murmurs. A doctor gestures to him to leave the ward. “But you haven’t told me what the hell happened to you. Why did they detain you? How long ago?”
“It was the twenty-seventh of last March,” Kasper whispers. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“Damn! Four months ago? Four months in places like this?”
“Right.” Kasper smiles. “This one isn’t even the worst of them.”
“Do you think your American friend . . . do you think he’s being held in the same kind of conditions?”
“I don’t know,” says Kasper.
He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t know what to think. He’s in a swamp. Allies, friends, enemies; nothing is clear.
Clancy the shrewd, Clancy the wise. Where is he now? Maybe he got himself out of trouble. Maybe he signed so they’d let him go home.
8
Brick Wall
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Palazzo della Farnesina, RomeSeptember 2008
The young functionary looks tired; his face is drawn.
The office is immense, with two big windows open to let in the light of a sparkling September day in Rome. The sounds of the capital are carried on the northwest wind, with the eternal drone of traffic along the Tiber in the background.
Barbara Belli finishes her coffee and reflects upon the fact that she finds herself in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the third time in the past four months. No, it’s the fourth time. Maybe even the fifth. The futile pilgrimages of a lady lawyer to the Farnesina Palace.
Since the first meeting, everything—apart from the coffee, which has clearly improved—has gone downhill.
Things had started off so well: at the end of July, the minister himself had written her a letter in which he guaranteed that he’d look into the case. It was an official letter, a registered document with all sorts of reference numbers.
Barbara had thanked His Excellency; the letter was an important gesture on his part. Nevertheless, in a subsequent meeting she had felt duty bound to point out to His Excellency’s courteous staff that the letter unfortunately contained some rather significant inaccuracies.
To begin with, her client had not been arrested; he’d been kidnapped. Furthermore, her client wasn’t being held in a prison, but in hiding places in various tiny, scattered villages, a fact that seemed to demonstrate the serious irregularities of his detention. Insofar as no official document regarding his case had been issued by any local Cambodian authority whatsoever, her client could not be said to have a legal situation. And finally, it was a little difficult for her client to enter into contact with the local Italian diplomatic and consular authorities, as his days were rather full: he was spending them being tortured and undergoing decidedly harsh interrogations conducted by members of the Cambodian military; from time to time, interestingly enough, such sessions took place in the presence of individuals who were United States citizens.
“Pardon me, but how do you know all this?” the ministry functionary had asked her.
“I know it because his family is sending extortion money to a Cambodian officer. And thanks to those payments, every now and then my client manages to communicate with his loved ones.”
“Have you got proof?”
“I have records of the money transfers his family has made. I’ve given you copies of all that, you’ve got everything. . . .”
“That money could have gone to anyone.”
“Anyone . . .”
“Even to your client himself . . . you understand me.”
“Are you suggesting that my client has invented this whole story in order to extort money from his mother while he’s in Cambodia?”
“That’s not what I said,” the functionary had replied, backing down. “But my dear Ms. Belli, you must admit that the situation is clearly very complicated.”
Clearly.
And besides, as the same ministry official had explained to her with a self-satisfied smile, a letter personally signed by the minister for foreign affairs was not a thing to be sneezed at. As if to say: we’re not the United States, we may not even be France or Great Britain, but if our government takes a step, however small, then something must surely happen.
Since that meeting, another two months have passed. Two months of futile pilgrimages to the Farnesina.
Until this late September day.
“My client’s in a hospital,” Barbara Belli says, placing her espresso cup on the table in front of her. She takes a page of notes out of a folder. “He’s been in Preah Monivong Hospital in Phnom Penh for weeks and weeks.”
After gazing briefly at his assistant, who’s staring at his computer and raising an eyebrow, the ministry official—the same young functionary she has dealt with from the start—says to Barbara, “In a hospital? Is he wounded?”
“He’s very sick.”
“How do you know that?”
“An American friend managed to see him and then reported to his family.”
“An American friend. What kind of friend?”
“A pretty normal kind of friend. A mechanic, if I’ve understood right.”
The assistant looks up from the computer. “It says here it’s actually a prison hospital.”
“That’s a piece of good news,” the ministry functionary points out.
“Good news? Good in what sense, if I may ask?”
“Well, if nothing else, he’s being held in an official facility now.” The functionary spreads his arms. “Therefore, evidently, the local authorities have brought the case back into the legal system.”
Barbara scans the assistant’s equine features and points to his computer. “There’s nothing about the fact that humanitarian organizations consider that hospital a concentration camp?”
With an expression of mild skepticism the assistant checks some of the other results of his Google search. His expression becomes rather less bored. “Mm-hmm, yes, in fact I am seeing something like that,” he confesses. “But still, these sites aren’t . . . I mean, we know nothing about them. We’d have to look into how trustworthy they are. . . .”
“We’ll talk to our representative over there,” the young ministry official says. “Within a week, the honorary consul—”
“Honorary consul? Fucking hell!” cries Barbara, unable to contain herself. She slams her briefcase down on the table. The espresso cup overturns, but it’s empty; various documents escape the case but do not fall.
Among them is a photograph of her client. It’s a close-up taken some years ago, and it probably doesn’t correspond very closely to the way he looks today. She picks it up with both hands and shows it to the two men, brandishing it theatrically. This time she’s pissed off. “God damn it!” she says. “Don’t you realize this man has been kidnapped? Unlawfully detained since last March! An Italian citizen, abducted in a foreign country! They’ve imprisoned him, they’ve tortured him, they’re extorting money from his family. What else has to happen before Italy takes some steps to help him?”
“I really don’t understand your reaction,” the functionary objects. His assistant shrugs and curls his lip.
Barbara snatches up her purse and heads straight for the door while the functionary is still reminding her that His Excellency the minister wrote her a letter and even signed it with his own hand. “You tell me, do you think that’s something to be sneezed at?” he asks.
Fuck