In a Heartbeat

by Sandrone Dazieri

  I waited for the train a good distance behind the yellow line, afraid that someone would push me under it. I kept looking over my shoulder thinking that someone would jump out at me again with another knife. When you’re scared you feel like everyone’s out to get you. When someone brushed against me with a backpack I almost went at his throat. It was just a kid looking at something on his phone. I got into the crowded carriage that was as hot as hell, which seemed impossible considering that it was just above zero on the platform.

  I hung on a strap near a shoeless bum who everyone was avoiding like the plague; a flyer dangled in front of my nose. It was of a woman caressing and sipping from a bottle of water with a headline written above her head: I Want It Pure. I thought that I had seen it somewhere before, then it occurred to me. I’d made that ad.

  I changed trains then got out at Porta Venezia; it was still the same, clogged with trams and hotels. Bastoni’s office was only a five-minute walk from there but it was just far enough for me to get out of breath. Again I told myself that it was time to go on a diet, hit the gym and get a personal trainer, whatever that was (learn the term). When I rang the doorbell a young woman with tattoos on the backs of her hands and a bandana around her neck answered the door. Even though I wasn’t familiar with legal offices she seemed a little out of place. She checked my appointment at the reception desk. ‘Valentina is waiting for you,’ she said. ‘It’s the last office on the right. You can leave your coat on the coat rack.’

  I was drenched in sweat again and had to peel it off my back. I also discovered there was a tear on its back. Clean clothes didn’t last too long on this body. The hallway was narrow; dusty floor-to-ceiling bookcases on either side ended only at each closed, nameless door. I let a guy who couldn’t have been more than a metre tall walking with a crutch pass by. The tattooed woman said, ‘Goodbye, Avvocato.’ I knocked on the wooden door and expected to see something else strange. Instead I found Valentina Trevi, the lawyer. She was a curvy redhead of about thirty-five, tanned with freckles. There was just enough space in the office for her desk, more bookcases and file cabinets. A huge poster of a tropical island was on the only free wall. The window behind her seemed bricked-in; little light came through.

  When she saw me she smiled. ‘Wow! Look who’s here!’

  I was a little taken aback. Are all lawyers like this? ‘Hey there.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me directly instead of going through Mirko?’ she asked. ‘Was this a tactic or something or were you just afraid that I would’ve said no?’

  ‘A tactic?’

  She got up to hug me and kiss me on my cheek. ‘They beat you, huh?’ I smelled her sandalwood perfume, then began to drift.

  *

  I’m in a hotel room; from the window I can see the Alps. Valentina is naked on the bed and I am on top of her, massaging her back. Her body is warm and I am thinking about ordering room service. I feel like drinking something fresh and cold and …

  *

  I came back to the present. I blinked. ‘We know each other, right?’ I said to the lawyer.

  And how.

  3

  ‘I need a coffee,’ Valentina said after a while. ‘I don’t think that we have any barley tea.’

  ‘Coffee’s fine.’

  ‘Even that’s changed.’ Valentina wasn’t smiling anymore after hearing my story. Valentina — Vale — immediately believed me. My expression from before was convincing enough.

  She took me to a room across from her office, even smaller than hers, where a giant man with a red beard and messy hair was working on a computer. He had the expression of a man who was forced to touch faeces with his bare hands. When we walked in, he barely raised his eyes. ‘You should update your programmes every now and then,’ he said. ‘You still use Windows 98. It’s too slow.’

  ‘New programmes are expensive,’ Valentina said, clearly with her mind elsewhere. ‘Marco, this is Santo.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ grumbled the giant. ‘There are viruses on this computer that I thought were extinct during the Cretaceous period. Maybe I should copy them for old times’ sake. If I were you I’d put a firewall in.’

  ‘Whatever it is, you’d be the only one able to use it so don’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to know how to use it … ’

  ‘I said no.’

