The Cusanus Game

  “Do you know where the sales representative can be reached?”

  She pulled a card from the drawer of her imitation Biedermeier secretary.

  “His name is … one moment…”—she put back on her glasses—“Jacopo Ligrina, lives in Frascati. Do you want his address or his number?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “When he’s in the city, he usually stays in the Grand Hotel Terminus. That’s right around the corner, by the train station. He used to invite me there sometimes…” she went on, tapping the card wistfully with her glasses. “For a business meeting over a glass of wine. We always got along well. He helped me a lot when I took over this shop. But that was already a few years ago,” she added with a sigh.

  “I’ll try to reach him there,” I said.

  “Not a bad idea. Maybe you can wangle one of those miniskirts out of him. He likes pretty young women,” she replied, a trace of bitterness creeping into her voice. “I’m sorry, but I would have bet anything that a short while ago you—”

  I shook my head. “Anyway, thanks for the tip.”

  * * *

  I RETURNED TO the hotel. Shouldn’t I call the police after all and warn them that an attack on the train was planned? The transition had gone off without a hitch. Wasn’t it then at my discretion…?

  I dialed the number of the police. When headquarters answered, I said, “I happened to overhear a conversation. An attack is going to be committed today on the express train to Rome that departs here at 4:49 P.M. There was talk of a bomb.”

  “Listen, signora, we’ve been on heightened alert for days because of the unrest at the Centrale,” replied an irritated voice. “We already have enough problems. This is the thirtieth anonymous call about all manner of attacks on institutions and people, acts of revenge, death threats…”

  “But I know for sure. In the first car there’s going to be—”

  “Signora, we pursue all leads, of course. Please tell me your name.”

  “I don’t want to get involved in this,” I protested. “These are ruthless killers. The train will be blown up near Mondragone. From a viaduct located shortly before a tunnel, they’re planning to detonate a bomb that will be planted beforehand on the—”

  “My good woman, please! You’re calling from the lobby of the Grand Hotel Terminus, I see. Please tell me your name.”

  I hung up.

  I might have failed to undo the disaster, but I would definitely stop Father from boarding the train. Should I, as Renata had suggested in jest, come on to him and let him drag me to his room? Me, his own daughter? Well, I could prevent him from getting intimate with me, but I somehow had to detain him long enough for him to miss the ill-fated train. That had to be doable. But where was he?

  I looked at my watch.

  * * *

  I LOOKED AT myself in the mirror over the sink.

  “But we know each other,” he had said.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” I had insisted.

  “Yes, yes! It must have been only recently. I don’t forget the face of a beautiful woman so easily. And definitely not yours.”

  “I can’t remember us ever meeting anywhere.”

  “Well, then it’s high time to deepen our acquaintance and get to know each other better,” he had said with a smile.

  I felt hot and cold all over. I glanced at my watch. There was no way he would make the 4:49 train. I washed my hands. They were trembling so much that the drops sprayed off before I could dry them.

  When I stepped out of the bathroom, he lay naked on the bed and had draped the sheet over his hips. He must have undressed as fast as lightning; he had thrown his clothes over the armchair.

  My father looked at me with surprise in his brown eyes. “Aren’t you getting undressed?”

  “No, I’m not going to do that.”

  He folded his hands behind his head and asked with a smile, “This can’t be the first time you’ve gotten involved in an affair like this?”

  “What is it I’m getting involved in?”

  “Now don’t be like that! When someone lets herself be persuaded after a glass of champagne to come with a man to his hotel room, then it’s obvious that…”

  With a twinge of disgust and unease I noticed the erection that showed under the sheet.

  “Now come on, girl! You’ll have fun, wanna bet? I’m no beginner.”

  I stared at him in shock.

  “You can’t have had a sudden fit of remorse,” he sighed, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “Then I could have just taken the earlier train to Rome.”

  He looked sullenly at his wristwatch and stood up. As the sheet slid down, I turned away quickly.

