The Silence of the Wave (18 page)

The doctor’s voice interrupted the nightmare.

“Tell me the second episode.”

Roberto moved his head, like someone abruptly waking up and needing a few seconds to return to reality.

“I was in Madrid, handling a major deal involving Colombians, Spaniards, and Italians. The Italians weren’t the usual traffickers, Mafia, Camorra. They were—how can I put this?—normal guys who’d managed to get into the big time, which was quite unusual. You may have heard of the operation, I mean when we arrested them, because that unusual aspect of it caused a bit of a stir. Anyway, I was in Madrid with one of these guys, we had half a day free and he asked me if I wanted to go with him to visit a museum where there’s this big, very famous painting by Picasso. The painting is called
Guernica
—I’m sure you know it—but I can’t remember the name of the museum.”

“The Reina Sofía.”

“That’s it, the Reina Sofía. Roberto—he had the same name as me—had already been to see
Guernica
several times and whenever he was in Madrid he always went back. He was a nice guy, with lots of interests. He was like, I don’t know, a university teacher, a good schoolmate. The kind who finishes the work before the others and then passes the copy around. I liked talking to him and I think he liked talking to me. He said he thought I was different from the other people we had to deal with in our work. He meant our work as traffickers. He said he trusted me.”

“Why was he a trafficker?”

“I don’t know. He came from a good family, he’d been to university, he only had a few more exams to take and he could have graduated. I often thought of asking him why he was involved in trafficking, but I never did.”

“Were you afraid of making him suspicious?”

“Yes, it’s not the kind of question you ask in those circles. And anyway, if I’d asked him I think I know what he would have replied.”

“What?”

“He would have said there was nothing bad about dealing in cocaine, nothing immoral. He would have said there’s no real difference between drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. Except that the first are forbidden and the others aren’t. If someone said something like that to me today I think I’d agree with him.”

“Did you go to the Reina Sofía?”

“Yes, we went, and he told me a whole lot of things about
Guernica
. I remember hardly anything, apart from the thing about the Minotaur being a symbol of evil and bestiality.”

Roberto broke off. A shudder went through him, as if due to a sudden fever, and he pursed his lips.

“A few months later I had him arrested along with lots of others. He was given fourteen years. I think he’s still inside. All thanks to me, his friend. The man he trusted.”

* * *

The third episode had taken place in Panama.

Roberto was a guest at the farm of a man connected to the Cali cartel in Colombia. The man was a very important person and the farm was a crazy place: there were tennis courts, an indoor Olympic-size swimming pool, another huge pool outside with artificial waves, and a regulation-size football field with grass that was watered every day and actual terraces. There was even a fake volcano that produced eruptions to order.

Real professional teams played on the football field, invited and paid for by the host. The matches were organized to entertain the guests. And all the rest was there to astonish visitors, who included police officers, mayors, politicians and professionals, as well as, of course, criminals and Mafiosi from all over.

While Roberto was there, a new shipment of arms arrived. Pump-action rifles, assault rifles, guns of every kind. They just needed to be tried, and someone said it would be more fun to practice on living targets. The edge of the village a few miles from the farm was home to groups of semi-domesticated dogs, and this same person said that the dogs would make ideal targets. So they set off in a couple of jeeps loaded with people and arms and went in search of the dogs. In the end they found them, got out of the vehicles, and the weapons were loaded and handed out. Roberto got his gun too, and almost instinctively cocked the trigger.

A few people laughed, a few made jokes, a few said not to shout too loud because the dogs might escape. But the animals didn’t even think of escaping. They were used to people and just stood there thirty or forty feet away, calm and trusting. Some lying asleep, others searching in the rubbish, the puppies playing.

