He told me in brief, tense phrases that in all these years Michele had never stopped asking Lila to work for him. He had proposed that she manage a new shop on the Vomero. Or the accounting and the taxes. Or be a secretary for a friend of his, an important Christian Democratic politician. He had even gone so far as to offer her a salary of two hundred thousand lire a month just to invent things, crazy notions, anything that came into her head. Even though he lived on Posillipo, he still kept the headquarters of all his businesses in the neighborhood, at his mother and father’s house. So Lila found him around her constantly, on the street, in the market, in the shops. He stopped her, always very friendly, he joked with Gennaro, gave him little gifts. Then he became very serious, and even when she refused the jobs he offered, he wasn’t impatient, he said goodbye, joking as usual: I’m not giving up, I’ll wait for you for eternity, call me when you want and I’ll come running. Until he found out she was working for IBM. That had angered him, and he had gone so far as to get people he knew to remove Enzo from the market for consultants, and hence Lila, too. He hadn’t had any success, IBM urgently needed technicians and there weren’t many good technicians like Enzo and Lila. But the climate had changed. Enzo had found Gino’s fascists outside the house and he escaped because he managed to reach the front door in time and lock it behind him. But shortly afterward an alarming thing had happened to Gennaro. Lila’s mother had gone to pick him up at school as usual. All the students had come out and the child was nowhere to be seen. The teacher: He was here a minute ago. His classmates: He was here and then he disappeared. Nunzia, terribly frightened, had called her daughter at work; Lila returned right away and went to look for Gennaro. She found him on a bench in the gardens. The child was sitting quietly, with his smock, his ribbon, his schoolbag, and he laughed at the questions—where did you go, what did you do—with expressionless eyes. She wanted to go and kill Michele right away, both for the attempted beating of Enzo and the kidnapping of her son, but Enzo restrained her. The fascists now went after anyone on the left and there was no proof that it was Michele who ordered the kidnapping. As for Gennaro, he himself had admitted that his brief absence was only an act of disobedience. In any case, once Lila calmed down, Enzo had decided on his own to go and talk to Michele. He had showed up at the Bar Solara and Michele had listened without batting an eye. Then he had said, more or less: I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Enzù: I’m fond of Gennaro, anyone who touches him is dead, but among all the foolish things you’ve said the only true thing is that Lina is smart and it’s a pity that she’s wasting her intelligence, I’ve been asking her to work with me for years. Then he continued: That irritates you? Who gives a damn. But you’re wrong, if you love her you should encourage her to use her capabilities. Come here, sit down, have a coffee and a pastry, tell me what those computers of yours do. And it hadn’t ended there. They had met two or three times, by chance, and Michele had demonstrated increasing interest in the System 3. One day he even said, amused, that he had asked someone at IBM who was smarter, him or Lila, and that person had said that Enzo was certainly smart, but the best in the business was Lila. After that, he had stopped her on the street again and made her a significant offer. He intended to rent the System 3 and use it in all his commercial activities. Result: he wanted her as the chief technician, at four hundred thousand lire a month.
“She didn’t even tell you that?” Enzo asked me warily.
“No.”
“You see she didn’t want to bother you, you have your life. but you understand that for her personally it would be a significant step up, and for the two of us it would be a fortune: we’d have seven hundred and fifty thousand lire a month altogether, I don’t know if that’s clear.”
“But Lina?”
“She has to answer by September.”
“And what will she do?”
“I don’t know. Have you ever been able to figure out what’s in her mind ahead of time?”
“No. But what do you think she should do?”
“I think what she thinks.”
“Even if you don’t agree?”
“Even then.”
I went out to the car with him. On the stairs it occurred to me that maybe I should tell him what he surely didn’t know, that Michele harbored for Lila a love like a spiderweb, a dangerous love that had nothing to do with physical possession or even with a loyal subservience. And I was about to do it, I was fond of him, I didn’t want him to believe that he was merely dealing with a quasi-camorrist who had been planning for a long time to buy the intelligence of this woman. When he was already behind the wheel I asked him:
“And if Michele wants to sleep with her?”
He was impassive.