  “Or am I too old for you?” he asked challengingly, looking at his slim figure in the tall mirror of the wardrobe, running his hand over his belly and stroking his stiff penis.

  “You’re not old,” I said.

  “Still, I could be your father.”

  “Yes,” I sobbed, grabbing my handbag and rushing past him so that he wouldn’t see my tears. Hastily, I opened the door and ran down the hallway to the elevator.

  No, I told myself. You have to put those daydreams out of your head, or else you’ll go crazy. Such a confrontation would rob me of what remains of my illusions and cost me my self-respect. I had to find another way. Somehow I had to get to the platform and attract his attention.

  * * *

  I HAD NEVER before been wedged in by so many people. An attack of claustrophobia seized me; I could barely breathe. Sweat poured down my body. Ultimately, I managed to fight my way to the ticket hall, but it was impossible to get through the barrier to the platform.

  “Please, let me through,” I pleaded. “My father is on the platform. I have to get to him.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense!” gasped the young policeman.

  His face was red with strain; he was sweating even worse than I was in his bulletproof vest and helmet. He angrily pushed me back with his transparent plastic shield; the scratched surface was right in front of my eyes.

  “Back!” he roared. “No one’s getting through here!”

  The crowd behind me surged unrelentingly forward like a swell; it pressed me against the shield and squeezed the air out of my lungs. The people shouted and loudly gave vent to their rage, but they couldn’t break through the cordon. The police officers had interlocked the edges of their shields. They formed a springy but impenetrable wall. I was glad that they weren’t equipped with living shields, as would be used against demonstrators a few years later—stuck-together thin layers of calcium carbonate connected by muscles. Those muscles grown from mussel genes reacted to pressure with powerful countermovements. A group of police officers armed with such shields could clear a path for themselves through the densest crowds.

  “Last call,” boomed a voice from the ceiling loudspeaker. “Passengers to Rome with valid travel documents, please proceed to the passage next to counter one. I repeat: last call…”

  The remaining words were drowned out by a bang followed by clinking, screams of pain, and cries for help. One of the huge glass walls at the entrance to the ticket hall had burst from the onslaught of bodies. Again the swell surged forward and drove the air out of my lungs. I couldn’t even have screamed, but only gasped for breath. I was beset by the labored panting of the people; I felt their hot breath on the back of my neck and my ears, smelled their sweat and the exhalation of their fear pheromones. My travel bag hung somewhere between my knees. I couldn’t even bend over to reach it.

  Then I saw Father. He was walking along the platform with his two sample cases.

  “Father!” I cried. “Father!” But I produced only a croak, which was hopelessly submerged in the tumult.

  Up front by the train stood a young woman who hurried to him when she saw him. She was wearing one of those miniskirts made of animated textiles that I had tried in vain to buy that morning. But my father didn’t even notice her. Before she reached him, he boarded a
car in the middle of the train. A conductor lifted his cases to him through the door, and he tipped his hat in thanks. The woman stopped, and her hands sank to her sides. Then she too got on.

  Who was that woman who had been waiting for him, of whom he took no notice? Had he not seen her? Unlikely, for there weren’t many people on the platform. No one had been permitted to accompany the passengers, and they had apparently chosen in the onrush to take their seats on time.

  Shortly thereafter, the doors closed and the express began to move. Now fate would inexorably take its course. With tears in my eyes I stared at the red lights of the rear locomotive.

  The pressure of the masses of people behind me had abated after the train was gone. The tumult had moved onto Piazza Garibaldi. Stones flew; swarms of police officers trotted, armed with shields, their visors closed, across the square to the next operation. An overturned police car burned, and black smoke rose into the sky. Nearby the sirens of fire trucks and ambulances could be heard, but the vehicles had great difficulty reaching the piazza through the congested streets. The police had to beat open a lane for them. I remained at the entrance to the ticket hall. Broken glass crunched under my soles. I felt like crying. I couldn’t believe that I had again failed so miserably. Now, as soon as an opportunity arose, I would return empty-handed to Amsterdam and report my defeat. I had achieved nothing. In half an hour my father would be dead.

