The Silence of the Wave (14 page)

Good. No lies. All true, but without specific facts, keeping away from sharp corners, avoiding touching the points that made him scream with pain.

“In a way, you were an actor too.”

Roberto reflected on the exact significance of that phrase.

“Yes,” he said at last. “In a way, I was an actor too.”

“Tell me some stories about your work. I’m really curious.”

Roberto was about to say that it was better if he didn’t, that now wasn’t the time, that it was all in the past and wasn’t worth dredging up. Instead he said “all right” and started talking.

“It was the early nineties, I was working in Milan in those days. I was doing normal detective work, no undercover operations. We had to do an ambient.”

“What does that mean?”

“An ambient wiretap. It means we had to bug a guy’s home.”

“Why?”

“He was a big-time ecstasy dealer. When you have to do an ambient, you always have the same problem. How to get into the guy’s apartment, or office, or warehouse, or car, and plant the bugs without him noticing. At that time we often used a trick that’s now been discontinued. In the sense that after a while word got out and nobody fell for it anymore.”

“What trick?”

“We’d get in touch with the phone company and ask them to block the line, the person would call for help, we’d show up dressed as engineers, and use the pretext of checking to find out the cause of the breakdown to plant the bug. We’d install it in the phone because it was easier to hide it there and activate it, but it would pick up everything, not just phone calls.”

“You really did things like that?” she said, smiling and leaning forward across the table.

Roberto nodded and also smiled.

* * *

The line was blocked. The dealer asked for assistance. A few hours later Roberto and a colleague showed up at his apartment with their uniforms and their phone company badges.

“Good day to you, signore, is it you who called for technical assistance?”

He was a plump man in a tight-fitting sweat suit, with full lips, not much hair, small, suspicious eyes, and the air of someone confident he can handle every situation. He lived in a two-room apartment filled with cheap furniture. There was a smell of mustiness, cigarettes, and sweat.

“I called, yes. This fucking phone has been dead since this morning.”

The other carabiniere—his name was Filomeno, not a name you’d forget in a hurry—picked up the phone, tried to dial a number, unscrewed the receiver, pretended to examine the contents, and took apart the socket. He was waiting for the right moment to install the bug, but the dealer hadn’t taken his eyes off him.

“You don’t think I’m being bugged, do you?” the dealer asked at a certain point, while the two carabinieri were still pretending to be busy with their technical operations.

We’d like to bug you, Roberto thought, but if you don’t do something else for a few seconds we can’t put the fucking bug in. It was at that moment that the idea came to him. “It’s possible,” he said circumspectly.

He could feel the other carabiniere’s eyes on him: he must be wondering if his colleague had gone mad.

“And how can I find out?”

Roberto looked at him with the expression of someone making up his mind if he can trust the person he is talking to.

“Usually you can’t, but …”

“But?”

“In theory we could check. It’s illegal, though, and very risky.”

“I could pay you.”

Roberto let a few more seconds pass, as if he were weighing up the pros and cons.

“How much?” asked the other carabiniere, who by now had cottoned on to the game.

“One hundred and fifty thousand now and one hundred and fifty thousand when you give me the answer.”

Roberto shook his head.

“Three hundred thousand to be split between the two of us? To risk prison? Don’t even think about it.”

“How much do you want?”

“Five hundred thousand now and five hundred thousand after we’ve checked.”

The dealer looked first at Roberto, then at Filomeno, then again at Roberto.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” he said finally, in the tone of someone who knows men and knows that everyone has a price. “This is how you supplement your income, isn’t it?”

Then he went into his bedroom to get the money. By the time he came back, two minutes later, the bug had already been planted. Five hundred thousand lire in notes of various nominations—clearly the proceeds of his dealing—changed hands, later to be recorded as confiscated property. In the afternoon Roberto dropped by to give him the answer. The line was working again and he could rest easy: there weren’t any bugs.

Not only could he rest easy, he could talk in peace to the customers who came to see him at home, Roberto thought as he left with another five hundred thousand lire in crumpled banknotes.

