Three-Card Monte (11 page)

“Something wrong?” Fusco asked, seeing that Massimo had started beating the space bar convulsively, as he always did at home when his computer refused to cooperate.

“It won't turn on.”

“What?”

“It won't turn on. Or rather, it turns on but the operating system won't start. You see?” Massimo pointed at the screen, on which the obtuse device continued to maintain that it was completely unable to do anything.

“Yes, I see. But what does it mean?”

“Err . . . ” Massimo said, suppressing the instinct to say, I haven't a clue what it means. “There's something that isn't working. But I don't understand what. It seems there are some internal conflicts, that some drivers are missing. There could be several reasons for that. For example . . . ”

“I know, I know,” Fusco said with the embittered air of someone for whom nothing ever works, no matter how hard he tries, “these things stop working when they feel like it and without any apparent reason. Look, let's finish questioning this fellow and then we'll call Officer Turturro and he can take a look at it.”

 

The interview had concluded according to the ritual: Fusco had asked Kubo when he was planning to leave Italy, and Kubo had replied that he would be leaving on Saturday, immediately after the end of the conference, but that his colleagues in the research group, Komatsu and Saito, had planned to stay in Tuscany on vacation for the whole of the next week. Asahara was supposed to have gone back with Kubo on Saturday. After a handshake, Dr. Kubo was allowed to go and Fusco sat down again on his armchair with casters.

“Great,” he said in a dejected tone. “The next one will probably tell me that the dead man wasn't a professor but a professional actor, and that the whole thing was a joke. At least, that's what I'm hoping. All right, let's get on with this farce. Galan, the next one, please.”

 

The first round of interviews having been completed, Massimo was on his way back to the bar to have something to eat before resuming the process. A process that, apart from Watanabe's spectacular outburst, had proved distinctly monotonous. All the other Japanese interviewed, while demonstrating their eagerness to cooperate, had almost invariably answered Fusco's questions with the same sentence. Something that more or less began with “
gomennasai
” and basically meant, “I'm really sorry, but I don't know a damn thing.” All of them. Well, at least this time, none of it was my fault. Now, let's have a nice
schiacciata
, and then back to doing Our Duty. And, with this thought, he entered the bar. Inside which, the only person to greet him, sadly, was Aldo, who was playing absentmindedly with a pack of cards.

“Hi, Aldo.”

“Oh, it's you. No need to rush. It's only one-thirty.”

“My God, you're tetchy. I'm making myself a
schiacciata
. Is the rest of the battalion at lunch?”

“Only too right. Yes, they all answered the call of their stomachs. And poor Aldo was left here to cast spells.”

As he spoke, Aldo put down the pack and cut it two or three times with one hand. Then he took three cards from the pack and showed them to Massimo. Two jacks and an ace. Smiling, he took two cards between the fingers of his right hand and one in his left, holding them between thumb and middle finger; and with a slow, elegant gesture, after making sure that Massimo was watching, slid them facedown onto the table. Having done this, he looked at Massimo and pointed to the cards.

Far too easy, Massimo thought. He moved with all the speed of a sick sloth. The ace is the one in the middle.

Much less gracefully than Aldo, he picked up the card in the middle and turned it over.

Jack of spades.

Massimo stared openmouthed. He knew, because his grandfather had told him, that Aldo could do fantastic things with cards, but he had never seen him in action. Aldo looked at him and smiled smugly while Massimo turned down the volume on his iPod.

“How did you learn?”

“When I was a young man,” Aldo said, “I worked as a waiter on ocean liners.” He picked up the rest of the pack and started thumbing through it. “You can't imagine how bored a person can get on a ship. You have to find a way to pass the time. But, as you can imagine, there weren't many pastimes accessible to the crew, and they had to be small and cheap. And don't even think about fraternizing with the passengers.”