Then the host raised his rifle—naturally it was up to him to start—unhurriedly took aim, and fired. The first animal hit was a calm-looking ginger-colored dog, some kind of Labrador. The shot hit it in the back part of its body, its legs gave way, and it collapsed to the ground. Then all hell broke loose, a hell of fire and explosions and barking and whimpering and shouts and laughter and the smell of gunfire and smoke. Some dogs fell immediately, hit by the first volley. The others were pursued, and only a few managed to escape. Then the
shooting stopped, and Roberto found himself standing there deafened in the middle of the smoke, with his pistol in his hand. Only then did he realize that he too had fired, like all the others.

Reloading the weapons, they advanced in scattered formation toward the place where most of the animals had fallen.

A guy nicknamed El Chico because of his baby face blew away the dying puppies with a round of M16 fire. Others took aim at the survivors as they tried to escape. Some attacked the animals that were already dead.

The dog that had been hit first, the one that looked like a Labrador, was still alive. It must have had its hip shattered, and was making high-pitched whines and flailing with its hind legs in a desperate attempt to get back on its feet.

Roberto approached it, cocked the trigger, and shot it in the head. Blood and brain matter spattered on his trousers as the animal’s body was shaken by a final shudder and fell still.

* * *

“I feel as ashamed as if it had happened yesterday. I couldn’t prevent that massacre any more than I could prevent the rape of the three girls. But nobody forced me. I could have fired into the ground, or in the air, or not fired at all. I chose to take part.”

“You shot the Labrador because you didn’t want it to suffer.”

“I’m a coward, a bastard, a piece of shit. The reason I was so good at working among criminals is because I’m like them. I belong with them, I—”

“That’s enough now!” The doctor’s voice was like a slap, rapid and well-aimed.

Roberto gave a start, just as if he had indeed been struck, and dropped his head. After a few seconds he raised it again and for no particular reason started inspecting the ceiling of the room. He looked at the highest shelves in the bookcases, then at a thin stucco frieze that ran parallel to the edge of the ceiling, some ten inches below it, then at a small crack in the plaster on which he focused for several seconds, as if the solution to everything were hidden just beneath it.

At last he turned his gaze toward the doctor. His eyes were moist and red. He sniffed, trying to do so in a polite way.

The doctor handed him a pack of tissues.

“But these weren’t the things you
didn’t
want to talk about this afternoon, were they?”

“No, they weren’t,” Roberto said, drying his eyes.

I woke up very early this morning, feeling very thirsty, and got up to go and drink a glass of water. I had already drunk all of the glass I had on the bedside table during the night without even waking up, as always happens to me. I drink in my sleep and in the morning I always find the glass empty and never remember drinking. When I was very small I was convinced it was a ghost that came and drank my water.

When I entered the kitchen I saw Mom there, sitting next to the open window. She had her back to me and didn’t hear me come in. She was looking out of the window and crying.

It had been a long time since I had last seen her cry, and I froze. I would have liked to give her a hug and tell her there was no reason for her to be so sad, because I was there. But I couldn’t do it—I
never
can. Instead, scared she would turn round, see me, and lose her temper because I’d seen her cry, I crept silently away, went back in my room, and sat down on the bed.

I was sure she hadn’t heard or seen me. But after a few minutes she came into my room and also sat down on the bed, next to me. She had stopped crying, but was sniffing a bit. She had cleaned her teeth—I could smell the toothpaste—but I still noticed that she had smoked a cigarette. Or maybe more than one. She took my hand and we sat like that in the same position, hand in hand. The light from the corridor came in through the half-open door.

“Sometimes I’m a bit sad,” she said without changing position. I nodded. I didn’t know what to say, or maybe I knew what I should have said but didn’t know how to say it. I wondered what our life would have been like if Dad hadn’t died. It struck me that life is very unfair. I felt like crying and I made a great effort to stop myself.

“You know, when you grow up sometimes you’re afraid of time passing. It’s a difficult thing to explain, but the older you get the faster time seems to go. That’s what makes you afraid.”

She looked at me to see if I was following her. I nodded even though I wasn’t terribly sure what she was saying.

