In a Heartbeat (9 page)

‘You’re in your underwear.’

‘Do you think that they’ll fine me?’

‘I won’t snitch.’

I grabbed the ledge close to her legs. ‘I don’t have a towel.’

‘I’ll get you one from the locker room.’

‘Thanks.’

She came back with a white towel. When I got out she covered me. ‘Full service.’ We looked at one another. Then she said, ‘Santo … ’ her eyes welled up with tears. I took her face into my hands and then I kissed her.

‘Oh God, Santo.’ I nibbled her neck. My fingers went under the elastic of her underwear. I breathed in her ear.

‘Wait.’

I gently fingered her. She was wet. She arched her back and dug her nails into me.

‘Who are you?’

We went up to the apartment.

Monica hesitated at the door, and I pushed her inside. We had sex on the rug in front of the fireplace that I couldn’t work out how to switch on.

It was strange but nice.

It was the first time in a lifetime that I had had sex without being wasted. For a moment there I thought that I couldn’t do it, but then the old motor kicked in.

‘It was … different,’ she said afterwards.

I was trapped, trying to untangle myself from my trousers that were still around my ankles while my shoes were still on. I had dressed because I didn’t want to get caught leaving the pool half-naked.

I reeked of chlorine.

‘Was it better or worse?’

‘It was different,’ she said again.

‘How long has it been?’

She took a pillow from the sofa and put it under my head. She rested her head on my chest. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Not even yesterday for your birthday?’

‘No. I was hoping … ’

‘You know, executives are stressed out. No pussy.’

She punched me on my shoulder. ‘Bastard.’

‘Sorry.’

I lit a cigarette. ‘I dealt and I stole.’

‘What?’

‘I was answering your question from before. Who I was? Who I am? I’m riff-raff, bad news, I’m a criminal.’

‘Really?’

‘Are you scared?’

She didn’t say anything for a long minute, then …

‘How did you become a
criminal
?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘A friend got me into it. It seemed better than breaking my back doing manual labour at the market loading and unloading fruit. I was self-employed without anyone telling me what to do.’

‘Selling drugs.’

‘If someone wants to smoke a joint or do a line, they’re free to do it.’

‘Drugs kill.’

‘What is that, the slogan for a ‘Just Say No’ commercial? You can die from crossing the street. Who says it’s better than dying from drugs?’

Silence.

‘And the bullet?’ she said.

‘The one in my shoulder?’

‘Yes, that one.’

I rubbed my shoulder and could actually feel something small and hard.

‘I don’t know, it’s gone, along with my memory.’

‘Did it happen often, I mean getting shot at?’

‘From what I know that was the only time.’

She took the cigarette from my lips and took a drag.

‘I thought that you didn’t smoke?’

‘Every now and then, but never in front of you. You didn’t want me to smoke. You were against drugs including caffeine.’

‘Now that explains the crappy breakfast.’

‘A big change from what you remember, isn’t it?’

‘I want to know why.’

‘Because, Saint, life goes on. You found your path and it’s a better one now.’

‘I wish that I could believe, you but I know from experience that it’s never that simple. Did you know that I had to do with a private investigator?’

‘No, why?’

‘I was just asking.’ I lit another cigarette with the last one.

‘How was Roveda killed?’

‘They said that someone stabbed him in the eye while he was in the pool.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘It was done with something sharp. He became unconscious and drowned. It happened yesterday afternoon but they only found him later last night. He was kind of a loner and a misanthrope.’

‘From what you’re saying it seems that you knew him well.’

‘He was a family friend, like a distant uncle. He always gave me dolls for my birthday when I was little. He got them at the airport duty-free shops on his travels around the world. I still have them; then he moved on to roses. When I heard that he was dead, I … ’

She wiped her tears away.

‘He didn’t really love me, you know. When I was little I had thought he did, but when I got older I realised that he was only nice to me to stay on my father’s good side. It was a real disappointment. But to die that way … ’ she sniffed. ‘Towards the end the relationship between him and my father grew colder, but he’s still deeply shocked by what happened to Mariano. Poor man, Daddy seemed so old when I saw him this morning. Fragile … ’

‘Why had Roveda and your father argued?’

‘It was about the agency.’

‘Does your father have something to do with Beagle & Manetti?’

‘My father had his own agency that wasn’t doing so well, Giovanni Manetti came in as an investment partner.’

I was shocked. ‘Is Beagle your last name?’

‘No, stupid, it’s Bonanno. Beagle was my father’s dog. His name was Spot, not very original I know, as he was a beagle. They used him in the company logo.’

‘I thought it was a pig.’

‘Spot was a bit fat, poor thing. He died while chasing a cat. A heart attack. Can you believe it? It almost never happens to dogs.’

‘They die when they have to die. My dog was fine the day before.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Spillo.’

‘Nice.’

‘Anyway, to use the dog as a logo reflected my father’s sense of humour. But he lost his sense of humour when Manetti named Mariano the CEO. Daddy didn’t agree, but he was in the minority and had relatively little say in the day-to-day business of the company.’ When Manetti died his heirs wanted to respect his wishes: his son became president, a purely symbolic role, and Mariano remained CEO.

