The Broker

He gripped the phone and wondered who else out there knew about the call. Who else was listening? He glanced at the street below and wondered who was down there. Only Luigi?

He dismissed those thoughts and sat at the table. He wanted some coffee, maybe a double espresso to get the nerves buzzing, certainly not a cappuccino because of the late hour, but he wasn’t ready to pick up the phone and place an order. He could handle the "Hello" and the "Coffee," but there would be a flood of other words he did not yet know.

How can a man survive without strong coffee? His favorite secretary had once brought forth his first cup of some jolting Turkish brew at exactly six-thirty every morning, six days a week. He’d almost married her. By ten each morning, the broker was so wired he was throwing things and yelling at subordinates and juggling three calls at once while senators were on hold.

The flashback did not please him. They seldom did. There were plenty of them, and for six years in solitary he’d waged a ferocious mental war to purge his past.

Back to the coffee, which he was afraid to order because he was afraid of the language. Joel Backman had never feared a damn thing, and if he could keep track of three hundred pieces of legislation moving through the maze of Congress, and if he could make one hundred phone calls a day while rarely looking at a Rolodex or a director}’, then he could certainly learn enough Italian to order coffee. He arranged Ermanno’s study materials neatly on the table and looked at the synopsis. He checked the batteries in the small tape player and fiddled with the tapes. The first page of lesson one was a rather crude color drawing of a family living room with Mom and Pop and the kids watching television. The objects were labeled in both English and Italian-door and porta, sofa and sofa, window and finestra, painting and quadro, and so on. The boy was ragazzo, the mother was madre, the old man teetering on a cane in the corner was the grandfather, or il nonno.

A few pages later was the kitchen, then the bedroom, then the bath. After an hour, still without coffee, Joel was walking softly around his room pointing and whispering the name of everything he saw: bed, letto; lamp, lampada; clock, orologio; soap, sapone. There were a few verbs thrown in for caution: to speak, parlare; to eat, mangiare; to drink, here; to think, pensare. He stood before the small mirror (specchio) in his bathroom (bagno) and tried to convince himself that he was really Marco. Marco Lazzeri. "Sono Marco, sono Marco," he repeated. I am Marco. I am Marco. Silly at first, but that must be put aside. The stakes were too high to cling to an old name that could get him killed. If being Marco would save his neck, then Marco he was.

Marco. Marco. Marco.

He began looking for words that were not in the drawings. In his new dictionary he found carta igienica for toilet paper, guanciale for pillow, soffitto for ceiling. Everything had a new name, every object in his room, in his own little world, everything he could see at that moment became something new. Over and over, as his eyes bounced from one article to another, he uttered the Italian word.

And what about himself? He had a brain, cervello. He touched a hand, mano; an arm, braccio; a leg, gamba. He had to breathe, respirare; see, vedere; touch, toccare; hear, sentire; sleep, dormire; dream, sognare. He was digressing now, and he caught himself. Tomorrow Ermanno would begin with lesson one, the first blast of vocabulary with emphasis on the basics: greetings and salutations, polite talk, numbers one through a hundred, the days of the week, the months of the year, even the alphabet. The verbs to be (essere) and to have (avere) were both conjugated in the present, simple past, and future.

When it was time for dinner, Marco had memorized all of the first lesson and had listened to the tape of it a dozen times. He stepped into the very cool night and walked happily in the general direction of Trattoria del Monte, where he knew Luigi would be waiting with a choice table and some excellent suggestions from the menu. On the street, and still reeling from several hours of rote memorization, he noticed a scooter, a bike, a dog, a set of twin girls, and he was hit hard with the reality that he knew none of those words in his new language.

All of it had been left in his hotel room.

With food waiting, though, he plowed ahead, undaunted and still confident that he, Marco, could become a somewhat respectable Italian. At a table in the corner, he greeted Luigi with a flourish. "Buona sera, signore, come sta?"

"Sto bene, grazie, e to?" Luigi said with an approving smile. Fine, thanks, and you?

"Molto bene, grazie," Marco said. Very well, thank you.

"So you’ve been studying?" Luigi said.

"Yes, there’s nothing else to do."

Before Marco could unwrap his napkin, a waiter stopped by with a straw-covered flask of the house red. He quickly poured two glasses and then disappeared. "Ermanno is a very good teacher,’" Luigi was saying.

"You’ve used him before?" Marco asked casually.

"Yes."

"So how often do you bring in someone like me and turn him into an Italian?"

Luigi gave a smile and said, "From time to time."

"That’s hard to believe."

"Believe what you want, Marco. It’s all fiction."

"You talk like a spy."

A shrug, no real response.

"Who do you work for, Luigi?"

"Who do you think?"

"You’re part of the alphabet-CIA, FBI, NSA. Maybe some obscure branch of military intelligence."

"Do you enjoy meeting me in these nice little restaurants?" Luigi asked.

"Do I have a choice?"

"Yes. If you keep asking these questions, then we’ll stop meeting. And when we stop meeting, your life, shaky as it is, will become even more fragile."

"I thought your job was to keep me alive."

"It is. So stop asking questions about me. I assure you there are no answers."

As if he were on the payroll, the waiter appeared with perfect timing and dropped two large menus between them, effectively changing whatever course the conversation was taking. Marco frowned at the list of dishes and was once again reminded of how far his Italian had to go. At the bottom he recognized the words caffe, vino, and birra.

"What looks good?" he asked.

"The chef is from Siena, so he likes Tuscan dishes. The risotto with porcini mushrooms is great for a first course. I’ve had the steak florentine, outstanding."

Marco closed his menu and savored the aroma from the kitchen. Til take both."

Luigi closed his too and waved at the waiter. After he ordered, they sipped the wine for a few minutes in silence. UA few years ago," Luigi began, "I woke up one morning in a small hotel room in Istanbul. Alone, with about five hundred dollars in my pocket. And a fake passport. I didn’t speak a single word of Turkish. My handler was in the city, but if I contacted him then I would be forced to find a new career. In exactly ten months I was supposed to return to the same hotel to meet a friend who would take me out of the country."

"Sounds like basic CIA training."

"Wrong part of the alphabet," he said, then paused, took a sip, and continued. "Since I enjoy eating, I learned to survive. I absorbed the language, the culture, everything around me. I managed quite nicely, blended in with the surroundings, and ten months later when I met my friend I had more than a thousand dollars."

"Italian, English, French, Spanish, Turkish-what else?"

"Russian. They dropped me in Stalingrad for a year."

Marco almost asked who "they" might be, but he let it pass. There would be no answer; besides, he thought he knew.