Three-Card Monte (12 page)

Officer Turturro was waiting for him in the doorway of the department with the laptop case in his hand.

“Hi. Nice day, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is. Shall we go in?”

Massimo opened the door and went in, followed by Turturro, to be greeted by a terrible smell of garbage in brine that grabbed him by the stomach and accompanied him all the way to the porter's lodge. The porter did not seem remotely bothered by the aroma.

“What can I do for you?”

“Good morning. I'm looking for Carlo Pittaluga.” And maybe also a bathroom. Because in two seconds I'm going to throw up.

“Who shall I say?”

“Massimo Viviani and . . . ” Massimo stopped, realising that he didn't know how to introduce his companion. Officer Turturro? Signor Turturro? My personal bodyguard?

“Turturro,” the officer told the porter.

“Just a moment,” the porter replied, and dialed a number on his phone. “Dr. Pittaluga? Viviani and Turturro are here for you. Shall I send them up? O.K.” He put down the receiver. “He says to wait here and he'll be right down.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you study here, signore?” Turturro asked Massimo.

“No. I studied mathematics. On Via Buonarroti. And you don't have to call me signore. Do I seem that old?

“I did engineering. On Via Diotisalvi, over there.” He made a sign with his hand, as if to underline the fact that this smell didn't reach Via Diotisalvi. “I was there for two years. Lots of theory and no practice.” He smiled. “It wasn't for me.”

Massimo nodded, but said nothing in reply. Partly because he wanted to avoid breathing as much as possible, partly because situations like waiting in the company of someone you hardly knew always made him feel a little uncomfortable. He realized he must seem impolite not to say anything, but on the other hand, once they had established that it was a nice day, what else was there to say? In addition, Officer Turturro struck him as the typical idiot who enrolled on an engineering course without having much idea what it involved, and who, having realised that it wasn't enough to just fiddle around with computers, but that you also needed to study and understand things in order to pass exams, dropped out, justifying his decision by saying that he was a practical person, that he wanted to do things and didn't need to study all that pointless stuff, and so on. Massimo didn't like people like that. Actually, Massimo thought, there weren't many people he did like. Fortunately, he now heard the sound of heavy but enthusiastic footsteps on the stairs and realized that Carlo had arrived. He turned, and saw the fellow descend the last steps and come toward him at a solemn pace.

Carlo Pittaluga began with a pair of size fourteen tennis shoes and ended, six and a half feet above them, in a big smile involving all thirty-two teeth, topped by two disturbingly alert green eyes. In the middle, a tartan shirt and a pair of pants appropriate to his size. Apart from belonging to the restricted number of human beings whom Massimo liked, Carlo was absolutely one of the most intelligent people he knew. Having graduated with honors, he had remained in the Chemistry Department as a graduate technician, even though, given his résumé and his skills, he would probably have been able to get a better position. Be that as it may, he was now the computer technician for the department's center for calculations, a role he fulfilled in an erratic but highly competent fashion.

“Hello, Viviani,” he said, waving to Massimo as he approached.

“Hello, Pittaluga,” Massimo replied with a smile. “This is Officer Turturro. What Officer Turturro is holding in his hand is the laptop I was telling you about.”

“All right. Let's go straight to the computer room and read the disk. Then we'll go to my office and copy it onto a memory stick or a CD.” And he headed up the stairs, followed by Massimo and Turturro.

“Does it always smell like this?” Turturro asked as they climbed the stairs.

“No, someone must have opened a fridge down in Organics. Judging by the hint of excrement, I'd guess it was Cognetti's fridge. Anyway, it's not so bad,” he asserted, while the color of Massimo's face expressed the opposite opinion. “It would have been worse if they'd opened Crudeli's fridge.”

“Why, what's in Crudeli's fridge?” Massimo asked. “Poison?”

“Insect pheromones. Synthesized sexual attractors for different kinds of insects.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“Well, for example, three years ago one of the phials got broken, and I guess they must have synthesized those pheromones well, because within a day the department was full of bees. They were everywhere, in the air conditioning, the drawers, other places too. There were people who didn't use the toilets for weeks after that. But anyway, the smells don't get in here so much,” Carlo said, stopping in front of a reinforced door and opening it with a few turns of his key. “
Et voilà
. Please come in, grab a seat.”

