A sublime country, Italy, for those who adore ruins: These are new ones. It’s a nice place to visit: The food is good. But right now the scene is nauseating. The beauty of Italy, not understood by those who come from outside, lies in its complex, esoteric mysteries, in its architectural heights that radiate age-old struggles: stone gargoyles and demons directed toward Saint Peter’s, the perennial clashing ground between one Spirit and another: The first speaks Latin, the second English.
Joe Spiazzi has the nerve to smile. He shakes his head. His cream-colored jacket matches the extreme hue of his wrecked incisors, his salt-and-pepper hair, his almost jaundiced skin, despite his excessive body bulk: He adores suckling pigs …
He despises Rome. He is fifty-two years old and his family is miles and miles away, an astronomical distance away, in a city with a name that eternally recalls Italy, Assisi, where Saint Francis spoke to and tamed the wolf: Ciudad de la Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles sobra la Porziuncola de Asìs—otherwise known as Los Angeles. Or better yet, to teach a lesson to the Spirit who speaks convoluted Latin: L.A. Where his wife, on the West Coast, at this hour, 1 in the morning, having put the two kids to bed, is studying the sparkle in Jim Morrison’s eyes in the mural in front of their house, in the neighborhood of Venice—built to imitate the network of Venetian canals, Italian hydraulic and urban engineering exported to the world: Made in Italy. A little like Joe Spiazzi’s family bunch: wacky in Italy, reborn in the American dream.
Just a short time left now before he returns home. He’s served two years in this Muslim crossroads, central to the geopolitics of U.S. intelligence only because the Polish Pope was suffering from Parkinson’s and the next Pope would be a German to be controlled and tamed as Saint Francis did with the wolf. This country is shaped like a boot and, as everyone knows, boots sink into mud. This peripheral mud that for years now has been outside any borders that matter. This city that calls itself eternal and proclaims itself to be the second Jerusalem, with its bell towers that are better suited to postcards than the heart of a dying faith.
Checks on the Muslims: routine. In actuality: to ascertain destination routes. Those shits from al Qaeda don’t plan anything in Italy: Italy doesn’t exist, it’s just a channel to move through—an empty boot. There is nothing critical here. Joe wasted his time on satellite surveillance, the monitoring of subjects by SIGINT, SIGnals INTelligence, even old-fashioned tailing. He hates the black terrorist bombers, the young guys in Iraq should do what nobody has the guts to say: drop the Bomb and so long to everyone—Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, imams. He voted for Bush Jr. in the embassy ballot box. He hates the Democrats: ticks who feed on blood indiscriminately, who don’t even know what and where Rome is, sucking Joe Spiazzi’s blood and that of his family.
It’s almost over, not even a month left until his return to L.A., and this mess erupts. The Italian Premier killed and dismembered by an exceptional explosion, in the very heart of Rome. Fuck. There’s now a chance his boss might keep him here. All of a sudden, Italy becomes a boiling point—and not because it’s sunny here.
He looks around: It’s a shambles. Italian police, colleagues of Joe dressed as Italian policemen: This is, after all, the fifty-third state. Firemen. Scientific teams. Dogs. Tape to cordon off the area.
It’s pointless to stay here. Better to return to headquarters. Behind Palazzo San Macuto, a building of gray ashlar where the Italians form their governmental commissions, endlessly discuss attacks and massacres, and struggle like ants to bring home a crumb of power that comes from above—never reaching any conclusion. The Palazzo that should solve Italy’s mysteries: All they’d have to do is call him, Joe Spiazzi, he would teach a class to the commission members for a couple of hours, and they would go home with three-quarters of the solutions that they stopped seeking years ago.
Time to go. Leave the “scene of the slaughter.” He crosses Via del Corso, obviously closed to traffic. He sees two bums passing a bottle of liquor back and forth, laughing obscenely.
Obscene. He swerves away from them. And suddenly he hears … in the immense din of the excavation, in the jumble of acute siren wails, he hears … one of the two tramps. Who shouts: “Hey, Joe!”