  Valentina put a plastic cup under the snout of the coffee machine and pressed a button but nothing happened. She fumbled with the machine and lifted the lid. ‘Doesn’t anyone ever remember to put water in?’

  ‘There’s a bottle on the floor,’ said the giant and then said to me, ‘are you Vale’s new client?’

  ‘Mind your own business Elef,’ she said severely. ‘This thing isn’t even plugged in!’ The water began to boil and the aroma of coffee filled the air. Then the light cut off together with the computer, as well as the light bulb that hung from the ceiling.

  ‘Dammit!’ the giant said.

  ‘The electricity!’ yelled a female voice from the hallway.

  ‘So that’s why it was unplugged,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘OK, Santo, forget about it. I don’t feel like going to the café.’

  I nodded.

  The voice from the hallway yelled again. ‘I just lost two hours’ worth of work! Elephant, I’m going to kill you!’

  The giant: ‘It wasn’t me!’

  We went back into the office and sat down while the tattooed woman stomped through the hallway. I could hear fighting and screaming in the next room.

  ‘I said that it wasn’t me! Oi, get off of me! You should always save every now and then anyway!’

  ‘Turn it back on! Turn it back on now!’

  ‘These two are a pain in the arse,’ Vale mumbled. ‘Santo, I didn’t expect this kind of thing from you. I just thought that you were ambitious and a little narrow-minded and with the kind of job that I do, no one surprises me anymore.’ She grimaced. ‘Before you ask, let’s get this out of the way. We were together only for one nice weekend in the mountains. You and Salima weren’t serious at the time, I mean as serious as someone who already has an official girlfriend could be. So with this, let’s move on and I don’t want to talk about it again. Agreed?’

  ‘Of course. I hope to remember that weekend sooner or later.’

  ‘Too bad for you if you can’t.’

  ‘What’s the next move?’

  ‘I’ll help you write a report of everything that’s happened to you, including your amnesia, the private investigator that you hired and the person that tried to kill you. Then you’ll explain everything to the magistrate.’

  ‘This will keep me out of jail?’

  ‘If you believe in fairy tales. It’ll help along the investigation.’

  ‘That was my first thought. What’s the second option?’

  ‘You let them question you and you keep your mouth shut.’ She sighed. She didn’t like the situation at all. ‘The judge has got something against you; I don’t know what it is.’ An office argument isn’t motive enough for a serious suspect and you weren’t the only suspect from what I could tell.’

  ‘Roveda was on everybody’s shit list.’

  ‘That’s the point. Let’s hope that by tomorrow they’ll find the real killer.’

  ‘That would be this week’s first stroke of luck.’

  ‘No honey, you got lucky when you came to me and I didn’t kick you out like you deserved. Now you have to sign the paperwork. They’ll do a background check to see if there aren’t any outstanding warrants.’

  ‘I have a clean record.’

  ‘You mean you’ve never been arrested after everything that you’ve done?’

  ‘I was careful and I flew under the radar.’

  ‘You can’t know that for sure if you can’t remember.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘I want to know where you were Saturday. Ask your friends, your Catholic comrades or whoever you want but find out. They are going to ask you tomorrow.’

>   ‘Can I refuse to respond?’

  ‘No. You have to cooperate with the investigation. “I don’t remember” is always suspicious. Is everything clear?’

  ‘More or less … ’

  ‘Then there’s another problem. You have to go back to your house. Maybe you can even take a shower.’

  ‘And get blown up.’

  ‘You can even roam for the rest of your life and let the next tenants worry about it but if something goes wrong when they search your house … There are two things that we don’t want: a policeman being blown up while searching through your stuff or they find something that we don’t want them to find.’

  ‘Like the phone records.’

  ‘Like the phone records. If there’s anything suspect in the house I want to be the first to know.’ She grew more irritated and I could understand why. ‘If your mysterious assailant tried to kill you, provided that it’s the same guy, then there’s probably nothing to worry about at home.’

  ‘Probably isn’t good enough for me.’

