Three-Card Monte

by Marco Malvaldi

  “That’s why, since there was no chance of learning the double bass, and I really wasn’t attracted to the idea of taking it in the ass from the rest of the crew”—with these words Aldo destroyed the romantic aura in which Massimo had begun to bathe the scene—“I started learning card tricks. I’d spend hours in front of the mirror, trying over and over, without thinking about anything else. It was a hypnotic exercise, which required concentration. You really had to focus. You couldn’t think about anything else. And you immediately realized that you absolutely couldn’t cheat yourself. If a trick didn’t look right in the mirror, if the corner of the card stuck out even for a second, you immediately realized that you couldn’t try doing that trick in public. It’d come out wrong and you’d end up with egg on your face. A magician has to be infallible, otherwise he’s either laughable or embarrassing.”

  Aldo put the cards back in their box and placed it on the table.

  “Sometimes I think that all that time in front of the mirror with the cards saved my mental health. I saw people literally go crazy.” Aldo was silent for a moment, then went on in a changed tone, “Now, with my arthritis I can’t do most of the moves so well, but three-card monte is something I’m still pretty good at. Have you figured out what I did yet?”

  “No. And I’d like to get there by myself, so don’t tell me. You put the cards down one after the other. Very slowly. Did you really have an ace in your hand, or did you replace it before doing the trick?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Aldo said, and turned over the first card on his left. “No, the ace is here.”

  “Right. So you put down the ace, pretending it was a jack.”

  “Correct. Very good.”

  “Oh, yes, very good. I still don’t know how the hell you did it.”

  “Look.” Aldo took the jack between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, and the ace between the thumb and index finger of the same hand. Then he turned his hand, holding the cards facedown in such a way that the ace was over the jack, but slightly out of line with it.

  “Now, I put down just these two cards. You watch me and you unconsciously take it for granted that I’m putting the lower card down first. But I’m not. Look. First I put down on the left the card that’s on top, which is the ace. As soon as I’ve put the card down, I place my index finger, which is now free, on the edge of the card that’s still in my hand, and lift my middle finger. So you’ll have the impression that the card I have in my hand is the one that was underneath, which according to you I kept from the start between my thumb and my index finger. But you’re wrong. At this point, very slowly and also a little bit clumsily, so that you think I’ve made a mess of things, I put down the second card, and the trick’s done.”

  And he repeated the gesture very slowly, in such a way that Massimo could understand. Then he put the cards back in the pack.

  “The important thing is to divert your attention, to make you believe what I want you to believe. I’ve seen people in ports make a decent living with this trick. And I was as good as them. Maybe better.”

  “I get it. But what if I pick the right card?”

  “You won’t. Trust me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Trust!” Massimo made a gesture to underline the concept. “The last person I trusted was my wife, and she cheated on me. The only thing I trust is what I see.”

  “All right, then. You see, if we were in a port, I’d have an accomplice hidden in the crowd. If you picked the right card, I’d ask you if you felt confident enough to double the bet. And you’d probably be a bit taken aback for a moment. Just long enough for my accomplice to shout out ‘I’ll double the bet!’ Then he’d take your place, win instead of you, and give me back the money later.”

  “And what if I got in first and immediately said, ‘O.K., I’ll double the bet’?”

  “No problem. You’d win. At which point, my accomplice would sneak closer to you and once you’d walked away he’d follow you home, waiting for you to turn onto a poorly-lit street. Then he’d pull out a big club and persuade you to give him everything you have in your pocket. Of course he might beat you with the club first. Depends on the kind of person.”

  “I get it. But what if—”

  “What if, what if. It’s all bullshit, Massimo. If my grandfather had had wheels he’d have been a wagon. Get a move on, make that schiacciata and eat it, and then you can tell me what’s going on at the police station. I’ve been here all morning, I think I have a right to get the news before everyone else.”

  SIX

  The morning of a fine day, after days of rain and wind, always puts people in a good mood. The air is crystal clear, purged of all its nanoscopic impurities, and it goes easily into your lungs, without any effort, giving you a wonderful feeling of convalescence. In the distance, you can see the mountains in all their detail, no longer obscured by the blanket of dust and smog that usually infects the atmosphere, and the town itself is clearer, better defined, more real.

  All these things—the weather, the renewed ability to breathe, having something to do—had raised Massimo’s mood to such a level that not even the prospect of driving to Pisa in his car had managed to piss him off as it would normally have done quite automatically.

  Frightened at the prospect that the Pisan motorist might be getting lazy, the diligent workers in the traffic department had created a veritable parallel city, a kind of perverse labyrinth of no-entry signs, absurd roundabouts, and Dantesque bottlenecks. This parallel city was in turn inhabited by parallel citizens, the motorists: temporary avatars of flesh and blood, imprisoned in their cars, which were themselves hemmed in by the unavoidable density of the urban traffic, they exclusively showed the Mr. Hyde aspect of their personalities, becoming incensed at whatever happened, both inside and outside their vehicles.

