Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  Jake rejoiced. He took me shopping for ludicrously expensive designer suits – ‘You need to give those dull grey men a tantalising hint of your inner slut’ – and bought me a sleek maroon Gucci briefcase that was almost too beautiful to desecrate with my professional bread-and-butter: drafts of dry-as-dust memoranda designed to reassure securities regulators that our clients weren’t defrauding investors.

  That summer we decided to stay put at Lake Cottage. I already had a desk drawer of unused plane tickets, each testimony to a weekend break cancelled after a last-minute summons from the partners and, increasingly, the clients. Staying close to the office was a way of limiting the damage. Jake and I swam and read, Laurel and Hardy curled contentedly before us, half pets, half glossy footrests. It should have been relaxing, but we were both acutely aware of my mobile phone, sitting like unexploded ordnance on the table between us, ready to go off at any moment.

  As my ego swelled, Jake watched, waiting for it all to pass. ‘What you have to remember, Paula, is that I’m sixteen years older than you,’ he told me, when I climbed into bed, bubbling with work chatter after a two a.m. conference call with a bank in Paris and an engineering firm in Delhi. ‘I don’t begrudge you any of this and I do understand the thrill of feeling like a Master of the Universe. You’re quite a macho girl, you know. But I went through my equivalent of all this a decade ago.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me,’ I mocked, ‘that when I’m your age I’ll realise it’s all a charade and wonder why I didn’t opt for babies.’

  ‘Stop trying to make me feel old, you female chauvinist pig,’ he said, pulling me into the warm spoon of his curved body, ‘and go to sleep.’

  21

  Winston rang me in the early hours, two weeks before the hearing in The Hague. The call shrilled through the villa, and on the other side of the thin wall I could hear Sharmila and Steve waking. On Washington time, Winston was all brisk efficiency. ‘Paula, I’ve been thinking, and I’d like you to go to Rome. I need to know what those dots are. The dots on the letter attached to the mother-of-all-maps, the ones Ismael noticed. We need to see the original.’

  ‘Rome? Are you serious?’ I was muzzy with sleep.

  ‘I am indeed.’

  ‘But we’re within days of the hearing. And what’s the point? Neither side can submit new evidence now.’

  ‘We can’t add, no, but we could eliminate, if any of their evidence turns out to be suspect. I’m probably fussing, but that map is one of the foundation stones of their case. If there’s anything wrong with it, I have to ferret it out. Fly to Rome, check it out, then go straight from there to The Hague.’

  ‘Can’t Francesca do it?’

  ‘To be honest – and you must never tell her this – I don’t trust her. It’s got to be a quick in-out visit, and I need someone I won’t have to coach every step of the way.’

  ‘Well, I’m flattered, Winston, but you’ve got a bigger appetite for brinkmanship than I realised.’

  I could tell from his voice he was smiling. ‘Keeps me young. This is the best bit of the game, when everything’s thrown into the air and you’re forced to think on your feet, to start dancing.’

  A few days later I checked into the Santa Elena convent off the Piazza Navona, after emailing a request for access to the Italian Foreign Ministry archives in Rome.

  When I walked through the doors Francesca was waiting in the lobby. It was uncanny how accurately she matched my mental picture. Tinkling with silver jewellery, wide-hipped in a flowing gypsy skirt, she was the kind of woman who applied kohl eyeliner in the morning with a heavy hand, then left it to form smudged bruises as the day wore on. ‘Paula, finalmente!’ she exclaimed, pronouncing my name the Italian way. Wrapping her arms around me, she bundled me towards the exit, hissing, ‘Ignore the witches,’ as the nun at Reception looked on.

  ‘I’m sorry to descend on you like this,’ I said, when we were tucking into pasta at a restaurant round the corner. ‘You must have assumed you were done with us. If you can just help me find what I need at the Foreign Ministry, I’ll leave you in peace.’

  ‘Oh, it’s no problem.’ She sighed. ‘Any distraction is good.’

  ‘Not enjoying your research?’

