“You think I’d give you a defective phone?” Luigi asked.
“No, of course not.”
“How was your nap?”
“Uh, nice, very nice. I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Ciao.”
Where was Luigi? Lurking nearby with a phone in his pocket, just waiting for Joel to call? Watching the hotel? If Stennett and the driver were still in Treviso, along with Luigi and Ermanno, that would add up to four “friends” of some variety assigned to keep tabs on Joel Backman.
He gripped the phone and wondered who else out there knew about the call. Who else was listening? He glanced at the street below and wondered who was down there. Only Luigi?
He dismissed those thoughts and sat at the table. He wanted some coffee, maybe a double espresso to get the nerves buzzing, certainly not a cappuccino because of the late hour, but he wasn’t ready to pick up the phone and place an order. He could handle the “Hello” and the “Coffee,” but there would be a flood of other words he did not yet know.
How can a man survive without strong coffee? His favorite secretary had once brought forth his first cup of some jolting Turkish brew at exactly six-thirty every morning, six days a week. He’d almost married her. By ten each morning, the broker was so wired he was throwing things and yelling at subordinates and juggling three calls at once while senators were on hold.
The flashback did not please him. They seldom did. There were plenty of them, and for six years in solitary he’d waged a ferocious mental war to purge his past.
Back to the coffee, which he was afraid to order because he was afraid of the language. Joel Backman had never feared a damn thing, and if he could keep track of three hundred pieces of legislation moving through the maze of Congress, and if he could make one hundred phone calls a day while rarely looking at a Rolodex or a directory, then he could certainly learn enough Italian to order coffee. He arranged Ermanno’s study materials neatly on the table and looked at the synopsis. He checked the batteries in the small tape player and fiddled with the tapes. The first page of lesson one was a rather crude color
drawing of a family living room with Mom and Pop and the kids watching television. The objects were labeled in both English and Italian—door and porta, sofa and sofà, window and finestra, painting and quadro, and so on. The boy was ragazzo, the mother was madre, the old man teetering on a cane in the corner was the grandfather, or il nonno.
A few pages later was the kitchen, then the bedroom, then the bath. After an hour, still without coffee, Joel was walking softly around his room pointing and whispering the name of everything he saw: bed, letto; lamp, lampada; clock, orologio; soap, sapone. There were a few verbs thrown in for caution: to speak, parlare; to eat, mangiare; to drink, bere; to think, pensare. He stood before the small mirror (specchio) in his bathroom (bagno) and tried to convince himself that he was really Marco. Marco Lazzeri. “Sono Marco, sono Marco,” he repeated. I am Marco. I am Marco. Silly at first, but that must be put aside. The stakes were too high to cling to an old name that could get him killed. If being Marco would save his neck, then Marco he was.
Marco. Marco. Marco.
He began looking for words that were not in the drawings. In his new dictionary he found carta igienica for toilet paper, cuscino for pillow, soffitto for ceiling. Everything had a new name, every object in his room, in his own little world, everything he could see at that moment became something new. Over and over, as his eyes bounced from one article to another, he uttered the Italian word.
And what about himself? He had a brain, cervello. He touched a hand, mano; an arm, braccio; a leg, gamba.
He had to breathe, respirare; see, vedere; touch, toccare; hear, sentire; sleep, dormire; dream, sognare. He was digressing now, and he caught himself. Tomorrow Ermanno would begin with lesson one, the first blast of vocabulary with emphasis on the basics: greetings and salutations, polite talk, numbers one through a hundred, the days of the week, the months of the year, even the alphabet. The verbs to be (essere) and to have (avere) were both conjugated in the present, simple past, and future.
When it was time for dinner, Marco had memorized all of the first lesson and had listened to the tape of it a dozen times. He stepped into the very cool night and walked happily in the general direction of Trattoria del Monte, where he knew Luigi would be waiting with a choice table and some excellent suggestions from the menu. On the street, and still reeling from several hours of rote memorization, he noticed a scooter, a bike, a dog, a set of twin girls, and he was hit hard with the reality that he knew none of those words in his new language.
All of it had been left in his hotel room.
