After Hannibal

  Fabio was silent for a moment or two. Then he said, “Yes, I think I have. There is a man in Carrara, we grew up together, we were like brothers. We don’t see each other so often now but I know he would be ready to do me a service—and I would trust him.”

  “Well, an element of risk there must always be. This finding of an honest man is the first hurdle and in a way the most important. He will present himself, on oath, not as your friend but as your relentless creditor, pressing for repayment of a largish sum.”

  “But I don’t owe him any—”

  “Bear with me a while longer. This debt we are speaking of was contracted before you made the agreement with your partner. Obviously the house, as your principal asset, acts as security. Now the debt has fallen due, you cannot pay, you fall into a panic. Do you begin to see? We will present the court with a cambiale, signed by you and made out to your friend in Carrara. This is a document containing a written promise to pay a stated sum to a particular person, or sometimes to the bearer, either at a date specified or on demand.”

  “I know what a cambiale is,” Fabio said.

  “In that case, you will know that it is a standard document and that they are issued in batches and the year and the number of the issue are printed on them. They come in different denominations. We will need enough of them to cover the sum your partner is claiming to have paid for the house. They will have to be dated well before you made the bill of sale, let us say three years ago.”

  “Do you mean backdated?”

  “The date when the debt was contracted will be written in ink in the space provided. But the document itself will bear the authentic year of issue, which also of course constitutes evidence of the year of signature. In other words you will have to find old ones. Three years old, to be precise. There is always a certain quantity of these forms in circulation, blank of course but with the original year of issue on them. As I am sure you know, they are made available to the public through stores with a license to sell tobacco. Some of these may have stocks of old ones lying around. But it is more probable you will get them through a bank. Perhaps you are on friendly terms with a tobacconist or someone who works in a bank? It is always better to do things through people you know. In any case, with a little patience you will find them.”

  “I daresay that is true,” Fabio said, “but I don’t see—”

  “You will,” Mancini said. “In a short while you will.” He regarded Fabio with smiling benevolence for some moments; then he raised his head and his smile merged with the light. “We will obtain the cambiali and we will ask your friend in Carrara to act as the creditor. That is to say, you will sign and date a document bearing in its watermark the year 1992, promising to repay your friend, within three years, a certain sum, fairly substantial but not too improbably large, say two hundred and twenty million lire, just a little more than the price of the house. In other words, this promissory note has now fallen due. Are you beginning to see the pattern, Signor Bianchi? It has a certain beauty, as I think you will agree. We will be invalidating a fictitious sale by means of a fictitious debt. The note has fallen due, you cannot pay back the debt, you panic, you enter into a false sale of the house, you admit it is false, you throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Why did you do it? Not to avoid tax, not to evade your responsibilities as a good citizen, no and no again, you did it because you were afraid that this creditor would take the house, which you have offered as security for the debt, leaving you and your partner without a roof over your heads. The judge may not altogether believe it, of course.”

  “But in that case—”

  “I mean as a private person he may not altogether believe it. But the papers will be in order, your friend will be there as witness, he will have a lawyer to present the cambiali on his behalf, which will really be on your behalf, though it will not seem so. Naturally you will have to pay the fees of this lawyer of your friend; you could not press friendship so far as to expect him to pay them. Have no fear, Signor Bianchi, we will carry the day.”

  “And afterward?”

  “Your friend will not hold you to payment, naturally. When everything is settled he will tear all those pieces of paper into much smaller pieces and throw them to the wind.” Mancini paused, tilting his head slowly, first to one side, then the other. “That is, if he is the man you think him,” he said. “If he is not, then of course he will say you have defaulted on the debt and perhaps he will try to take possession of the house. In that case we would probably have to declare these cambiali to have been fictitious documents and try to invalidate them by declaring the existence of some genuine document antecedent to them. In theory there could be a whole series of such documents stretching back into the past, each invalidated by the one before.” The lawyer chuckled, an abrupt and rather startling sound in that quiet room. “That would give them something to think about,” he said. “It won’t be necessary, of course.” He spoke almost with regret.

  “I certainly hope not,” Fabio said, rather sharply. “It would cost me more in legal fees than the house is worth.”

  “A regression of falsehoods and deceptions going back through all the generations to the original agreement, God’s pact with Adam. The money hasn’t been minted that could pay the fees for that. No, we will prevail in this matter, Signor Bianchi, never fear. Of course, you may find yourself facing a charge of fraud in the end, but that is better than losing your house, don’t you think? The law is on our side, you see.”

  “On our side?” Fabio felt his head beginning to spin a little. There was something unsettling in the way Mancini unfolded his thoughts. He seemed to look at everything in the light of the universal.

