I slept badly and woke up early. I made myself my usual cup of instant coffee and switched on the TV, again turning down the sound. I didn’t want to hear any bullshit. Beniamino arrived at midday. ‘News of Max?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Call him.’
Max told me not to worry: three hundred thousand people had arrived in Genoa from all over Europe, and, after what had happened the day before, the police forces would confine themselves to monitoring the situation.
‘Horseshit,’ Beniamino muttered.
The events of the previous day were faithfully repeated blow by blow. Undercover police and agents provocateurs were able to operate unchecked and the first police charge kicked off at around three in the afternoon. Tear-gas rounds were fired from helicopters and from police boats lining the coast.
The protest march was broken up into three sections and the demonstrators didn’t know what to do or where to go. They held up their hands to signal surrender but the baton blows just kept on coming. No one was spared, not even cameramen, press photographers or paramedics with red-cross signs on their chests and backs. One ranking officer from the DIGOS—Italy’s special-operations and anti-terrorist corps—who hadn’t even bothered to put on a mask, was filmed kicking a fifteen-year-old boy full in the face while his men held the lad down. The cops used any quiet moments to have group photos taken of themselves in a variety of warlike poses. The streets of Genoa were streaked with blood and the hospitals were crammed with casualties. The nurses hurriedly stitched them up before they were shipped out to the temporary detention center at Bolzaneto, where they were placed in the care of men from GOM, a special unit of the prison police created for the purpose of quelling prison disturbances and ‘managing’ awkward or dangerous detainees.
The prisoners were forced to stand for hours facing the wall, their legs and arms spread wide apart. They were given fresh beatings and the women were threatened with rape by truncheon. Prison doctors in combat fatigues saw it as part of their job to go round ripping out earrings and body jewellery. The Justice Minister made a personal visit to the detention center and subsequently declared that he had seen nothing out of the ordinary. His statement astonished no one. He would do anything for his ‘boys’ and was the only government minister who genuinely believed that Italian prisons were luxury hotels: he had even complained to the press that cells were fitted with color TVs. He had, however, omitted to say that the detainees were not able to switch channels and that, without the contact with the outside world that TV provided, his jails would quickly have turned into violent, rioting, hellholes.
Hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing from Genoa. It seemed like it was all over but in fact, preparations for one final blood-letting were underway. Pretending they had been attacked, the cops burst into a school that the protest organizers, the Genoa Social Forum, were using as their headquarters—an authentic round of score-settling. The battered heads and broken noses were caught on TV cameras as those unable to walk were stretchered out. The TV showed a close-up of a policewoman in a black T-shirt emblazoned with the anti-capitalist slogan ‘No Global!’ She even had a tattoo on her arm. But in her hand she gripped one of the new US-import batons. A handkerchief hid her face from view. Only her helmet was standard-issue: blue and shiny with the police coat of arms embossed in gold.
There was no news of Max; his cell phone appeared to be switched off. By two in the morning, Beniamino and I were convinced he had been arrested, and I phoned Renato Bonotto, the lawyer. He was still awake, glued to the TV. He told me that in Genoa constitutional rights had been practically suspended and that lawyers were impotent. All one could do was wait.
At 6 A.M. my cell phone rang—a Genoa number.
‘My name is Delia Manzi. Are you Marco?’ the kindly voice of an elderly lady asked me.
‘Yes, I’m Marco.’
‘Look, my husband and I have found an injured man in our backyard. He asked us to call this number.’
‘Let me talk to him.’
‘My husband is giving him first aid in another room. Your friend is seriously injured and needs to go into hospital.’
‘That would be dangerous, Signora. The police would arrest him.’
‘That’s just what he said. But you’ve got to understand that we can’t assume responsibility . . .’
‘Of course. If you could just hang on for a couple of hours, we’ll come and pick him up.’
‘We live in Corso Italia, but the neighborhood is full of police.’
‘Don’t worry about that. What’s the house number?’
When I’d hung up, Rossini took the cell phone and dialed the number of a Genoa nightclub. ‘I want a word with Vagno.’
For twenty million lire, some people belonging to the Genoese Mafia agreed to pick up Max from his hiding place and take him to a services area on the Milan-Venice autostrada.
In the meantime I went and woke up Daniele Cusinato, a surgeon with a weakness for horse-racing who would happily treat anyone for ready cash, no questions asked. I accepted his price and told him to stand by.
Max arrived in the back of a furniture truck, stretched out on a mattress. He was rather pale, his head was bandaged, one eye was swollen and he had a sticking plaster over his eyebrow. He gave us a smile but as soon as we lifted him he passed out from the pain. We put him in my car and headed for Padova.
‘Go easy,’ Rossini muttered. ‘You want the traffic cops to pull us over?’
‘Max is in a bad way,’ I snapped back. ‘He needs a doctor.’
‘Control your nerves, Marco. And don’t exceed the speed limit.’
Max cleared his throat. ‘Any more deaths?’
‘No. But there are a lot of serious injuries,’ Rossini replied.
‘They beat me like a drum,’ Max mumbled.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
‘Lousy. Never felt worse in my entire life.’
