Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“My brother got out of prison a month ago,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “He was keeping his appointments with his PO. He was trying to get into the welder’s union. I loaned him a thousand bucks to buy a Trans Am. I said, ‘Why do you need such a stupid car?’ And he does this, Come on, Ronnie, come on, big bro, I’ve been in the joint ten years. What broad is gonna be interested in an ex-con? I need the car to put me back in play. I need it to keep me good. I won’t be just some asshole looking to screw up his program and get back inside. Who could argue with that? I gave him the money for the car. He totaled it on the New Jersey Turnpike. Chest right through the steering column. He crashed the stupid car I bought him and died. So I feel especially bad about my brother. But that is my business. And I’ll mention him or I won’t as I choose.”

He stared at the ceiling.

“Ronnie, I’m sorry.”

When he finally spoke, his voice was gentler. “I used to tease Sandro about you,” he said. “Sandro playing coach. Or dad. You just seemed too young. And you were. But honestly, I don’t even know if you’d be different older. I like you. But there’s something you never seem to get.”

And that’s why I can’t love you.

Ronnie didn’t say that. And yet all the way back to the Kastles’, and lying in the dark loft, the sound of someone kicking a metal garbage can down the Bowery, I felt the sting of that phantom phrase.

I was the girl on layaway. And it wasn’t Ronnie who’d put me on layaway. It was something I had done to myself.

* * *

The news hit about Roberto Valera the next week. I didn’t see it in the newspaper. Helen mentioned it when she came over, on Gloria’s insistence, to see my films. I’d borrowed a projector from Marvin and Eric. In the way Marvin had gravely made me memorize the proper procedure for loading my reel, I understood that he and Eric were invested in me. They liked my films and were saving “damaged” but in fact perfectly good roles of Kodachrome for me to take home. I had just loaded the first film, Waiting, I had called it, the footage of the patient Mob chauffeurs on Mulberry, when Helen asked if we had heard what happened to Sandro’s brother.

“He was kidnapped!” she said.

My film flickered on the screen that Gloria had put up for me, a white bedsheet. The first driver. Sweat rolling down his face.

From my terrified position I was able to see that to Helen it wasn’t a big deal.

“Kidnapped,” she said, “and Sandro has been in my office talking to people in Italy nonstop. No one can get through to the gallery now, never mind that it’s costing me a fortune.”

Helen watched the films and said they had something. “Maybe for a group show I’m thinking of,” she said, “for next summer.”

I nodded but it went in one ear and out the other. All I could think of was Roberto.

I went to the international newsstand on Astor Place and bought all the Italian newspapers they had. It was not major news, not on the front page. Deep in the business section of La Repubblica, one incident of many. Roberto Valera, taken on May 1 from his countryside home above Bellagio. Armed combatants had entered in the early-morning hours and then driven him to an unknown location. There was a photograph of Roberto holding up the previous day’s newspaper, May 2, proof he was alive, that he existed inside time. He gazed at the camera, looking like the Roberto I knew. Irritated, a man whose patience was being tested.

A call had been made to the police in Rome, the article reported, the caller declaring the kidnapping the work of the Red Brigades, not by accident on International Workers’ Day. It had been confirmed that the anonymous call had been placed from inside Rome’s Termini train station, from a pay phone right next to the police kiosk. A comical, taunting gesture. The playfulness of it reminded me of Durutti and the others in the Movement. But Durutti wasn’t kidnapping anyone. The people on the Volsci carried guns, but as defense, they said, against Fascists, who also carried guns. They shared an attitude about life, a lightness. They weren’t clandestines. Only Gianni was possibly that. Gianni, who had been watching Roberto. That was why he had been there, at the villa. To form an impression of schedules and habits.

The anonymous caller from the pay phone near the police kiosk said Roberto Valera was an enemy from the enemy class. He was being detained by the people’s army. Held in a people’s prison, at a secret location. He would be tried by a people’s court. If he was found guilty, the punishment would be severe.

There were other kidnappings and attacks that had also occurred on May 1, according to La Repubblica . A SIT-Siemens manager was shot forty times in the legs outside his home in Milan. I remembered what Roberto had said about the kneecappings, that it was a bumpkin method borrowed from the Mafia, who would do it to cattle to destroy a farmer’s herd. Roberto had shaken his head at the savage stupidity of borrowing a technique meant for cows. Another manager, from Fiat, had been kidnapped that same morning, with a three-billion-lire ransom.

Why Roberto would be tried and the other ransomed I didn’t know. When I looked at his image in the newspaper, the impatient gaze, holding the newspaper up, a wave of nausea passed through me. Not sympathy, just nausea. It was possible he might die.

I thought of Gianni telling the carabinieri I was married to a Valera, his employer, and that he was taking me shopping.

I thought of that long and bewildering day, waiting for Gianni on the other side of the Alps. How cold it was as the light drained away, and Gianni did not appear, and I could not seem to answer my own question of how long it was a person was meant to wait.

* * *

The day after I learned Roberto had been kidnapped, Burdmoore Model came to visit. The Kastles were out. I invited him in. “Oh, uh, okay,” he said, slightly unsure of why he should stay since Stanley and Gloria were not home. He asked about Sandro. I said we were no longer together. There was an uncomfortable silence. I said his brother had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. Did he know? Had he heard about it? I imagined in him some silent sympathy for my involvement with Gianni. I wanted his sympathy.

“They are trying him,” I said.

Burdmoore nodded. “This brother of Sandro’s, he runs the company? What business are they in again?”

I said, “Rubber, mostly. And motorcycles.”

“I’d imagine he’ll be guilty,” Burdmoore said.

“And then what?”

“After the death sentence?” He scratched his chin, thinking.

“Like in Brecht’s Der Jasager, ” he said. “After a fate has been decided, it’s customary to ask the victim, the sacrifice, if he agrees to his fate. But it’s also customary for the victim to say yes. So maybe he’ll be given that option. I mean the mandatory option of accepting his fate. Then again, maybe they’ll just let him go. One thing I’ll say about these kinds of militants, which I do understand, from my own history. These are people who consider the means they use to be the same, morally, as those of their enemy. In other words, no less justified. One’s own means are always justified. To them, the capitalist, like in this case your boyfriend’s brother—”

“Ex-boyfriend.”

“Either way, the capitalist isn’t a marionette serving some other, larger system of evil. He is power himself. Evil itself. And they’ve nabbed him.”

I went back to check La Repubblica on the newsstand at Astor Place a few times and didn’t find anything. I realized that if I wanted to follow that kind of news, I had to read Il Sole 24 Ore, the financial and business paper Gianni was always holding in front of his face. I went to the library on Forty-Second Street after work and read it on those wooden dowels in the periodicals room, rustling pages as old men smelling of liquor slept in club chairs, a woman shuffled around trying to look purposeful, but the wrong kind of purpose for a library. She circled the room, moving with that particular way that homeless women had of seeming like little girls, taking steps with their toes turned slightly inward, chewing on a frayed sleeve, little girls shuffling down the hall to their parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night. I read through Il Sole 24 Ore . After three days of no news except that the Fiat manager had been released after his family produced the ransom, Roberto appeared again in the paper. There had been a statement by the Red Brigades that he could forestall his trial, and the possibility of a guilty sentence, if the government was willing to trade him for eight militants currently imprisoned. Roberto had written a statement encouraging this. Insisting on it. It was, he said, the only way to save his life.