  ‘It’s not enough for me either but I could call the bomb squad.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Let’s see if Elephant has any suggestions.’

  She knocked on the wall. ‘Elef, can you come here for a second please.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘It’s his field. Land reclamation as well as electronic surveillance. He was one of the best in Milan.’

  ‘I would have never expected it. Why did he stop?’

  ‘He was shot in the stomach. Elef, please sit down.’

  The giant pushed a pile of documents onto the floor and sat down on an armchair. Delicate hands. I could see him doing delicate work. He sat and the chair squeaked.

  ‘Elef, what would you do if you knew that you had a bomb hidden somewhere in your house?’

  ‘I would call the bomb squad.’

  ‘And what if you couldn’t.’

  ‘I’d move.’

  ‘C’mon Elef.’

  He changed the look on his face. ‘I’d get a sniffer and a metal detector.’

  ‘What’s a sniffer?’ I asked.

  ‘Explosives leave two kinds of traces, particles or vapours. The sniffer sniffs, that’s where the name comes from.’

  ‘It’s clear now.’

  ‘Usually airports use industrial-size sniffers but they also have smaller ones for emergencies.’

  ‘Where do I get these two things? I don’t think that they sell them at the African Bazaar.’

  ‘You can easily get them cheap on the internet.’

  ‘Can anyone use them?’ Valentina asked.

  ‘To search someone yes, but to clear an apartment … ’

  ‘I’ll take that risk.’

  ‘There’s another possibility,’ the giant said. ‘I don’t like these guys but there are professionals who know how to handle explosives. They can get rid of this problem. They’re people that sometimes work abroad doing this kind of job, I don’t know if you follow me.’

  ‘Contractors,’ said the lawyer, and translated for me. ‘Mercenaries.’

  ‘Are they discreet?’ I asked.

  ‘Very discreet considering their work is barely legal on Italian soil. Abroad is another story. They’re very expensive. The more discreet, the more expensive.’ He patted me on the back; it hurt like hell. ‘You’re paying anyway.’

  *

  The giant would arrange the meeting with the contractors as soon as possible, maybe even the next day. I left at two in the afternoon, starving. I went to a café close by. I said to hell with the diet and ordered the typical take-away Milanese meal: a grilled sandwich.

  Whilst eating, I found out that there were five messages on my answering machine. The first one was from Rina: ‘Bianchi is looking for you.’ Then there was one from a guy babbling in English. I only got my name. And one from Bianchi: ‘Where the hell are you? Get your arse here.’ Then another from the same English guy again, of which I understood only my name. One from Monica: ‘Call me.’

  At the end, the answering machine said that it was full and that I should delete the old messages to make space for the new ones. No way! I wondered how the Ad Exec could be so stupid as to leave the means for these people to find him. There was no way he could avoid them now. Only telepathy was missing. Or was it?

  After the second sandwich I had enough energy to get back to the mental hospital issue. I had put that aside. I was afraid that it could happen again at any time, but did I really want to know more?

  No thanks. I wasn’t ready yet.

  This happened before I found out that the cops would do a background check on me. Imagine if they had caught me trying to stab some old bastard in the eye. It was best to hear it from the doctors who had treated me, if only I knew where to find them. Giulio had suggested asking my father but just the thought made me sick. In this new life, I hoped that I would never see that bastard again. I didn’t have his number in the address book. Maybe because the Ad Exec knew it by heart, so I called the home number that I remembered hoping that it was still the same … the number you have reached has been disconnected … Shit.

  The bartender had a phone directory. There were about sixty Dentis. I was one of them but there was no Piero, my father. It had always been his dream to spend his winters on the beach somewhere. I had always thought that the old man said this to make himself look good, like the time he said that he was going to fix up and race the old Guzzi Galletto motorcycle. It wound up just rusting in the basement. He also said that we would tour Europe in a camper van, which we never did.

