The Seventh Function of Language

As he passes Simon, the third gang member puts something on the table, which Simon covers with his napkin.

They shove the Camorra guy in the back of the Fiat and speed off.

There is panic in the café. Simon listens to the screams from inside and understands that the two bodyguards are injured. Each one has a bullet in his leg, as planned.

Simon says to the frightened-looking Bianca: “Come with me.”

He leads her over to the third man’s motorbike and hands her the napkin, inside which is a key. He says to Bianca: “Drive.”

Bianca protests: she’s ridden a scooter before, but never a bike as powerful as this one.

Lifting his right arm, Simon says, scowling: “Well, I can’t either.”

So Bianca straddles the Triumph, Simon kickstarts it and sits behind her, arms around her waist, and she twists the handle to accelerate, sending the bike flying forward. Bianca asks which direction she should take and Simon replies: “Pozzuoli.”

99

It is like a lunar landscape, somewhere between a spaghetti western and a science fiction film.

At the center of an immense crater coated with whitish clay, the three gang members surround the paunchy VIP, who is kneeling next to a boiling mud pit.

Around them, geysers of sulfur burst from the bowels of the earth. The air is thick with the stench of rotten eggs.

Simon’s first thought was to go to the Sibyl’s cave in Cumae, where no one would have come to find them, but he decided against that because it was too kitsch, too obviously symbolic, and he’s getting tired of symbols. Except it is not that easy to get away from them: as they tread the cracked earth, Bianca tells him that the Romans believed the Solfatara, this dormant volcano, to be the gates of Hell. Okay …

“Salve! What do we do with him, compagno?”

Bianca, who had not recognized the three men at the Gambrinus, asks wide-eyed:

“You hired the Red Brigades from Bologna?”

“I thought they weren’t necessarily the Red Brigades; isn’t that what you insisted to your friend Enzo?”

“No one hired us.”

“Non siamo dei mercenari.”

“No, it’s true, they did this for free. I convinced them.”

“To kidnap this guy?”

“Si tratta di un uomo politico corrotto di Napoli.”

“He hands out building permits from the mayor’s office. Thanks to the permits he sold the Camorra, hundreds of people died during the terremoto, crushed by the rotten buildings the Camorra had constructed.”

Simon approaches the man and rubs his stump against the man’s face. “Not only that, but he’s a bad loser.” The man shakes his head like an animal. “Strunz! Si mmuort!”

The three Red Brigades members suggest ransoming him in exchange for a revolutionary hostage. The French-speaker among them turns to Simon: “Ma, it’s not certain that anyone will want to pay for a pig like him, ha ha!” The three men laugh, and Bianca, too, though she wants him to die, even if she doesn’t say so.

An Aldo Moro–style uncertainty: Simon likes that. He wants vengeance, but he also likes the idea of leaving it to chance. He grabs the Camorra man’s chin in his left hand and squeezes it like a vise. “You understand the alternatives? Either your body is found in the boot of a Renault 4L or you can go home and continue being a bastard. But don’t you dare set foot in the Logos Club again.” He remembers their duel in Venice, the only one in which he ever truly felt in danger. “Anyway, how does a peasant like you end up so cultivated? You find time to go to the theater when you’re not too busy organizing crimes?” But he immediately regrets this question, loaded as it is with politically incorrect prejudices.

He releases the man’s chin, which immediately starts wagging. He speaks very rapidly in Italian. Simon asks Bianca: “What’s he on about?”

“He’s offering your friends lots of money to kill you.”

Simon laughs. He knows the kneeling man’s persuasive talents better than anyone, but he also knows that between a Mafia bureaucrat with Christian Democrat connections and Red Brigades members in their early twenties, there can be no possible dialogue. He could spend all day and all night talking without persuading them of anything.

His opponent must realize the same thing because, with a suppleness and speed one would never suspect in someone so corpulent, he leaps at the nearest brigade member and tries to wrestle his P38 from him. But the gang are young, fit men; the man is smashed over the head with the butt of a gun and crumples to the ground. The three brigade members aim their guns at him while yelling insults.

And so this is how the story will end. They’ll shoot him here and now for that stupid escape attempt, thinks Simon.

A gunshot goes off.

But it is one of the brigade members who collapses.

Silence falls again on the volcano.

Everyone breathes in the sulfurous vapors that saturate the air.