  The feeling Massimo sometimes had, driving inside this heap of confusion, was that the authorities had never had the intention of producing a street network but rather a mini-golf course. Yellow lines for cycle lanes and rows of retroreflectors marked off your route; cheerful blocks of white and red plastic, arranged to imitate a roundabout, forced you to overtake or slow down in the stupidest way; broad avenues fed into narrow medieval streets filled with arches, at the end of which, if you were lucky, a single free parking space awaited you so that you could at last get out of your car. But in spite of all this, Massimo was in an excellent mood. The fact that he was being forced to sacrifice part of his free day trying to figure out what was in Asahara’s computer didn’t bother him in the slightest. On the contrary.

  The previous day, the computer had been identified by Katsuo Komatsu, another of Asahara’s colleagues, as the professor’s new laptop, which he had owned for only a few days. After registering the fact that the computer wouldn’t turn on, Massimo had suggested a drastic solution to Fusco: that they open up the computer and read the hard disk directly through another computer. Fusco had approved of the idea, and had asked Officer Turturro if the police station had at its disposal everything required to perform this operation. Turturro had explained that it didn’t, that it had practically nothing that was required, and that in any case he himself had never performed an operation of that kind on a laptop. At this point, while Fusco was looking at poor Turturro as if suspecting him of having sabotaged the computer himself, Massimo had ventured a suggestion:

  “I know someone who may be able to read the hard disk. He’s a technician at the University. He’s very good, and he’s very discreet.”

  “Uh-huh,” Fusco said without much enthusiasm.

  “If you have another solution . . . ”

  “Oh, no. It’s just that everything here works through friends. Through official channels, nothing ever works. You’re always asking, asking, asking. We don’t have computers, we don’t have cars, we don’t have a damned thing. It’s best if you don’t get me started on this. Let’s do as y
ou say, Signor Viviani. All I ask is that Officer Turturro be present. I know this investigation is a complete mess, but I think I should keep it at least a little bit official.”

  And so Massimo and Officer Turturro had agreed to meet in Pisa the following day at the place where this person worked. That was why Massimo was now in Pisa instead of being by the sea with a towel, a book, and a sandwich, enjoying a little peace and quiet.

  After avoiding all the various traps the traffic department had scattered along the route, Massimo crossed the Ponte Solferino, parked on Via Fermi, and walked to Via Risorgimento where the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry stood, or rather, endured: a sad building in retro-Fascist style, too recent to exercise the charm of long-standing university departments and too old to still be able to function decently. Looked at from the outside, it seemed to be wondering what it was still doing there. Fortunately, however, the authorities had not left the old department alone: on the other side of the street, the venerable orthopedic department of Santa Chiara Hospital kept it company and supported it in its daily battle against the beautiful and the modern.

  Officer Turturro was waiting for him in the doorway of the department with the laptop case in his hand.

  “Hi. Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. Shall we go in?”

  Massimo opened the door and went in, followed by Turturro, to be greeted by a terrible smell of garbage in brine that grabbed him by the stomach and accompanied him all the way to the porter’s lodge. The porter did not seem remotely bothered by the aroma.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Good morning. I’m looking for Carlo Pittaluga.” And maybe also a bathroom. Because in two seconds I’m going to throw up.

  “Who shall I say?”

  “Massimo Viviani and . . . ” Massimo stopped, realising that he didn’t know how to introduce his companion. Officer Turturro? Signor Turturro? My personal bodyguard?

  “Turturro,” the officer told the porter.

  “Just a moment,” the porter replied, and dialed a number on his phone. “Dr. Pittaluga? Viviani and Turturro are here for you. Shall I send them up? O.K.” He put down the receiver. “He says to wait here and he’ll be right down.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you study here, signore?” Turturro asked Massimo.

  “No. I studied mathematics. On Via Buonarroti. And you don’t have to call me signore. Do I seem that old?

  “I did engineering. On Via Diotisalvi, over there.” He made a sign with his hand, as if to underline the fact that this smell didn’t reach Via Diotisalvi. “I was there for two years. Lots of theory and no practice.” He smiled. “It wasn’t for me.”

  Massimo nodded, but said nothing in reply. Partly because he wanted to avoid breathing as much as possible, partly because situations like waiting in the company of someone you hardly knew always made him feel a little uncomfortable. He realized he must seem impolite not to say anything, but on the other hand, once they had established that it was a nice day, what else was there to say? In addition, Officer Turturro struck him as the typical idiot who enrolled on an engineering course without having much idea what it involved, and who, having realised that it wasn’t enough to just fiddle around with computers, but that you also needed to study and understand things in order to pass exams, dropped out, justifying his decision by saying that he was a practical person, that he wanted to do things and didn’t need to study all that pointless stuff, and so on. Massimo didn’t like people like that. Actually, Massimo thought, there weren’t many people he did like. Fortunately, he now heard the sound of heavy but enthusiastic footsteps on the stairs and realized that Carlo had arrived. He turned, and saw the fellow descend the last steps and come toward him at a solemn pace.

