When he reaches the landing, he stops for a moment, pretending to give a final adjustment to the cloth napkins neatly rolled up in the drinking glasses. What he’s really doing, though, is slipping a quantity of sleeping pills in the soup that would put six locomotives to sleep. There, all done.
“One thing leads to another,” he sings to himself contentedly.
“We have a new waiter,” Signor Armando announces to his coworkers. Signora Merlo, who is on duty, smiles with the rest:
“Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto …”
When she smiles, she gets a little distracted and says two or three times: “Alberto, Alberto …”
Luckily, no one notices except the nephew, Ottavio, who smiles back and kids her:
“I’m not called Lamberto or Alberto, my name is Ottavio.”
The five colleagues who are off duty dig into the soup.
“That’s odd,” says Delfina, after tasting the first spoonful, “it tastes of cabbage, but also slightly of grenadine.”
“To me,” says Signora Zanzi, “it tastes like gooseberry. But it’s very good.”
“By the way,” asks Delfina, “the other day some strange armed men showed up on the island. Who were they?”
“Hunters passing through,” Ottavio explains hurriedly.
“Are there rabbits on the island?” asks Signor Giacomini, who besides being an authentic fisherman, is also an authentic hunter.
“Gray partridges, also just passing through,” Ottavio replies quickly. “For the main course, as you can see, we have filet mignon with pistachios, with a side dish of creamed cauliflower, and an eggplant patty. To finish, peach pudding and Sicilian cassata.”
“Cassata, they always serve us cassata,” grumbles Signor Bergamini, “and never polenta.”
“Would you like polenta for dinner tomorrow, Signor Bergamini?” Ottavio asks solicitously.
“Polenta for appetizer, for the main course, and for dessert!”
“Signor Bergamini can speak for himself,” Signora Zanzi points out. “For the rest of us, whatever Anselmo does is done right.”
Ottavio watches them eat, mentally dry-washing his hands in delight.
Midway through the meal, Signor Armando takes over from Signora Merlo, who in turn begins hungrily spooning soup.
“It’s good,” she says. “It tastes as if it’s flavored with apricots. I’ll have to remember to ask Signor Anselmo for the recipe.”
And she too repeats, with great conviction: “Whatever Anselmo does is done right.”
While Ottavio is there, he tries to strike up a little conversation with Signorina Delfina.
“I’d like to invite you to take a stroll,” he says.
“Where, up on the roof?”
“Why, no, in Milan, in the Via Montenapoleone … In Rome, in the Via Veneto … In Barcelona, on the Ramblas … In Paris, in the Rue de Rivoli …”
“And in Carpi?”
“In Carpi … where’s Carpi?”
“Ah, there, you see? You don’t know geography.”
“Signorina, you always seem to think everything’s funny. But I’m very serious. I’d like to give you a gift of a necklace …”
“Of dried chestnuts!” Delfina finishes his sentence for him.
“I’d like to take you up into the Dolomites.”
“Piggyback on your shoulders? Watch out, I weigh 130 pounds, even if I look like I weigh 103.”
“Would you come with me to Singapore?”
What a creep! He’s just finished slipping a sedative into her soup and now he’s bowing and scraping shamelessly!
Now however he needs to go downstairs to allay Anselmo’s suspicions. The chess game is over and the baron has won. Now they’ve started a game of whist. The baron and Anselmo are playing against a couple of bandits. Once again, the baron wins. But evidently the series of victories is making him sleepy, because he yawns and glances at his watch.
“It’s late,” he declares. “I’m going to bed.”
“I’m curious,” the bandit chief says to him.
“Curious about what?”
“Curious to see if tomorrow your finger grows back the way your ear grew back.”
“It’s possible. Would you care to make a bet on it?”
“I’m not in the right frame of mind for betting. I have to make up my mind whether I should send your right foot to the board tomorrow or invite a couple of those gentlemen over to the island to show them that you’re still alive.”
“Why not just send me over to Orta instead?” the baron smiles at him. “I give you my word of honor that I’ll go, show myself, and return. I could swim over, if you like.”