  He’d collect a pile of brochures, changing his mind each time. ‘We can also rent or maybe it would be better to buy or maybe we could find a used one, why not?’ I was ten years old and I’d believed him because at that age every father is a cross between Superman and Aladdin’s genie. As the weather got warmer, however, he talked about it less and less. He even seemed embarrassed when I asked him about it. In July he’d said, ‘Maybe next year.’ Then he went down to the bar with his useless loser friends. Who knows, maybe this time he had actually followed through?

  Then I had a brilliant idea, all thanks to the wrinkled and dirty newspaper at the café that closely resembled my shirt. I was looking for something about Roveda and I found it on the third page. There was a picture of a villa near the coast and an article on the investigation. The killer had left no trace but a series of clues suggested that maybe Roveda roamed in gay circles. Oh, so Roveda was gay!

  I chill went down my spine.

  Could the Ad Exec also be … ?

  That would explain why he put Spillo on him. Jealousy! Maybe I should search my house to see if there were any photos of naked men around? I could see myself explaining this to Monica. There’s something else that I didn’t tell you, a small detail …

  I read more. Maradona had lost weight! In the colour photo, (the newspapers were all in colour nowadays), he was twice the size that I remembered. I read the story: cocaine, trouble with the law, redemption. Our stories were a bit alike. More news. An old joke on Berlusconi, surveys about the forthcoming elections (every party forecast victory). There was a story about a guy they’d found on a beach in Cornwall who had forgotten how to speak but knew how to play the flute with his nose so well that everyone who heard him play cried. Hmmm … Something very similar had happened to me according to what Ines said, except for the flute. There was also the possibility that I too had been in the newspapers, maybe in the local news.

  Where do they keep old newspapers? In the library. The only one that I knew was the Sormani Public Library, where I’d been once to do some research for a science project in secondary school. I still remember the experience as one of the most boring of my life. Now at least I didn’t know what to expect.

  I got there by tram. The building was just as I remembered it in the previous century, boring grey stone with a lot of bicycles locked in front of it. The last time I had left my moped out there and when I came back the spar
k plug was gone.

  The woman at the information desk told me how to get to the periodicals section. It was a huge room with vaulted ceilings and a series of monitors fixed to tables that seemed to be there just for decoration. Only recent newspaper editions were immediately available; to get to the older ones you had to fill in a request form.

  I filled out one for the Corriere della Sera and instead of a pile of newspapers the librarian brought a small cylinder of microfilm. I tried to look at it against the light. The pages were there but to read them I needed a microscope. After I’d stood there for about twenty minutes trying to figure this out, the employee finally showed me how to insert the film in the microfilm machine. So that’s how you do it!

  August 1991, how nostalgic. It made quite an impression on me, thinking that it was so long ago that it was now a microfilm, like in a James Bond movie. I focused on the Milan sections but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I changed the cylinder four times, going through La Repubblica, Il Manifesto and Il Giorno. The fourth was the lucky one, La Notte. I should have checked that one first; it was my trusty evening newspaper. The sticker on the microfilm box said that it had stopped publication in 1998. That’s why the sign was gone in Piazza Cavour.

  The article was dated 12 August. ‘A man was found on an abandoned farm in Vaiano Valle. The Milanese carabinieri found a man of approximately 30 years of age in a fragile physical condition. The man was unable to identify himself and was also without identification.’ There was a photograph of the farm but there was no photo of the man.

  Was it me? What the hell was I doing on a farm anyway? Who the hell had stolen my wallet? From the time I was at Ines’ to the time they found me, six days had gone by. Six days was a long time to wander deliriously. Maybe I was out there picking mushrooms?

  I looked at the newspapers from the following days, and this time I was left with no doubts. For 18 August I read: ‘The man from Vaiano Valle has finally been identified. S. D., resident of Via dei Transiti 6, Milan, is in a stable condition but continues to suffer from amnesia and is presently undergoing treatment at the Luigi Sacco psychiatric hospital under the care of Dr Zurloni.’