents. Cappuccino, 1 euro. Slander of people I’ve never seen or known, on the house.
“Incredible, but true,” Aldo said out of a sense of inertia: Snijders was silent, and since this was, after all, a bar, somebody had to say something. “Just like in one of those puzzle magazines.”
“True,” Del Tacca cut in. “The trouble is, even the people investigating won’t get any further than the crossword. You should know, my dear Professor Sneie, that the inspector we’re talking about isn’t exactly on the ball.”
“On the ball?”
“What Pilade means,” Aldo translated, “is that the person dealing with the case is no genius.”
“It depends on the moment,” said Tiziana, who was now participating fully in the discussion. “Say what you like, but this time he did something clever.”
“It depends on the person,” Massimo said, wiping the tables with a cloth just to have something to do and trying to tell himself over and over that this was his bar, although maybe not for much longer, because if you murder your grandfather they’ll arrest you, which makes running a bar a little difficult. “If he’d told me and only me, maybe yes, that would have been clever. But to tell the official town crier of the Annoying Old Men’s Cooperative doesn’t strike me as a great idea. Who was the information supposed to be kept from? The people at the conference. Who’s the first person you tell? A delegate to the conference. You do the math.”
“Come on, Massimo, don’t talk crap. How was Fusco to know that someone from the conference, someone who actually speaks Italian, would show up here today? It was an accident.”
One of the most tiresome aspects of human beings is the ridiculous belief that they are not responsible for the consequences of their actions, as witness the childish casualness with which, all too often, we attribute the disastrous outcome of our stupidity to fate.
It was an accident.
It was an accident, he was coming back from a wedding and had drunk a few too many toasts, and besides what was that woman doing in the middle of the road? It was a piece of bad luck, he ate a big meal and then went for a swim to help his digestion and had a heart attack. It wasn’t his fault, he simply lit a fire next to a pine grove in the middle of August.
That kind of statement really pissed Massimo off. It’s all a matter of probability. If you behave in a certain way, the probability that something will go wrong increases. The fact that you didn’t want to cause trouble doesn’t diminish the fact that, objectively, you’ve caused a lot of trouble. You just have to think about it for a moment. It’s why rules of safety, rules of behavior, exist. 99.9% of the time you don’t need them. You only need them in the 0.1% of the time when something goes wrong. If you had kept your brain alert and stuck to the rules like a good boy, maybe nothing would have happened.
“Just shut me up, it’s best for everyone.”
“You don’t have to worry, Massimo,” Snijders said. “I don’t intend to tell anyone at the conference. I have my reasons. Now that you’ve told me, I need to speak to that inspector as soon as possible.”
“What?” Massimo asked, while four arthritic necks, whose owners had understood perfectly well what was about to happen, turned toward the professor.
“I need to speak to him. I heard something yesterday at the conference that might be important.”
Silence. Total silence. Sometimes, very rarely, there are times, some shorter, some longer, when you don’t hear a single sound. The rain had stopped pouring, no car was passing along the avenue, no housewife was torturing an old tune, in other words none of the noises that constituted the normal if tiresome morning background of the bar allowed themselves to disturb the peace. It seemed as if nature had coordinated things in such a way as to have a little tranquility, because people were talking here. For a second or two Massimo savored this wonderful lack of sensation, before Snijders broke the silence by clearing his throat and launching into what showed all the signs of being a long preamble.
“Yesterday, I heard Asahara talking with a group of American professors. They were talking mainly about other people, what they were doing as research and so on. After a while, the name Watanabe was mentioned.”
A pause, and a sip of cold cappuccino that made Massimo shudder just to see him take it.
“Masayoshi Watanabe is a professor in Kobe. A theoretician, like me and like Asahara. He’s a well-known scientist, publishes a lot, and does things that are very, let’s say, elaborate. He has at his disposal a cluster of a few thousand processors that for all intents and purposes are used only by himself and his students. He mainly does large-scale parallel simulations of the mechanical behavior of polymers and biological materials.”
We haven’t understood a damned thing, the faces of the old-timers said in unison. Becoming aware of this, Snijders brought his speech down to earth:
“In other words, he does some very demanding and very expensive research that uses lots of computers. I know him by sight, like Asahara, but I’ve had only a few opportunities to talk to him. It’s no secret, though, that a lot of people in Japan don’t like him. Especially Asahara, who was a theoretician of the old school and never liked Watanabe’s way of doing research. The fact is, a large percentage of the funding that the Japanese government allocates for research goes to Watanabe and his center. And if it goes to him, it doesn’t go to the others.”
“I see,” Tiziana said mistakenly. “But they didn’t kill him.”
“That’s not the point. The point is that the Japanese government depends for its fun
ding decisions on what other professors say, usually the most important ones in the country. And Asahara was a member of the advisory board. Now, what I heard was this. I heard Asahara say that there was something in his computer that would destroy Watanabe.”
Ah, Massimo thought. Well, well, we have our murderer, the old-timers’ faces exclaimed.
“Now, given what you’ve told me, I’m sure you’ll agree that the first thing I should do is talk to the police.”
“Oh, of course,” Del Tacca said. “But phone home first. The man in charge is quite capable of arresting you for stealing your clothes from the rag merchant.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No, don’t say sorry,” Ampelio said. “There’s no point.”
“Grandpa, please just shut up,” Massimo cut in. “Excuse me, professor, but there’s something not quite right. What words did Asahara use exactly? Did he really say destroy?”
“Oh, yes. That’s what he said all right. In my laptop, he said, I have something that will destroy Professor Watanabe. He was laughing when he said it. I thought he was joking. But now . . .”
“And what do you think it could have been?” Aldo asked, in a tone that said, come on, we’re not going to believe everything this scarecrow says, are we?
“I have my suspicions,” Snijders replied, not even noticing the old man’s doubtful attitude. “Like I said, a center doing calculations like the one Watanabe runs needs money. Lots of money. Without funding, it won’t get anywhere. Now, it’s possible that Asahara, being on the board that’s supposed to evaluate Watanabe’s funding request, was of a negative opinion. And that this opinion, in other words, his report advising against giving funding to Watanabe, or even preventing it, was on his laptop.”
Snijders finished his by now ice-cold cappuccino while Massimo looked away, then resumed:
“This is just a hypothesis, of course. It needs checking. We’d need to know if it really was possible for Asahara to do that. If he was that powerful. And if the board really is due to meet soon.”
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