The rest of the investigation was easy. It only took two weeks of wiretaps and a bit of physical surveillance to arrest the plump man in possession of a few thousand doses ready for sale in clubs in the city and the province.

* * *

“I could listen to these stories for hours,” Emma said when he had finished. “You liked doing that work, didn’t you?”

More or less the same question as the doctor. Except that this time it didn’t make him uncomfortable.

“Actually, investigative work can be quite boring. You spend hours listening to phone calls, transcribing
conversations, watching the movements of someone who doesn’t do a damn thing all day, or maybe scouring records to find out all you can about the suspects, which was the thing I personally hated the most. But then, of course, there are moments when you think you wouldn’t like to do any other kind of job in the world.”

And other moments when you wonder if it’s all worth it
. The sentence materialized in his head but did not transfer to his voice.

Emma covered her mouth to stifle a yawn.

“Maybe we should call it a night,” Roberto said. “It’s getting late.”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry. I wasn’t yawning out of boredom. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all, but I really don’t want to call it a night. How would you feel about going for a ride? Spring is here, let’s take my motorbike and see a little of Rome by night.”

“You ride a motorbike?”

“Only from time to time these days. I used to use it a lot more. There are loads of things I used to do and never do now, or hardly ever. But tonight, with this air, seems like the right time. What do you say?”

I had a great bike once too.

A really great bike it was. And I did some really stupid things with a group of idiots like me. We’d go out on the autostrada at night and take our bikes up to a hundred and twenty miles an hour, sometimes even faster. I also got into some crazy chases on my bike
when I worked in robbery. I could have crashed at any moment during those rides or those chases. But it never crossed my mind. Ever. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Death didn’t exist.

But then I started to feel afraid of everything. I’d never thought about it so clearly as I did at that moment. I started to feel afraid of death just when I stopped caring about my life. I stopped riding a motorbike. I stopped doing a lot of things. When you ride a motorbike—the way I rode it—you’re always very close to the edge. A moment before, you’re all-powerful, invincible, a moment later you’re a lifeless body, a broken doll, with your eyes open and your mouth half-open in surprise.

I had a great bike once too.

Roberto thought all these things simultaneously. He shuddered and took a deep breath.

“All right, let’s go.”

Emma came out of the garage on her bike, with her helmet already on her head. She had another one for Roberto, hanging from the handlebars.

“I hope it fits you,” she said, pointing to it.

Roberto put on the helmet with a certain effort, got on, gripped the sides of the saddle, and smelled the aroma of Emma’s hair. Then they set off.

Emma rode with confidence, communicating a sense of composure. She wasn’t going fast but gave the impression she could do so at any moment and still keep control of the vehicle.

They sailed smoothly through the streets, and the bike, at that speed, was almost silent. It wove easily between the cars, rounded the bends, and on the darkest corners seemed to swallow the night in its headlight.

Every now and again, when they stopped at traffic lights, Emma would say something, but Roberto couldn’t make out the words. He held on tight, looking at the
streets as they passed by without recognizing them. He barely noticed, at a certain point, that they were crossing the Tiber, leaving the lights of Castel Sant’Angelo on their right. They stopped about ten minutes later and Roberto got off the bike with the feeling that it had been his first time. In a way it really was, he thought, looking around. They were on the Janiculum Hill.

The calm roar of the fountain. A smell of cut grass and unknown flowers. Not many cars. A reassuring blur of lights in the distance. A small pack of stray dogs walking slowly, calmly, following their leader into the gap beneath a flight of steps, to be swallowed up by the city glittering below.

Looking at the dogs, Roberto thought about all the sleepless hours he had spent walking the streets, smoking. Plenty of stray dogs then, along with seagulls, the last customers leaving late-night restaurants, policemen and carabinieri, street cleaners, vans carrying newspapers hot off the press, then the silence of the hour when there really is nobody about, then the first people emerging from their homes and running in the cold and dark, then the first people coming out to go to work, and then all the others, and then the day, when hiding is more difficult.