At the word “fraternizing,” Massimo's mental projector started showing a dream sequence of a young heiress, her smile a mixture of the girlish and the wanton, secretly passing the key of her cabin to Aldo wrapped inside a napkin, but he immediately shook himself out of it. Maybe I should start going out with girls again, instead of just thinking about them, he told himself while Aldo continued with his story.

“That's why, since there was no chance of learning the double bass, and I really wasn't attracted to the idea of taking it in the ass from the rest of the crew”—with these words Aldo destroyed the romantic aura in which Massimo had begun to bathe the scene—“I started learning card tricks. I'd spend hours in front of the mirror, trying over and over, without thinking about anything else. It was a hypnotic exercise, which required concentration. You really had to focus. You couldn't think about anything else. And you immediately realized that you absolutely couldn't cheat yourself. If a trick didn't look right in the mirror, if the corner of the card stuck out even for a second, you immediately realized that you couldn't try doing that trick in public. It'd come out wrong and you'd end up with egg on your face. A magician has to be infallible, otherwise he's either laughable or embarrassing.”

Aldo put the cards back in their box and placed it on the table.

“Sometimes I think that all that time in front of the mirror with the cards saved my mental health. I saw people literally go crazy.” Aldo was silent for a moment, then went on in a changed tone, “Now, with my arthritis I can't do most of the moves so well, but three-card monte is something I'm still pretty good at. Have you figured out what I did yet?”

“No. And I'd like to get there by myself, so don't tell me. You put the cards down one after the other. Very slowly. Did you really have an ace in your hand, or did you replace it before doing the trick?”

“That's a very good question,” Aldo said, and turned over the first card on his left. “No, the ace is here.”

“Right. So you put down the ace, pretending it was a jack.”

“Correct. Very good.”

“Oh, yes, very good. I still don't know how the hell you did it.”

“Look.” Aldo took the jack between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, and the ace between the thumb and index finger of the same hand. Then he turned his hand, holding the cards facedown in such a way that the ace was over the jack, but slightly out of line with it.

“Now, I put down just these two cards. You watch me and you unconsciously take it for granted that I'm putting the lower card down first. But I'm not. Look. First I put down on the left the card that's on top, which is the ace. As soon as I've put the card down, I place my index finger, which is now free, on the edge of the card that's still in my hand, and lift my middle finger. So you'll have the impression that the card I have in my hand is the one that was underneath, which according to you I kept from the start between my thumb and my index finger. But you're wrong. At this point, very slowly and also a little bit clumsily, so that you think I've made a mess of things, I put down the second card, and the trick's done.”

And he repeated the gesture very slowly, in such a way that Massimo could understand. Then he put the cards back in the pack.

“The important thing is to divert your attention, to make you believe what I want you to believe. I've seen people in ports make a decent living with this trick. And I was as good as them. Maybe better.”

“I get it. But what if I pick the right card?”

“You won't. Trust me.”

“I wouldn't dream of it. Trust!” Massimo made a gesture to underline the concept. “The last person I trusted was my wife, and she cheated on me. The only thing I trust is what I see.”

“All right, then. You see, if we were in a port, I'd have an accomplice hidden in the crowd. If you picked the right card, I'd ask you if you felt confident enough to double the bet. And you'd probably be a bit taken aback for a moment. Just long enough for my accomplice to shout out ‘I'll double the bet!' Then he'd take your place, win instead of you, and give me back the money later.”

“And what if I got in first and immediately said, ‘O.K., I'll double the bet'?”

“No problem. You'd win. At which point, my accomplice would sneak closer to you and once you'd walked away he'd follow you home, waiting for you to turn onto a poorly-lit street. Then he'd pull out a big club and persuade you to give him everything you have in your pocket. Of course he might beat you with the club first. Depends on the kind of person.”

“I get it. But what if—”

“What if, what if. It's all bullshit, Massimo. If my grandfather had had wheels he'd have been a wagon. Get a move on, make that
schiacciata
and eat it, and then you can tell me what's going on at the police station. I've been here all morning, I think I have a right to get the news before everyone else.”

