My Mother-in-Law Drinks (4 page)

As if ever since she moved in all we'd been eating were delicacies from the hands of Chef Gianfranco Vissani.

And now I knew that the police would be coming. At least, that's what I'd been told. Perhaps Matrix was a wanted criminal and Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo was an undercover policeman staking out the supermarket on a hunch that sooner or later his man would come in so that he could arrest him? That would explain the sketchy lesson on the operation of the video security system, to say nothing of the farcical move with his finger on the remote control: truly pathetic.

So was this a long-planned police operation about to be set in motion? From one minute to the next, would the supermarket suddenly be filled with cops, pouring in through the side doors with bulletproof vests and submachine guns, and would they haul off Matrix as he smiled, the way notorious wanted criminals always seem to do at the moment of their capture, at the photographers and television crews who promptly materialized?

It was a plausible hypothesis, but I didn't believe in it past a certain point. A policeman with that kind of priority on his mind is unlikely to waste a lot of time chatting with people about his dead friends—at the risk of involving them in the operation, for that matter.

At that point I started taking under consideration competing possibilities, such as, for instance, that this was not a police operation at all. That it might be about an old settling of accounts, a private dispute, a retaliation between rival gangs, even. In that case, the arrival of the police foretold by Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo took on an entirely different connotation: the police would be coming, sure enough, but only to collect a dead body.

The more solid the alternative hypotheses became, the more I wondered whether the wisest thing might not be to rush out of the store and call the police myself. But by now Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo had almost drawn even with Matrix, who was coasting along the dairy case without paying him the slightest attention (something that only confused me further, because a fugitive, or in any case someone involved in dodgy or criminal matters, ought to be suspicious of his fellow man by definition, especially when his fellow man is following him), and I felt called upon to stay there, even though I didn't know what was going to happen, much less in whose defense I was supposed to intervene. Among other things, at that hour of the morning the supermarket was practically deserted, so that, if needed, I wouldn't have been able to turn to any volunteers for aid and assistance.

The thing that got on my nerves the most was the fact that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo (if in fact that was his real name) must have figured out what kind of person I was, otherwise he'd never have been able to drag me so successfully into that fucked-up situation in the first place.

That's why he'd gone to all the trouble of complimenting me on my inflexibility in negotiating his old friend's settlement, and I, like a prime sucker, had gone along with it. Obviously I couldn't take to my heels now—not after allowing myself to be praised as a man of principle.

In the meantime “Montagne verdi”
 
had finished playing, and a few yards down the aisle there was a little old lady who kept shooting me glances, because she'd already tried three times to reach a jar of cranberry beans, without success.

I wondered: all those people who are always sticking their noses into others' misfortunes—the rubberneckers who always cluster around when public disasters occur; those who, when a fistfight breaks out, don't think twice about risking their personal safety just to elbow their way into the front row; the people who, when they hear two cars crash into each other, even if they've been standing in line for forty-five minutes at the post office, will happily give up their turns to run outside to enjoy the show live—where the fuck were they all right now, why didn't they come nosing around, prying into the sinister intentions of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo?

Now Matrix was moving along the metal rail running along the front of the dairy and fresh pasta case with the step of a prison guard inspecting cells on death row during evening shakedown, scanning the yogurt section with particular severity.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo was little more than a yard away from him, but unlike Matrix, he had his back to the dairy products, because he'd pulled the remote control out of his jacket once again and was now pointing it at two other monitors with the nonchalance of a technician testing an electrical system.

After the engineer had been playing around with the remote for a while, Matrix turned his head and looked him in the face (Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo gave him a perfunctory smile, which he did not return); then Matrix looked down at the hand that was holding the remote control, and from there back up, at the two monitors, after which he made a sort of approving expression with his eyebrows (kind of like: “Oh, I see”), and then went back to hunting for yogurt.

“Young man, excuse me,” the little old lady had, so to speak, asked me, seeing as her ocular solicitations hadn't had much effect. And she tipped her head in the direction of the cranberry beans, which were in fact on a shelf too high for her to reach, short as she was.

That's what old people always do when they need something: they mobilize you even before you realize what they want done. You have to make yourself useful without explicit guidance from them.

“Ah, certainly,” I replied, and I headed over to help her.

It was just as I was on tiptoes trying to reach the jar of beans for her (how long could I have taken, five seconds?) that I recognized the nearby voice of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo as he said simply, in the calmest possible tone:

“Freeze.”

I turned around and saw, first, Matrix's arms rising slowly over his head as if in response to a divine convocation, then his head with the ponytail, then a pistol aimed roughly at his temple, and then a hand gripping that pistol, in turn connected to an arm that ran straight into the side of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.

That's exactly how I saw it, step by step, working backward, the way it looks when you hit
REWIND
on a camcorder without first hitting
STOP
. It's incredible how fear circumscribes and amplifies one's perception of events (which is why many witnesses, even when testifying under oath, will insist that they never saw the one specific thing that the judge keeps asking them about, because at that moment, even though they were right in the middle of what was happening, fear had selected certain details for them while canceling out all the rest).

In a situation like that, one thinks, who knows what speed the brain is operating at. How much instinctive philosophy it produces. What intelligent thoughts about the provisional nature of life, the discovery of what truly matters, and so on.

But the only question that kept drilling into my head as I was standing there was this: “How the fuck does he keep his hand from shaking?”

