From EUR they had set out and now they were back in EUR.
Samurai remembered the afternoons of frantic consultations, the exchange of weapons, the thrill of putting on ski masks, the contact with the stock of the semiautomatic. With the money from their first armed robbery, they had gone out for dinner in the fancy restaurant on the fourteenth floor. The mythical Il Fungo. At this point, he was the only survivor of that band of heartless madmen. Now that he could go to Il Fungo whenever he felt like it, and be sure of getting a king’s reception, of being revered like a pasha, it still didn’t give him the hot excitement of those years. Years that he would never be able to get back.
Samurai was sad. And he wondered whether any of it had been worthwhile.
It was a bright, sunny morning. Two young hookers were taking turns baring their breasts, for the benefit of the groundskeepers.
Enough self-pity. There were other projects to get underway. There were other paths to explore. There was a whole life out there to pin down and possess. Enough is enough.
He headed back to his Smart Car, with the proud stride of a man without shadows, or who has decided, for once, not to have any.
Marco Malatesta was waiting for him, leaning on the car.
“I ought to shoot you right between the eyes.”
Samurai plunged his hands into the pockets of his Tom Ford leather jacket.
“The girl took it pretty hard, didn’t she? Well, that’s your fault. You need to tell women the truth. Maybe not always, and not all at once. But the important things, Marco. At least the important things.”
“You crossed a line, Samurai. This is something that concerns you and me. You should have left her out of this.”
“You’re the one who dragged her into it, not me. Anyway, I’m in agreement with you. War isn’t something the ladies should be involved in. Indeed, this morning you didn’t find Alice’s pretty little head on your desk, in Ponte Salario, did you?”
“Fuck yourself, Samurai. You’re not going to manage to win this one. Not this time. Your Great Project is going to be stillborn.”
Samurai smiled. He just loved laying all his cards on the table. He loved taking on an adversary worthy of respect. It was like going back to the old days. When things were clearer, black and white, and the street and the halls of power were still the place where men clashed and fought.
“The Great Project! Do you have any idea what this is going to mean for our Rome? Thousands of jobs, homes for the poor, a new level of prosperity.”
“Why don’t you let Spartaco Liberati spout that kind of bullshit? You’ve set up a feeding trough for every filthy pig in Rome, including the priests.”
“Cement is the soul of Rome, Colonel. And the priests, as you know, care deeply about all questions concerning the soul.”
“There’s a war, Samurai. And when there’s war, there’s no project. And you’re not going to be able to put a halt to this war.”
“War? What are you talking about? All I see is peace.”
“Look more carefully, Samurai. Weren’t you the one who always knew everything?”
“Once I was, maybe. Back when we were both on the same side.”
“I’ve never been on your side. We’re in two different armies, the two of us.”
The two of us. Us against them, the way it used to be. In spite of himself, Samurai felt a certain admiration for men like Malatesta. Rarae aves, very rare birds in the dirty sky far above the common servants of the state.
“But that’s where you’re wrong,” Samurai went on, patiently. “In the old days, the street dreamed of becoming just like you. We dreamed of normality, power, prosperity and comfort. And why not, of creating a better world.”
“Bullshit. You’re telling yourself a story that never happened.”
“But now,” Samurai resumed, in the same tone of voice, “you’re the ones who do everything you can to be like us. And you do an excellent job of it.”
Marco didn’t reply. He’d thought the same thing when he’d questioned Number Eight, after he’d survived the ambush laid for him by Paja and Fieno. He’d wondered whether “Us” and “Them” still made any sense. Whether the priests, Rapisarda, and Setola belonged to the same state as, say, de Candia. If they were the halls of power. And what about him? Where did Colonel Marco Malatesta really fit in? On which side?
Marco stepped aside and let Samurai walk past. But this time it was the bandit who remained where he was.