  Carlo Pittaluga began with a pair of size fourteen tennis shoes and ended, six and a half feet above them, in a big smile involving all thirty-two teeth, topped by two disturbingly alert green eyes. In the middle, a tartan shirt and a pair of pants appropriate to his size. Apart from belonging to the restricted number of human beings whom Massimo liked, Carlo was absolutely one of the most intelligent people he knew. Having graduated with honors, he had remained in the Chemistry Department as a graduate technician, even though, given his résumé and his skills, he would probably have been able to get a better position. Be that as it may, he was now the computer technician for the department’s center for calculations, a role he fulfilled in an erratic but highly competent fashion.

  “Hello, Viviani,” he said, waving to Massimo as he approached.

  “Hello, Pittaluga,” Massimo replied with a smile. “This is Officer Turturro. What Officer Turturro is holding in his hand is the laptop I was telling you about.”

  “All right. Let’s go straight to the computer room and read the disk. Then we’ll go to my office and copy it onto a memory stick or a CD.” And he headed up the stairs, followed by Massimo and Turturro.

  “Does it always smell like this?” Turturro asked as they climbed the stairs.

  “No, someone must have opened a fridge down in Organics. Judging by the hint of excrement, I’d guess it was Cognetti’s fridge. Anyway, it’s not so bad,” he asserted, while the color of Massimo’s face expressed the opposite opinion. “It would have been worse if they’d opened Crudeli’s fridge.”

  “Why, what’s in Crudeli’s fridge?” Massimo asked. “Poison?”

  “Insect pheromones. Synthesized sexual attractors for different kinds of insects.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Well, for example, three years ago one of the phials got broken, and I guess they must have synthesized those pheromones well, because within a day the department was full of bees. They were everywhere, in the air conditioning, the drawers, other places too. There were people who didn’t use the toilets for weeks after that. But anyway, the smells don’t get in here so much,” Carlo said, stopping in front of a reinforced door and opening it with a few turns of his key. “Et voilà. Please come in, grab a seat.”

  Following Carlo, Massimo and the officer entered what was probably the most chaotic room in Europe. Beyond a glass door, about a hundred computers of various shapes and sizes were humming, filling the air with a heavy background noise. Dozens of colored wires ran all over the dimly lit room, on the floors, on the walls and around the tables, on which lay a number of disemboweled computers, with what had once been their internal components scattered here and there.

  “So,” Carlo said, moving a fan from a stool and bravely sitting on the latter. “Tell me what’s going on. Let me make a bit of space on the desk here.” With a sweep of his hand he shifted a few assorted parts, which would have fallen straight to the floor and smashed had Turturro not grabbed them. “Just stick them on the floor, they’re only rubbish. O.K., now let’s see how we can open this baby.”

  Carlo turned the computer over and started unscrewing the back with a screwdriver. As he did so, he asked Massimo, “You did tell me this thing belonged to a Japanese?”

  “Yes.”

  “Strange.”

  “Why strange?”

  “Because the Japanese usually have tiny laptops. Something you can hold in your hand, or even smaller. This one’s big. Well, all the better. Easier to work with. Apart from anything else, I’ve never seen this model before. It’s one of those assembled ones, I think. You see, it isn’t a single block.” Carlo put one of his big fingers inside the body of the laptop and used it as a lever. With a noise of something breaking, a small block no larger than a pack of cigarettes (a unit of measurement that’s very useful in describing technological objects about which we know nothing, apart from the size) sprang free of the casing. “Oh, that’s nice. What just came off is the hard disk. Now we’ll connect it and transfer everything to Argo.”

  “To what?”

  “To Argo,” Carlo repeated, pointing to the electronic
monster humming beyond the glass door.

  “Argo? You mean that’s one computer?”

  “No, it’s a lot of machines working in parallel, run by a main server that directs the processes. The server works on Mosix and is only responsible for distribution to the afferent machines,” Carlo explained proudly as he connected the disk to a cable emerging from some unspecified place inside the beast, “whereas the slave multiprocessors are the real calculating machines. Each one works by itself on a specific process. We could also get them all working in parallel on a single process, but that can be a mess because of redirection.”

  “Yes . . . ” Turturro said as if he had actually understood any of this. But what exactly are all these computers for?”

  “For making calculations.”

  “All of them?”

  “There aren’t that many,” Carlo said. “Chemical calculations can be really huge. A dynamic simulation or the optimization and calculation of the frequencies of a complex of a transition metal usually takes weeks. Even if you use four or eight processors in parallel. The more processors you use, the less time it takes. Anyway, this has almost finished copying. There wasn’t much there, as it happened. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” Turturro said. “The computer was almost new.”

  “Right. Now, let’s go up and I’ll transfer it somewhere. Do you have anything to put it on?”

  Officer Turturro nodded and took a CD from his bag. Carlo took it delicately in his big fingers and nodded, then relieved the stool of his weight and walked silently out of the room, followed by the representative of the law and the representative of curiosity.