Wu Ming - 54

Cary automatically arched his eyebrow. ‘But what about the doppelgänger? This French Canadian who’s supposed to be the image of me?’

‘Don’t tell me you’re not curious to meet him. At least to see if he really is the spit of you.’

‘If that’s why, then there’s no doubt about it. They showed me a photograph, and if I’d asked them to let me have it, you could judge as well. A stocky man with no sense of posture whatsoever.’

Betsy stopped walking back and forth and joined her husband among the cushions on the sofa.

‘I confess, darling, that I really am curious about it. Basically, I’d get used to it. The occasional stroll with a stranger, what could be wrong with that?’

‘I’ll think about it, Betsy, I’ll think about it. The secret agents reckon it would take just a little make-up to turn a used-car salesman into Cary Grant. It would take a damned sight more than that: showing him how to walk, how to dress, how to smile. I’d have to give him a few lessons. Otherwise it would be a disaster. He doesn’t look a bit like me. Not a bit!’

Chapter 18

Bologna, 11 February

Around lunchtime the Bar Aurora is always half empty. Not many of us stay there to eat. Maybe there would be more of us if Capponi bothered to serve up something other than the usual old mortadella sandwich, I don’t know, maybe a nice plate of pasta, but he says you need a special licence to cook, and Benassi won’t have anything to do with it because it would be too expensive. Anyway, even if he did, everyone with families would rather go home, tagliatelle made by your wife is always going to be better than anything Pierre throws together. So, at about one, you usually see the bachelors, the childless widowers, and people like La Gaggia or Brando who have a shop a stone’s throw away and don’t fancy going all the way home.

But after an hour, an hour and a half at the most, the bar starts livening up again, like a cat after its nap, a few yawns and it’s ready to go. First arrival is Bottone, with his son Massimo, on a motor scooter, wobbling slightly on the pillion seat. Massimo is one of the people who took part in the ‘Ten Thousand Kilometres on a Lambretta’ competition, the one in which a Bolognese student, who rode into the desert and then all the way to the North Cape, was placed third. Massimo got as far as Paris, met a girl, and forgot all about the competition.

Bottone is already sitting next to La Gaggia and shuffling the tarocco pack, when Walterún and Garibaldi turn up. They live in the same building and still ride bikes. Then the rest come in dribs and drabs, all in an exact sequence. The only unpredictable one is Melega, because if he has some news he wants to deliver, he waits until the bar is full to make more of an effect, and, if not, he’s always among the first to arrive after work.

‘So what do you think?’ Walterún suddenly begins. ‘Now that Scelba’s back, there’s not going to be much to smile about.’

On the other side of the table, La Gaggia pulls a face and tries to change the subject.

‘D’you hear what happened on Friday? They interrogated that girl who knows all about the death of Wilma Montesi.’

‘There are some good ones going around about that,’ comments a tram driver, cup in hand. He only ever comes here to drink coffee.

Walterún insists on the accuracy of his news. ‘I’m sure you’re right, but, mark my words, if the murderer of the Montesi girl turns out to be a big shot, that’s Scelba finished.’

Our emigrant’s shin takes a sharp kick under the table. La Gaggia shakes his head nervously, and tries to nod towards Bottone, who still hasn’t dealt the cards. He is trying to point out to Walterún that the issue of Prime Minister Scelba is something to be saved for later on, for when they’re playing, as though he were a joker to be pulled out in an emergency, because once this subject comes up Bottone will start going on about the atom bomb again and the game will be over. But Walterún just won’t get it.

‘That bloke isn’t a Christian Democrat, he’s a fascist, he’s the kind who solves problems with a truncheon! You remember the time they tried to change the election law? What a shock that was!’

‘Why, is Fanfani any better? With that Hitler ’tache of his?’

‘But they do say Fanfani’s more left-wing,’ the postman butts in, sipping his glass of bitters.

‘No, no, let me tell you,’ Bottone’s voice shuts everyone up. ‘They’re not more left-wing and less left-wing, they’re all exactly the same.’ He pauses for a moment, and La Gaggia attempts the impossible.

‘Quite right! For example, that guy Fanfani knew stuff about the Montesi case —’

‘The only good Papist is a dead Papist!’ Bottone again, red in the face, thumping his fist hard on the table. ‘Fanfani, De Gasperi, Pella. But Scelba is in another category, a much bigger one. They’re the ones who were delighted with Benito before the armistice, and then afterwards they were all anti, and now they’re back doing their thing again. There aren’t enough bullets for them all, you’d need something else.’ He starts machine-gunning with his finger. ‘And if I had a button to set off an atom bomb to wipe them off the face of the earth before they even noticed, I’d press it, boom, you can count on that.’

All that happens is that Bottone ends up with eighteen cards and has to deal again. La Gaggia shakes his head dolefully, and Walterún tries to apologise.

‘What’s this about Fanfani knowing things, Gaggia?’

A glance across the table, reproof for having woken up too late.

‘Well, it seems that this girl who knows everything, the one they interrogated, told Fanfani a few things back in December, on her parish priest’s advice.’

‘Priests, priests. ’ Stefanelli nods mysteriously, knocking back his chaser as well.

‘Hey, Gaggia,’ Garibaldi says as he throws down a king of cups. ‘I don’t get it, I really don’t. How come this girl Anna Maria went to Fanfani rather than the cops?’

‘How the hell should I know? She probably thought they were important matters, and pretty much everyone was involved, aristocrats, politicians, people at the highest levels. Because forgive me, if you knew things as big as that would you go and tell the cops?’

‘Oh no, certainly not. But I wouldn’t go to Fanfani either. I’d go straight to the editors of L’Unità and put the cat among the pigeons.’

‘Well, I don’t know, Fanfani was Interior Minister, they must have thought he was better.’

The bar door opens all of a sudden, and everyone turns round and stops talking. It’s an unusual time for anyone to show up, and Melega and the others are still at work. The bald pate of Adelmo Castelvetri pops into the bar, gleaming like its owner’s leather shoes. His clothes, on the other hand, show signs of wear: jacket frayed at the elbows, colours a bit faded, one button different from the others, but he still manages to look stylish, at least as stylish as Pierre on the evenings when he dazzles everyone at the dancehall. He’s a queer customer: everyone expects him to turn up in the bar at some point during the day, but he’s one of those people who doesn’t have a fixed time, he just shows up all of a sudden, and because of that habit of his many people wonder what exactly it is that he does for a living; he can’t be more than forty, a bit young for a pension. He doesn’t have a private income, Bottone knows his father and says it isn’t possible. But he does have money, he can afford expensive clothes and he’s got a scooter as well. In fact it seems as though money comes and goes from his pockets in waves; he’ll turn up in a new suit, then he’ll wear it every day for a few months, and he’ll tell you it’s more lived-in that way and he likes it better. But no one believes him, and in fact the most mean-minded among us say he’s involved in shady dealings. And no one can agree on what those dealings might be, some people say it’s petrol-smuggling, others that he’s simply a conman. And what about him? He claims to be an agent and a — how does he put it? — business broker, always there to give everyone advice on how best to use their savings, how to exploit them, what to buy and where, the best deals of the moment. And we can’t really say that he cons us that often, although it’s true, his nickname, Gas, comes from that scam he did in gas for lighters, which left lots of us 3,000 lire the poorer. And Garibaldi, who invested more than everyone else, took that very badly and has never let him forget it.