  ‘Ah, that Ingegnere Agostini. A man of vision, but as a writer, oh, Dio! The letters, all they talk about is sacks of cement, the width of walls, the number of employees and what he paid them, down to the last lira. It’s like a robot. This year, finally, I accept: Ingegnere Agostini, he was very, very’ – vairy, vairy – ‘boring. Un uomo noiosissimo, in fatti. This is my misfortune.’

  ‘It must make it hard to keep going.’

  She gave a low, rueful laugh. ‘Some colleagues, they love the research so much they would do it for ever. Me, I used to be like that, but no more. If I had my choice now, I would sit in the sun all day and eat ice-cream. I am only finishing this doctorate because I need it for my next job. Once I have financial security, Massimo can join me in Turin. But in the meantime, uffa, che barba. So helping Signor Pibody and my new friend Paula, I don’t mind. Also,’ she said, ‘it makes Professore Tadesse very nervous. And that I like.’

  I laughed. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Tadesse? He is the Francesca for the other side. You didn’t know? Darrar, they also pay someone to go through the files.’ She explained that Professor Tadesse Zeleke, exiled patriot, had managed, even as Darrar’s Negus was toppled by a military regime that led to a Communist dictatorship – itself replaced by a rebel movement that ushered in a socialist democracy – to keep churning out research papers that had won the approval of each successive administration.

  ‘Funny thing,’ she said, with heavy irony. ‘Darrar politics change so much, but he always change too, at just the right instant.’

  ‘In my country we’d call him a Vicar of Bray.’

  ‘A man without principle. Massimo says Italy was full of Tadesses under Fascism. We never speak, but he watches me, and I watch him.’

  The following morning we settled ourselves in the scoop seats of the bus Francesca used for her daily commute. I surveyed the rush-hour bustle outside, glad of the air-conditioning. Tanned businessmen wove through the traffic on Vespas, expertly avoiding groups of Catholic pilgrims, clustered around anxious guides. Those hot and bothered-looking hitch-hikers could only be American, I thought. No other race would think shorts and skimpy T-shirts appropriate for a series of visits to Renaissance churches and Roman temples.

  Being in Italy felt strange. My peace of mind was premised on keeping the pre-Jake and post-Jake periods of my life as far apart as possible, but here they met. On my last visit to Rome, I’d been with him, bound for the monastery of Monte Cassino. We’d flown out of New York a few days after Christmas and had spent the afternoon wandering through a Piazza Navona bathed in thin winter light, my cold hand buried in one of his pockets. A gaggle had formed around a pig-tailed blonde artist offering three-minute caricatures. We’d joined it and ended up sitting for her, laughing at ourselves. ‘My love for you is as big as this piazza,’ Jake had scrawled on the back of his sketch, then handed it to me, only to reclaim it over dinner when he crossed out the a, turning ‘piazza’ into ‘pizza’. Walking to the bus stop with Francesca that morning I’d spotted the blonde artist setting up her easel and begun to tremble. Her life had probably barely changed in the last three years; mine, in contrast, had entered a parallel universe.

  The bus lurched through the Centro Storico and across the Tiber, heading north. As the stops passed and the crowd of rush-hour passengers thinned, Francesca discreetly pointed out a few familiar faces. ‘Dottore Corrado, expert on Cyrenaica in the twenties, Dottoressa Barzini, the colonisation of Somalia. As you can see,’ she whispered, ‘scholarship and glamour do not go together. We are a shabby lot.’ When a lean, bearded gentleman in a tweed jacket boarded, her face froze in careful non-recognition. As he walked past she raised her eyebrows and silently mouthed at me, ‘Tadesse.’

  When the bus sto
pped near Mussolini’s Olympic Stadium, the group alighted and formed what looked like a well-established straggle, some of the scholars teaming up in companionable twos and threes, others strolling alone, acknowledging their peers with polite nods. Our crocodile walked past the stadium’s preening statues of wrestlers and athletes, breathing in the comforting medicinal scent under the umbrella pines, picking up speed as the Fascistic bulk of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri – the Farnesina – hove into view. By the time the side door opened, on the dot of nine a.m., many had reached an ungainly trot, with a luxuriantly moustachioed professor from Taranto the undeclared winner of the day’s race.