‘Then don’t waste any breath,’ Beniamino said. ‘We’ll be at the doctor’s before long.’
At the autostrada exit there was a roadblock manned by carabinieri. As ever, my Skoda Felicia failed to attract their interest.
‘It would be wiser to have him admitted to hospital,’ the doctor told us.
‘That’s not an option.’
‘He has concussion, but I can’t tell how severe it is,’ the doctor replied gravely. ‘There could be complications. Besides that, he has a broken left wrist, three broken ribs, bruises all over his body, and he’ll need a dozen or so stitches in his head and a similar number over that eye.’
‘It’s up to you, Max,’ Old Rossini said.
‘No hospitals,’ he grunted. ‘They’d arrest me straight away.’
‘He could make up a believable story,’ Cusinato suggested. ‘After all, Genoa’s a fair distance away.’
‘The cops will be searching every hospital in Italy for people with his kind of injuries and bruising,’ I said. ‘Besides, his criminal record would blow wide open any story he could come up with.’
‘Okay,’ the doctor said, ‘I’ll do what I can to patch him up, but if his condition deteriorates I’ll have to advise you to get him to the nearest E.R.’
Max waved his good arm. ‘Hey, doctor,’ he muttered, ‘give me some kind of horse painkiller, will you? I can’t take this much longer.’
I left the doctor’s consulting room and phoned Rudy at the club. I told him to get us a van and something we could use as a stretcher. A few hours later we were easing Max down onto his own bed.
‘Give me a cigarette, would you? I haven’t had one since yesterday.’
I lit one and put it between his lips. ‘So what happened?’
‘I don’t feel like talking about it.’
The doctor told us to keep you awake,’ Rossini said. ‘Besides, I’m really dying to hear what kind of fucked
-up mess you got yourself into.’
‘I was right in the middle of the march, with the rest of the people from the fair-trade movement,’ Max started. ‘All of a sudden these Black Bloc people appeared and started smashing store windows, and then the police charged us. I ran but they caught up with me pretty quickly.’
‘You don’t have the physique for that kind of activity any more,’ Beniamino scolded him.
‘There were four of them,’ Max continued. ‘They kept kicking me and laying into me with their batons and it wasn’t till I’d passed out that they went away. Then I dragged myself into the courtyard of a building and hid behind a car.’
‘Which is where Signora Manzi and her husband found you, right?’
‘Yeah, a nice old couple,’ Max remarked. ‘They called the caretaker and his son and had me moved into their house. I’m afraid I bled on their settee.’
‘It’s lucky nobody called an ambulance.’
‘A lot of Genoese didn’t appreciate the way the police were behaving.’
Rossini got to his feet. ‘I’ll go and order some flowers for Signora Manzi. It’s the least we can do.’
Max wanted to watch TV. Almost every channel was still broadcasting pictures of the clashes in Genoa and interviews with leading politicians. The opposition was voicing concern and indignation, while the government was giving its full support to the actions of the forces of law and order. A journalist talked in a way that was subtly defamatory, about the young man who had been killed, while adopting a tone that oozed phoney sorrow for a young life cut brutally short. I turned down the volume.
‘Turn it back up; I want to listen,’ Max said.
‘Aren’t you tired of hearing crap?’
‘Might as well get used to it. We’re going to be hearing about Genoa for a long time to come.’
Someone knocked at the door. It was Virna. ‘Rudy told me Max has been hurt.’
‘Rudy talks too much.’
My ex-girlfriend ran to Max’s bedside and showered him with kisses and caresses. It was at that point that I noticed I had some sleep to catch up on, so I left them to it. My apartment stank of smoke; I threw open the windows and jumped under the shower. Knowing Virna was next door put me on edge. As always, I became awkward and tactless. For me to be jealous of Max was ridiculous, but I really didn’t know what to do about it. I was still in love. I stretched out on the couch and fell fast asleep.
Over the next couple of weeks, Fat Max’s condition improved considerably. Clearly he had a hard head. Cusinato came and examined him regularly and finally made up his mind to take him off the danger list. He was the kind of doctor who’s very cautious with patients he can fleece. Virna was also often in attendance. She would prepare lunch and dinner and keep my associate merrily entertained. By this time I was openly avoiding her, but she appeared not to register my hostile attitude.
Max worried me. He was getting better quickly enough but his mood just got darker and darker. He watched TV and read the newspapers almost obsessively and was forever surfing the Internet, checking out the anti-globalization movement’s websites in search of news. Rossini noticed this, too, and was unable to control his tongue.
‘You’re really pissing me off, Max,’ he said.
‘Yeah? Why?’
‘I can understand you licking your wounds, but you’re coming on like a bloody martyr. It’s unbearable.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Besides, it’s time we got back to work and focused on the Master of Knots. We’ve already wasted too much time.’
‘Right now, I’ve got other stuff on my mind—’
Rossini leapt to his feet. ‘I never wanted to get involved in this S and M crap in the first place; the two of you dragged me into it kicking and screaming. But I have no intention of letting go of it now. I swore a solemn oath I’d eliminate that sadistic piece of shit.’