Joe Spiazzi turns, he doesn’t know where that call is coming from, whether it’s even directed at him. A 360-degree scan in a few fractions of a second and he intercepts one of the two bums who raises the bottle to him and shouts again: “Hey, Joe!” Nobody pays any attention to those two bums, nobody notices the anomaly, and with his hands in his pockets he clutches the two Beretta Px4 Storms, feels the technopolymer grip of the two semiautomatics. Thirty shots available. And the bum approaches swaying, smiling …
“Joe…” he murmurs, smiling, bottle in hand.
Joe smiles back, twisting his neck to the right, and in his slow Italian, devoid of inflection, he says: “Move and you’re dead.”
“You too,” and the bum keeps smiling. “My companion shoots if you shoot. We don’t want to shoot. You don’t want to shoot.”
Joe smiles.
The bum is motionless, bottle raised in the air. “It’s just to talk. We won’t move. There’s nothing we’re supposed to do to you, just something we have to tell you. If you call your colleagues disguised as Italian cops, we’ll shoot. We’ll shoot everywhere. We just want to talk. Briefly…”
Joe smiles and has time to think about the sparkle in his wife’s pupils; his wife, who is now, in the Los Angeles night, staring at the sparkle in the pupils of that two-dimensional, faded Jim Morrison on the wall at 17th Place.
“In less than fifteen minutes you’ll get a call on your cell phone. It’s your boss at the Third Service. He will inform you that the perpetrators of the massacre, four Arabs belonging to al Qaeda, have been caught. Within an hour the TV networks will go crazy. Your president will go crazy. All this is fake. The church blew up, and you don’t know a thing.”
Joe stops smiling and asks: “What should I know?”
“You, nothing. That’s why we’re using you as a contact. We know and we want those who know to know that we know.”
“And who knows?”
“Nothing will happen to you. It’s just a short time before you go back to where you came from. Venice is a very nice area, you have a very nice family…”
Joe’s index fingers squeeze the triggers, the triggers are at the halfway point of their short arc. “What do you want?”
“For you, who don’t know anything, to know. That you make it known. And to give you some advice. Take your family and move them. Not because we have any intention to do anything to you. You understand. The important thing is now, Joe. Joe Spiazzi, when he receives the telephone call from his boss, won’t be here: He’ll be a few hundred meters away from here. Piazza Minerva. The Minerva Obelisk. The one in front of the Dominican church. Designed by Bernini. The one with the elephant whose ass faces the entrance to the church, as an affront to the Pope. You know the one?”
Joe knows it. A hundred meters as the crow flies. “And why should I go there?”
“Because the tapes will be handed over to you. You’ll take in as much as you want to take in, but it’s important that you see them and then report to your boss. Your boss knows, but he doesn’t have the tapes. He knows what they were up to, but he isn’t clear on how and why.”
“What who was up to?”
The bum falls silent, takes a slug, moving the bottle cautiously.
Joe: “And if I don’t do it?”
“No big deal. We’ll find other channels. You, however, will stay in Rome. For sure: How could four shitty Arabs who blew up the Italian Premier in a centrally located church have escaped you? It’s your problem. And your family’s. I think it’s essential that you move them. To understand what I mean, you have to see the tapes.” Ipse dixit. Another slug of liquor. “Only twelve minutes until your boss calls. You should go. You can turn your back on us, there’s nothing more we have to do, we won’t do anything to you.”
Jo
e Spiazzi is motionless: human granite compressed at the moment of decision.
He turns his back on the bums.
He trusts them.
He goes to Piazza Minerva.
He photographed the two men. What service are they agents of? As soon as he gets back, digital images of their features: They’ll be entered in multiple databases. Joe will know who the players are. And what the game is.
There it is. The elephant designed by Bernini supports a pointed obelisk, dazzling in the chilly morning. The dust of the blown-up church covers everything. He has left traceable footsteps on his way here.