The two men look into one another’s eyes for a long time. The bandit reads in the baron’s eyes a superb unruffled calm, which he attributes to many long years of familiarity with wealth and power. The baron reads in the eyes of the bandit a cold-blooded determination. This is a man who would not think twice about crushing him like a fly. His good manners are a dusting of vanilla sugar on a TNT bomb. A shiver runs through the baron. “Luckily,” he thinks, “I’m perfectly safe. As long as my nerves hold out.” He yawns. He yawns again.
“I’m going to bed,” he says again, “sweet dreams, one and all.”
“Good night, uncle,” says Ottavio with a smile, as false as Judas.
“Good night, Your Lordship.” That was Anselmo. The bandit says nothing.
Baron Lamberto climbs into bed and falls asleep immediately, into a tangled welter of confused dreams. He dreams that he is in a boxing ring about to begin a match. His opponent is Ottavio, but he is also the gangleader and he smiles at him maliciously. In his left boxing glove, he is clutching a silver carving knife, in his right he is brandishing a semi-automatic carbine. Then he drops both weapons and picks up the weight-lifting bar.
“What are you doing?” Lamberto tries to say. “That’s against all the rules.”
Ottavio walks toward him, lifting the heavy piece of equipment higher and higher. His smile is transformed into a menacing grimace.
“Ottavio, have you lost your mind?”
The baron is unable to speak. His words become tangled in his mouth, gummed up on his tongue, obstructing his throat and nostrils, preventing him from breathing.
“Let’s be done with this,” says Ottavio in the dream, “I’ve had enough chamomile tea!”
Anselmo is nowhere to be seen. The baron has the impression that at the beginning of the match Anselmo had been acting as referee. Why, there he is now, playing bingo with the gangleader.
The baron tries to call out “Anselmo, Anselmo,” but his butler’s name cleaves to his palate, rolls around in his trachea, and becomes an intolerable weight pressing down on his heart.
Now Baron Lamberto wakes up in a sticky hot lake in which it is impossible to swim. Lifting one arm out of the water is like lifting a mountain. The arm comes up loaded with seaweed, dead fish, crumpled paper, and garbage. At last, the baron wakes up in his own bed. But the nightmare hasn’t ended. His breathing is labored, he feels his throat tightening, sharp pains burst in his chest. He reaches out one hand to yank on the bellpull, but he can’t do it. He wants to call Anselmo, but it’s as if his mouth has been bricked up. Gathering his last few ounces of strength, he slides a hand under his pillow and pushes the button that activates the speaker. The answer is a chorus of fitful snoring. No one is speaking his name. “They’re sleeping,” the baron realizes, “and I’m dying.” But he has no time to feel fear, because he’s already dead.
It is Anselmo who finds the body, already cold, at six the next morning when he brings up the coffee. Without wasting time with hysterical reactions or dramatic scenes, he pushes the buttons of the loudspeakers, one after the other. Nothing. Work seems to have stopped in the attic.
Anselmo runs upstairs, panting, and throws open one door after another, shouting, shaking the motionless bodies spread out in disorder on the beds and the floors.
“Traitors! Murderers!
Is this how you respect your contract?”
They’re sleeping so deeply that you’d assume they were dead if it weren’t for the sound of their regular, slightly labored breathing. Anselmo delivers a series of slaps to the face of Signora Merlo, delivers a kick in the shin to Signor Armando, tosses pitchersful of water into the faces of the others, and hauls on their arms. Nothing seems to work. They wouldn’t wake up if the Last Trump of the Apocalypse sounded.
“Sleeping pills,” thinks Anselmo as he looks around for the umbrella that he dropped somewhere, he no longer knows where. “This is Ottavio’s handiwork.”
“Wake up! Wake up!” he shouts in tears. “Back to work!”
His shouting, however, has been heard by the bandits standing guard, who hurry upstairs to find out what’s happening.
“The baron is dead,” sobs Anselmo, “they let him die in his sleep. There’s nothing left for you to do here. Clear out!”
