Three-Card Monte (4 page)

That makes two of us, Massimo thinks, looking outside toward his involuntary collection of living antiques.

“It's an idea . . . ” says the girl with the big eyes.

“Look, let's do this,” the other girl says with a determined air. “We'll tell the chief tonight, at the reception, and then tomorrow,” she looks at Massimo, “we'll come straight back here and let you know.”

“All right,” Massimo replies. “If you decide before then, you can even let me know tonight. I'm going to be there with you.”

“How do you mean?”

“You just said there's a reception tonight, and your friend was saying that she has to give a presentation the day after tomorrow. That means you're talking about a conference. As far as I know, the only conference in the vicinity is”—he takes a brochure from behind the counter—“the Twelfth Interna­tional Workshop on Macromolecular and Biomacro­molecular Chemistry—my God what a waste of capital letters—taking place at the Hotel Santa Bona in Pineta from May 21 to 26.”

“Yes, that's right. But how did you come to have this brochure?”

“Because even conference delegates have to eat, and in such cases they turn to a catering service. And in this particular case, the catering service is being provided by me.”

“You and Aldo,” Tiziana cuts in.

“Yes, all right. Me and Aldo. Aldo's the gentleman outside with the white hair who's insulting the gentleman in the beret. We're in charge of the catering. That's why, unless anything untoward happens, I should also be at the conference tonight.”

D
ays on which terrible things happen always begin like any other. Until something happens, they're just average days.

The first day of the Twelfth International Workshop, etc., etc., is no exception. Like any ordinary conference, at which no one is killed, it begins with a speaker of particular distinction who gives a lecture summing up his life's work. After this comes the first installment of seminars, which lasts from nine until eleven, followed by the first coffee break. Everything starts again at 11:30, and continues until lunchtime, when people usually have between one and two hours at their disposal. Finally, the conference resumes in the afternoon, continuing from 3:00 until 4:30, when there is a second coffee break, followed by the final installment of lectures, at the end of which, unfortunately, nothing has been planned.

Coffee breaks are essential for restoring the spirits of the conference delegates, exhausted by two hours of hard listening sitting on theater-style seats in a half-lit room. Usually in these circumstances, most of the academics lose every semblance of restraint: they hurl themselves at the trays, fill their plastic plates with precarious pyramids of breadsticks and sandwiches, and, gobbling down what they have conquered, listen to whichever colleague happens to have ended up next to them talking with their mouths full, while they chew enthusiastically.

In all this, Massimo and Aldo, impeccable in their uniforms—of waiter and maître d' respectively—are extras, acting at different speeds and in different styles: Massimo pours and Aldo decants, Massimo nods and Aldo approves, Aldo offers and Massimo serves. At first, obviously, they don't exchange a single word: they have to cope with the mad scramble of scientists. Subsequently, when most of the food has been plundered, the situation calms down and it becomes possible to exchange a few words.

“I didn't think there'd be so many people.”

“There aren't so many really. Maybe about two hundred. I've seen conferences with more than a thousand people.”

“A thousand people? I was thinking of those photographs of old conferences, the ones you see in the newspapers when there are anniversaries, obviously. The Solvay Conference, or something like that. Twenty, thirty people at most.”

Aldo smiles and serves coffee to two Japanese who thank him and return his smile, then continues:

“Apart from anything else, not that I know about these things, but what's the point of a conference with a thousand delegates? How are you going to discuss anything?”

“This isn't the Congress of Vienna, Aldo. Anyway, to judge by the few I've been to, you don't really get serious discussions at conferences.”

“You're right. There aren't many discussions at conferences. Could I have a coffee?”

The person who has spoken is a short man in a yellow T-shirt and a pair of surfing shorts. Although he spoke in Italian, his accent and appearance classify him as Nordic. Sure enough, the badge hanging from the bottom of his T-shirt identifies him as A. C. J. Snijders, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands. Massimo, who takes an immediate liking to him, pours what he has requested into a plastic cup and as he does so says, “If you can call this coffee . . . ”

“Thanks. Look, as long as it has caffeine in it, it's fine by me. I need to wake up.”

