In a Heartbeat (15 page)

She came closer to have a better look at me. The skin of her throat was pearled with sweat and her eyes were two pieces of coal. ‘I don’t believe you.’ Her expression cracked. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘I have never seen you before. I don’t know who you are.’

She tightened her lip and then she slapped me. I didn’t react. ‘Tell me who I am.’

‘Salima.’

She slapped me again, harder this time. ‘What’s my name?’

‘Salima Fares, dammit!’

Another slap. ‘What’s my name?’

My ears rang, I blacked out for a second and my head spun.

Sally.

‘Sally?’ I said.

She took a step back as if she had been hit.

‘Is your name Sally?’

She bent over, coughing. She then pushed me away and shoved a bathroom door open to a rusty squat toilet with no windows. She knelt down and her body heaved and retched while she vomited.

Sally
. Her name came out of nowhere and yet I knew that it was right. I knelt next to her and held her forehead like I did at times for my old man when he came home drunk, which was all of the time.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘I’m … I’m OK … ’

Cough. Spit. Retch.

‘Indigestion?’

She pushed me away and got up. She got a towel from her bag and dried her mouth.

‘Yeah, sure. Indigestion that’s been going on for three months.’

‘You should go to a doctor.’

‘I’m pregnant, you dick, and you should know that already!’

‘I told you that I don’t remember a damn thing.’

The sudden realisation was like something that came from the top of my head and shook down to my feet, sliding coldly down my spine.
No, Jesus Christ, no!
I thought before I asked but I knew that the answer was a yes. ‘Is it … ?’

‘Yes it is, it’s your son.’

I fell on the floor.
Shit!

‘Is it normal? Is it a boy?’

She nodded. ‘Are you crazy? Why wouldn’t it be normal?’

‘With the kind of luck that I’ve been having recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if the baby had two heads.’

Her expression was:
it could be true
. My expression was:
I’m going to kill myself
.

‘This time, I’m going to smoke and you can slam me. I need to.’

‘Just one.’

‘I’m a father.’ I thought that I was too young to be a father, then I put myself up to date. I was almost too old. ‘Excuse me if I ask; do you want to have it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course, did you already tell me?’

‘Shit, Santo.’ She took a step closer to me. ‘I thought that … I thought that you’d left me.’

‘What kind of name is Sally?’ She took another step forward.

‘You gave it to me. It was something between us.’

‘Your name is the first thing that I have remembered in these three days.’

Another step. ‘Is that all?’

A door opened in a part of my brain, and it had closed straight away.

‘I think so. How long have we been seeing each other?’

‘For about a year.’

‘And you already told me about the kid. How did I take it?

‘Badly. We argued a lot then you told me that you needed some time. You disappeared. You didn’t answer my calls. I waited for two weeks.’

‘Until this morning.’

‘I woke up in a bad mood.’

‘Me too.’ I threw the cigarette in the toilet. ‘Have I been here before?

‘No.’ Another step.

‘What is this place?’

‘This is our cultural centre. Downstairs there’s a prayer room and a playroom. This part, however, is mine. It’s where I give lessons.’

‘Judo?’

‘Karate.’

‘Why?’

‘Because these girls should learn how to defend themselves. The more extreme families seize their documents to keep them home, or they get beaten for wearing western-style clothing or even if they speak with other males. A girl who lives near here had her feet burned with an iron by her father who tried to keep her from going out.’

‘You should change religion.’

‘Religion has nothing to do with it. It’s ignorance.’

The last step brought her within a centimetre from me. I raised my face. Salima was beautiful and frightening at the same time with what she carried inside her. I reached out to take her hand.

Then the children began to scream.

5

When we looked into the gym, it seemed like the end of the world had come. The children were running everywhere, screaming and crying. A monster that looked like a robot was at the door with a semi-automatic in his hand. The robot yelled. ‘Stay still and calm. Where are your parents? Where are they?’ He repeated it again in French.

Salima ran into the middle of her students. I was paralysed. What the hell was going on? Aliens attacking? Daleks? Behind the first robot appeared a second and a third, and it was only then that I understood that they were men covered in full body armour. They also wore black balaclavas and helmets with dark visors. It was the Italian SWAT team, the Carabinieri Special Forces.

One of them walked up to Salima and grabbed her by the arm. ‘You shut these kids up, lady! You understand?’

I was scared that Salima would do one of her moves, but she was smarter than that. She didn’t fight back. Outside a helicopter thumped, hovering over the building. Blades of light cut across the windows. The walls shook.

Salima yelled something in Arabic. The girls shouted louder. I didn’t understand a thing. The noise from the helicopter was unbearable. Then pieces of glass started to fly though the room. A SWAT officer saw me and pointed the rifle. ‘On the ground, now!’

More officers came from the stairs. The helicopter hovered. The children screamed and cried. Through the large windows, balaclavas and gun muzzles poked from outside. There were radios, sirens, explosions, commotion and screaming.

‘I said get down!’

I complied.

He ran to me and patted me down, then ripped out my wallet and took out my ID. Another tied my wrists behind my back with something. They weren’t handcuffs but they worked just as well. The blood stopped flowing to my fingers.

‘What the fuck is going on?’

The SWAT officer pulled me to my feet. ‘Move.’

Salima didn’t receive the same treatment as me, no cuffs, maybe because she was a woman, but they dragged her with me down the stairs.