“Let’s stay calm,” says the gangleader, who’s been summoned by one of his bandit disciples. “Calm and sangfroid. Let’s see the body.”
No doubt about it. The baron is deceased. The official pronouncement is made by the physician bandit. “In my opinion,” he says, “this was a myocardial infarction.”
“No suspicious circumstances? No signs of an injection? Is there a chance that someone poisoned the baron?”
“I’d rule that out in the most absolute terms. The baron died of natural causes.”
“Just out of curiosity,” says the gangleader, “take a look at the hand.”
The physician bandit removes the dressing, looks, and clears his throat: “The finger has only half-grown back. If the baron had lived until this morning, he would have had two index fingers and ten fingers in all, just like he used to. Twenty digits in all, if you count the toes.”
“You,” says the gangleader to Signor Anselmo, “go to your bedroom and stay there. Two of you keep an eye on him. Where is the other one?”
Ottavio is still in bed sleeping the sleep of the just. When they tell him that his uncle has gone to his just rewards, as people used to say, he asks for a handkerchief and covers his eyes, so that no one can see that they’re dry. They shut him in his room and turn the key in the lock and then head up to the attic. Here there is nothing to be done: everyone is snoring like a dormouse in hibernation and there is no way to bring them to their senses. It is sufficient to lock them in and put a sentinel on the landing.
“Now, let’s think about ourselves,” says the gangleader. “When he was alive, Baron Lamberto was worth the prospect at least of twenty-four million dollars. For his corpse, they won’t give us a penny.”
“We have his nephew,” observes one of his disciples.
“He’s worth even less. In his last will and testament, the baron left him nothing but a sailboat. He doesn’t know that yet, but I do for certain, without the slightest doubt. This operation is a failure. Nothing remains but to take to our heels.”
“And fall into the hands of the police surrounding the island.”
“The pilot who was supposed to come pick us up with his plane—”
“—won’t, because there’s no money in it for him, either.”
The gangleader views the situation without illusions.
“We have to find a way to leave unnoticed.”
“Maybe we can turn ourselves into invisible men.”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“We could dig a tunnel under the island, under the lake, under the mountains, and then we could surface in Swiss territory.”
“Shut up and let me think.”
“What, are you only one who can think?”
“You can think too, let’s all think together, but no one better open his mouth to spout any more nonsense.”
They think and think, but it’s like scratching away at a marble wall: nothing comes loose, the fingernail can’t get purchase.
From time to time one of them makes a sudden move, opens his mouth, and everyone turns in his direction, but the idea—on the verge of being expressed in words—has stolen away.
“I had it on the tip of my tongue,” the man explains apologetically.
The twenty-four Lambertos, one after another, let their thoughts wander. One of them wishes he was on a beach in the Balearic Islands, another dreams of being on a hotel terrace in Macugnaga looking up at Mount Rosa. Only their chief knows how to concentrate properly. His teeth start to hurt, he’s concentrating so hard. But the idea just doesn’t come.
“Let’s try using the dictionary,” he says at a certain point.
Not everyone knows what a dictionary is, but they say nothing to keep from being taken for illiterates. In the meanwhile, their chief has taken a fat volume from the shelf, slips his finger between the pages at random, lets it fall open, and reads:
“ ‘Pandemonium.’ Well, if pandemonium broke loose we could make our way south to Brindisi in the confusion. Let’s try another.”
“The next word is: ‘Lynx. European mammal belonging to the order of the Carnivora, a skillful predator, with soft fur and pointed ears topped with a tuft of hair.’ ”
Then comes: “Talcum.”
“Magnificent,” says one of the bandits. “We’ll order twenty-four bags of talcum powder, hide inside them, and return them to the manufacturer saying this talcum is white and we were actually expecting pink talcum. Then along the way we can jump off the truck …”
“Trapezoid,” the chief reads aloud, continuing to slip his finger between the brittle old pages at random, in search of a useful suggestion.
There emerge, in a shambling procession: “Myrmecology. The zoological study of ants”; “Pipe cleaner. A device made of flexible wire with which tufted fabric is twisted and used to clean the stem of a tobacco pipe”; “Caciotta. A soft cheese from central Italy, rounded and flat.” Excellent for a snack, but unhelpful in terms of escape plans.