“Boring in there?”

“A little. The thing is, it's not my field. I'm a theoretician, and this morning it's the experimental scientists who are talking. The first speaker today, the one who opened the conference, was a theoretician. A really good one.”

He takes a sip of his coffee, and makes a face that seems to mean: “It's not so bad.”

“Kiminobu Asahara. A Japanese,” he says as if this explains everything.

“Who's that?” Aldo butts in, just to have something to say.

“The old man over there, in that group. The tall one.”

The little group indicated by Snijders is composed exclusively of Japanese men old enough to have bombed Pearl Harbor, so it's lucky that in pointing him out Snijders has specified that Asahara is tall. Sure enough, one of the elderly Orientals is a whole head taller than the group average. This particular individual has a glass in his hand and seems to be in a state of catalepsy: as he is being spoken to, his eyes close and his trunk leans forward slightly. The movement makes the liquid in the glass spill over a little, and (perhaps) because of the sudden cold he wakes up for some twenty seconds, then begins again to sink slowly into oblivion.

“What's he doing, sleeping?” Aldo asks.

“Pretty much. He falls asleep very easily. Even when he's speaking. And when he speaks his voice becomes ever more confused. During his lecture he must have lost consciousness a hundred times. It was torture. Ten seconds of silence and then one word. For some reason, they still get him to speak, an old man like that, I really don't know.”

“Well, he must be an important person, probably highly respected,” Aldo says, a touch acrimoniously, because he doesn't think it's such a terrible thing to be old.

“Oh, yes, he's important. He's done many good things as far as science goes. But it isn't right to get him to speak. People fall asleep. He should just be a presence, and that's all.”

Snijders finishes his coffee in two gulps, then looks disconsolately at the gathered scientists. “Well, I think I've heard enough for this morning. Can you tell me if there are any free beaches around here?”

“Not around here, no,” Aldo says. “There are the bathing establishments on the beach. You can hire an umbrella or a hut and you have access to the sea.” As he speaks, he pours some fruit juice for a thin young woman who looks as if she has just come back from her cat's funeral and who according to her badge is Maria de Jesus Siqueira, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.

“And how much does it cost to hire an umbrella?” Snijders asks, in a tone that makes it clear that the cost of the hire might be crucial in establishing whether he likes this coast or not.

“I don't know, it depends. Between five and ten euros a day. Not so much,” Aldo replies curtly, looking Snijders up and down as if asking himself if a man like this has ever seen ten euros together in one place in his life.

“Hmmm. That's quite expensive. Well, I could go back to the lecture . . . ” Although he is still smiling, he doesn't seem very happy. The Portuguese woman, who is still standing there with her full glass in her hand, presumably not understanding anything, attempts a slight smile, which she then hides by drowning it in her fruit juice.

“If you're interested,” Massimo says, “the hotel has a swimming pool. It's there behind the oleander hedges. It's reserved for guests of the hotel.”

I'm a guest of the hotel, says the light that comes on in Snijders' eyes.

 

Sitting in the darkness of the conference hall, Koichi Kawaguchi was suffering terribly.

Firstly, he was suffering because of the lectures. All the lectures programmed for the day were being given by experimental chemists, and he was neither a chemist nor an experimenter. Koichi Kawaguchi was a computer expert, who, together with other researchers in his department, had developed a code for calculating the mechanical properties of polymer-based composites. Since this code could in principle be used—and would be coveted—by all those doing research in the field of macromolecules, his department had sent a representative to present the code and do a little publicity at every conference touching on the subject of polymers, even if only remotely. Including the present conference, whose central theme was the synthesis and characterization of functionalized and biofunctionalized polymers. In other words, things in which Koichi did not have the slightest interest, studied by people who were presumably not interested in his code.

Therefore, what lay in store for Koichi was a conference in which he would spend the oral sessions (skipping the lectures was out of the question) listening to reports of which he understood nothing and which in any case did not interest him in the slightest.

