Fabio Bianco peeled back the curtains on a bright August afternoon. In the distance, a sliver of Lake Geneva sparkled in the sunlight. The peaks of the Jura Mountains fell away from Mont Tendre and formed a scalloped horizon of white and gray against the brilliant blue sky.
Lausanne was so different from New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, or any of the other cities Bianco visited in his capacity as CEO of Trikon International. The Swiss city’s cleanliness was seductive. Casting an eye across that sweep of water, mountains, and sky, feeling a snap in the midsummer air, one could almost believe that the world was not collapsing into filth.
Bianco let the curtains fall together, and for a moment the room went black. His tired old eyes reacted slowly these days. The onset of cataracts? Why not. He was afflicted by every other malady of old age.
The room slowly brightened. As usual, he had taken a suite: bedroom, bath, and sitting room for solitary meals, balcony, and an alcove with a desk, several electrical outlets, and a telephone jack. On one side of the desk was a laptop computer, its fuzzy white cursor blinking slowly on the blue field of an otherwise empty screen. On the other side was a portable laser printer. A rivulet of accordion paper tumbled from the printer to the thickly carpeted floor.
“You look tired, Uncle,” said Ugo. He had dragged an ottoman across from the deeply cushioned sofa and leaned with his elbows on the desk.
“Mezzo-mezz’,” said Bianco, fluttering a hand.
He was very thin, fragile, his wispy white hair almost entirely gone. Once he had been able to glare down anyone who dared stand against him, his face as haughty as any Caesar’s with its proud Roman nose and penetrating brown eyes. Now, riddled with hypertension, ulcers, a weakening heart, he felt old and used up. But the will remained. The drive to master whoever or whatever stood in his way, even if it was his own slowly failing body.
He pulled open the mouth of a black satchel resting on the floor and plunged his hand into it. Made of the finest calfskin, the satchel was a gift from an old friend who was also Bianco’s physician. It was stuffed with all manner of medical necessities: transdermal nitroglycerin pads, vitamins, anti-inflammatories, an extra pair of reading glasses, and pills to regulate blood pressure, heart rhythm, cholesterol, and water retention. He dug out his antacid and swigged it directly from the bottle. It tasted more like chalk than cherry.
“Your ulcer is bad today?”
“Always bad,” said Bianco. “Meeting with the French makes it worse.”
“I thought you were meeting with more than just the French.”
“The French, the Germans, the Swiss, the Swedes, all of the member nations of the United Europe arm of Trikon will be present,” said Bianco. “But it is from the French I expect the trouble. They have been miffed ever since the Board appointed Chakra Ramsanjawi over Jean-Pierre Delemonde as chief coordinating scientist of Trikon UE. I expect they will use the recent incident aboard Trikon Station as a pretext for pulling out.”
“Let them,” said Ugo. “If United Europe can survive without the British, Trikon UE could survive without the French.”
Bianco looked at his nephew. The young man’s shoulder muscles rippled defiantly beneath his open-necked shirt. His black hair fell like fine fur on his collar. His brown eyes gleamed in a sliver of sunlight poking through the curtains. The light projected a silhouette of Ugo’s head on the alcove wall. His profile was strong, classical Roman. Family and friends often remarked that Ugo was the image of the young Fabio. Yes, I looked like that once, Bianco thought to himself. Long ago. Long ago.
With a sigh and a shrug of his frail shoulders he told his nephew, “We need everyone, Ugo, even the goddamned French.”
“If it were up to me…” Ugo began.
The laptop suddenly beeped and its cursor began to run across the screen, leaving trails of characters in its wake.
“Momenta. Rome is calling,” said Bianco. He fumbled for his reading glasses.
The words scrolled up the screen in French, the language of Trikon UE: AN ADDRESS BY FABIO BIANCO, CEO, TRIKON INTERNATIONAL, TO THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND MEMBER CORPORATIONS OF TRIKON UNITED EUROPE. ANNUAL MEETING. 19 AUGUST 1998.
The printer started to hum. Rather than strain to read the letters on the laptop’s screen, Bianco waited for the pages rolling out of the printer. The typescript was large enough so that he did not need his glasses. Bianco was not pleased with what he read. The French syntax was strained and the verbs were bland and weak. Worse, it attempted to avoid the truth. The sole allusion to the theft of the American computer files was a single sentence on page two: AN UNFORTUNATE MISAPPLICATION OF DATA.
As soon as the transmission ended, Bianco fired off a return message. I WILL NOT STAND BEFORE THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND DISPENSE OLIVE OIL. His forefingers hammered at the keys of the laptop. I WANT THE TRUTH, LA VERITA. CAPISCE?
The Rome office of Trikon UE acknowledged his ire. Bianco ripped the pages from the printer and tore the speech into confetti.
“Speech writers think they have words for all occasions. I expect enough displeasure without inviting the Board to brand me a weakling.” He gripped his desk as pain ripped across his stomach like a bolt of forked lightning.
“Are you all right, Uncle?”
“Fine. Just some pain. I’ll be—” With a trembling hand, he reached into his satchel. He gulped antacid ravenously.
“Do you want me to call the hotel doctor?”
Bianco waved away the suggestion. He placed the bottle uncapped on his desk and reclined his chair.
“You want to rest now? I can come back at dinnertime.”
“No, Ugo. I am fine. I want you to stay. I want to ask you a question.” Bianco closed his eyes. “Remember when we would sit in the garden of your mother’s house and talk about the world in the year 2000?”
“I said there would be soccer games on the moon,” said Ugo. “With a field six times as long and six times as wide and a dome pumped full of air. What a fool I was. Playing soccer on the moon! Now we can’t even play in England.”
“You were merely being a boy,” said Bianco. “I was the fool, a grown man who foresaw an international consortium and a space station where the brightest minds from every nation could solve the problems created during centuries of ignorance.”
“You have come closer with your prediction than I have with mine.”
“But it is not good enough, Ugo. The space station is our perfect laboratory not because it is free of gravity but because it is free of borders and free of competition. It provides us with an endless view of the very world we are trying to save.
“But I learned too late that man is a stubborn creature. He will bring his politics and his competition with him. The people working on the project care only about dollars and lire and yen and who claims the glory.”
“They are scientists, Uncle. They should know better.”
“They know,” said Bianco. “But they forget. I don’t have the answer. Maybe I should return to research myself.”
“You can’t go to the space station with your condition.”
“My doctor treats my condition with pills and warnings to avoid spicy foods. I do not obey because spicy foods are one of the few pleasures left me, other than watching beautiful women stroll the piazzas on a summer evening.”
“There are no women strolling piazzas on Trikon Station,” said Ugo.