Supernotes (16 page)

“There's not much to do here,” Kasper says with a smile.

“You know what I mean.”

Of course I know, Kasper thinks. The fact is, I can't trust you. I can't trust anyone anymore. I can only tell people what happened to me and hope someone gets word back to Italy. To my mother. To Patty. To my Roman lawyer, whom I don't even know. Before it's too late.

Too late even to remember.

“I must write it down,” he murmurs, lost in thought.

“Right.” Victor Chao nods. “Writing is very important. I do it all the time. I'll let you read my stuff. And I'll get you whatever you need. For one thing, I'll find you somewhere better than that crowded room where you sleep. And some notebooks. You want notebooks, don't you? Notebooks and pencils. So you can write.”

“Why are you doing this, Victor?”

“I don't want you to die before me,” the Taiwanese says, laughing. “That's all, my friend.”

“Italian! You come here right now!”

The Kapo glares and sneers as usual, his yellow canines prominently displayed. He gestures toward the administrative offices. “You have visitor, Italian.”

Kasper does a quick mental count. The week's not up yet, but apparently the Americans are impatient. Their timeline cannot be extended. At his last meeting with them a few days ago, he was in such a sorry state that they must have figured they shouldn't let too much time pass.

Mong Kim Heng is waiting for him.

This time the little dictator of Prey Sar isn't smiling. He's not playing his standard nice guy role. He shows Kasper to an office. It's not the room where his conversations with the American agents take place. It's an office used by the managerial staff. “He's waiting in there,” he says.

Kasper opens the door and goes in. Mong Kim Heng remains outside.

“Buongiorno.”
The man sitting on the far side of the table makes a gesture as though welcoming Kasper to his home. “Sit wherever you like.” He speaks good Italian, but with a distinct French accent.

Kasper tries to place him. He's not in his mental Rolodex. Never seen him before. Kasper's sure of it.

The office is cool. The air-conditioning seems like a joke to him. He drops into an armchair and puts his elbows on the meeting table.

Who can hold meetings in such a place? Kasper ponders this question while sizing up his new acquaintance. He must be around forty, short black hair, thin mustache, dark eyes. A light suit and a sky-blue shirt without a tie.

“My name is Louis Bastien, and I'm a French civil servant,” he begins. “Let's use first names, if you don't mind.”

Kasper barely nods. He looks around the room again. Where are the microphones hidden? And the video cameras? There are no pictures or mirrors on the walls. Not even suspicious lights. But the recording devices have to be somewhere.

“My colleague Marco Lanna and I have talked at length about you. He says hello.”

“Marco Lanna, but of course,” Kasper says, smiling ironically. “Are you a part-time diplomat too? What's your real line of work? Marriage counseling? Plumbing? Selling insurance?”

Louis Bastien nods but doesn't seem too amused. He strokes the ends of his mustache and shakes his head a little. “I play guitar.”

“Just what we need, a musician.”

“A musician, yes, and a pretty good one too. Unfortunately, however, it's only a hobby. I'm a diplomat by profession. Some coffee? Tea? Coca-Cola, perhaps…”

Kasper stares at him as though he's mad. Bastien gets up, opens the door, sticks his head out, calls the guard, and gives him the order, in English. Then he closes the door and hands Kasper his cell phone. “Call your loved ones. It's on France.”

The conversation is brief.

Kasper calls
la mamma
at home in Florence. Manuela Sanchez answers the phone.

“She's resting,” Manuela tells him.

“Don't wake her up.” Kasper asks her if she's heard from Patty in the past few days.

Manuela stammers a mostly incomprehensible answer. Strange, Kasper thinks. She's the unhesitating, direct type.

“Tell me what's going on,” Kasper urges her.

“I don't know if—”

“Manuela, you've got to tell me!” he exclaims, almost begging. “Please. The whole truth.”

“Patty gave me a letter for you. I promised I'd get it to you somehow, maybe through the honorary consul—”

“Open it.”

“Listen, I—”

“Open it. I don't have much time.”

She reads it to him. Just a few lines.

Patty couldn't take it anymore. She's left him.

After all, it's only fair. I had a feeling it might happen, he tells himself.

But it's not true. He never once thought she could possibly leave him. And it's not fucking fair. Looks like he should have believed the Americans when they threw it in his face.

“Read it to me again. Slowly,” he asks Manuela. She does so without objection.

