‘And afterwards?’ Davide asked.
‘You see, Davide,’ he said, ‘if they’ve become so cautious, we have to be cautious, too. Let me explain what we’re going to do tomorrow. Just before two o’clock, Livia will call a taxi and go to this Publicity Photographic place. We’ll follow her. But let’s suppose that someone else, very cautiously, is also following Livia, to make sure that Livia doesn’t have any friends with her, like us. If that’s the case, this person will notice that we’re following Livia, and then we won’t get anywhere. Are you with me?’
‘Of course,’ Davide told him with his eyes.
‘So we have to follow Livia, but indirectly. In other words, we’ll go ahead of her, we’ll set off a hundred metres in front of her and keep the same distance. But even then, only up to a certain point. Imagine the formation: first us, in the Giulietta, then the taxi with Livia and then, possibly, this person following Livia. While we’re in the city, in the traffic, we can maintain this formation because the man won’t notice that we’re with Livia, given that we’re in front of her, but by the time we get to the end of the Via Egidio Folli, we’ll be on a road in the open country or almost,’ he pointed at all the green on the map, ‘and we’ll probably be the only cars around at that hour. Then he may suspect, because we’ll be all too visible. In addition, when we’ve got to these Ulisse Apartments, we’ll have to park the car, if we park it right in front, we’re rather naïve as pursuers. So you understand what you have to do there on the bicycle.’
He was starting to understand.
‘You do a reconnaissance. After seeing exactly where the Ulisse Apartments are, you have to find two things for me: a place where we can hide the car as close as possible to the building and to the main road, but without it being visible from the building itself. And the other thing is a secondary street which is near the building but isn’t the Via Folli. Or at least you have to be able to tell me if there’s neither a spot to park nor a secondary road.’
Silence. They hadn’t heard the whoosh of car tyres for about ten minutes. It was almost two in the morning, they still had many hours to wait, and they were not the kind of men to sleep on the night before a battle.
‘My father liked playing solitaire,’ he said to Davide. ‘He must have left a few packs of cards here. Do you know how to play scopa?’
‘Yes.’ Scopa wasn’t much fun with only two players, but they had to do something.
3
Livia emerged from the front door of her building and got into the taxi. It was just after 1:30, the traffic was starting to thin out: many people preferred to eat at that hour. ‘Via Egidio Folli,’ she said to the driver.
In the mirror she saw the driver giving the usual disgusted grimace: whatever address you give a taxi driver, he’ll think it’s a stupid destination. Why does anyone need to go to the Via Egidio Folli in their lives? Or to the Via Borgogna, for that matter? And maybe he was right.
The driver continued along the Via Plinio, crossed the Via Eustachi, the Viale Abruzzi, turned into the Via Nöe and reached the Via Pacini. At this point Livia admired Davide’s driving skills, with which, of course, she was already familiar: the Giulietta with Davide and Signor Lamberti on board was ahead, always within sight, but never right in front of the taxi. Following a car by keeping ahead of it was a delicate operation in city traffic and Davide was performing perfectly.
Despite the heat and the nervous tension which flustered her a little, Livia noticed another thing: her taxi was being followed. There was no skill in this discovery: she had noticed the car immediately in the Via Plinio because it had left at the same time as her taxi, and because it was a lovely car, a Mercedes 230, of a colour she liked, a bronze which verged on greyish brown, like caffè latte. She had seen it again in the Via Nöe, then in the Piazzale Pola and now in the Via Pacini. The little mirror she had in her hand as she painted her lips every now and again told her how faithfully the Mercedes was following her taxi and also how unconcerned its driver seemed about being spotted.
The oral instruction manual she had been given by Signor Lamberti had covered that eventuality: ‘If you notice you’re being followed, ask the taxi driver to pull up at a news stand and buy a paper.’ This simple operation would tell Signor Lamberti that she had a friend behind her.
‘Could you stop at the next news stand, please?’ she said to the driver who, resigned by now, made no grimace, but stopped the car in front of the news stand at the corner of the Via Teodosio. Livia got out and was pleased to see the Mercedes stop a little further on. She was much less pleased to see the Giulietta disappear quickly at the end of the Via Teodosio. She knew Signor Lamberti and Davide were still protecting her, but no longer seeing their car unsettled her. She bought a fashion magazine and immediately got back in the car.
In the Via Porpora, the driver asked, ‘What number in the Via Folli?’
‘At the end, just after the tollbooth.’
The driver shook his head. ‘Then you’ll have to pay my return fare.’
‘Of course, don’t worry.’ Without ever turning her head to look back, using only her little mirror, she could still see the Mercedes perfectly well, it was just behind them now, gleaming in the sun, bronze, slender, and malign.
‘The Via Folli ends here, we’re in the countryside,’ the driver said. ‘Where is it I have to go?’ The stupidity of passengers had made him brutish: they never even knew where they wanted to go.
‘A bit further on, there’s a large building on the left.’ The road was running between cultivated fields and for a long stretch there were no houses of any kind: the illusion of being in open country was almost perfect.
‘That one there?’ the driver asked with a martyred air.
They could see it already. Signor Lamberti had described the street and the Ulisse Apartments to her over the phone, just as Davide had described them to him after going there by bicycle.
‘Yes, that’s the one.’ She glanced in the little mirror, she could still see the Mercedes behind her. She wasn’t afraid any more, she knew Signor Lamberti and Davide were close, closer than ever. Next to the sky-grey building which rose in the middle of the cultivated fields, all by itself, because of some clever bit of property speculation, there was an old farmhouse, more than a hundred metres from the main road, peeping out from a small wood, and that was where the Giulietta was, amid the greenery, in the open air but invisible, and that was where her friends were, also in the open air in the scorching heat of the hour, equipped with a modest but useful little telescope with which they could enjoy a view of the whole Ulisse building, with all its twelve floors and a little of the countryside around, so green and sunny, and yet so disturbing.
‘This one?’ the driver said as he stopped, even though there couldn’t be any doubt: it was the only building amid all the fields, a twelve-storey sky-grey tower, gigantic and futuristic, vaguely reminiscent, in its isolation, of those monumental Aztec temples that emerge here and there in the wilderness. It was a building intended for human habitation, but nobody, or almost nobody, was living in it yet, even though all the apartments were already sold: people need to invest their money, they don’t want to keep their money in the mattress like their grandparents, so it was complete, finished, equipped with every facility. Around it there was a large concrete parking area, with white lines to demarcate the parking spaces, only the cars were missing.