“You shouldn’t have it in for me. You and I belong to the same breed. The breed of men of order. We’re trying to keep the ship of state on a level keel, with its prow turned into the wind, in the midst of this Babylon that Rome has turned into.”
“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! The fish rots from the head,” Marco retorted.
Samurai threw his arms wide.
“Once again, with these Cartesian categories. The fish, the head . . . The world has changed, and I’m the first to say it’s a pity, but it’s changed. Have you ever read Zygmunt Bauman, by the way?”
And now it was Marco’s turn to burst out laughing. As if Keynes wasn’t enough. Now he’s throwing in Zygmunt Bauman, too!
“Say hi to Max for me,” he said, turning to leave with a sarcastic grin, “I haven’t seen him around in a while.”
Samurai stiffened. Marco understood that the ties between Samurai and the “philosopher” still remained to be explored, and when he got back to the office, he issued an order for an investigation into Farideh’s young boyfriend.
He called Alice over and over. Voicemail. She wasn’t answering his calls. Marco felt himself burning deep down when he got a call on his work line. Thierry was unmistakably worried.
“Did you send someone to the demonstration?”
“What demonstration are you talking about, sorry?”
“Where the hell are you? The apocalypse is being unleashed out there! Turn on the television, if you don’t believe me.”
Footage of clashes in Rome. Billowing clouds of smoke. An armored car under siege by demonstrators on Piazza San Giovanni.
He grabbed his helmet and handgun and raced toward his Bonneville.
He hadn’t talked about this with Alice. But if there was this big of a mess going on, she was certainly involved somehow.
XLVI
Under a magnificent bright sun, on an afternoon baking in the warmth of Indian summer, the little two-sided hot-air balloon with the morphing faces of the prime minister and the minister of the economy that transformed into vampires hung in midair over a dense carpet of humanity, bright and colorful, from which a chorus of voices rose into the air, echoing with chanted slogans. Alice had knotted her black North Face jacket around her waist, cursing that burden of Gore-Tex which, ultralight though it might be, still remained an inconvenience, and which she had stupidly brought along with her on that cloudless day. And so she was clad in the orange T-shirt that Diego had given her. “Get Mad as Hell!” it said on the T-shirt of the Rebel Dragons. It might not be particularly poetic, that was true. But it was very clear.
Alice stared ecstatically at the spectacle she was now part of, continuously snapping photos with her iPhone. During the night she’d had something similar to one of her old panic attacks. Eyes wide open, she had asked herself whether she shouldn’t give Marco another chance. She didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t felt that way for a long, long time. And the first decision no longer seemed like the right one to her. She had arrived at the demonstration tired and stressed out, almost without conviction. But what was happening around her verged on the incredible. The physical pleasure of community and action erased all doubts.
She couldn’t remember ever having seen anything like it. They’d done it. The event had gone viral. How many people could there be? Two hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? Diego’s eyes were gleaming. He handed her a Ceres cigarette
and showed her on his smartphone the latest update on La Repubblica’s live feed.
“More, there’s more of us than that. Police headquarters is talking about five hundred thousand. You understand, Alice? If they say half a million, then there must be twice as many of us. They’re not going to forget this October 15 anytime soon.”
It was almost three o’clock by now. She had trooped in behind a streamer—“Women, and That’s Enough”—that for more than an hour now had been struggling to get moving. And Piazza Esedra—why not, they continued to call it by its old name, not Piazza della Repubblica—couldn’t contain any more people. They still hadn’t gotten started when they heard that the truck of the “United Against the Recession” contingent, marching with FIOM, the metalworkers’ union, which was at the head of the procession, had almost reached the end of Via Cavour, close to Largo Corrado Ricci. She could barely make out the van of “San Precario,” St. Part-Time, with the steelworkers of Pomigliano, which was also stuck on Piazza dei Cinquecento. Her gaze came to rest on another streamer, “United for Global Change,” which officially declared war on the international regime of banks and bankers. She thought about Marco for a second: she wondered how he might have mocked that outsized target.