  “I mean in the sense of the law’s delays.” Mancini looked at the man seated before him, at the strong, still athletic frame, the pale scars, not unbecoming, on the cheek and forehead, the deep-browed face at once melancholy and saturnine. Before this business of the house was over, long before, there would be another young man, another dependency, seeds perhaps of another betrayal. “Well,” he said, “I have looked at the deed of sale that you and your partner cooked up, so to speak. It is made out in proper form, there is nothing to get hold of there. But there is one thing strongly in your favor and that is the clause giving you usufruct of house and land. It was very wise of you to include that, otherwise you could have been turned out of the place at once, bag and baggage.”

  “If they had tried to do that,” Fabio said, “I would have burned the house down. The usufruct clause was the notary’s idea, not mine—I trusted my partner completely.”

  “Whoever’s idea it was, it is a very fortunate thing for you. You will have the right of continued residence and the enjoyment of all produce and income and any other advantages derived from the house and land until the case is settled. And the case will take long to settle, Signor Bianchi. Cases like this in Italy take many years. With the hearings concerning the cambiali and the hearings concerning the legitimacy of the sale and the disputes arising from these, it will be well into the next century before we get even a preliminary ruling. Then if it were unfavorable, which I think highly unlikely, there are various appeals procedures … No, I think we can safely say that the threat of dispossession is very far from imminent. Meanwhile, there is the situation of your former partner. He has not much money, as I understand it. He has no profession. Now, effectively, he has lost his house. He may find, may have already found, a new protector, if I may so express it. But he is aging, as we all are. Protectors will get scarcer. It seems to me that he is considerably worse off than you are.”

  “I would not have him back,” Fabio said, and this was not altogether true but would become so. “Not if he came begging. Why did he do it?”

  “You have no idea?”

  “None at all.”

  Mancini regarded his client in silence for a moment. It was quite extraordinary, the evasions people were capable of, the way they would armor themselves against the lance of blame. Even a blunted lance, ev
en minor blame. He smiled and placed his hands flat on the desk before him as if about to rise—it was his way of signaling that the interview was over. “Perhaps some lawyer talked him into it,” he said.

  From his vantage point on the hillside Harold Chapman kept watch with his binoculars on the stretch of road that included the Checchetti house. From here he could see the junction of the road with the broader one that led down from the village. The lorry would come this way.

  It was quite hot, even here in the shade, and the flies were bothersome. But it did not occur to him to abandon his post. When you have set your hand to the plow … Somewhere below him he heard a snatch of birdsong, abrupt and lyrical, with a melancholy dying fall. Some kind of warbler. He had originally bought the binoculars in order to do some bird-watching during his stays here in his holiday house. He knew little about birds but they were on his list of leisure activities for Italy, like learning more about art. He had always, since his boyhood, made lists of things to be accomplished; but the lists changed with circumstances. Quite often, looking back, he could not understand the importance he had attached to some of the items. Getting Cecilia to marry him had headed the list once …

  He brought the binoculars to bear on the stretch immediately below him, where the terraced land leveled out to the road, pale clay color now after the recent spell of dry weather. The poplars along the road were in full leaf and they fluttered in the light breeze. It was a complex interplay of branch and foliage that the binoculars showed him, arbitrary to the point of hallucination, full of movement and shadow and gloss, with depthless spaces here and there, leading him through the leaves into some radiant world beyond. There was no sign of any dark lump that might have been a warbler.

  He moved the glasses in a long sweep over the silver gleam of the olives on the rising ground beyond the road and the rows of vines above them. Perspectives were confused by the nearness of things; the vines and olives meshed together in an intricate trellis of silver and green. At the far edge of vision, on his left, he saw Ritter emerge onto the track, walk a few paces, then stop suddenly and stand quite still with his head lowered. Dangling from his right hand a hooped blade, bright in the sunshine. It was a billhook, Chapman decided after some moments. Ritter must be doing some clearing of the ground.

  This sudden, inexplicable immobility confirmed Chapman in the distrust he had felt on first meeting the German. He remembered the vague eyes, the strange absence of possessions. The man was standing there as if transfixed. What could you make of a man who stopped like that for no apparent reason?

  Chapman moved the binoculars away, reinforced in his sense of his own normality, his solidarity with the great majority of the human race. Lying there on an early summer day, under a vast and cloudless sky, dabbing at flies, clutching binoculars, he felt himself to be entirely reasonable. He was waiting for the defeat of his foes. Some were winners in life, some losers. He knew himself to be a winner.

