Джанрико Карофильо - Rome Noir

This is the part that makes your head spin.

A small gold almond appears.

The Madonna appeared here in Rome in 1820, and two Jewish bankers of the Ratisbonne family were instantly converted.

The small gold almond quivers and expands.

It appears to stream forth from the altar, it instantly inflames the altar’s gold like an ultra-body, a blazing spirit.

It is the void exploding.

The void explodes and grows larger, the flame is hungry for air, it mushrooms.

The Premier of Italy only has time to be astounded, to raise his bent head.

The church collapses in a roar.

The bodyguards are killed in the blast.

When the attaché, former FEMA, of the United States third intelligence service in Rome, the real secret agency, arrives at the scene of the devastation, the disaster has not been reconstructed: Italians, those clever people, spaghetti-eaters good for patting him on the head or endlessly running around behind the bench of the Court of New York, in perpetual trials against the Mafia. Clever guys good for Scorsese. The attaché who arrives at the “scene of the slaughter” (the dirge, repeated over and over, audible above the dense ring of reporters droning on like automatons in front of their cameramen) has the advantage of language: He is a fourth-generation macaronic and knows how to listen, knows how to speak Italian, and knows what the Italians are hiding under this language that is the oldest and most ambiguous modern tongue in the world, intact for eight hundred years, from Dante’s Inferno through to today.

What Joe Spiazzi sees, zipping his jacket up to his neck, occasionally flashing an embassy badge, is an inferno of concrete and centuries-old beams of moth-eaten wood, the remains of an unseemly bell tower, a few meters from the political heart of the nation that generated, digested, and excreted its great-grandfathers to the New World. The church is no longer there. The bodies have been extracted from the rubble. The cars are ulcerated scrap iron.

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.