“Oh, there’s no way to even move here!” Diego objected irritatedly.
She too drew from their forced immobility not only an unbridled excitement, but also a sense of vulnerability. She knew that an overextended period of stasis never promises anything good. It wears you out. It poisons the blood.
For that matter, up till now she hadn’t seen a single uniformed officer. And that didn’t necessarily constitute a piece of good news. It seemed that riot police and Carabinieri had vanished into thin air. What the hell had become of them? She had seen them at work during the peaceful general rehearsal of the night before, on Via Nazionale, in front of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, where the Rebel Dragons had set up their Quechua tents for a night of Occupy Rome. Twelve hours before, police headquarters had shut off all points of access to the historical center in the direction of Piazza Venezia and Via dei Fori Imperiali. Barricades formed by armored police wagons and units in riot gear like some immense legion of heavy armored cavalry sealed off every aperture—from avenue to alleyway—between the Monti quarter, the Tritone Tunnel, and Via Barberini. Which is to say, the three symbolic gates leading in to the Forbidden City. To the Rome of the Palaces of Power. The Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, Palazzo Chigi, Palazzo Grazioli, the prime minister’s extremely private residence.
Sure, of course. Let them fuck themselves over completely by making the city inaccessible not only to the Indignados and to Occupy, but to everyone. A city that in its spectral silence would thus become unmistakable proof of the very things that they were shouting in the street. That the emperor really had no clothes, and that he was marshalling his troops to protect the palaces that had by now become nothing more than simulacra of an empty power. Empty and illegitimate, too, because held only by a few, and devoid of any true representative input. The city, the real city, the other city, would become theirs.
All the same, there was a problem. There most certainly was. Alice found herself face to face with it when “Women, and That’s Enough,” the group she had joined finally managed to move the first few yards in the direction of Piazza dei Cinquecento.
Alice recognized the Neri. The Black-bloc anarchists.
They were marching at a brisk gait, arriving from the direction of the Termini train station. The lead-gray hue of their sweatshirts, the heft of their combat boots, the backpacks and, especially, those damned helmets, fastened to their waists by carabiners, said everything about them that needed to be said, much more clearly than any watchword. Alice recognized the Piedmontese accent from the left-wing social centers of greater Turin, the Venetians of the No Dal Molin movement, and the unmistakable Salento dialect of the Neri from Lecce and Brindisi. All of them soon drowned out by the heavy, emphatic accent of those Romans from Ponte Marconi. The ones who went everywhere with their dogs and with whom she’d had a set-to the year before, on December 14, at Piazza del Popolo, when they’d called her a “little hipster” in the midst of a hail of molotov cocktails and torn-up cobblestones.
The Neri sliced into the procession like a hot knife into butter. Even worse, as if it belonged to them. Without encountering the slightest resistance and, above all, without having to push through any filter. The uniformed cops were elsewhere. Guarding the flanks of the procession were now only a few scattered platoons of city constables. And the local flatfeet, safe in the comfort of their squad cars, took great care not to ask that rising black tide arriving from the Termini station what the hell they thought they were doing marching around with helmets. It was easy to say that the procession took care of its own safety. Everyone knew that was bullshit. Even she knew it. Everyone knew that that afternoon no one was protecting anyone else. And no one was responsible for anyone other than themselves. They knew it. And the police knew it.
Alice thought that their progress down Via Cavour should have broken up and diluted the poisonous slime that had first insinuated itself and by now had taken firm possession of the center of the procession. But it turned out she was wrong. The Neri marched along, preceded by three cordons in the vanguard, behind which men and women continued to congregate in orderly files, as if in accordance with some long-planned synchronized set of movements. Also, the two tattered banners with the A of anarchy, which had been fluttering on Piazza dei Cinquecento and had clearly been meant as nothing more than a gathering point, like the umbrellas waved in the air by tour guides at the Colosseum, had since been rolled up and tucked away in backpacks. Another very bad sign.
