Three-Card Monte (10 page)

Yes, I was right. Do I have any choice? More importantly, do I have anything else to do?

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. As I was saying, we'll have to make some choices. Before anything else—”

“Excuse me, Inspector,” Signora Ricciardi cut in—from her voice, Massimo recognized her as the woman who had phoned him six times a day for the whole month preceding the conference, haggling over the cost of everything and making his life a misery—“but I need you to explain something to me. Signor Viviani here”—she pointed at him with her thumb, and her voice turned acid—“also worked at the conference, serving during the coffee breaks. Why isn't he a suspect? Not that I have anything against him, let's be clear about that, I just wanted to know.”

“As far as I know, Signor Viviani was not acquainted with the victim, or with anybody else present at the conference,” Fusco replied, forcing himself to be patient. “In addition, Signor Viviani has already given ample proof of his usefulness to the police in a previous investigation, and his observational skills would be a great asset to me.”

Take that, bitch. First he treats me kindly, and then he defends me. He's quite something today, is Fusco.

“All right, then. Now . . . ” To cut things short, Fusco pressed the button on the intercom.

“Yes, sir?” Officer Galan intoned.

“Galan, we're almost ready to start. When you see the professor out, wait five minutes and then bring in the first of the witnesses.” Fusco switched off the intercom. “As I was saying, we don't have much time and we'll have to make some choices. Since the victim is Japanese, we'll begin with the Japanese. There are about twenty of them. It'll be necessary to—Why are you laughing?”

“I'm sorry,” Professor Marchi said, having indeed let out a little puff that had sounded like a stifled laugh. “It's just that it occurred to me you may have a few problems questioning the Japanese.”

“Why?” Fusco asked, with a nervous smile. “Are they going to hit me?”

“Good heavens, no,” Marchi replied. “But, you see, some of them are very old. Their English is terrible. In general, the Japanese don't speak English well. To be honest, they speak it even worse than the Italians, and you know how bad they are . . . In addition, for Japanese of a certain age, English was the language of the enemy. To be honest, in some cases you might not understand a word.”

Fusco gave Massimo a questioning look. He received a positive response.

“It's true,” Massimo said, “from what little I've heard, the Japanese in general are hard to understand. But if you don't mind, I'd like to suggest a solution.”

“Go on.”

“Among the younger Japanese, there are some who speak excellent English. I heard them during the coffee breaks. One in particular. We could ask him to work with us for the most difficult cases. It'll be like a relay. I'll translate from Italian to English, and then he'll translate from English to Japanese, and vice versa.”

Fusco muttered something, then slowly began to nod. “All right. Let's do it. What's this fellow's name?”

 

Koichi Kawaguchi was nervous. Very nervous. Firstly, he was nervous because he liked Italian espresso very much, and had not taken into account the fact that the intensity of the flavor went hand in hand with the concentration of caffeine, which was why after three days the ration of six cups a day he'd been sticking to, apart from keeping him awake with his eyes wide open two nights in a row, was starting to give him a touch of tachycardia and hands as sweaty as sponges. Secondly, he had been summoned to the police station together with all his countrymen for some reason he was unable to ascertain, but which some maintained was connected with the death of Professor Asahara. Thirdly, they had called him aside after a while and explained to him that, in collaboration with another person, he would have to help the Italian police to question some of his colleagues who had difficulties with English. Although from one point of view this had filled him with pride, it hadn't helped to make him any calmer. In a way, singled out from his compatriots like this, he felt a bit of a traitor, even though he was aware he wasn't doing anything wrong. Last but not least, the other person was the man with a face like a Taliban fighter whom Koichi had seen first behind the counter during the coffee break, as if he were a waiter, and who was now present at the police interviews.

Putting two and two together, Koichi had become convinced that Massimo belonged to the Secret Service, and that he had been keeping some of the conference delegates under surveillance for quite a while. And this was the thing that made him most nervous of all.

 

“Did you know Professor Asahara?” Fusco asked, taking his eyes off Professor Watanabe and reading the prepared question from a sheet of paper.