“Sometimes, when I was young, I met friends of my grandparents who maybe hadn’t seen me for some years. People I didn’t even remember. Everyone always said how incredible it was, I’d become a woman, how time flies. It seems like only yesterday you were just a
little girl. It got on my nerves when they said that kind of thing. It seemed such crap …” She broke off. Mom is always very careful about swearing. She says it’s not just a question of good upbringing and not being vulgar, and that the way in which we speak influences the way we think. I’m not sure of that, but I suspect this was something that Dad used to say.

“I’m sorry, Giacomo. It just came out. When you’re tired or sad it happens. Anyway, I wanted to say this: when I heard those phrases, so many years ago, they seemed to me like nonsense. But now I understand.”

It seemed to me she wanted to add something, but she didn’t. Maybe she thought it was too complicated for someone my age. So she gave me a big hug, and I smelled her motherly smell, from when I was little, and we stayed like that, until the sadness went away a bit.

“I was working with an agent from the DEA, who was undercover like me, and in association with the Spanish police and special departments of the Colombian police.”

“The DEA is the American narcotics agency?”

“Yes. Often it’s difficult to distinguish one of their undercover agents from a real trafficker. But I think the same could have been said of me. His name was Phil, and right from the start I didn’t like him at all. There was something … I can’t find the word, maybe rotten, about him. He made such a negative impression on me that in the preparatory phase of the operation I thought seriously of asking to be replaced.”

Roberto stopped to think, wondering what would have happened if he had obeyed that impulse. He dismissed the thought immediately.

“Obviously I didn’t. One of the aims of the investigation was to identify a network of members of the
police and the drugs agencies—Italian, Spanish, and American—who were in the pay of the traffickers. People who’d been untouchable up until then. And that was why, during the whole operation, relations with my covering team—the colleagues who were following my work and were supposed to intervene in case of emergency—were kept to a minimum. Every contact could be very dangerous.”

“How long did the operation last?”

“More than a year and a half. I was in Colombia almost uninterruptedly for about a year, by far the longest period I spent in South America. I had an apartment in Bogotá, I lived there, I was there for six months consecutively, without ever coming back. I know Bogotá much better than Rome, and I liked being there. I liked a lot of things about Bogotá.”

“Such as?”

“First of all, the climate. It’s close to the Equator but it’s at an altitude of eight thousand five hundred feet. It’s never really hot and never really cold. There’s hardly any difference between the seasons, it’s like spring all year round. Then I liked the old city—La Candelaria—a place that’s still dangerous but very beautiful. The taxi drivers always told you, almost obsessively, to keep your doors firmly locked, and sometimes, at night, you had the impression that small bands of ghosts had materialized in the streets, ready to strike and then disappear again.”

“But you were armed?”

“No, though most of the people I was with were. And yet I never had any problems, even when I went around alone and unarmed. In Bogotá you find things you don’t expect. For example, there’s an incredible tram system—the TransMilenio, a kind of surface metro—that works like clockwork: you feel as if you’re in Stockholm or Zurich. Then there are streets closed to traffic where you can’t even park a car. You imagine a South American capital—and especially Bogotá, which has such a terrible reputation—as a place where cars are one on top of the other, double- and triple-parked, just like here in Rome. Well, I lived in an apartment on the fifteenth floor in a residential neighborhood, and at night I’d open my window—the air was always cool and never cold—I’d light a cigarette, look out at the empty streets, and feel a sense of peace. I liked it a lot.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“It’s a surprising place. They have a national library in La Candelaria that they say is the most visited library in the world.”

Roberto broke off, rubbed his eyes with his fingertips, and massaged his temples.

“You were telling me about the library.”

“Yes. Actually I never went in, I only saw it from the outside. Somebody told me about it …”

All at once Roberto had the feeling he was talking in a language he barely knew. He couldn’t find the words
in Italian, although complete sentences came to him in English or Spanish. This lasted some twenty or thirty seconds, then things returned to their place.

“A girl. She was the one who told me about the library. She was almost twenty years younger than me and she was the daughter of one of the men we were investigating. I met her at her father’s house and after two days it was as if we’d known each other forever. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.”