Authors: Massimo Russo
“Good. When’s the pick-up?”
“They’re waiting for your order.”
“Proceed then. Mr. O’Neal doesn’t want to wait any longer.”
“Yes sir!”
As he strode away, Karl radioed instructions to the small army that had been formed purposely for the operation. Tommy watched him following his orders. He liked giving orders. Lording it over so many people was immensely gratifying. And it didn’t bother him to have to account to someone else. It was a small price to pay in exchange for his position, and in any case, O’Neal was much more than a simple boss. He was the person who controlled the minds of almost everyone in the world, so it was only right that he should be the kingpin. Then there was his dreadful personality and his constant and insatiable quest for power. He had interests everywhere: from literature, virtually his own personal branch of business, to cinema, sport and music. He had managed to buy up almost everything, without stinting. Only one thing was missing, and he was working on that, with the dedicated services of Tommy and his army.
‘Money can buy anybody who’s up for sale. You only need to agree the price.’ This was what Tommy had learned from that man over the last few years. He had also been bought, but it hadn’t been a question of money. He had simply been promised, and given, command.
“Sir? There’s a problem.”
“You’re the one who’s paid to solve problems! I don’t want to be hassled. And neither does Mr. O’Neal.”
“I know, but this problem requires special attention. The mark can’t be bought or picked up alone.”
He handed some papers to his boss who looked them over with an irritated grunt.
“Damnation! Can’t we get rid of the colaterals?”
“There could be consequences.”
“Then pick them up too!”
“We have to rework the plan.”
“There’s no time. Stage something clean and above all simple. I want them here within the hour!”
“Yes, sir!”
The glitch made Tommy nervous, but he was sure he would deal with it, as always. There wasn’t a single situation that he hadn’t tackled successfully. There was no goal in life that he hadn’t reached. And he certainly wouldn’t fail now. The stakes were too high to let them fall into the hands of their opponents.
Chapter 9
The case was heavy enough to convey the importance of its contents. Norman left the bank, beset by doubts and carrying the only real thing in his life in his right hand. Before going outside, he had ducked into the undisturbed privacy of the toilets in order to make sure that what had just happened was no dream. Perhaps what he had lived through earlier in the day had been a nightmare and he was now savoring a dream to offset it and restore his equanimity.
In all his years, he had learned very little about the meaning of life, but he was sure of one thing: the only absolute truth in the universe is equilibrium. Every action has a consequence. Good is the opposite of evil; joy, pain.
Maybe his dreams had had the same reaction. He had sat on a toilet seat in the most opulent restroom he had ever seen, balanced the case on his knees and opened it. Incredulity had become fact. To make sure he was awake, he had scrolled through the menu on his mobile to find ring tones. He had turned the volume to maximum and selected the most horrible jingle, the only one he believed would wake the dead. The noise alone would surely wake him if his brain were still in the REM phase. The image of an indignant Giuseppe Verdi popping up and insulting him before smashing the phone in his face had made him smile. He had pressed the key and the most deafening, hideous music ever composed and played had bounced off the marble walls and floor of the toilets. He had let it run for a few seconds and noticed he was still there. He had proved his point: what was happening to him was real. The joy he had felt then gave him a rush of adrenaline. A shiver had slithered down his back, through his body to his heart, which had begun to overheat in the meantime. He had
felt it thudding through the beat of the jingle. Then he had switched off the phone, tucked it into his jacket pocket and tried to relax. He had taken stock of the sight before him and realized he was scared stiff. The pictures that had flashed through his mind traveled at the speed of light. He was amazed that his first thought was of his mother. She had been dead for too long to be able to mould her son and point him in the right direction. He had remembered how poor they were and how, despite everything, he had always managed to bring a smile to her face. He had promised her that one day they would be rich. “I’ll do it, Mom, don’t you worry about anything. I’ll buy you a house so big that you’ll have to hire a car to get from the kitchen to the bathroom.”
He had been overwhelmed by sorrow, in spite of all that money before his eyes. Maybe his mother had been watching him and feeling less than proud of him. He had done nothing to deserve being given the briefcase. Finally, he had decided to do what he always did in similar situations: stifle his qualms and leave them to wander, lost and alone, across his mind. Ignoring them was the only way to stop them existing. He could hardly deny that he had sometimes been ashamed of his behavior, but he believed that survival, in times when “conscience” was classified under “memories”, was inextricably linked to the ability to smother pangs of guilt. At times, he had felt alone in a crowd of people who didn’t know that feelings of unity even existed. Society was geared to producing profits, not to feeling truly alive. He had thought of the words he had written in order to leave some trace of his presence on earth. He had wondered whether someone, some day, would understand them.
Alone.
The thought compressed between desire and weariness. I imagine desire, but can’t understand where it comes from. I wait meekly, unable to anchor a sense of awareness, taking hope from the idea of meeting someone.
Nothing.
I still remember everything.
Sound, light, silence, consciousness.
Yes, consciousness... how better to understand being alive?
What better way of attracting reality?
I countermand every order, but the setting stays the same.
Only black, only a shadow between the white pages of memory that takes the space it needs to be able to understand.
Without light there is no life; you will merely be a second that has lived the infinity of time, without being seen...
Alone.
A flash cuts through the darkness, but it’s only the hope of beginning to see.
I intend to, but I don’t grasp. I imagine, but in vain.
I collect the pages of the past to remind the future that it really does exist.
Alone, like every other thing that has realized how a second may be marvelous when combined with the idea of not being alone.
He had locked his thoughts in a corner of his mind, in the hope that he wouldn’t have to venture there again, and had closed the case containing sufficient money to allow him to vanish without a trace. He would set off with Julia for a world where he would find all he had lost, hoping that he still could.