Patty asks his forgiveness, but explains that she no longer knows who he is. Maybe her family's right, she says. After all, they've read on the Internet what everybody else has. And then there's the fact that he never talks about what he does, and there are those long, unexplained trips. What is he hiding? Maybe he has a wife and children in some other part of the world….

“Forgive me, but this is all too big for me. Too big, too strange, and too difficult.”

Kasper listens to her last words again. Now he's well and truly alone. Alone in the never-ending storm that's steadily getting worse.

He tells Manuela good-bye, closes the telephone, and hands it back to Louis Bastien.

“Thanks.” Kasper rises to his feet. “I'm going back,” he says.

“Wait a minute. I came all this way because I'd like to talk to you.”

There's a knock at the door. The guard enters, bearing a tray. He puts the drinks on the table and leaves. The smell of hot coffee is overpowering, but Kasper takes it the way he's taken everything else.

How long has it been since the last time he drank coffee? It doesn't seem important now.

“Please sit down,” the Frenchman says.

“I don't have time, Monsieur Bastien.”

“Are you saying you don't have hope?
L'espoir fait vivre.
”

“Oh, right, the French and their proverbs. I know some too.
Chacun est l'artisan de sa fortune
is the right one for me. Thanks for the visit. Thanks for the telephone call. But I'm not your problem.”

Soon I won't be anyone's problem anymore, he thinks.

He bids the diplomat good-bye and has himself escorted back to the camp.

Now he knows what he has to do. And he even knows how to do it.

Mondello Beach, Palermo

February 2009

“Another month and we'll be able to go swimming here.”

Giulia spreads her arms and spins around. “Know what I think? This weather's so incredible, I could just about jump in right now.”

Barbara smiles and watches her friend, in a T-shirt and jeans rolled up to her knees, play with the moving film of water at the edge of the beach. It's a February that already has the fragrance of spring. The sun's speaking Sicilian, which puts them both in excellent humor. They've been hanging out, chattering like free-spirited, happy-go-lucky, lighthearted teenagers, having fun the way they did when they were little girls, inseparable friends who shared secrets and dreams.

It's been some time since they last scheduled a couple of days off just for themselves and picked a city to explore. Two wives and mothers released on bail and well aware that this weekend will pass quickly.

They should escape more often, they think.

They've discussed Kasper extensively. Barbara's told Giulia the whole story, first of all because she's a trusted friend, but also because she's married to a pretty prominent American businessman.

A man with influence, as is said in such cases.

If the right Americans exist, Giulia is without a doubt the best connection Barbara has. Her friend's husband is part of the liberal establishment, newly energized with Barack Obama settled into the White House. It's no coincidence that one of the new president's first actions was to announce the closing of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Perhaps the U.S. government will no longer tolerate the existence of other such institutions elsewhere in the world.

“My God, what a horrendous business,” Giulia says indignantly. “I can't even imagine such a thing. I'll talk to my husband about it. You'll see, in a few days I'll give you the name of the best person to contact. Meanwhile, don't worry. This story's going to find its way to whoever needs to hear it, and very soon.”

As she prepares to go back to Rome on Sunday evening, Barbara finally feels as though she's close to a concrete result. On the plane, ready for departure, she checks to make sure her cell phone's turned off and puts it back in her bag. At that very instant, Manuela Sanchez is sending her a message.

But several hours will pass before Barbara reads it.

She sees her coming up from the subway in Piazza della Repubblica.

It's Monday morning in Rome, and her ivory trench coat blends into the crowd. Barbara doesn't move; she stays where she is, next to her car.

Manuela's instructions were pretty simple: “I'll find you.”

And so Barbara's waiting.

Not many minutes later, they're heading toward Piazza Venezia amid the heavy traffic of Via Nazionale. “Where shall we go?” Barbara asks.

“Let's wander a bit.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let's drive around. Don't stop anywhere. If you have enough gas.”

They slowly pass workers who are repairing the pavement by replacing the sampietrini, the black basalt stones. “Look at what a good job they're doing,” Manuela says. Their movements are precise and methodical, the signs of a skill steeped in history. The tick-tick of the hammers flies in the face of modernity.

“Some professions will always be around,” Manuela observes. She shrugs and takes out a cigarette but doesn't light it. “Some professions tell you the story of a world. Take the world of drugs, for example.”