The chief persists, increasingly angry. He’s no longer reading the words aloud, he’s firing them like so many bullets: “Dodecahedron. Metaphorical. Simmer. Prolegomenon. Window.”
At the word “window,” the bandits sigh in relief. At least they know what that means, without reading the definition. Then the chief reads the word “pee” and they all burst out laughing. They certainly didn’t know that the dictionary had that kind of word in it. With all the jolly laughter, one or two of the bandits find that very same word in their pants.
The chief isn’t laughing. He’s opened the dictionary at a random page and he’s sitting there, finger stabbing the page, eyes wide open. You can almost hear the buzz of his brain as his thoughts whirr around. Minutes go by on tiptoes, fingers to their lips, before he finally speaks.
“Idiot.”
“Oh, there are insults in the dictionary too? It just keeps getting better.”
“No, I’m an idiot for not thinking of it before,” the chief explains.
“What did you find?”
“Come on, read it out loud.”
“Don’t keep us on pins and needles.”
“Balloon,” the chief reads aloud.
The twenty-three other Lambertos look at him, baffled, with a vague suspicion that their chief’s reason may have been unhinged by all the intense concentration.
“Why is the chief talking about baboons?” one Lamberto whispers to the other.
“What do monkeys have to do with any of this?”
But the chief of the Lambertos isn’t thinking about simians. The word that he read in the dictionary brought to mind something that happened during the first few days of the island’s occupation.
“We were in the cellars, the baron, his butler, and me. Do you have any idea of how big the cellars of this villa are? That day, I saw all of them, inch by inch, level by level. Did you know that there are five floors of underground cellars?”
“You never told us, so how on earth could we have known?”
“On the fifth floor down, the lowest one, the baron has—or I shoul
d say had—his personal museum. The only reason he showed it to me is that I was holding a gun on him. He has the baby carriage his nurse used to take him out for walks in, the tricycle he first learned to pedal on, the safe from his first bank, a photocopy of his first million, in other words, all his little personal souvenirs and memorabilia. One room of the museum is piled to the ceiling with big packages tied up with a stout cord. And you know what’s in those packages? This is exactly what the baron told me that day: ‘Those packages contain the most beautiful dream of my life. They hold all the different pieces of the aerostatic balloon with which I had hoped to reach the North Pole, and back then I would have been the first man to set foot on it. There are the bolts of cloth, the sections of the crew car, the helium canisters. In this file are the plans and instructions. Even a child could assemble the balloon in just a few hours.’ I wasn’t really listening to him, because I wasn’t interested just then. It’s lucky I remembered it in time. Now do you understand?”
“No,” a few voices mumbled, clearly mortified.
“We’ll escape by balloon.”
“Good idea, so the police can shoot at us and.… pfffft, the balloon will deflate.”
“We’ll escape at night.”
“They’ll see us when the spotlights illuminate us.”
“No, we’ll tell the police that the spotlights bother Baron Lamberto, because the glare filters through the curtains and keeps him awake.”
“And where will we go?”
“Switzerland.”
“And after that?”
“And after that mommy will tuck you into bed, give you a hard candy with a hole in the middle, and kiss you goodnight in the middle of your forehead. Enough talk, let’s get to work.”
Not all the Lamberti are convinced, but their chief is finally sure of himself again … The only choice is to follow him. Anyone have a better idea? No one. Any other possibilities worth trying? None. At least now there is a clear plan of action: inflate the balloon, climb aboard, and escape to the mountains.
IN ORTA, WHEN THE SUN RISES AGAIN, NO one knows what has happened on the island during the night, but many people do have the impression that this is going to be a special day. In the meanwhile, the tour bus bringing the bankers from Miasino arrives a quarter hour earlier than usual. There they are, climbing the outside staircase of the Palazzotto della Comunità with a spring in their step, in Indian file. There is always someone standing outside whose idea of fun is to count them: “… forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight.”
Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto Page 7
