The Silence Of The Wave Part 13

"Maybe I'll tell you next time. If we go too fast we risk hurting ourselves."

Hurting ourselves. Hurting yourself. Let's not hurt ourselves. Don't hurt yourselves, children. I hurt myself, mommy. It hurts. What did I do wrong to hurt myself, daddy? Was I bad?

Daddy.

Bad.

Bad.

Words. Fragments of gla.s.s, cutting.

Roberto spoke slowly, choosing with care the few elementary words of the question. Cautiously, as if he were walking on a wire or handling sharp, dangerous objects.

"What year is your son in?"

"He's in middle school, but he's a year ahead. He'll be twelve in May. Now they say we ought to let them play longer, that it isn't a good idea to send them to school too early. At the time, though, they told me he was so good, so precocious, it was a pity not to let him gain a year. If I could do it all over again, I'd make him go to school normally. What about you? Do you have a wife, children? Tell me about your life."

Again the tapping of the limping waiter. Much louder than before. Very loud. Too loud. Except that now the waiter was nowhere near them. Pins and needles. Nerves on edge. Elusive reflexes. Are you mad? Maybe, but basically we all are. A wife, no, certainly not. Children? Certainly not. Certainly not. Certainly not.

"No. I've never been married." He heard his own voice. It came from G.o.d knows where and had an unusual solidity. Maybe I came close to it, he thought of saying, just to add something. But he didn't want to.

"And you told me you're a carabiniere."

"Yes."

"But something like a captain, an officer?"

"I'm a marshal."

"Wow, that's impressive," she said with an ironic smile. The same one, it seemed to Roberto, that she'd had in that commercial for condoms. "Of course, when I hear the word marshal I think of a man in a rather ridiculous uniform, with a paunch and a big moustache."

He felt a slight pang of annoyance over the 'rather ridiculous uniform.' But that brought him back to the table and the conversation, which was a good thing.

"The marshal in charge of the station where I had my first posting was pretty much like that."

"And what exactly do you do, as a carabiniere?"

He tried to think of an answer as quickly as possible. Tell the truth. Tell a pack of lies. Mix truth and lies. In other words, what he had always done.

"Now, to tell the truth, nothing. I'm on leave for health reasons. I don't know where they'll put me when I go back. If I go back."

"Because you went mad?" The same smile as before.

"Because they noticed. I was mad before, but I was better at hiding it." That had come out well.

"And before they noticed?"

For a few seconds Roberto was again aware of a s.h.i.+ft in the axis of reality in this conversation. The question-'before they noticed?'-even though part of their humorous banter seemed to him a serious and pertinent one. It fact, it was serious and pertinent. Emma knew something about him and was calling him to account. She knew some of the things he had done, things he had never admitted to anyone, not even the doctor. Maybe she also knew some of the things he hadn't had the courage to confess even to himself. Roberto wavered in fear before escaping that wave of folly and managing to respond. Then the coordinates of the conversation returned to normal.

"I was in a special operations group, and worked undercover for many years."

"You mean you infiltrated gangs, that kind of thing?"

"Yes, that's exactly it. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't really talk about it, but I don't suppose you have many acquaintances who are international cocaine traffickers. And besides, I've finished with that work forever. Even if they take me back."

"Why have you finished with it forever? Is it something to do with the problems that brought you to the doctor?"

"I'd say so." He was behaving himself. He wasn't telling lies. He was moving cautiously along the thin ridge separating truth from lies.

They fell silent. Roberto looked Emma in the face, following the line of her cheek all the way from her cheekbone to her mouth.

She drank some wine and wiped a drop from her lips with the edge of her napkin. "You don't have to answer. I told you I wasn't ready to talk about my story; I a.s.sume it's the same for you."

"It's hard to talk about undercover work. It's all about playing a part, a role. The problem is, you have to play it for a long time, for months, sometimes even years. The people you spend most of your time with-the criminals-are the same people you're going to have arrested. They think of you as a colleague and sometimes a friend, but you're working to put them in prison. It's easy to lose your balance when you live like that for a long time."

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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sistance. 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 a.s.sistance?"

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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king bug in. It was at that moment that the idea came to him. "It's possible," he said circ.u.mspectly.

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 pa.s.s, 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 d.a.m.n 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."

18.

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.