Six meters of monument—faded red granite. An obelisk erected by a pharaoh. Joe remembers when he dealt with sculpture and esotericism in Rome, when there wasn’t a thing to do all day except locate Arabs and blacks in bubu outfits; it was interesting. The elephant, exotic and adorned with hallucinogenic fabric, has a significance: It supports the obelisk.
… a robust mind is necessary to support solid wisdom …
A time when stones radiated, spoke. Even now those stones radiate—the late Italian Premier knows something about it.
The cell phone rings. Fourteen minutes have passed since the bum called out to him.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Robert. Come back to headquarters, it’s urgent. We’ve been hit by an earthquake. You fucked up. Our men have intercepted and captured the four guys who committed the massacre. They say they belong to al Qaeda. Saudis or something like that. We have to plug the leaks. You should have stayed on top of them. They’ve confessed. In less than an hour the news will be given to the press.”
Joe swallows a filament of gastric acid. “I’m coming. I need some time. It’s chaos here.”
Robert cuts off the call.
What’s going on? Joe leans against the elephant: the resistant granite eaten away by weather which erodes everything, which turns everything into excrement. Metabolism: this superhuman, temporal force. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: even that of a church blown sky high.
“Stay there. Leaning like that. It’s perfect.” The voice, Italian, is deep and penetrating. From under the elephant’s belly, Joe glimpses only an abdomen and the crotch of the man’s Prada pants. The man who is speaking, his voice calm, not commanding. “With your hand propped like that, I can see that you’re holding only one of the Berettas in your pocket. Fifteen shots. There’s no reason to use it. You should know, however, that you are in someone’s sights. The building to your left, third window on the right, on the second floor.”
Joe moves his head with infinitesimal caution. He sees the glitter, guesses that it’s an altered AK-47. He cannot guess who is behind the weapon.
Joe returns to his position. “What do you want?”
“They already told you. Watch the DVD before going back to Third Service headquarters. Turn everything over to Robert Mc-Intire, the section head. You will be given an immediate transfer. Home. They will know that we know. We want one more thing: for you to say that it is now too late. It has begun. It’s already done. Think about your family, Spiazzi. Stay where you are, in that position, for another two minutes, and don’t take your eyes off the DVD that I will now place on top of the monument, here, under the elephant’s belly.”
The hand sets down a small unlabeled DVD case.
The man goes away.
Joe continues leaning against the elephant designed by Bernini: a strong mind, supporting wisdom.
He turns cautiously to the window on the second floor: Nothing glitters anymore, the room is empty.
Two minutes. He grabs the DVD case, opens it: an unlabeled disk.
He looks for an Internet café.
It is not a wise choice, but since it isn’t, it is: an Arabic Internet café. Outside the walls of San Giovanni. Appia Nuova. The opposite direction from his agency’s headquarters. There would be a saturation check on all Arabs. In a few minutes the Italians would be able to raid and inspect. If the DVD was risky for him, the Italian police would nonetheless provide a delay to plot his next moves.
He is the most out-of-the-way customer. No one can see the screen of the computer he’s using. He has the headphones half on, so he can hear what’s happening in the place and at the same time listen to the audio of the DVD.
Twelve files. Twelve film clips. He double-clicks on the first.
Images shot from a video camera outside Palazzo Montecitorio. There is a date and time: an evening twelve weeks earlier. The view shifts, scanning the way to the service exit. A car. Political figures get out. Here is the slain Premier. Leaders and representatives of the opposition. Last: a cardinal. The one most cited for the next Consistory, after the brief parenthesis of the German Pope who won’t last long: He has already had two strokes.
A cardinal at Montecitorio?
The number of guests: eleven.