  ‘The archive section closes at two,’ Francesca said, as we queued. ‘So, five hours of work a day, maximum. Requests take a day to process and you can order no more than two box files at once. So you see why everyone arrives early.’

  ‘Christ, how inefficient.’

  She grimaced. ‘Ah, when I started my doctorate, I went through that stage, as everyone does, of complaining at the laziness of Italy’s civil service, the inefficiency of our historical research system – the US and British national archives are marvels, you know. Now I have learned to accept. I think you say in English, “It is what it is”, yes? Every second is precious.’

  Indeed she was divesting herself of coat, wallet and valuables at lightning speed, showing me where to stow mine in a locker, checking that I held only pencils, not pens, as stipulated by the regulations.

  ‘Come and meet Beppe. He is a pervert, of course.’

  I was digesting this unexpected remark as she led me to the main desk, where a middle-aged man, dandruff-flecked and balding, stood reading his request list while gently caressing his stomach, like a marsupial minding its young. She introduced me in Italian and I noticed that I had been elevated to Dottoressa Shackleton, presumably in a bid to win better service. ‘Signor Beppe Scalfaro, the deputy archivist,’ she said to me. ‘Beppe speaks some English.’

  ‘Buon giorno, Signor Scalfaro,’ I said, offering my hand. His was soft and moist and, having fluttered upwards for a split-second to make contact, his eyes descended to the level where they clearly felt most comfortable.

  ‘Oh, only very little,’ he said modestly, gazing at my breasts.

  At my request, Francesca had ordered the file containing the Heriu Tekle letter, with the attached map, the day before. We bore the box to the table, carefully choosing a spot that would require Tadesse, already bent over a pile of documents, to swivel an awkward 180 degrees to see what we were up to. Francesca and I slowly leafed through the contents. It didn’t take long. It contained correspondence between Italy’s Foreign Ministry and the Negus of Darrar in the first three months of 1899. None came with a map. My heart began to pound.

  ‘It’s not here,’ I whispered. ‘Have we got the right file?’

  ‘The file numbers are correct.’ Francesca checked the box label against her notebook.

  We made ourselves go through the letters once again, more slowly. Nothing. What was I going to tell Winston? ‘Shit.’

  The sibilants must have carried in the hushed room: Tadesse turned slowly in his seat, his gleaming dark eyes taking in the two of us, hunched conspiratorially over the box file. He looked down at it, up at our dismayed faces, and then he smiled.

  Francesca straightened in her chair. ‘Toilet, Paula, now.’

  She marched us to the Ladies, where she checked each cubicle, then leaned against one of the basins with her arms folded, her back to the wall-length mirror.

  ‘Tadesse did it. He stole the letter. You saw how he smiled?’ She was shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Vigliacco, vigliacco!’

  ‘Which suggests there’s something in it worth hiding.’

  ‘Maybe, but we will never find it now. I can’t believe it!’

  ‘How would he steal a document, though? Don’t they search your bags before you leave each day?’

  ‘Yes, but they are not always so careful. He could fold it up, put it in a pocket. His socks, his underwear. You hear stories.’

  ‘But that’s a big risk for a respectable professor to take, isn’t it? If he were caught, his reputation would be destroyed. And this guy, from what you say, wants to stay in academia.’

  ‘OK, so maybe the bastard hid it here, in the building,’ she said. Her eyes were swimming with tears, her ample mouth curved in a bitter bow of resignation. Being beaten by a despised colleague, I suspected, was not a new experience.

  ‘Don’t get upset, Francesca. We don’t know for sure Tadesse did anything.’

  ‘I know in my heart he did,’ she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. She wiped it angrily away, then ran the cold tap and splashed water on her face. ‘All my life, all my life’ – a sob – ‘I have seen men like Tadesse win and decent people lose.’

  ‘Let’s not give up just yet. Help me to think this through. Are people allowed to use the lockers as deposit boxes?’

  ‘No.’ She blew her nose and checked her make-up in the mirror. ‘You have to hand the key back every day.’

  ‘So there would be no obvious place to hide a document once he’d removed it from the file.’

  ‘No. But maybe he burned it.’