“Sorry, but is this a cliché?” she asked.

Roberto shook himself.

“Is what a cliché?”

“I don’t know. Coming here …”

“I’m going to tell you something you won’t believe.”

“Go on.”

“This is only the second time in my life that I’ve been here.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe you. How is that possible?”

He shrugged. There were cities in the world where he had spent just a few weeks, but which he knew much better than Rome.

“Let me tell you something else.”

“All right,” she said, with the expression of someone embarking on a game that is likely to be full of surprises.

“I’ve never been inside the Coliseum and I’ve never visited the Forum. Actually, I’ve visited hardly any of the famous places in Rome.”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“That’s not possible. People come from all over the world just to see those places. You live a few hundred yards away and you’ve never been there.”

It didn’t seem so important to Roberto. Or maybe it was, but he wasn’t capable of distinguishing important things from those that were less so.

“That’s quite unacceptable. I’ll take you there one of these days. We’ll take the bike one sunny Saturday afternoon and do
Roman Holiday
in reverse.”

“Roman holiday? How do you mean?”

“The movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”

Roberto had never seen it, but knew vaguely what it was about and lied with a nonchalant gesture. Of course he had seen it, for heaven’s sake, even though it was a long time ago and he could remember hardly anything about it.

As he told the lie, it struck him that he couldn’t remember most of the movies he had seen in his life. Was there a difference between never having seen a movie, visited a place, or read a book, and having seen it, visited it, or read it and remembering nothing about it?

“And now that we’ve mentioned it: they say I look like Audrey Hepburn. I tend not to pay too much attention to that, but the fact that you haven’t yet noticed does annoy me a bit.”

Roberto looked at her and didn’t see anything that reminded him of Audrey Hepburn. But he lied again and said yes, of course, how could he not have noticed, there was a definite resemblance.

“That used to make me so happy when I was a little girl. It seemed like a sign from fate, that I was predestined.”

Emma’s words hung in the air for a long time over the fountain and then were swallowed up by the noise of the water.

“Who’s your son with right now?”

“His grandmother, who’s always happy when I ask
her to look after him. Actually, Giacomo’s quite big now and I could leave him on his own, but I can’t get used to the idea that he’s growing up so quickly. In many ways he’s much older than his age. The books he reads, the music he listens to, the things he writes. Even the things he says. When I can get him to speak.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a very quiet boy, very introverted. It isn’t easy to talk to him.”

She seemed about to add something, but at the last moment held back, as if an unexpected thought had stopped her in mid-flow. She made an impatient gesture with her hand.

“Anyway, I was telling you about my mother. She was pleased when I asked her to stay with Giacomo, because I almost never go out in the evening and she’s worried about me, because I’m alone, I don’t have a boyfriend, or a partner, whatever you want to call it. I don’t think we ever stop worrying about our children. Sometimes the thought of that scares me. We want to protect them from everything, but we can’t do that forever.”

We want to protect them.

Our children.

Dizziness.

Calm down. Everything’s under control. Calm down.

Listen to her voice. Concentrate on her voice and breathe.

Calm down.

“Giacomo gets on well with his grandmother. Less with his grandfather. My mother’s still young, my father’s quite a bit older than her. They’re both doctors—he’s retired now and she’s still working. He isn’t aging well. He was a handsome man—actually, he still is—and he can’t bear the thought of old age. He cheated on her lots of times and she knew. I’ve often wondered why she stayed with him, and I’ve never found an answer. Or rather, I’ve found it and I don’t like it, so I try not to think about it. Now the positions are reversed: she’s the one who has someone else, a married man. She doesn’t flaunt it, but she doesn’t do anything to hide it either. She lies, but without worrying too much whether or not her lies are believable, without making too much of an effort not to be found out. Actually, I think my father knows all about it and just pretends he doesn’t. Because he’s afraid that if he says something she may leave him. She’s kind to him, she takes care of him, and they still sometimes go out together. But the whole power balance has changed, and now my father is the weaker of the two. Life can be pitiless.”