The joy of Piazza Esedra had been swept away by a contagious wave of anxiety. The police and Carabinieri helicopters that were following from high above that river of humanity and sending aerial footage back to the monitors in the interservice control center at police headquarters and, at the same time, live onto Sky TV, were now hovering lower in a threatening way. The chop-chop-chop of the rotors formed a sinister background noise, which clumped together the voices and the music of that multitude which still believed in a cloudless afternoon.
Alice found Diego next to her, panting.
“I don’t like this, Alice, this is not good. The head of the procession has almost reached St. John Lateran, but the police are assembling at Largo Corrado Ricci. I’m afraid they want to break the procession in two.”
“But why?”
Diego indicated the Neri with a nod of his head. After that, it was only a matter of seconds.
Suburra, the ancient quarter of brothels described by Petronius Arbiter, was at their feet. Via dei Serpenti on the right, Via del Colosseo and the sacred hill of Fagutal Jupiter on the left. And nearby, the very same mezzanine apartment that a cabinet minister discovered had been purchased for him without his knowledge, now as celebrated as many an immortal pasquinade, if not more.
Suburra, the eternal image of an irredeemable city. Home to a violent and desperate plebeian mob that centuries ago had become a bourgeoisie, now the city’s geographic center. Because it was and still remained its beating heart.
Suburra, the origin of a millennial contagion, an irreversible genetic mutation.
That was the place. How could they have failed to think of it before now.
“Hey, you pieces of shit!”
Like the whistling through the air that announces the coming blow, the shout of the Neri preceded the tremendous crash of a street sign ripped out of the ground and now used to shatter the plate glass windows of a temp agency. Now the ski-masked demonstrators had put on their helmets and pulled their hoodies over them, and they were moving like Bolshoi ballerinas. In a nihilistic dance of fire, stones, and steel ball bearings.
Alice and her “Women, and That’s Enough” reeled in horror. Enveloped in the greasy smoke of burning car tires and fuel, at le
ast three parked cars were in flames, while through the front door of a supermarket the spoils of a sudden proletarian expropriation had begun to rain out onto the asphalt. Boxes of corn flakes, cans of tuna, bottles of water and pop-top cans of Neri Chinotto, cans of Scottish smoked salmon. On the opposite side of the street, squeezed into the cramped space of a locked street door, Alice started to scream at the top of her lungs.
“Fascists! Fa-a-ascists! You’re a bunch of Fascists!”
A man in a ski mask stared at her for a few seconds. And for a brief moment he lowered the slingshot he was about to use to fire gleaming steel ball bearing into the sign outside a bank.
“Go fuck yourself, bitch!”
Now Alice was weeping. She knew the magnetic force of street violence, its capacity to overwhelm the meaning, the smell, the music, and the words of those who had peacefully occupied that street. She had curled up on the asphalt, with her head bowed over her legs, and she could no longer bring herself to behold the spectacle of destruction, though she couldn’t keep herself from hearing the deafening sound of it. She tried to get out of the damned doorway, closed tight behind her, and realized that she was alone now. Diego had vanished. The women of “Women, and That’s Enough” had disappeared with him. A middle-aged man with a CGIL union handkerchief around his neck was dripping blood from his scalp. He’d tried to get between the Neri and an ATM, until a steel bar cracked his head open.
Where on earth were the cops?
What were they doing?
Why the fuck were they just standing by and watching?
She tried to find reassurance in someone’s gaze. In a gesture of reaction. But there was nothing. The Neri were being left free to act as they pleased. She spoke to the guy who had appeared ten steps away or so. He had a bandanna tied over his nose that covered mouth and chin, a light-colored cotton jacket with the hood pulled up. And he kept pointing his Olympus digital videocamera toward the middle of the scene with slowed, careful movements. Movements that seemed impervious to the adrenaline of those moments. He was no doubt a journalist.
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