But this, Koichi could stand.

Something else that lay in store for Koichi was the prospect of spending the whole round of poster sessions standing by his poster in jacket and tie, as Japanese custom demanded of all those presenting their work either with a poster or in an oral session. A poster in front of which, presumably, nobody would stop, obliging Koichi to spend a few humiliating hours simply standing still and waiting.

But even this, Koichi could stand.

All this would be taking place in the conference hall of the Hotel Santa Bona, whose stiff plastic chairs combined admirably with the irregular functioning of the air-conditioning to annoy the conference delegates, who, for the ten minutes during which the air-conditioning was on vacation sweated like marathon runners, and for the following ten (in which the system, probably feeling guilty, tried to recover credibility by vigorously blowing cold air into the room) risked pathologies ranging from pleuritis to acute lumbago.

But even this, Koichi could have stood.

What he really couldn't stand was the fact that the conference hall of the hotel had a glass wall. And through the glass wall you could see an oleander hedge. A few minutes earlier, Koichi had seen that strange Dutch professor disappear behind the oleander hedge, in swimming trunks and inflatable ring cushion, with a book in his hand. And now, through the gaps in the hedge, the placid figure of A. C. J. Snijders was visible from time to time, sitting in the ring, supporting the book with one hand and trailing the other in the water, clearly at peace with the world and with himself.

 

“Do you think they're going to finish everything?”

“I have no idea. If they do, they have my admiration. And I'll put flowers on their graves.”

“All right, don't exaggerate now.”

“I'm not exaggerating. Look at how much stuff there is. If these old guys really finish everything, one or two of them are bound to die on us.”

It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and while the first part of the afternoon session of the conference was taking place, under the mysterious title
Protein Binding, Folding and Recognition
, Massimo and Aldo were finishing laying the tables by the swimming pool with the trays and carafes intended for the scientists' snack.

The culinary part of the afternoon had been personally taken care of by Tavolone, the chef from Aldo's restaurant and a firm believer in the equation: quantity equals quality.

Faced with the task of organizing a mid-afternoon aperitif/snack/tasting session, Tavolone had had the idea of exploiting his recent vacation in Spain and cramming the hundred square feet of tables at his disposal with a magnificent array of tapas of all kinds. From behind his table, Massimo salivated as he gazed at the ranks of multicolored delicacies: potato tortillas, creamed cod canapés, little sausages dressed in layers of artichoke, broccoli tops wrapped in bacon and sprinkled with granules of crisp baby onion, small tomatoes stuffed with goat's cheese and parsley, and so on. They cheered you up just to look at them. And made you hungry, of course. Not that it took much to make Massimo hungry. After all, he was Ampe­lio's grandson, and blood was thicker than water.

But the food had been arranged too well. Too tidily, in compact, symmetrical piles. It wasn't possible to take a single thing out before the crowd arrived without leaving an obvious hole. That was why Massimo was trying to evaluate how likely it was that the delegates would leave any survivors that could then be taken prisoner and executed after everything had been put away, maybe enjoying the coolness of seven o'clock in the evening sitting on a deck chair next to the swimming pool without a thought in the world. Tiziana would be in the bar until eight. On the other hand, the scientists had already given proof of their talent that morning, when they had raided the tables during the coffee break and left nothing behind but crumpled napkins and a little fruit juice at the bottoms of the glasses.

To distract himself from the thought of food, once everything was ready for the beginning of the break, Massimo had sat down with the earphones of his iPod in his ears, and was enjoying a nice mix of hits from the 80s to the present day.

While Massimo was listening, slumped in his plastic chair, Aldo had taken from his pocket a pack of poker cards, still in its glossy cardboard wrapper. He opened it, took out the pack, and spread it in a perfect textbook fan, with every card showing on the corner the suit and the value before being covered by the preceding one. He closed the pack, cut it, and shuffled it American-style. Then he took a card from the pack and showed it to Massimo with the air of someone who is about to do something amazing, but he must have changed his mind because he almost immediately replaced it and put the pack down behind the table.