The Flamethrowers (44 page)

He was telling me about the state the loft was in when he signed his lease. “These guys did not believe in banks.” He bent down and opened
a door hidden in the wall. “A safe is an adjective as a noun. Probably a very old concept.”

He could have been talking to anyone. Where I had felt his attentions at the opening, now I felt the old distracted and performing Ronnie.

“What do you keep in there?”

“Secrets,” he said, shutting it. “And deeds. This guy whose boat I worked on as a kid gave me some land and money. I never claimed any of it. I keep the deeds in this safe.”

“Why didn’t you claim it?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Like all your stories.”

“This is the longest. But listen, I think I need to hit the hay.”

I said I should go anyhow, it was late. But I hesitated, hoping for some way to make it through the distance, to reach him.

“The guy in Rikers with your name,” I said. “It’s about Tim, isn’t it.”

I detected a faint crease of irritation in his face.

“That’s right. It’s about Tim,” he said. “Guy I shared a childhood with.”

“Why can’t you just say, ‘I feel bad about my brother’?”

“I feel bad about my brother,” Ronnie repeated in a robotic tone. “I feel bad about my brother.”

I stayed quiet.

“You think you’re the first person to think of that? That I feel bad about my brother? Let me introduce you to a concept. Two concepts, actually. Important tools for surviving the human condition. One is called irony. Say it with me.
Eye-ron-eee
. Now, the next is harder to pronounce, but let’s try.
Diss-sim-you-lay-shon
. Giving the false appearance that you are not some thing. Like a hustler pretends that he is not a skilled player of pool. One may, in a quite different circumstance, give the false appearance that he does not suffer from guilt about his own brother’s incarceration, but instead, simulates an interest in the incarceration of not his kin but phantom subjects with which he has only one tenuous but coherent link: a name.”

He lay down on the couch.

“My brother got out of prison a month ago,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “He was keeping his appointments with his PO. He was trying to get into the welder’s union. I loaned him a thousand bucks to buy a Trans Am. I said, ‘Why do you need such a stupid car?’ And he does this,
Come on, Ronnie, come on, big bro, I’ve been in the joint ten years. What broad is gonna be interested in an ex-con? I need the car to put me back in play. I need it to keep me good. I won’t be just some asshole looking to screw up his program and get back inside.
Who could argue with that? I gave him the money for the car. He totaled it on the New Jersey Turnpike. Chest right through the steering column. He crashed the stupid car I bought him and died. So I feel especially bad about my brother. But that is my business. And I’ll mention him or I won’t as I choose.”

He stared at the ceiling.

“Ronnie, I’m sorry.”

When he finally spoke, his voice was gentler. “I used to tease Sandro about you,” he said. “Sandro playing coach. Or dad. You just seemed too young. And you were. But honestly, I don’t even know if you’d be different older. I like you. But there’s something you never seem to get.”

And that’s why I can’t love you.

Ronnie didn’t say that. And yet all the way back to the Kastles’, and lying in the dark loft, the sound of someone kicking a metal garbage can down the Bowery, I felt the sting of that phantom phrase.

I was the girl on layaway. And it wasn’t Ronnie who’d put me on layaway. It was something I had done to myself.

*  *  *

The news hit about Roberto Valera the next week. I didn’t see it in the newspaper. Helen mentioned it when she came over, on Gloria’s insistence, to see my films. I’d borrowed a projector from Marvin and Eric. In the way Marvin had gravely made me memorize the proper procedure for loading my reel, I understood that he and Eric were invested in me. They liked my films and were saving “damaged” but in fact perfectly good roles of Kodachrome for me to take home. I had just loaded
the first film,
Waiting,
I had called it, the footage of the patient Mob chauffeurs on Mulberry, when Helen asked if we had heard what happened to Sandro’s brother.

“He was kidnapped!” she said.

My film flickered on the screen that Gloria had put up for me, a white bedsheet. The first driver. Sweat rolling down his face.

From my terrified position I was able to see that to Helen it wasn’t a big deal.

“Kidnapped,” she said, “and Sandro has been in my office talking to people in Italy nonstop. No one can get through to the gallery now, never mind that it’s costing me a fortune.”

Helen watched the films and said they had something. “Maybe for a group show I’m thinking of,” she said, “for next summer.”

I nodded but it went in one ear and out the other. All I could think of was Roberto.