But then, he had hesitated. A doubt had stopped him short. Did he really want to be with her? Or was it just the anxiety brought on by the situation? And what if the problem arose again once they had left? Was he really sure he wanted to try again? He thought about the conversation he had had with his mirror image. He could do anything he wanted with all that money. All his daydreams could come true, the ones that were already happening in the parallel world behind the glass. And he could do it now. He could disappear before anyone noticed the error. Because he was positive it was an error. That money wasn’t meant for him, but for some dork who had made a two-million-dollar mistake. He had pondered for a minute, but in the end had decided to disappear. And there was no room for anyone else. Too risky. Too many questions to answer. Too many problems to solve. You didn’t find money like that just lying around. Another Julia though, of course. He was aware of the stain on his soul. But the money would probably remove that too.
It was growing dark to match his mood. The city seemed more chaotic than usual. He decided to hail a taxi and set his plan in motion. He would need a car to leave his old life behind, and surely the cab driver would know where the nearest car hire firm was. The man who was rich thanks to his own merits flashed into his mind. He was almost tempted to turn around and start looking for him, to give him what rightly belonged to him. But in that case, he would have to return the money. He certainly couldn’t afford to linger near the bank in case they realized their mistake and started searching for him to get the swag back. He felt like a fugitive. All things considered, he deemed it better to vanish for the time being. The hunt could wait. He looked around for the unmistakable yellow bodywork and caught sight of a woman on the opposite side of the street who was hurrying somewhere she shouldn’t have been going. It was Julia, striding briskly along, wearing clothes that couldn’t possibly have been hers.
“Julia!”
His voice was drowned by the clamor of city traffic and she didn’t hear him. She disappeared down the steps to the subway. Norman dodged across the road, heedless of the danger of being mown down by a car whose horn blared to remind him there was an underpass. On the opposite sidewalk, Norman stopped briefly to wonder what he was doing. A moment ago, he had resolved to turn his back on everything, and now he was risking his life to chase after the person he had decided to betray. The thing that struck him as strange was the way she was walking, and he ran after her, intent on finding out whether something had upset her. After all, his feelings for her had been real and he had to ask her why she had submitted his book without his consent. He ran towards the tunnel and down the stairs, keeping watch for a red coat. He caught sight of her and began to close the gap between them. At that moment, the train arrived and Julia got on. Norman was still about a hundred yards away and wouldn’t have had enough time to reach her carriage before the doors hissed shut, so he jumped into the one closest to him, triggered by the same wild urgency that had forced him through the throng in the corridor. He had only walked through two carriages towards hers when the train stopped, and from the corner of his eye he saw the red coat climbing the stairs towards the exit. He leapt off the train in the nick of time.
“Julia! Stop!”
The rumble of the departing train muffled his shout. He rushed towards the exit, but the crush of people slowed him down. He took his phone out of his pocket and dialed Julia’s number, but he got the same message as before: the person could not take his call. He charged up the steps and saw the red coat turn the corner of the street to the left. He yelled again, but the thunder of a pneumatic drill opposite swallowed his shouts as if they were flies. He skirted the tramp squatting on the sidewalk; he could have sworn it was the same man he had given his change to earlier, but there was no time to find out. He had to get past the sea of people moving in an orderly manner along the street if he wanted to catch up with Julia. He turned the corner and stopped dead in his tracks, shocked by what he saw. He might as well throw himself under the bus hurtling towards him, or let himself be knifed by a robber who knew what was in the case he was carrying. The woman he had loved, the woman who had inspired him to plumb the depths of those human feelings locked in the infinity of time for words of eternal love, was gazing into the eyes of another man.
The intensity of that look demonstrated yet again that the irony of fate had repaid him in kind for his earlier decision to cut all ties with his present life. Julia stroked the man’s lips lovingly, as if she had known him for ever. Arm in arm, they stepped inside the hotel behind them. Norman stood frozen to the spot for several minutes. All the tender moments he had spent with the woman he considered a goddess flashed before his eyes, the woman he had given a piece of his life to every evening, for whom he had written out one of his dreams every morning.
“Julia! Why?”
His phone ringing took him by surprise; it was perfect timing to say the least. He thought it might be Julia; perhaps the red coat belonged to someone who resembled her. Perhaps his mind was re-setting the equation, presenting him with the bill for the evil thoughts of earlier. But the voice on the other end of the line was not the one he had hoped to hear.
“Hello, Mr. Lae. Why are you looking so pale? You shouldn’t be too surprised.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“Only five minutes ago, you’d made up your mind to leave that woman, and now you’re upset because she’s in the arms of another man.”
“How on earth do you know...?”
“The public gardens are five minutes away. I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll have a nice chat. I’ll be wearing a purple scarf.”
“That’s it! I have no intention of...”
“Julia won’t be coming out for a couple of hours; there’ll be time enough for you to go back and wait for her.”
The conversation ended as abruptly as it had begun. The ground had been sheared from under Norman’s feet again. He stared at the city around him as it continued its usual mad dash towards a destination that no longer needed to be found and whose outcome was pre-determined. Everyone’s life was in the clutches of banality, each one gone astray in the pursuit of his or her dreams in a society that had no time to live them. The meaning of life had been lost, if it had ever existed. The real and only purpose nowadays was to be seen, thus restricting life to personal appearance. Every single human life could be summed up in a simple sentence: “I lived because I was seen, even if no one wanted to listen to me.” All that mattered to people was being featured on the cover of a newspaper or on television in order to leave their mark. Nobody cared why they were photographed or invited to appear on television. Nobody would remember their words, except for those who still hoped to be able to change the system. But everybody would remember the smiling face captured by the camera lens.
Norman recalled all the discussions he had taken part in at university on life in today’s society. He remembered only too well all the disagreements he had had with his third year lecturer, and he had respected her highly even though they had never shared the same ideas.