I bet you did, Massimo thought.

Masayoshi Watanabe was a small man in his sixties, no more than five feet tall, impeccably dressed in gray and as stiff as a pole, with a motionless, rigid, contemptuous expression, vaguely reminiscent of an Indian chief with an ulcer. His whole person gave off a mixture of moral rigor, severity, and irritation that, in spite of his ridiculous height, made you uncomfortable just to look at him.

The question was turned into English by Massimo and reformulated by Koichi in Japanese with one or two extra bows by way of punctuation. Watanabe, apparently without taking his upper teeth away from his lower teeth, replied in a kind of rapid, monotone growl composed almost exclusively of consonants, in which Massimo thought he made out the word “Asahara.” Koichi carried the reply back from Kyoto to London, and Massimo accompanied it from England to Pineta:

“He says Professor Asahara had honored him with his friendship for many years, and that his death is a terrible loss to science and to all who knew him.”

The interview went on like this for a while: Fusco asked his questions in an impersonal voice, Watanabe growled sentences that seemed for all the world like complicated and highly contemptuous insults, and Koichi passed on very polite and appropriate answers that Massimo translated faithfully for the inspector.

After a few minutes of this curious wireless telephone, Fusco said, “On the first day of the conference, the victim referred to the contents of his computer, saying with a great deal of certainty that the said contents would be able to destroy you. This has been ascertained thanks to the statement of a witness. I quote verbatim the statement of Professor Antonius Snijders: ‘In my laptop, I have something that will destroy Professor Watanabe.' Do you recall these words?”

“No,” Massimo said after the usual interlude, noting that Watanabe's face was becoming even stiffer.

“Would you care to speculate as to what these particular contents could have been, or what subject they might have concerned?”

“No,” Massimo repeated, trusting to Koichi, but unable to help noticing that the “no” uttered by Watanabe the second time, while definitively negative in substance, had seemed a little clearer and longer in form than the previous one.

“Given the circumstances, I must ask you if you have ever had any reason to wish for the death of Professor Asahara.”

Massimo translated, and Koichi looked at him over his glasses with a worried air. Don't make me ask this question, his nervous face said in Esperanto. There was a moment of embarrassed silence, made all the heavier by the fact that, as far as Massimo could tell, Watanabe had understood the question perfectly well.

“Please translate,” Fusco said, somewhat impatiently.

“
Watanabe gakucho
. . . ” Koichi began, bowing as low as a skier, but was silenced by Watanabe with what amounted to an order, curt and peremptory, uttered in an English as bad as it was threatening:

“No nid transration!”

There was indeed no need of translation. Either of the question, or of the answer.

In the two minutes that followed, according to what Koichi, still bowing like an oscilloscope, passed on to Massimo, a volcano in the shape of Watanabe explained, in a tone that overcame all language barriers, the many ways in which this question offended him, as a professor and as a Japanese, concluding that he had already being insulted enough that morning and that he had no intention of answering any more stupid questions. With this, the acute phase of the eruption being over, the Japanese luminary turned and left the room without even closing the door behind him, leaving the heterogeneous quartet of inquisitors in a state of visible embarrassment.

“Frankly, I'd have preferred it if he'd tried to hit me,” Fusco said in a tone of forced indifference after a few seconds, without waiting for Massimo's translation. “Galan, since the door's already open, go get the next one, and God help us!”