  I turned to the left, where the wild dogs of the city lived between the ugly concrete columns under the train station overhang. They seemed to be only moderately impressed by the people’s excitement and were indifferently watching a water cannon attempting to extinguish the burning police vehicle. A big gray mongrel—spotted, almost without fur, with fearsome yellow fangs in his ugly snout and drooping ears ragged from countless battles—stood up from his spot and approached me with measured steps to sniff my hand. The dog wasn’t modified—there was no such thing yet at that time—but his beautiful brown eyes, the most beautiful thing about him, had an alert intelligence and looked at me encouragingly. His stumpy tail twitched in a friendly way.

  I crouched down and fished a bar of Belgian chocolate from my travel bag. It had gotten soft. In Schiphol I had in a fit of ravenous hunger bought half a dozen bars after I had been forced to go without sweets for a year. He ate the soft mass out of my hand without even touching me with his dark jowls. As his companions stood up and approached, a glance out of the corner of his eye and a warning growl were enough to send them back to their spots. They watched him and drooled as he licked the last remains from the tinfoil.

  I noticed that my hands were trembling. In these minutes it was happening; in these seconds. The animal looked at me intently. He sensed my tension. Did he feel sympathy? I closed my eyes and could no longer hold back the tears. The express had reached the space-time point of its doom.

  What a failure I was, damn it.

  * * *

  TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER the departure from Napoli Centrale, rounding the northern part of the city in a wide curve, the express reached the bend at Villa Literno and entered the first high-speed stretch toward Rome. Within five minutes it accelerated to 220 miles per hour, which it reached near Falciano. Shortly thereafter, it crossed under the viaduct of the road from Carinola to Mondragone; then it shot in a low concrete trough across the Fontanelle and sped toward the tunnel through Monte Mássico.

  The bomb the terrorists had planted in one of the compartments of the car directly behind the front locomotive was probably detonated from the viaduct. The blast pressure built up to its full strength when the head of the train had entered roughly sixty to eighty yards into the tunnel tube. The front locomotive was blown off and raced on; it was, however, lifted off the tracks by the explosion and shot, rotating like a projectile in a rifle barrel, through the tunnel until the friction with the walls stopped it after about five hundred yards and it came to rest lying on its side.

  As the explosion tore apart the first car, the second was pushed into it, followed by the third and fourth. In fractions of seconds they became wedged and plugged the tunnel. The kinetic energy of cars five to eight and the massive rear locomotive pushing from behind, functioning like the piston of a scrap metal press, compressed the agglomeration of matter even more and brought the core area to a temperature of over thirty-five hundred degrees. Sealed off from air, the train and its passengers were baked into a compact mass of metal, plastic, leather, textiles, and human flesh. None of the passengers escaped with their lives. The total number of people who met their death was never determined. The authorities spoke of 412 victims, but those were only the ones who had valid travel documents and reserved seats. Many suspected that it was over five hundred, for some people had managed despite the barriers to make it onto the train.

  * * *

  I STARED DESPONDENTLY into my wineglass. How could I have approached my plan so stupidly and rashly? It would have required more thorough research, precise planning, and refined strategy—the way the octopuses prepared themselves for their operations. I hadn’t expected it to be impossible to get to the train, even though I might have guessed as much.

  Who had the woman on the platform been, who had been waiting for my father? That should have been me. She had been in the exact situation that would have been useful to me for my plan. Might it have been me? Had I returned a second time from the future to carry out my plan? Nonsense! The woman had boarded the train. Had she died with him? Inevitably. I had never seen her get off again.

  When I entered the hotel half an hour later, a woman came plunging out of the elevator, distraught and teary-eyed, and rushed past me. For a moment I thought I was looking into my own face. Was I seeing ghosts?