  The returning swing of the binoculars gave him a section of the Greens’ roof with the edges of the plastic sheet curling and rippling in the breeze. The Greens were losers. He focused again on the junction of the roads. The lorry would turn off, begin to descend, be brought up short by the stakes halfway down the slope, just below the Checchetti house. Chapman had not seen military service but he felt now like a commander, waiting in ambush with his troops. Hannibal, somebody like that. He had read in his guidebook about that long-ago battle on the northern shores of Trasimeno, how the Carthaginian commander had waited in hiding in the hills above the lake, watched while the Roman troops blundered into the trap. Just as he himself was waiting and watching now. Admittedly the scale was different, the Checchetti could hardly be called an army, except as stragglers from the shadowy host of those who had tried at one time or another to get the better of him, do him down, deny him his rights or his gains—two things often confused in his mind. But the feeling was the same; that elation Hannibal must have felt, he, Harold Chapman was feeling now, the sense of commanding the heights, like an eagle. Of course, looked at another way, both he and the Checchetti were no more than little colored flags on the spacious map of another’s mind. Mancini was the Supreme Commander. But as he lay there Chapman was content with his role. He would be in at the kill, like Hannibal. He was well provisioned: there were a bottle of white wine and a cheese sandwich in his knapsack. He would lie there and think his thoughts and wait for the prophecies of the amazing Mancini to come true.

  Ritter stood still for several minutes, holding the billhook loosely against his side. He had clambered from the gully to get his rake, which was lying some distance away at the edge of the road. But the act of emerging from the tangled slope to the fuller light and uncluttered space above had somehow stilled him, like an exposure. And in the first moments of this stillness a memory from his interpreting days had come to him. A conference in Singapore, ten years before, in the mid-eighties. He had gone as interpreter to the official dinner on the last evening of the conference.

  Consecutive interpreting, not simultaneous. Perhaps that was why the memory of it had sprung to his mind so suddenly, coming with the sense of exposure he had felt on emerging from the gully. Consecutive interpreting, when one is alone and unscreened and in full view, speaking for two or three minutes at a time, had always given him a feeling of being overexposed, too much in the open; and this had intensified in the years just before his breakdown.

  A private room in a tall building, high up. One wall was plate glass, through which you could look down on the lights of the city. Someone was speaking after dinner. Which one was it? He could remember the people at the table only in their official functions: representatives of the Relief Agency, the pharmaceutical company, the Singapore government; and their jeweled, bare-shouldered wives. The faces of the men were all one face, benign, calmly prosperous. The words too were the same, whatever the mouth that uttered them, full of friendly sentiment. Heartfelt thanks to our hosts of the Relief Agency, who have made such dedicated efforts … If we had in places of trust more people of this caliber, I venture to suggest … Hear, hear! General euphoria and congratulation. And the reply from the Agency chief, Singapore Chinese—Ritter remembered his face now, shallow-set eyes, full mouth. See it as a privilege as well as a duty … But the true philanthropists are those who like my friends here are ready to accept financial loss in order to make these drugs available to the countries of the Third World …

  One of the drugs was called Soronex. He had remembered the connection at that moment, while the Chinese was speaking, like the detail of a dream recalled unwillingly, wrenched into focus by some doleful sensation or event. Soronex. A medical conference in a gray northern city on the other side of the world, some six months before, the briefest of references. Under investigation, deleterious side effects, possible interference in the supply of sugar to the brain. Under investigation—that meant automatic suspension of marketing in countries where controls were enforced. But these were not the countries the Chinese was talking about.

  Ritter thought again of the faces around the table. He had glanced aside at that moment of unwilling recall, seen a sudden scatter of raindrops across the glass wall that divided them from the darkness outside. Every evening during his stay in Singapore the rain came just at this time, as if seeking still to nourish the roots of the lost forest buried beneath the great complex of banks and hotels and shopping precincts that is the modern city.

  Well-fed and well-satisfied humanitarians sitting at the long table. The drug would be available at a much lower price. Quite frankly we have accepted substantial cuts in our profit margins. In India, for example, where gastric disorders are endemic, Soronex will be of great, of inestimable …

  Nothing official yet, of course: tests on suspected drugs take a long time. But an unfavorable response expected. No further manufacture, naturally. A smooth switch in marketing to sell off stockpiles in the Third World. Some few at that dinner would have known; most would have guarded their ignor
ance carefully. Perhaps one or two genuine innocents.

  Ritter began to move forward again, as if that possibility of innocence had released him. A medical conference in Brussels, a celebratory dinner in Singapore. Quite different people, no connection; but interpreters are wanderers, they move from conference to conference over the face of the earth, sometimes they see connections that were never intended to be seen. He had thought himself a mouthpiece for these people and others like them. But since his breakdown and illness he had understood that they too were merely conduits, that the stream had been fouled somewhere higher up, nearer the source, by other people making other speeches, or no speeches at all. His father too, he knew it now, nothing so dignified as a spokesman, a mouthpiece only.

  He took the rake and returned to the gully. The cuttings he had made below the mouth of the cave had gathered into a mound, blocking his way; they had to be raked back before he could proceed farther. When this was done he was able to see into the cave more clearly. It went some two meters into the hillside, deep enough for a man to sleep in shelter. Leaf mold lay thickly over the mouth; but when this was swept away he discovered the ground to be clear and level. There was an old wine bottle, cracked at the neck, among mold and the loose earth at the entrance.