Following Carlo, Massimo and the officer entered what was probably the most chaotic room in Europe. Beyond a glass door, about a hundred computers of various shapes and sizes were humming, filling the air with a heavy background noise. Dozens of colored wires ran all over the dimly lit room, on the floors, on the walls and around the tables, on which lay a number of disemboweled computers, with what had once been their internal components scattered here and there.

“So,” Carlo said, moving a fan from a stool and bravely sitting on the latter. “Tell me what's going on. Let me make a bit of space on the desk here.” With a sweep of his hand he shifted a few assorted parts, which would have fallen straight to the floor and smashed had Turturro not grabbed them. “Just stick them on the floor, they're only rubbish. O.K., now let's see how we can open this baby.”

Carlo turned the computer over and started unscrewing the back with a screwdriver. As he did so, he asked Massimo, “You did tell me this thing belonged to a Japanese?”

“Yes.”

“Strange.”

“Why strange?”

“Because the Japanese usually have tiny laptops. Something you can hold in your hand, or even smaller. This one's big. Well, all the better. Easier to work with. Apart from anything else, I've never seen this model before. It's one of those assembled ones, I think. You see, it isn't a single block.” Carlo put one of his big fingers inside the body of the laptop and used it as a lever. With a noise of something breaking, a small block no larger than a pack of cigarettes (a unit of measurement that's very useful in describing technological objects about which we know nothing, apart from the size) sprang free of the casing. “Oh, that's nice. What just came off is the hard disk. Now we'll connect it and transfer everything to Argo.”

“To what?”

“To Argo,” Carlo repeated, pointing to the electronic monster humming beyond the glass door.

“Argo? You mean that's one computer?”

“No, it's a lot of machines working in parallel, run by a main server that directs the processes. The server works on Mosix and is only responsible for distribution to the afferent machines,” Carlo explained proudly as he connected the disk to a cable emerging from some unspecified place inside the beast, “whereas the slave multiprocessors are the real calculating machines. Each one works by itself on a specific process. We could also get them all working in parallel on a single process, but that can be a mess because of redirection.”

“Yes . . . ” Turturro said as if he had actually understood any of this. But what exactly are all these computers for?”

“For making calculations.”

“All of them?”

“There aren't that many,” Carlo said. “Chemical calculations can be really huge. A dynamic simulation or the optimization and calculation of the frequencies of a complex of a transition metal usually takes weeks. Even if you use four or eight processors in parallel. The more processors you use, the less time it takes. Anyway, this has almost finished copying. There wasn't much there, as it happened. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Turturro said. “The computer was almost new.”

“Right. Now, let's go up and I'll transfer it somewhere. Do you have anything to put it on?”

Officer Turturro nodded and took a CD from his bag. Carlo took it delicately in his big fingers and nodded, then relieved the stool of his weight and walked silently out of the room, followed by the representative of the law and the representative of curiosity.

 

Carlo's office was no more chaotic than the computer room, but could certainly have honourably competed with it in untidiness. Here, Carlo copied the data, recalling it from Argo and mastering it onto CD. Once the operation was over, he had looked at Massimo, his eyes bursting with curiosity.

“Do you want to see what's in it right away?” Translation: if you look at it right away you're going to send me out of the room, aren't you?

Massimo and Turturro looked at each other. It's not up to me, Massimo thought, but . . .

Turturro raised his eyebrows, in a gesture that could easily have been interpreted as “I don't see any harm.” Turturro's eyebrows had not even reached their destination before Carlo clicked twice on the first of the two folders.

“Ah, here we are. There are two documents. This is the first one: ‘Natsu,' dated May 20 at 23:21.”

The first document appeared on the screen, and this time all three raised their eyebrows.

The document, obviously, was in Japanese.

“Does either of you know Japanese?” Carlo asked.