‘The children!’ she said, trying to go back. Another SWAT officer pushed her back. It must have been the confusion of the moment, but I finally reacted.

‘Hey, you piece of shit!’ I yelled but as soon as I moved in his direction the one behind me hit me, in the back with the rifle butt. He probably didn’t mean to hit me so hard. In the end, I was a well-dressed white male in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I was on the edge of the step and I lost my balance. With my hands tied I couldn’t grab onto anything and I fell against the handrail, smashing it.

I was inside Oreste’s. Wonderful, nothing’s changed. The dirty tables, the wasted patrons who try their best to keep their eyes open, the drunken housewives, the rancid stench of fried food …

Oreste reaches out from behind the bar to say hello. Wow, Oreste’s old. His moustache is white and he’s lost his hair. ‘Hey, look who’s here! Trafficante!’ he yells. ‘Where’ve you been all this time? C’mon, I’ll make you my special cocktail.’

Oreste slides me a glass filled with a brown liquid. I smell it, the odour is disgusting, I cough, and it tastes like …

*

Ammonia.

‘Good, breathe.’

I coughed again. I opened my eyes and saw a paramedic in an orange jacket. I tried to get up but the she kept me down. ‘Wait. You fell hard.’

My head hurt and I felt like vomiting. I was lying on a stretcher. Around me was the sound of yelling, boots and broken glass. I leaned on my elbow and a spasm of pain drilled into my head.

‘I said lay down,’ she repeated.

‘Get the hell off me!’

I tried again and staggered to my feet. The stretcher where I was laid out was in the middle of the blind alley. A group of cops stuck out from a van with mounted lights, lit up as if it was daytime. Along both sides, Arabs were lined up with their faces against the wall. There were at least fifty of them; their hands were held back with white plastic ties. That’s what they had used. I looked at my wrists; they were crossed with red marks. They hurt almost as bad as my head. I touched it. I had a lump on my forehead as big as a melon. Bastards.

The SWAT team shook down the Arabs one at a time, keeping them up with kicks and slaps. Some of them had bloody faces; many of them were in shirts and T-shirts, and a couple were shoeless. One SWAT officer looked at me when I stood up. He had my ID in his hand and gave it back to me. ‘You may leave now, sir. Let this one through!’ he said to his colleagues.

‘Where’s Salima?’ I didn’t see her against the wall.

‘Sir, I said that you can leave, so get out of here!’

He took me by the arm and dragged me out of the alley. There were more people. Women, a sea of them. The call centre was under guard with more members of the SWAT team outside. The street was full of armoured cars and police cruisers; the restaurants had pulled down their metal blinds. Bodies hit against me and voices spoke every language in the world except my own. There was also a fire engine with the ladder leaning against the window of Salima’s building. The SWAT team was going in and out. I approached a woman who was covered with a veil that exposed only her eyes and the tips of her toes. ‘Have you seen Salima? Salima, do you understand?’

She shook her head and went away. I tried again and again and again, but no one understood me. An Italian man came up to me. I saw him arguing with a SWAT officer who blocked access to the alleyway. He was about forty, wearing a sheepskin coat and round glasses. ‘Excuse me, are you the man who was taken out by stretcher?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘I need to talk to you for five minutes.’

A squad car of regular cops without body armour spread into the crowd, which immediately opened for them and closed behind them.

The guy watched them pass. ‘I can’t believe what they’re doing here.’ We pushed through the crowd until we reached a small space in the street in front of a closed café. I sat down on a concrete block used to prevent cars from parking there. It had been painted over to look like a penguin. My head pulsated along with my shoulder and I still had the smell of ammonia (
my cocktail
) in my nose. I reached for my cigarettes but they weren’t there. Damn. I went from one nightmare to another.

‘It’s an anti-terrorism operation,’ the guy said. ‘I don’t think that this is only happening in Milan.’

I thought of the Red Brigades before remembering the present time. ‘Are they looking for … suicide bombers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are there any here?’ Ragiul and his friends didn’t seem like the type but you never know.

‘Who can say? Usually, they find someone with a bit of hash in their pockets or some illegal immigrants without permits. They arrest them, keep them in jail, and then move them to a detention centre for a few months. Afterwards they deport them. Tomorrow you’ll read in the newspapers that the operation was a success.’

‘Does this happen often?’ I asked.

‘It’s the war.’

This war sucked. I wasn’t used to having it in my own backyard. A line of Arabs were escorted into a carabinieri van with tinted windows. Jail and then the detention centre. I wasn’t exactly sure what the latter was but I just hoped that it wouldn’t happen to me.

‘A man from the Islamic Cultural Centre called me,’ he continued. ‘When I got here the SWAT team had already gone in. Not that it would have mattered much if I’d got here first.’ He spoke calmly but beneath it all he was as angry as a hell. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself; my name is Mirko Bastoni.’

‘Santo Denti. Do you know Salima?’

‘Fares? Of course, she’s one of the activists here.’

‘Is she OK? We were together before I went flying down the stairs.’

‘She’s fine. She’s in a courtyard with the children. They’re keeping them there until they finish searching the apartments.’

‘Is she going to be deported?’

‘No, she’s got a visa.’

At least she’s got that. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’

‘I’m a lawyer. You were assaulted and Salima said that you were present when they came in and scared the children. Your testimony could be useful in our attempts to release the detainees.’

‘Will it make a difference?’

He smiled. ‘Sometimes you do something because it’s the right thing to do, not because it will make a difference. Can I count on you?’