With food waiting, though, he plowed ahead, undaunted and still confident that he, Marco, could become a somewhat respectable Italian. At a table in the corner, he greeted Luigi with a flourish. “Buona sera, signore, come sta?”
“Sto bene, grazie, e tu?” Luigi said with an approving smile. Fine, thanks, and you?
“Molto bene, grazie,” Marco said. Very well, thank you.
“So you’ve been studying?” Luigi said.
“Yes, there’s nothing else to do.”
Before Marco could unwrap his napkin, a waiter
stopped by with a straw-covered flask of the house red. He quickly poured two glasses and then disappeared. “Ermanno is a very good teacher,” Luigi was saying.
“You’ve used him before?” Marco asked casually.
“Yes.”
“So how often do you bring in someone like me and turn him into an Italian?”
Luigi gave a smile and said, “From time to time.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Believe what you want, Marco. It’s all fiction.”
“You talk like a spy.”
A shrug, no real response.
“Who do you work for, Luigi?”
“Who do you think?”
“You’re part of the alphabet—CIA, FBI, NSA. Maybe some obscure branch of military intelligence.”
“Do you enjoy meeting me in these nice little restaurants?” Luigi asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes. If you keep asking these questions, then we’ll stop meeting. And when we stop meeting, your life, shaky as it is, will become even more fragile.”
“I thought your job was to keep me alive.”
“It is. So stop asking questions about me. I assure you there are no answers.”
As if he were on the payroll, the waiter appeared with perfect timing and dropped two large menus between them, effectively changing whatever course the conversation was taking. Marco frowned at the list of dishes and was once again reminded of how far his Italian had to go. At the bottom he recognized the words caffè, vino, and birra.
“What looks good?” he asked.
“The chef is from Siena, so he likes Tuscan dishes. The risotto with porcini mushrooms is great for a first course. I’ve had the steak florentine, outstanding.”
Marco closed his menu and savored the aroma from the kitchen. “I’ll take both.”
Luigi closed his too and waved at the waiter. After he ordered, they sipped the wine for a few minutes in silence. “A few years ago,” Luigi began, “I woke up one morning in a small hotel room in Istanbul. Alone, with about five hundred dollars in my pocket. And a fake passport. I didn’t speak a single word of Turkish. My handler was in the city, but if I contacted him then I would be forced to find a new career. In exactly ten months I was supposed to return to the same hotel to meet a friend who would take me out of the country.”
“Sounds like basic CIA training.”
“Wrong part of the alphabet,” he said, then paused, took a sip, and continued. “Since I enjoy eating, I learned to survive. I absorbed the language, the culture, everything around me. I managed quite nicely, blended in with the surroundings, and ten months later when I met my friend I had more than a thousand dollars.”
“Italian, English, French, Spanish, Turkish—what else?”
“Russian. They dropped me in Stalingrad for a year.”
Marco almost asked who “they” might be, but he let it pass. There would be no answer; besides, he thought he knew.
“So I’ve been dropped here?” Marco asked.
The waiter plunked down a basket of mixed breads and a small bowl of olive oil. Luigi began dipping and
eating, and the question was either forgotten or ignored. More food followed, a small tray of ham and salami with olives, and the conversation lagged. Luigi was a spy, or a counterspy, or an operative, or an agent of some strain, or simply a handler or a contact, or maybe a stringer, but he was first and foremost an Italian. All the training possible could not divert his attention from the challenge at hand when the table was covered.
As he ate, he changed subjects. He explained the rigors of a proper Italian dinner. First, the antipasti—usually a plate of mixed meats, such as they had before them. Then the first course, primi, which is usually a reasonably sized serving of pasta, rice, soup, or polenta, the purpose of which is to sort of limber up the stomach in preparation for the main course, the secondi—a hearty dish of meat, fish, pork, chicken, or lamb. Be careful with desserts, he warned ominously, glancing around to make sure the waiter wasn’t listening. He shook his head sadly as he explained that many good restaurants now buy them off premises, and they’re loaded with so much sugar or cheap liqueur that they practically rot your teeth out.
Marco managed to appear sufficiently shocked at this national scandal.