“The world of drugs…”

“Exactly. Maybe drug laws will be liberalized someday. Think how many jobs would be lost. Masses of people and rivers of money would have to find new reasons to exist and new purposes to serve. Men who risk their lives every day, on one side or the other, would be forced to find themselves a different line of work.”

“You miss that world, don't you?”

Barbara's question is sudden, deliberately abrupt, but Manuela doesn't blink. She shakes her head slightly. “No, I don't miss it. I'm convinced I made the right choice fifteen years ago. I miss the adrenaline, though. I do miss that. The taste for risk that made every day different from the rest. Today, every day is the same. It's hard to get used to.”

“But you take care of others. You do volunteer work with prisoners. You help out sick people. You—”

“It's not enough. It's not the way I'd like it to be. But the past doesn't come back. Not even if you've got two assholes on your tail following you wherever you go.”

“When did that happen?”

“It's happening now.”

“Excuse me?” the lawyer asks, getting agitated.

“It means they've been following me for days. They're behind us right now. But don't worry. Drive just the way you've been driving up to now. You may as well make them go in circles. When we're finished, take me back to Termini. I have a train in two hours.”

They could be from the FBI, the CIA, or some other American agency. They could be Italians working with the Americans. Or they could even be independent contractors. Manuela's probably not the only one of Kasper's contacts who is under surveillance.

Barbara drives past the Baths of Caracalla, downshifting as the road gets steeper. “Are you telling me they're watching me too?”

“There's nothing more likely.”

“Shit.”

Manuela points to a street up ahead. “That goes to Garbatella, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“I used to have a boyfriend in that part of town, many years ago. Let's drive around there.”

They head down Via Cristoforo Colombo, among the thousands of vehicles traveling between Rome and the Lazio coast at that hour on a Monday morning. In such a river of traffic, it's not at all easy to tell whether they're really being followed or not. But as soon as they turn off onto Via delle Sette Chiese and enter the Garbatella quarter, with its characteristic pink buildings, a greenish Hyundai comes zipping out of nowhere, like a lizard from between bricks.

“Jesus Christ! There they are, I know that's them,” Barbara blurts out.

“Pay no attention.” Manuela gives her directions. They drive into a labyrinth of narrow streets, past the distinctive little houses and squares of a part of Rome where the city suddenly turns into a village. Manuela seems to feel right at home. “There you go, park over there,” she says.

Barbara looks up at the edifice and the sky-blue sign on its façade. “But this is the police station!” she objects.

“Damn right. This way the guys following us will have something interesting to write in their little report.” Then she adds, “It's not a bad thing to have been a cop's girlfriend. Especially if you happen to become a criminal later.”

Kasper's situation has gotten completely out of hand. Manuela summarizes it for Barbara in a few words. She's been able to talk to Kasper for a few minutes on the phone. He sounded desperate and determined, she says. Two states of mind that don't go together very well, unless…

“Unless what?” Barbara asks, a second before she guesses the only possible answer.

Manuela tells her about the letter to Kasper from his girlfriend Patty.

“Does Kasper's mother know?”

“I told her myself. I had to. She wasn't the least bit surprised. Her comment was something like, ‘I understand her, poor girl.' Then she added that everyone lives with at least one ghost, and Patty has found hers.”

“That letter must have seemed like a dagger to Kasper.”

“I don't know. I got the feeling he was expecting it. It was like he was waiting for something like that so he could make the decision he's been moving toward for months.”

“Are you saying that—”

“I'm saying he's planning his exit from the scene. Not by suicide, at least not by what a normal person would think of as suicide. He'll go down fighting. I wouldn't be surprised if he's got it all organized….”

She pauses and opens her leather bag. She takes out two little notebooks with thick black cardboard covers. “There's another reason why I think we've reached the end of the line,” she explains. “These were delivered to Kasper's mother's house yesterday. Brady sent them.”

“What are they?”

“Diaries and memoirs. Kasper's writing. He's recalling things and telling his story. It's all in here. But maybe some more will come. He wants his lawyer to wait for the right moment and then hand the notebooks over to the big newspapers. And so…”

Manuela gives Barbara the two little volumes.

Barbara clasps them tight. “The right moment,” she murmurs. “And how am I supposed to know when the right moment comes?”

“That's easy. It'll be the day you learn he's dead.”