I went to the international newsstand on Astor Place and bought all the Italian newspapers they had. It was not major news, not on the front page. Deep in the business section of
La Repubblica,
one incident of many. Roberto Valera, taken on May 1 from his countryside home above Bellagio. Armed combatants had entered in the early-morning hours and then driven him to an unknown location. There was a photograph of Roberto holding up the previous day’s newspaper, May 2, proof he was alive, that he existed inside time. He gazed at the camera, looking like the Roberto I knew. Irritated, a man whose patience was being tested.

A call had been made to the police in Rome, the article reported, the caller declaring the kidnapping the work of the Red Brigades, not by accident on International Workers’ Day. It had been confirmed that the anonymous call had been placed from inside Rome’s Termini train station, from a pay phone right next to the police kiosk. A comical, taunting gesture. The playfulness of it reminded me of Durutti and the others in the Movement. But Durutti wasn’t kidnapping anyone. The people on the Volsci carried guns, but as defense, they said, against Fascists, who also carried guns. They shared an attitude about life, a lightness.
They weren’t clandestines. Only Gianni was possibly that. Gianni, who had been watching Roberto. That was why he had been there, at the villa. To form an impression of schedules and habits.

The anonymous caller from the pay phone near the police kiosk said Roberto Valera was an enemy from the enemy class. He was being detained by the people’s army. Held in a people’s prison, at a secret location. He would be tried by a people’s court. If he was found guilty, the punishment would be severe.

There were other kidnappings and attacks that had also occurred on May 1, according to
La Repubblica
. A SIT-Siemens manager was shot forty times in the legs outside his home in Milan. I remembered what Roberto had said about the kneecappings, that it was a bumpkin method borrowed from the Mafia, who would do it to cattle to destroy a farmer’s herd. Roberto had shaken his head at the savage stupidity of borrowing a technique meant for cows. Another manager, from Fiat, had been kidnapped that same morning, with a three-billion-lire ransom.

Why Roberto would be tried and the other ransomed I didn’t know. When I looked at his image in the newspaper, the impatient gaze, holding the newspaper up, a wave of nausea passed through me. Not sympathy, just nausea. It was possible he might die.

I thought of Gianni telling the carabinieri I was married to a Valera, his employer, and that he was taking me shopping.

I thought of that long and bewildering day, waiting for Gianni on the other side of the Alps. How cold it was as the light drained away, and Gianni did not appear, and I could not seem to answer my own question of how long it was a person was meant to wait.

*  *  *

The day after I learned Roberto had been kidnapped, Burdmoore Model came to visit. The Kastles were out. I invited him in. “Oh, uh, okay,” he said, slightly unsure of why he should stay since Stanley and Gloria were not home. He asked about Sandro. I said we were no longer together. There was an uncomfortable silence. I said his brother
had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. Did he know? Had he heard about it? I imagined in him some silent sympathy for my involvement with Gianni. I wanted his sympathy.

“They are trying him,” I said.

Burdmoore nodded. “This brother of Sandro’s, he runs the company? What business are they in again?”

I said, “Rubber, mostly. And motorcycles.”

“I’d imagine he’ll be guilty,” Burdmoore said.

“And then what?”

“After the death sentence?” He scratched his chin, thinking.

“Like in Brecht’s
Der Jasager,
” he said. “After a fate has been decided, it’s customary to ask the victim, the sacrifice, if he agrees to his fate. But it’s also customary for the victim to say yes. So maybe he’ll be given that option. I mean the mandatory option of accepting his fate. Then again, maybe they’ll just let him go. One thing I’ll say about these kinds of militants, which I do understand, from my own history. These are people who consider the means they use to be the same, morally, as those of their enemy. In other words, no less justified. One’s own means are always justified. To them, the capitalist, like in this case your boyfriend’s brother—”

“Ex-boyfriend.”

“Either way, the capitalist isn’t a marionette serving some other, larger system of evil. He is power himself. Evil itself. And they’ve nabbed him.”

I went back to check
La Repubblica
on the newsstand at Astor Place a few times and didn’t find anything. I realized that if I wanted to follow that kind of news, I had to read
Il Sole 24 Ore,
the financial and business paper Gianni was always holding in front of his face. I went to the library on Forty-Second Street after work and read it on those wooden dowels in the periodicals room, rustling pages as old men smelling of liquor slept in club chairs, a woman shuffled around trying to look purposeful, but the wrong kind of purpose for a library. She circled the room, moving with that particular way that homeless women had of seeming like little girls, taking steps with their toes turned slightly
inward, chewing on a frayed sleeve, little girls shuffling down the hall to their parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night. I read through
Il Sole 24 Ore
. After three days of no news except that the Fiat manager had been released after his family produced the ransom, Roberto appeared again in the paper. There had been a statement by the Red Brigades that he could forestall his trial, and the possibility of a guilty sentence, if the government was willing to trade him for eight militants currently imprisoned. Roberto had written a statement encouraging this. Insisting on it. It was, he said, the only way to save his life.