Get it? Not: “Where did he pull that gun out from? I didn't notice any bulge in his jacket when we were talking before”; or else, following a slightly more paranoid line of argument (justified, I think, given the circumstances): “Now he's going to shoot him and, while he's at it, he'll turn around and take me and the old woman out, too.”

Just, you know.

No: “How does he keep his hand so still?”

That's all.

As if this were some tremendously important question. As if its answer would determine all further developments.

Okay: it was bullshit. One of those senselessly obsessive thoughts that you cling to in extreme situations.

But you should have seen Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo in action. He moved competently, calmly, as if he'd never done anything else in his life but throw down on people in supermarkets. If he wasn't a professional, he'd at least practiced that operation down to the very last details.

Matrix, for that matter, now that I had a better look at him, was much younger than the engineer (at a glance he might have been somewhere between thirty and forty), wiry but brutal-looking, like an Extreme Fighting lightweight champion. The kind of guy I'd say “Sorry, my mistake” to if he cut in front of me, just to be clear.

“Excuse me young man, could you give me those?” said the little old lady, clearly out of patience by now. She was referring to the jar of beans that I was clutching by the lid with all five fingers of my left hand. She still hadn't realized what was happening right behind her (which was a relief, because I was afraid she might scream).

I'd heard her, but my body was in standby mode. If I'd been able to move, I'd have handed her her inopportune jar and then urged her to get out of there as quickly as she could, perhaps making my escape with the excuse of ensuring that she reached safety.

Instead I stood there, incapable of tearing my eyes away from the scene that, just a little more than ten feet away, continued to intensify and deteriorate in that surreally deserted supermarket which people seemed to be consciously avoiding rather than coming in and buying groceries (and to think that I could hear the attendant at the deli counter rustling around in back doing something, just a short distance away), even though it would have taken practically nothing, a trifle (a child on the run from his mother suddenly appearing at the other end of the aisle, a slightly louder than average noise, any of an infinite number of microevents) to violently alter the progression of developments and unleash tragedy.

Pure pornography, clearly. Because when reality starts putting on a show, that's the effect that it achieves. That's why reality shows, which constitute only the feeblest attempts at imitating reality itself, are as successful as they are.

In fact it was not only my fear of the worst that kept my attention so riveted. The truth is that, although admitting this is not exactly a testimony to my integrity, a part of me wanted to know how it was going to end.

Matrix remained obediently motionless awaiting further instructions from Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo as if he were accustomed to this sort of contretemps.

“Turn around,” he ordered, moving the pistol barrel from his temple to his cheek. “Next to me. Slowly. Without lowering your hands.”

Matrix complied, but he came dangerously close to snorting in annoyance.

“Feh,” said the old woman, deeply annoyed that I still hadn't made up my mind to give her her fucking cranberry beans.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo took a step back, continuing to press the barrel of the pistol into Matrix's cheek.

“On your knees.”

For an instant Matrix hesitated, as if that order somehow deviated from police protocol for that kind of operation; then he put on an expression of visible tolerance for a rank beginner. He was probably hoping to make Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo nervous and provoke him into doing something stupid, so that he could take advantage and pull a counter-maneuver of some kind. But if that was his plan, it wasn't working.

Once his kneecaps touched the floor, the next command was issued.

“Hands behind your back. Crossed. And lower your head.”

Matrix shot him a glare, as if to say that now he was taking things too far.

The only reply that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo offered was to shove the pistol barrel a little harder into his cheek.

It must have hurt, because Matrix pulled his head back and emitted a moan that was immediately silenced, the way you pull away from the dentist's drill at the first stab of pain.

“Move it,” the engineer commanded, with glassy indifference.

That was when the old woman realized that something was happening behind her that might be worth seeing and finally she turned around.

“
O Maronna
,” she said in a faint voice. And she covered her mouth with one hand (I wonder why, I thought to myself, people always feel a need to censor themselves when something scares them).

Whereupon I had the impulse to give her the beans, just like that, for no good reason, but this time she was the one who refused to cooperate.

Matrix crossed his arms behind his back and bowed forward. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo followed his movements by moving the barrel of the pistol from his face to the back of his neck. With his free hand he lifted Matrix's arms to the height of the metal rail that ran along the front of the dairy case. The leverage forced Matrix to bow even lower, as if he were supplicating the linoleum floor.

Now it looked like a wartime scene. A prisoner awaiting execution, kneeling before his executioner, deprived even of the right to look at him.

Matrix's face, what little I could see of it, seemed to have lost the careless confidence it had worn until just a minute before. A loss that by rights I ought to have noticed with some satisfaction, considering how obnoxious I'd found him up to that point; but instead I was having a hard time accepting it. Seeing someone fall completely under another person's control always has a unpleasant effect on me.

The old lady grabbed my arm. She was squeezing it.

I came that close to saying “What about the beans?” but I managed to restrain myself.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. The appearance of such a distinctly police-related contraption reassured me of his intentions. In fact the old woman immediately asked me, “So he's a detective?” as if I ought to know.

What I found most unsettling about that masterfully executed operation was the fact that, in spite of appearances, it still didn't look like an arrest. At least, not an ordinary arrest. The impression one got from watching Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo at work was that he'd been waiting for that moment for some time. There was something excessively calculated, something . . . personal, in that display of bravura. That's why I continued to refer to him mentally by the name and title with which he'd introduced himself. In other words, I didn't believe (and hadn't believed from the beginning) that he was a cop.