‘Beniamino’s right,’ I said. ‘The tattooing lead got us precisely nowhere. We need you to monitor the adverts at the S and M sites. It’s the only lead we have left.’
Max lit a cigarette. ‘You’re both right,’ he conceded with a sigh. ‘I’m still pretty shaken. Not just because of the beating, but because of everything else that’s happened. I can’t think of anything else.’
‘Well, it all seems crystal clear to me,’ Rossini cut in. ‘Just like it did even before it happened. They’d given you a pretty clear warning at the previous summit in Naples last March.’
‘You’re wrong about that,’ Max hit back. ‘What happened in Genoa has a totally different significance.’
Max would really have liked to go on thinking about it out loud, but our attitude made that impossible. It was a delicate moment—there was a real danger that a permanent rift might be created between us. Mediation was vital. Which, basically, is what I’m good at. I made a cautious proposal: we would hear Max out and then, once that was done, we would go after the Master of Knots again.
While Max talked, I realized why Beniamino had been so unwilling to engage in this discussion. He had grasped intuitively the kind of analogies Max might make with things in his past that he wished to forget. Whereas I, on the other hand, had just been surveying the overall situation from a distance without really thinking much about it, maybe because I was more concerned about what could happen to Max, and so I hadn’t understood a thing. The way the cops had behaved seemed pretty normal to me and, indeed, if we had been talking about prison or the use of violence against run-of-the-mill crooks and misfits, I’d have been right. But in Genoa the people on the receiving end had been peaceful citizens without police records.
In the 1970s, policing had been very different, the aim always being to contain street clashes. A couple of young people had lost their lives, but no open season had ever been declared on demonstrators, and there had certainly been no rampaging through hospitals. What’s more, once those arrested had been handed over to the prison police the beatings had always ceased.
Genoa had been different. The women and men who had protested against the G8 summit were treated from start to finish like common criminals caught red-handed. In other words, the violence meted out on them was standard jail violence: the savage beatings of a single person lying on the ground, by a group of four or five officers, was the usual punitive ‘Sant’Antonio’ technique used in Italian prisons. The way the police burst into and smashed their way through the school used by the Genoa Social Forum as their headquarters was just how police would retake control of a rioting prison: an occupation force moves in, the rioters are beaten senseless and then immediately transferred to other institutions. And the special prison-police unit at the temporary detention center at Bolzaneto had given their new guests just the kind of welcome normally reserved for dangerous prisoners arriving at a maximum-security prison. As Fat Max spoke, analyzing each detail of the way the forces of law and order had behaved, the TV images of the police charges flashed through my mind. The forest of raised hands, the terrorized faces and gaping mouths reminded me of something that had happened years earlier in the special prison at Cuneo. I closed my eyes. Just as I had done then when I felt the first truncheon strike my back.
Max had finished his piece. He poured himself another grappa and broke open a new pack of cigarettes.
‘This is just a problem for you and your fellow dreamers,’ Rossini commented. ‘We’ve always had to deal with these methods.’
Beniamino wasn’t that wrong. ‘I have to confess that none of this stuff surprises me too much either. Nor does it scandalize me, particularly.’
‘It’s a real morale booster talking to you two,’ Max said.
‘What do you expect?’ Rossini asked. ‘From where we’re sitting, nothing’s changed. And when I say “we” that includes you, too. You’re an outsider and a misfit and you always will be.’
‘Nowadays even traffic cops lash out like wild be
asts. They’ve forged papers and got their hands on guns and truncheons,’ I said. ‘Look at the way they treat the black immigrants who sell their bric-a-brac in the city center under the arcades, and how they smash up street buskers’ instruments.’
‘You ought to be happy about it,’ Rossini interrupted me, joking. ‘At long last we have a democratic police force that treats everyone the same way.’
‘Things are different now, and there’s no going back,’ I resumed. ‘They’ll use every means available to cut your legs away from under you, and they’re not short of means: the mass media, the batons, the prisons . . .’
‘And agent provocateurs,’ Rossini added. ‘These so-called New Red Brigades just stink of secret-service involvement. They’ll use them against you to settle old scores. Just wait and see how long it takes them to round up the Italian political refugees in Paris and throw them into prison.’
Max smiled. ‘Those guys are safe. They’ll never touch them.’
‘We’ll see about that. “International Terrorism” can be used to justify anything.’
Max raised a hand to signal surrender. ‘All right, you win,’ he spluttered, connecting to the Internet. ‘Let’s change the subject. How come you couldn’t find out anything about the Master of Knots’ tattoos?’
‘Because they were most likely done in Japan rather than Italy,’ I explained.
‘A real shame,’ Max muttered, shifting the mouse.
There wasn’t much new on the S and M sites, and no great increase in the number of adverts since we’d last looked. Max said a bit of a lull was to be expected over the summer.
‘We’re well into the second week of August,’ I pointed out. ‘Almost everyone’s away. Maybe the S and M gang is on holiday, too.’
Max gave Beniamino a sly look. ‘How come you’re not at the seaside with Sylvie? The nightclubs are all closed right now.’
‘Given the state you were in, I couldn’t make any commitments. She was very understanding and went off to Spain with a friend of hers.’
The Master of Knots Page 12