“He’s not himself,” an article headline in
Il Sole 24 Ore
announced the next day. The quote was from his own mother. Signora Valera said her son deplored any negotiations with terrorists and never,
never ever,
would have advocated such a thing. “He’s not himself.” The photo of him holding the newspaper the day after his capture appeared next to the article.

Not himself. It seemed a kind of death sentence. If Roberto was killed, it wasn’t the old Roberto. It was some other, who was now begging for negotiations that he hadn’t approved of until it was his own life in question. There was silence the next day, and then an article on the question of where he was. The police in Rome had apparently hired a psychic who held a séance that the investigating team attended. The planchette had produced only the word
Cinzano
. A dead end. On the seventh day of Roberto’s capture, the chief constable in Rome stated that priority should be given to investigating the organized wing of the autonomist youths in Rome’s San Lorenzo, from which he believed the Red Brigades found support and cover.

I told myself that the question of Roberto’s life had nothing to do with me.

I had been back in New York a month. I was not in contact with Gianni. Not in contact with Sandro, had not seen him since the week after my return, when he walked out of the Kastles’ loft nodding angrily.

My guilt concerning the question of Roberto’s life was a fantasy, I told myself. It was not reality.

If Gianni was involved in Roberto’s kidnapping, that was not related to anything that was related to me. If Gianni had said the family would pay, that was something Gianni had said. I was just a girl who went to a factory to meet her boyfriend and met him by accident with another woman.

If Gianni was keeping tabs, well, that was Gianni. And if the family paid in some form, that could be Gianni. It certainly was not me.

This is what I told myself. And then repeated. And then said again. I ignored the part where I drove Gianni’s getaway car—or maybe it was his hearse.

*  *  *

“So in the fall of 1967 I went to Los Angeles,” Marvin said. I was on the white divan for a new round of prints, something to do with emulsions, different emulsions.

Roberto had now been in captivity for a week. I kept expecting to run into Sandro, waiting to. Marvin was speaking in the flat, nasal, unmodulated tone of his, almost a drone, indicating that he was going to recount in great detail some aspect of what he considered his critical personal history. I had just said that Sandro’s brother had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It was impulsive, but I figured maybe we could talk about it. It was Marvin who had introduced me to Sandro in the first place.

Marvin said it was terrible news. He shrugged and added something about it being a high-profile family and then there was an anecdote and we were suddenly, it seemed, going to talk about Marvin instead, about his own history.

“The first job I had was as a stock footage researcher. I was employed by a director doing preliminary work for a feature. The script called for documentary scenes of people dying violent deaths. That’s to say, actual people dying. The stock footage vaults where I did my research had the negatives of the Pathé newsreels from beginning to end. I went through, looking for violent deaths. What I found overwhelmingly
were executions, almost all of them by firing squad. I gave the director all the scenes I’d had printed. Nothing ever came of the project, and that director disappeared off the face of the Earth, as people tend to do, change their names, become Hare Krishnas, drink themselves to death, whatever. I never heard from him, wouldn’t have thought of him again, but one of the scenes I’d given him was, according to the newsreel caption, the execution of an Italian Fascist by a partisan militia, and when I met Sandro in 1968 or ’69, I had a déjà vu about his name. Was the condemned man in the stock footage also Valera? Because that would be an incredible coincidence. In the summer of 1974 I was back at that same vault and tried to find out. But in the intervening time, things had changed. They used to make a viewing print for just a lab charge. Now they charged a fee for each phase of their service. I didn’t want to find out badly enough to spend a lot of money. Really it had nothing to do with Sandro Valera. It was about something specific becoming stock footage. I always had this feeling there were two worlds. The one we live in, you know, just streaming along, future into present into past, recorded distortedly in people’s minds, and this
other
world: stock footage. Small integers of life, I mean life in quotes, which represent whatever did take place, whether or not what’s on the stock footage actually occurred. Cropping can make outcomes so ambiguous, but it doesn’t matter, see. It’s stock footage. A reference file to reality. Like you’re a reference file for Caucasian skin tones; it doesn’t matter that you exist. For the technician or projectionist, you’re an index for the existence of woman, flesh, flesh tones. Which brings up the question of race, unaddressed. You, as
you,
have nothing to do with it.”