“Learn the word ‘gelato,’ ” he said, his eyes glowing again.
“Ice cream,” Marco said.
“Bravo. The best in the world. There’s a gelateria down the street. We’ll go there after dinner.”
______
ROOM
service terminated at midnight. At 11:55, Marco slowly picked up the phone and punched number
four twice. He swallowed deeply, then held his breath. He’d been practicing the dialogue for thirty minutes.
After a few lazy rings, during which time he almost hung up twice, a sleepy voice answered and said, “Buona sera.”
Marco closed his eyes and plunged ahead. “Buona sera. Vorrei un caffè, per favore. Un espresso doppio.”
“Sì, latte e zucchero?” Milk and sugar?
“No, senza latte e zucchero.”
“Sì, cinque minuti.”
“Grazie.” Marco quickly hung up before risking further dialogue, though given the enthusiasm on the other end he doubted it seriously. He jumped to his feet, pumped a fist in the air, and patted himself on the back for completing his first conversation in Italian. No hitches whatsoever. Both parties understood all of what the other said.
At 1:00 a.m., he was still sipping his double espresso, savoring it even though it was no longer warm. He was in the middle of lesson three, and with sleep not even a distant thought, he was thinking of maybe devouring the entire textbook for his first session with Ermanno.
______
HE
knocked on the apartment door ten minutes early. It was a control thing. Though he tried to resist it, he found himself impulsively reverting to his old ways. He preferred to be the one who decided when the lesson would begin. Ten minutes early or twenty minutes late, the time was not important. As he waited in the dingy hallway he flashed back to a high-level meeting he’d once hosted in his enormous conference room. It was packed
with corporate executives and honchos from several federal agencies, all summoned there by the broker. Though the conference room was fifty steps down the hall from his own office, he made his entrance twenty minutes late, apologizing and explaining that he’d been on the phone with the office of the prime minister of some minor country.
Petty, petty, petty. The games he played.
Ermanno was seemingly unimpressed. He made his student wait at least five minutes before he opened the door with a timid smile and a friendly “Buon giorno, Signor Lazzeri.”
“Buon giorno, Ermanno. Come stai?”
“Molto bene, grazie, e tu?”
“Molto bene, grazie.”
Ermanno opened the door wider, and with the sweep of a hand said, “Prego.” Please come in.
Marco stepped inside and was once again struck by how sparse and temporary everything looked. He placed his books on the small table in the center of the front room and decided to keep his coat on. The temperature was about forty outside and not much warmer in this tiny apartment.
“Vorrebbe un caffè?” Ermanno asked. Would you like a coffee?
“Sì, grazie.” He’d slept about two hours, from four to six, then he’d showered, dressed, and ventured into the streets of Treviso, where he’d found an early bar where the old gentlemen gathered and had their espressos and all talked at once. He wanted more coffee, but what he really needed was a bite to eat. A croissant or a muffin or something of that variety, something he had not yet learned the
name of. He decided he could hold off hunger until noon, when he would once again meet Luigi for another foray into Italian cuisine.
“You are a student, right?” he asked when Ermanno returned from the kitchen with two small cups.
“Non inglese, Marco, non inglese.”
And that was the end of English. An abrupt end; a harsh, final farewell to the mother tongue. Ermanno sat on one side of the table, Marco on the other, and at exactly eight-thirty they, together, turned to page one of lesson one. Marco read the first dialogue in Italian, Ermanno gently made corrections, though he was quite impressed with his student’s preparation. The vocabulary was thoroughly memorized, but the accent needed work. An hour later, Ermanno began pointing at various objects around the room—rug, book, magazine, chair, quilt, curtains, radio, floor, wall, backpack—and Marco responded with ease. With an improving accent, he rattled off the entire list of polite expressions—good day, how are you, fine thanks, please, see you later, goodbye, good night—and thirty others. He rattled off the days of the week and the months of the year. Lesson one was completed after only two hours and Ermanno asked if they needed a break. “No.” They turned to lesson two, with another page of vocabulary that Marco had already mastered and more dialogue that he delivered quite impressively.
“You’ve been studying,” Ermanno mumbled in English.