  ‘Archives have smoke alarms everywhere, though, and library staff are hysterical about fire.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Why don’t we ask Beppe? He must know all the tricks.’

  She gave an incredulous laugh. ‘We can’t accuse a colleague without proof. They’d have to open an inquiry and Tadesse would destroy me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Francesca, no names necessary. We can hint. When you said Beppe was a pervert, what did you mean?’

  ‘Didn’t you see how he looks at you? Always, always the breasts.’

  ‘Well, at least that suggests he likes women. So a bit of outrageous flirting might work wonders.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do this, Paula. He give me the creep. And I have to use this archive in future, for many more months.’

  ‘Will you let me try, then?’

  ‘Of course. I see now,’ she said, with a rueful laugh, ‘why Signor Pibody sent you. Paula the Unstoppable, eh?’

  So we redeployed. Francesca returned to the table, from which she nervously kept watch on both me and Tadesse. I approached the desk warily, file in hand. Underneath Beppe’s white cotton shirt, I noted, he was wearing a string vest. A good mamma’s boy. Temperatures might rise to the nineties in midsummer, but Italy’s army of civil servants would still wrap up warm each morning. ‘Signor Scalfaro?’

  He turned, giving my nipples his full attention. I leaned obligingly across the counter, eyes as wide as an ingénue’s. Cop a look at that. ‘I’ve been having problems locating some documents that should be in this box. I’ve checked the catalogue numbers, but neither Dottoressa de Mello nor I can find it.’

  ‘Well, sometime documents they go missing. Niente da fare,’ he said, with a shrug. Nothing to be done.

  ‘Oh dear. This is terrible.’ I ran my hand through my hair a couple of times, doing my best to look distraught. ‘It’s a vital document, you see, and we just can’t work out where it might have got to. We were even wondering whether someone might have taken it. Francesca says you are the best archivist here,’ I cooed. ‘If you can’t find something, she says, no one can.’ I put one hand on his wrist, and kept it there.

  I had his full attention now. Our faces were inches apart. His irises were the colour of stone, and one eyelid fluttered, out of control. Could this be the reason for his failure to meet women’s gaze – self-consciousness over a disfiguring twitch – rather than an obsession with breasts? Then I took in the close-bitten nails, the careful comb-over. No, Francesca was probably right.

  He cleared his throat nervously a few times. ‘Let me see who last used that file.’ Fingers a-tremor, he fussed over the records. ‘Vediamo, vediamo …’ Suddenly he stood stock still. He lifted his head to look across the room to where Tadesse sat. ‘Chiaro,’ I thought I heard him say. Of course.


  ‘If there has been any misbehaviour by a researcher, I am not aware. But you know the phrase “nascondere in piena vista”? “Hiding in full sight”.’ He enunciated with slow, exaggerated care. ‘An archive is a very good place to hide a piece of paper, no?’

  I stared at him, baffled. Then the penny dropped. ‘The best place to lose a document is in the files,’ I said aloud. Tadesse hadn’t needed to smuggle out or burn any documents, nothing so crude. Just misfile them. Call up an unrelated box and slip the letter from one into the other.

  I stood there for a moment as Beppe busied himself with researchers’ request forms, unsure how to pursue this insight.

  ‘Might it be possible … to know which files enjoy the greatest popularity among your users?’ I asked, trying to be elliptical.

  ‘Every researcher’s request is handled in strictest confidence,’ he said primly.

  ‘Of course.’ It seemed we had reached the end of the line. I couldn’t search the entire archive. Crushed, I was turning to go when I felt a sudden pain in my right hip. As Beppe bowed over his forms, lips pursed in a silent whistle, his left elbow was surreptitiously jabbing a fat clipboard into my side. I looked down. It was the chronological list of processed readers’ requests: date, researcher and catalogue number. He was handing me the keys to the safe.

  ‘Oh, Beppe.’ I reached out and squeezed his hand. He blushed, a rose tide travelling up from beneath the rim of his vest until it reached his hair, turning him for an instant from creepy stalker to bashful Romeo. Then I took out my notebook and started scribbling down the catalogue numbers of every box Tadesse had called up in the last six months.