“Nor are there spicy foods.”
Bianco’s voice trailed off. He breathed deeply and cleared his mind with a relaxation method suggested by an old friend of his from Bangkok. The reclining chair felt feather soft, almost like a cloud. He had an impression of Ugo rising from the ottoman and drawing the curtains tightly against the lowering sun. He heard, as if from a great distance, the door of the suite clicking shut. He pictured Ugo tiptoeing on the luxurious carpeting out in the corridor.
Bianco drifted off into a dream. He stood alone in the middle of a vast plain. Lightning flickered in the distance, backlighting gray clouds that boiled into thunderheads. He held a sledgehammer with one hand, a wooden stake with the other. A voice commanded him to drive the stake into the ground. But the soil turned to concrete wherever he placed its point.
He awoke to find Ugo reading a newspaper in the sitting room. His young nephew pulled open the curtains. The mountains stood purple against the faint orange of the sunset.
“What time is it?”
“Almost nine. You were tired, Uncle.”
“Tired?” said Bianco. “Now I will be a cripple from this chair, eh?”
He shuffled into the bathroom to wash for dinner. The fluorescent bulbs raised a harsh image in the mirror. He almost laughed at himself. He certainly no longer resembled Ugo. His eyeballs were shattered with arteries, his strong nose had melted into a lumpy mass of flesh, his few remaining wisps of hair formed a tonsure on his freckled skull. Fabio Bianco, scientist-monk, Fra CEO.
They took a taxi to Ouchy and dined on a terrace overlooking Lake Geneva. The air was calm except for an occasional breeze that disturbed the reflections of shore lights on the glassy water. A jetliner’s contrail, illuminated by the moon, passed through the bowl on the Big Dipper.
After they returned to the hotel Bianco lay on the bed long into the night with the lights out and the television playing without sound. He used the remote control to spin the dial. There were so many channels, so much information. Talk shows, game shows, police shows, music shows. When he was a boy, he would lie awake on a summer night with nothing but the music of his neighbor’s mandolin floating through the open window. He would hear the mandolin telling him his future, the loves he would have, the great things he would accomplish, even the pain he would endure.
The local Swiss channel was showing a special report about the pollution that was strangling Venice. He watched mechanical harvesters scooping algae from the lagoon by the ton and still the water looked like a salad. He turned on the sound and heard that this summer was the worst ever. The smell was so terrible that the flow of tourists had dwindled to almost nothing. Swarms of flies thick as thunderclouds stopped trains when the wind shifted and blew them over Mestre. Their engineers could not see. Yet one of the harried scientists told the TV interviewer that Venice’s lagoon was so polluted with chemicals that nothing should be alive in it.
With a pained sigh Bianco switched channels again.
An all-news station from Atlanta in the United States showed a man with gray curls and a rumpled tweed hat broadcasting from a rocky coastline. The sky was thick with rain clouds. WHALE DEATHS was superimposed on the screen. Bianco raised the volume.
“Aaron Weiss reporting. Behind me is the Bay of Fundy. Beyond that misty horizon, two Canadian trawlers are steaming home pulling a sad cargo behind them—four right whales found dead and floating fifty miles west of Sable Island. This brings to thirty-four the number of right whales that have died this summer on North American shores or in coastal waters.”
The picture changed to show a blond woman wearing scuba gear and standing on the stern of a research vessel. Graphics identified her as Dr. Helga Knuttsen, marine biologist, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
“The preliminary results of autopsies performed on two right whales found off Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, indicate that the cause of death was starvation. The ocean contains a wealth of food. Unfortunately, right whales can only eat a diet of plankton.”
Weiss’s voice-over returned to explain that not all marine biologists were convinced that starvation was the cause of death. The picture cut to a man with a white beard and a leathery face creased with deep wrinkles. He was Professor Theodore Adamski of Sea World, San Diego.
“The fact that these right whales may have died of starvation does not inexorably point to the conclusion that the main staple of their diet has disappeared. Each of these whales has been found a significant distance from summer feeding waters, which is equally consistent with a disease resulting in disorientation. Two or three dozen whale deaths sounds like a staggering number, and the general public as well as marine biologists are understandably concerned. However, the number is well within the normal range of attrition.”
The picture returned to Aaron Weiss. His expression and voice turned somber.
“This reporter has dedicated the last ten days solely to investigating the story of the dying whales. It is too early to predict when these deaths will end and whether they have any hidden implications for the two-legged mammals that make their home on dry land. This is Aaron Weiss reporting from the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada.”
Bianco clicked off the television and groped in the dark for his bathrobe draped over the foot of the bed. Knotting the robe around his waist, he shuffled out to the balcony. A couple crossed the street in front of the hotel, their arms around each other’s shoulders. A taxi with a sputtering engine turned a corner, leaving Lausanne completely still. Bianco cupped his hands around his eyes in order to blot out the streetlights and gazed up at the sky. The moon was long gone, and thickening clouds scudded across the stars.
He waited, waited…
And there it was! A gleaming star, rising up beyond the mountains, brighter than all the others, moving steadily, purposefully, across the sky. Trikon Station.
Bianco fought down the urge to shout to the rooftops and wake up all of Lausanne so they could see and admire. He wanted to say to them all, Look! A man-made star is passing through our sky! Is it not beautiful?
Instead he watched in silence, a satisfied smile growing on his dry old lips, as the satellite sailed majestically, silently, across the night sky. He knew that tomorrow he would find the words to soothe the French. That no longer worried him. Something else was gnawing at him.
The report from Venice and Aaron Weiss’s story of the whale deaths. The two accounts twined together in his mind, not quite touching, but so close together. So close.
At last Fabio Bianco smiled to himself. He knew that once again he had heard the mandolin.
18 AUGUST 1998
TRIKON STATION