Change of scene. An interior. Joe recognizes it. The main room of the President of the Chamber. There he is, the President. Bugs everywhere in that place. Joe himself had been there, to replace someone who didn’t show up, passing himself off as one of the Italian Services. The image is blurry, the lighting dim. The President. The Premier. The Cardinal. They are all seated at a large, round table: twelve of them. A table of the Basile school, the Masonic architect who designed Montecitorio’s interiors. Esoteric symbols on the table’s Baroque legs.
They begin. Is it a séance?
The audio jumbled: “… so then let us concentrate, and together, through the visualization taught to us by the Masters, take action on the weak point, which will not give way unless we intervene … Let us invoke the Great One…”
Obsessively they invoke the Great One. It is the Masonic god, the Great Architect of the Universe … Joe wonders what it means. What does it have to do with the massacre on Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte? They continue invoking the Great One, hands linked to form a chain.
The image shifts. The group emerges from Montecitorio. First to go, the Cardinal with his retinue.
Joe Spiazzi doesn’t understand. He clicks on the remaining eleven clips. The same scenes, few variations, the same participants.
The last one: the date and time: today, an hour before the explosion. The President releases the chain ahead of time, prompted by the Cardinal, who says: “Done. The process is irreversible. Rome is triumphant once again. I must thank all of you. The head of the world will be beheaded. Caput Mundi for eternity: It comes back to right here, it is we…”
Joes sees the Premier stand up.
A gap. The Premier leaves by the side door of Montecitorio. The escort speeds up, passes through the piazza, the camera follows the guard up to the church, visible on Via Sant’Andrea delle Fratte.
The blast.
Fade.
Joe Spiazzi is baffled. There is still a snippet of video file left. The same camera. It’s night. The time in liquid display, the time when his wife gets bored at the desk of the advertising agency in Santa Monica. Here come some men. A van. Joe knows that van perfectly well. Four men get out. Joe knows those agents personally: They are his agents. They unhinge the door without making a sound. They come back out after a few minutes without a case they had taken in. Joe knows exactly what it contained.
They did it. Not the four from al Qaeda. Them. The Third Service.
Why? Joe checks the urge to vomit, his stomach shaken by a seismic shock.
The trip on a subway: slow, everything is blocked because of the massacre. He comes out of the metro’s dark hole, looks for a taxi, it’s hopeless.
He’s at the gate of San Giovanni. He looks around, ponders whether to call someone out from the agency. The agency … The agency perpetrated the massacre, he was not informed—has he been cut out of the loop?
A car, a Fiat, slows down, stops alongside Joe. A tourist leans out, seems to ask him something. Joe grips the Beretta in his right pocket. His left hand is in a nervous contraction, clutching the DVD case. He approaches the Fiat. And from the rear window, which is slowly lowered
, the face of Robert, head of the Third Service in Rome, leans out.
Joe’s jaw drops.
“Joe—the DVD.”
“You did it, Robert, the massacre…”
“It’s something that doesn’t concern you, yet you’ve already seen the files.”
“But…”
“You have no way of knowing. The stakes are high. You aren’t aware of everything. It’s as if they launched ten atomic bombs on American soil. You don’t realize what they’ve done…”
“Pray for the Great One?”
“Yes. Not God. The Big One. There are techniques for remote viewing, and there are techniques for moving objects from a distance. They moved the fault … mentally. Let’s hope we intervened in time, before they were able to finish the job. We don’t have tapes.”
The Big One. The San Andreas fault. Not Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, another San Andreas. The Big One: the greatest earthquake the human race will ever experience in the technological era. California destroyed, seismic waves reaching as far as Canada. The San Andreas fault runs in a north-south direction along almost all of western California, passing through two major cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, to then merge with another one farther south, the San Jacinto fault. The crustal plate that lies west of the fault moves northward, while that which lies to the east moves south, a phenomenon that gave rise to the term “transcurrent” or “strikeslip” fault. The friction between the two giant plates of rock builds up large amounts of energy which, when released, produces violent earthquakes.
Venice reduced to a Pleistocene landscape.
A tsunami that returns from the Pacific, while the West Coast is in flames.
Rome Noir Page 21