 

Sitting in the car, with the windows down to enjoy the warm wind produced by the moving vehicle, Massimo's body was heading for the cash and carry in order to stock up both the bar and his home refrigerator. Massimo's brain, on the other hand, was still in Carlo's office, thinking about what they had found in Asahara's new computer. And, as always, to be sure of not losing anything of what he was thinking, Massimo was talking to himself:

“So, let's go over this. There are two folders in the computer. The first contains two documents written in Japanese. Nobody can understand a damn word because they're written in ideograms, but to judge by the look of them, they don't seem to be official documents. There are also words written in different colors. Presumably notes. Notes about what, I don't know. But clearly written for personal use. In the other folder, there's a program written in Fortran with its various input and output files. A calculation code. Carlo says it's a program for molecular dynamics. And that it's very simple. It doesn't have any peculiarity. And when it comes to such things, I trust Carlo. So whatever that old Japanese professor was referring to has to be in the documents in Japanese. And at this point, until we find a way to understand what's in them, it's best not to think about it. Turn it whichever way you want, that's the way it is. If you don't have reliable data about something, you can't start to argue about it, just as you feel. Unless you're the Pope, of course. Am I the Pope? No, for the moment I'm not. So let's go and do the shopping and not think about it anymore. This afternoon Fusco can get some random Japanese to read the documents, there are plenty of them around, and then we'll see.”

 

Leaving the cash and carry, Massimo headed for home, in San Martino, to put his personal shopping in the fridge. Having got to Via San Martino, he should, in theory, have been able to turn under the arch in Vicolo Rosselmini and come out on Piazza San Bernardino, where he would have been able to park comfortably and drop his shopping at home, in the very same square. That was the theory. In reality, though, some idiot had parked his stupid scooter right in the middle of the arch, next to the terracotta flower beds of the restaurant, which already made it difficult enough to enter the alley without scratching the bumper. Cursing, Massimo got out of the car and tried to shift the motionless vehicle from under the arch.

Unfortunately, partly because the scooter stubbornly obeyed the laws of gravity, partly because our hero was objectively unendowed with the appropriate physical attributes, all that Massimo managed to obtain was a terrible sweat and a replenishment of his already large curriculum of blasphemies. There was no way: the scooter could not be moved. Still cursing, Massimo got back in his car, sat down on the edge of the seat in order not to touch it with his sweat-soaked back, and started to look for a parking spot, which he did not find until he got to Piazza dei Facchini, in other words, a considerable distance away. Then, as laden with bags as a llama, he headed laboriously for home.

 

Sometimes, when you're feeling pissed off, there's nothing better than to buy yourself something. Anything, even something stupid, in fact, preferably something stupid: something that doesn't cost much, that's absolutely superfluous, and whose sole purpose is to give you satisfaction. You see something, you want it, you go in and get it. Outside shopping, that doesn't happen often in life.

That was why, half an hour later, having finished transferring his purchases, and feeling cleansed at least in body by a nice shower, Massimo was wandering around a bookstore in search of something to keep him company on the beach and get rid of his bad mood. After hovering a long time around the mystery section and resisting the blandishments of the latest arrivals, he started to leaf through the classics. Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus
. Must be good. Of course, Camus on a beach is like giving a piece of
pandoro
to a cat. Maybe this winter? Robbe-Grillet,
Jealousy
. Oh, please. Soseki,
I Am a Cat
. Hmm, maybe. It's certainly long. My God, what a brick. No, no, something less bulky. Roald Dahl,
Tales of the Unexpected
. Short stories. Perfect. Never read anything by this guy, but I seem to remember hearing that he's good.

Pleased with his choice, Massimo went to pay, and as he was handing the book to the cashier, he found himself thinking again about that damned scooter. Almost simultaneously, among the books displayed by the cash register he saw one that, somehow, grabbed his attention. He smiled, picked it up, placed it resolutely on the cash register next to the Dahl, and took out his wallet. The cashier, who knew him, gave him a surprised look and said, “
Three Meters Above Heaven
, by Federico Moccia. Is it a gift?”