‘If you’re the boss’s daughter, why are you my secretary?’

‘I’m your assistant, not your secretary. I’m your second-in- command. I may help you with your meetings, but I never bring you coffee. That’s what Rina does, your real secretary, actually
our
secretary. I only started recently. I was out of the country up until three years ago, and I didn’t know anything about advertising. You taught me everything I know.’

‘How wonderful!’

I stretched and then stood up. ‘I’m starving. Let’s see if there’s something to eat in the house that isn’t spelt or barley.’

‘Rosario’s wife always cooks for you unless you tell her not to. Always vegetarian, sorry to say.’

‘We’re going to have to change that.’

I put on my trousers. Monica didn’t move.

‘Saint … ’

‘You’re not hungry?’

‘Saint, what are we going to do now?’

‘Let’s stick to the programme. I have to go back to work and pretend I’m the person from before. At least until after the investigation or until I come up with something better.’

‘You don’t remember anything … ’

‘You’ll show me.’

I looked at my watch. ‘What time do I usually show up for work? Do I have to punch in or something like that?’

‘No, you’re a director; you set your own hours. You usually get there around nine.’

‘So … we have a good seven hours.’

8

We decided to start with the mobile phone, since everyone had one; I had to learn how to use it. Monica showed me how to switch it on and how to check the address book. There were a hundred and twenty names that I didn’t know besides Rosario, Office and Monica. She also showed me how to write a text message and send it, and how to take photos.

I had heard about digital cameras before, but they had cost a lot and they were also enormous. Now, you had everything that you could possibly want, and it came in the size of a cigarette pack. You could send images around the world just by dialling a number. It was either genius or just plain stupidity, I couldn’t decide. I could even choose a ring tone from a selection of fifty different ones, annoying and also in stereo. There was everything from ‘La Cucaracha’ to the soundtrack from
The Sting.
Did this bother anyone? My neighbours complained even if I had the volume of the TV too loud; now with a phone I could torture everyone to death.

The Ad Exec had chosen the
vibrate
option; it was the drilling sound that had woken me up this morning.

‘You save messages here.’

Pressing the buttons, she showed me a list. Three or four were hers, from ‘
Where are you?
’ sent the night we were at La Scala, to ‘
Call me, the police are here!!
’ sent that morning. The others were unknown and more or less were
Call me
or
Are you there?
There was one that came from a Father Zurloni,
Don’t forget our meeting at 9:30pm, Regards.
I thought about asking Monica who it was, but she was already showing me the voice mail.

‘Press here, and you can listen to your messages.’

She put the phone to my ear and I heard her voice that had called me desperately the night at La Scala. Next was her sad message where she told me about Roveda.
There was an accident sob sob
and then there was one from Rina that asked me in a choked voice to come to the office for urgent news. Who knows if it was her who told the cops about the comments I had made about Roveda? Then there was a voice that asked me if I wanted to delete the message or listen again.

‘You can also catch up on the recent news or send a fax, but these functions aren’t that important at the moment.’

I agreed. I already felt exhausted and the lesson was just beginning.

‘Now here’s the fun part. The computer,’ Monica said.

Back then I had an IBM 286 that was heavy and packed with all the video games that I could find. I got it from a junkie who owed me. Inside was the previous owner’s diary written with a programme called WordStar. His pathetic writing had made me roar with laughter. The computer that I had now was in the office on the third floor (I hadn’t even noticed that there was a top floor with a terrace.) It had a screen only a few centimetres thick. There was no external hard drive, no wires connected the keyboard to the screen, and there wasn’t even a wire for the mouse. It didn’t have a ball but a red light. A laser.

‘Bluetooth,’ Monica said. ‘Radio waves.’

Monica showed me how to use the commands. There weren’t any cursors or lines, no
C: Open File, Delete, Print,
but little drawings that I had to press with a pointer.
Icons.
I realised that it was an Apple by the apple shape inscribed on the milky white plastic. The computer that I remembered was a greyish cube with a tiny screen.

Fascinated, I let Monica show me the menu. She said that the machine had a hard disk of 200GB. Gigabytes, that means a thousand megabytes! The computer that I had left behind at my old apartment, the apartment that wasn’t there anymore, had 20MB of memory and was still half-empty.

Then she showed me the internet.

I had already heard about it in my time but it was only something that the Americans had; now I discovered that it was a kind of infinite encyclopaedia subdivided into millions of computers scattered all over the world.
Networked
, 24 hours a day.

I could join as well if I had wanted to and create my own
webpage. Webpages
opened in every language in the world when I pressed the mouse button, actually when I
clicked
the mouse
.
Inserting any word into
Google
, a list of pages opened for me to
click
with all the information that I requested. Even an idiot could understand!

At the third click a page opened where a black woman was giving a blowjob. ‘Not bad. There was a time when you used to have to pay for this,’ I said.

‘Same now. If you click on it they’ll ask for your credit card. It’s spam.’

‘What’s
spam?
’

‘It’s unwanted advertising.’

‘So they’re one of us.’

Spam was everywhere. A new ad would pop up with something else to sell: sex, medicine, travel. Mostly sex. When I tried to close a window, more appeared to the point of clogging the screen and forcing me to close the programme.