  The waiter replenished my glass. I looked around the lobby. On a deep sofa upholstered in natural silk, a middle-aged man and a young black-haired woman sat side by side under a huge gold-framed painting that showed a deer crossing a forest path. Both were sitting with their back to me, but in the mirror off to the side behind them I could make out the man’s profile. If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes my father board the train, I would have bet that I was witnessing one of my father’s “business meetings.” Of course, I was mistaken, but I wished it had been him, for at that moment he was already dead. Deep apathy overcame me. I couldn’t bring myself to stand up and walk around the pillar to make sure.

  An old woman sat down at the table next to me. From her handbag she pulled out an orange and peeled it. I looked at her thin, liver-spotted hands. In her scrawny fingers she held a small mother-of-pearl-covered pocketknife, on which a little silver chain dangled. “Nothing will happen to you,” Heloise had said, “as long as you do not stray too far from yourself. It won’t always be easy, but you can return to your world. You only have to want to.”

  I stared at the knife with fascination. The mother-of-pearl handle sparkled, and the little chain flashed.

  “Is something wrong?” the old woman croaked.

  “N-no, no,” I said, averting my eyes. “I’m sorry. For a moment I wasn’t completely with it.”

  “That happens,” said the old woman, “but actually you’re still too young for that.”

  She laughed with a rattle, slit the fruit with her thumbnail into its segments, and inserted them one after another in her mouth.

  I was exhausted from the events in the train station and depressed about my failure. Ultimately, I had let it slip through my fingers, squandered my chance to make the pick-up sticks of reality fall only a little bit differently. I wanted to be alone. I asked the waiter to bring the rest of the wine to my room. I didn’t want to watch when the first news of the terror attack came on television.

  In the next room a frisky pair of lovers seemed to have nested again. I closed the blinds on the balcony door, finished the bottle of wine, showered, and soon thereafter went to bed. The next day I would try to get to Rome somehow, in order to book a flight to Amsterdam from there. The planes departing from Naples were undoubtedly all booked up
.

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night a rumble woke me. I reached for the light switch, but apparently there had been a power outage. Another rumble. Was it a storm? Was it an earthquake? A volcanic eruption? Somewhere a loud clinking sound could be heard, as if a large painting or a mirror had fallen off the wall and shattered. Something trickled on my face. Had the ceiling burst? Was plaster falling down? I stood up quickly and opened the door to the corridor. There was no light on outside either. I pulled up the blinds on the balcony door and peered out. It was long before daybreak. Over Mount Vesuvius hung a cloud of smoke in which lightning flashed. Or was it the reflection of volcanic eruptions? On the dark slopes of the volcano hung frayed clouds. Were they effluvia? Poisonous gases, as had beset Pompeii? In the distance the wail of police and rescue vehicles speeding through the streets could be heard. There seemed to be a mist over the city, approaching from the sea. Domes rose out of it, and slender towers that looked like minarets. The high-rises in the northeast were no longer there; the whole skyline of the Centro Direzionale was gone. Nowhere was a light to be seen. Had the whole city been affected by the power outage? I looked down. The train station was gone. I thought I made out in the dimness a vast square overgrown with weeds, on which there were scattered half-demolished and dilapidated market stalls. Everywhere were heaps of trash and half-decomposed carcasses of horses and dogs. Were there also human corpses among them? The area resembled a battlefield, and the flickering red reflection that poured out over it reinforced the impression that the fallen had been flayed. The sky was mirrored in black puddles. The smell of putrefaction filled the air.

  Far to the south, near the port, I spotted scattered lights and thought I saw ships: dhows, three-masted vessels … above them more lights in a break in the clouds. Were they airplanes? Satellites? No, they were standing still. A chain of balloons? No, they were stars—a striking constellation. The Corona Borealis? Impossible. I didn’t know this constellation; I had never seen it: a red supergiant like Rigel—but brighter than Sirius or Capella—in the center, surrounded by a semicircle of seven bright young stars, which it wore around its neck like a sparkling piece of jewelry.