 

The following witness, according to Fusco's schedule and as confirmed vocally by the person himself, was Dr. Shin-Ichi Kubo, in other words one of Asahara's three close colleagues at the conference, being a member of the same department as the dead man. The thirty-five-year-old Kubo, too, was impeccably dressed in gray, but unlike Watanabe (apart from being taller than a night table), did not keep his eyes fixed on Fusco but stared down at the floor, as if he did not have the strength to look up. It was obvious, though, from the bags under his eyes and his hangdog look, that Asahara's death had been a terrible blow to him. He too was asked the ritual questions, which he answered simply, still looking at the floor as if reading the answers from the tiles. Of course he knew Professor Asahara: he had been a colleague of his for three years, ever since he had moved to Waseda, the university in Tokyo where he worked. No, he didn't know that the professor had had myasthenia. No, Asahara did not suffer from depression, or at least had never shown any signs of it. Yes, he knew that Asahara had said those words: they had been reported to him by another colleague, Goro Kimura. He had not heard them himself, because he had not been present at the morning coffee break: since he was supposed to be giving rather an important presentation on Wednesday, he had stayed in the conference hall with his laptop during all of the coffee breaks, finishing his presentation and going over it. No, he didn't know what Professor Asahara had been referring to when he had said those words.

“Now, Dr. Kubo,” Fusco said, with a hint of kindness that struck Massimo, “I must ask you to make one last effort to cooperate. We have here Professor Asahara's laptop, which we got from his room. At this point, given the scarcity of clues, we have to analyze its contents. We need a person who knew the dead man and who can help us to analyze them, in the presence of our experts.”

Here, Fusco was downplaying the fact that the large, efficient group of people suggested by the term “our experts” consisted, sadly, of a single person, Officer Turturro, who had joined the police after two years studying computer engineering.

Having said this, Fusco leaned down and picked up a case from which he extracted a brand-new laptop, which he placed on the desk while Massimo and Koichi were translating. Kubo listened to Koichi's translation with a frown, and after looking at the laptop turned in surprise to Koichi and quickly said something. Before the translation arrived, Massimo had the feeling that he already knew what he would have to tell Fusco, and, unusually, the feeling turned out to be accurate.

“He says this isn't the late Professor Asahara's computer.”

Fusco gave him a sidelong look. “How can he say that? We took it from the dead man's room. Of course it's his.”

After a brief Italo-Anglo-Japanese exchange, which didn't actually seem necessary given that Kubo seemed to understand the questions perfectly well in English, Massimo was able to give a more comprehensive explanation:

“Dr. Kubo says this isn't the laptop he always saw Asahara work on, which he brought with him to Italy. This one is a different model.”

“I understand. But I don't see why this one couldn't also be his. We found it in his room. I know there are sometimes thefts from hotel rooms. But those are thefts, not swaps. We can try turning it on anyway, and seeing what's in it. If this computer was the dead man's, Dr. Kubo here might be able to recognize the contents.”

There followed a medium-length exchange.

“Dr. Kubo says we can try, and that if the computer is Asahara's, it can easily be ascertained. Apparently, the professor always used the same password for every computer he had access to, and Dr. Kubo, just like all the other members of the group, knows it. But he still maintains that Professor Asahara usually worked on another laptop, the one he referred to before, and that he probably meant that one when he spoke those words during the coffee break. He says that if you haven't found it, it means it's been taken.”

“I understand, I understand,” Fusco replied. “I'd already gotten there myself. I know perfectly well what it means if there was another laptop and we haven't found it. We'll look for it. As if this whole mess wasn't already complicated enough, all we needed was for someone to steal the computer. In the meantime, though, we have this one, and that's what we have to start with. Will you at least give me the satisfaction of switching it on and seeing if we find anything?”

Fusco wasn't completely wrong. Massimo waited a few moments, then, given that for some mysterious reason everybody seemed to be expecting him to be the one to switch on the computer, he took it, opened it, and pressed the
on
button. The object reacted with an irritable beep, then started humming softly while strings of tiny characters appeared one after another on the screen, so quickly as to make any attempt to read them impossible.

While the laptop completed its reawakening, Massimo helped Kubo to describe to Fusco the model and make of the missing computer. Then, going back to the computer screen, he saw a message in English stating that the machine was unable to start correctly, implicitly accusing the user of not having provided it with all the drivers necessary for it to work, and suggesting to the user that he should look into this and do something about it, because—this wasn't written, but could easily be inferred between the lines—if it didn't work, this was certainly not the fault of the machine.