T
he morning of a fine day, after days of rain and wind, always puts people in a good mood. The air is crystal clear, purged of all its nanoscopic impurities, and it goes easily into your lungs, without any effort, giving you a wonderful feeling of convalescence. In the distance, you can see the mountains in all their detail, no longer obscured by the blanket of dust and smog that usually infects the atmosphere, and the town itself is clearer, better defined, more real.

All these things—the weather, the renewed ability to breathe, having something to do—had raised Massimo's mood to such a level that not even the prospect of driving to Pisa in his car had managed to piss him off as it would normally have done quite automatically.

Frightened at the prospect that the Pisan motorist might be getting lazy, the diligent workers in the traffic department had created a veritable parallel city, a kind of perverse labyrinth of no-entry signs, absurd roundabouts, and Dantesque bottlenecks. This parallel city was in turn inhabited by parallel citizens, the motorists: temporary avatars of flesh and blood, imprisoned in their cars, which were themselves hemmed in by the unavoidable density of the urban traffic, they exclusively showed the Mr. Hyde aspect of their personalities, becoming incensed at whatever happened, both inside and outside their vehicles.

The feeling Massimo sometimes had, driving inside this heap of confusion, was that the authorities had never had the intention of producing a street network but rather a mini-golf course. Yellow lines for cycle lanes and rows of retroreflectors marked off your route; cheerful blocks of white and red plastic, arranged to imitate a roundabout, forced you to overtake or slow down in the stupidest way; broad avenues fed into narrow medieval streets filled with arches, at the end of which, if you were lucky, a single free parking space awaited you so that you could at last get out of your car. But in spite of all this, Massimo was in an excellent mood. The fact that he was being forced to sacrifice part of his free day trying to figure out what was in Asahara's computer didn't bother him in the slightest. On the contrary.

The previous day, the computer had been identified by Katsuo Komatsu, another of Asahara's colleagues, as the professor's new laptop, which he had owned for only a few days. After registering the fact that the computer wouldn't turn on, Massimo had suggested a drastic solution to Fusco: that they open up the computer and read the hard disk directly through another computer. Fusco had approved of the idea, and had asked Officer Turturro if the police station had at its disposal everything required to perform this operation. Turturro had explained that it didn't, that it had practically nothing that was required, and that in any case he himself had never performed an operation of that kind on a laptop. At this point, while Fusco was looking at poor Turturro as if suspecting him of having sabotaged the computer himself, Massimo had ventured a suggestion:

“I know someone who may be able to read the hard disk. He's a technician at the University. He's very good, and he's very discreet.”

“Uh-huh,” Fusco said without much enthusiasm.

“If you have another solution . . . ”

“Oh, no. It's just that everything here works through friends. Through official channels, nothing ever works. You're always asking, asking, asking. We don't have computers, we don't have cars, we don't have a damned thing. It's best if you don't get me started on this. Let's do as you say, Signor Viviani. All I ask is that Officer Turturro be present. I know this investigation is a complete mess, but I think I should keep it at least a little bit official.”

And so Massimo and Officer Turturro had agreed to meet in Pisa the following day at the place where this person worked. That was why Massimo was now in Pisa instead of being by the sea with a towel, a book, and a sandwich, enjoying a little peace and quiet.

After avoiding all the various traps the traffic department had scattered along the route, Massimo crossed the Ponte Solferino, parked on Via Fermi, and walked to Via Risorgimento where the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry stood, or rather, endured: a sad building in retro-Fascist style, too recent to exercise the charm of long-standing university departments and too old to still be able to function decently. Looked at from the outside, it seemed to be wondering what it was still doing there. Fortunately, however, the authorities had not left the old department alone: on the other side of the street, the venerable orthopedic department of Santa Chiara Hospital kept it company and supported it in its daily battle against the beautiful and the modern.