Mark Twain in Milan

by Rob Hunter

part 2

There was a thunk at the base of my neck, a curtain of blue ozone, shimmery like the aurora borealis, and I was standing behind the head of a beefy, elegantly tailored middle-aged man straight out of a 1920s gangster movie, the black and white variety. Said head was slathered with brilliantine. Sleek, like an otter.

“Less off the top, capisci?” said the head. His tone suggested I was a service sector clone and to speak only when spoken to. This was fine with me because I was sure I was not the one he thought he was talking to.

The head was sipping an espresso — thick black coffee with a twist of lemon peel — and I could not see his face. Across the room a big moose lounged dreamily with a sharpshooter’s rifle across his knees. The head was fiftyish and its attached body wore an Italian silk suit: pearl gray with wide, wide lapels and very expensive, an antique or something from a retro store. Except it was new.

I thought of him as Carmine, which is what I decided to be a good name for a head with an espresso and a henchman — I had seen The Godfather ten times. The Moose was tilted back against the wall, balancing on the two rear legs of a wooden chair. The bodyguard stared at me, I stared at the bodyguard.

“Chi è lei?” said the Moose, nonchalantly taking aim at my head. He showed a wide, ominous grin of many black teeth. I gathered this was him asking who am I. Pop, pop, pop! The Moose peppered the wall past my right ear with three shots in quick succession.

The blue aurora quivered and a woman popped out of thin air beside me. She was togged out in a tweed-and-velvet something that clung agreeably as she moved, and swinging a serious-looking cavalry saber. A veil covered her face and head. She brushed aside the veil and peeped out. This was the face on Giancarlo’s cameo. She gave me the once-over and attacked. I ducked.

The breeze of the sword’s passage sounded just like in the ninja movies. I made a note of this. “Ow!” I landed on my tukhes.

Her pale gray eyes grew huge. “Oh, terribly sorry, old chap. I thought you were someone else,” she said. “Are you still alive?” I said yes. “I say, good fun, what?” she remarked. A bullet zinged past and she dived under the desk. Under the desk seemed to be appropriate; I dived too. And missed the floor.

As I departed the scene, behind the Don and the Moose there was a shimmer — like on Star Trek when they use the transporter? In an electric haze stood Giancarlo Pieranunzi; he flickered and went out. I fell through the aurora borealis and was back in the tunnel.

“I was in Milan,” Sam Clemens was saying.

“I am a Milanese,” Giancarlo said. “I but lecture at the Università di Torino.”

“Ah, Milano,” posited Sam Clemens, “vast, dreamy, bluish, snow-clad mountains — the Italy I read of in the poems of Lord Byron.”

Giancarlo brightened at the name. “Byron. You have seen her, then. Lady Ada.”

“I have seen her,” I said. “Didn’t you guys notice I was gone?”

“Lady Ada?”

“I suppose so. She nearly took my head off with a sword. You, too, Giancarlo. You were coming in as I left.”

“Andreas... I have been here all the time.”

“An unholy miscegenation of locations, these comings and goings,” said Sam. “However, I have yet to meet myself.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said. “We would. Holy Carthusians!” There was a blast from an air horn and bumping down the tunnel came one of those red double-decker buses that used to run on Fifth Avenue years ago, a genuine historical relic. Except shiny and new and minus most of its top deck where the subway’s roof beams had sheared it off. A vertical exhaust pipe remained, chugging forlorn puffs of acrid coal smoke. There was no driver in evidence and no visible passengers. All its tires were blown; I guessed from running on the cement footings of the subway tracks. What was left of its destination banner — the canvas roller where terminals and routes are listed — said Università. Another parallel universe. We had gotten our mass exchange that, while heavier than Sam Clemens, Giancarlo Pieranunzi and me, was still nothing to the disappeared Lex Express.

“Now we go Ka-boom! Right?” I said.

“Sì, Andreas. I believe so. Unless something additional that we do not know about went over to make up the negative mass the espresso left behind.”

“Ivory. Onions. This can be our ticket out of here.” Sam Clemens was hopeful. “All we have to do is get aboard; which one of you...”

“Close but no cigar, Sam. We’re still a few tons shy of our missing train.”

Ka-bunka, ka-bunka, ka-bunka, the bus named Università flopped to a stop on squared-off wheels right where we stood. A woman got off, descending what remained of a circular stairway to the upper deck. She could have been entering a ballroom. She carried a white sable muff, one of those 19th-century hand warmers that doubled as a lady’s carryall.

“Well, that was exhilarating,” she said. “And you gentlemen are staring. This is rude,” said Lady Ada Lovelace.

“You’ll have to pardon us, your grace, but you tried to kill me only two minutes ago. With a sword,” I added.

“Balderdash,” she replied. She eyed me speculatively as if the idea might have some merit. “The last thing I remember is being booed off the podium of a lecture hall at the University of Turin. And here I am.”

“Yes. Here you are,” said Sam. He eyed her appreciatively. Giancarlo glowered. Lady Ada’s floor length gown was white silk trimmed with magenta velvet touches; her hair was coiled into a lacquered confection that framed a delicate oval face.

“I am sure you men find this all excruciatingly amusing, but I have things to do. You have had your fun, now if you will please...” And she was gone. No ozone, no blue aura, nothing. She was there, and then she was not.

The bus called Università belched a final puff as its boiler went out. Hands clutched behind his back, Twain sauntered off to the end of the platform to light up a fresh cigar. The bus steamed as it settled to one side and fell over.

“Andreas, we are stuck in a Monte Carlo simulation,” said Giancarlo Pieranunzi.

“Uhn, great. What is that?”

“A bump in nature. We have hit an anomaly in God’s roulette system. We are trapped together like St. Sebastiano awaiting the flight of the arrows. Samuel Langhorne Clemens has explained this all in his estimable Mark Twain in Milan. You have read this?”

I had to say I had never heard of the book. “I read Tom Sawyer once,” I said. “By Mark Twain.”

“Nononono. By Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Twain was the unreliable narrator which he made up for the tale. Furthermore he meant Torino, not Milano, but dared not to speak openly of what he had seen. Samuel Langhorne Clemens also experienced the Monte Carlo Simulation.”

“Use my name gently, sirs.” Hands behind his back, cigar at a tilt, Sam strolled back. “It is protected by copyright. Furthermore I never wrote the book. That’s a barge-load of nimble-fingered rotgut. And if I did, I don’t remember doing it.” He blew a smoke ring. “Well, I am pouring if you are buying. I recognized the lady, too.”

“Really?” I was surprised.

“From an illustration, actually — the frontispiece — of a book I have read. Can’t recall the book. But the lady... memorable. Ask our friend the mathematician.”

“Sì, Andreas — Ada has explained it all. She was English, but her heart was Italian.” Giancarlo kissed the cameo with the face of Lady Ada.

“Well,” said Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as he adjusted the tilt of his fez, “whilst I should enjoy remaining here with you — exploring the future — I have a deadline to meet. I have editors,” he said meaningfully.

“Sam is right,” I said. “Thanks for the chat; let’s do it again some time.” I hustled down the tunnel.

And then returned. “No Soap. For fifty yards in either direction both ends of our section of the tunnel have been bricked up. No way out without a sledgehammer.”

Giancarlo said something in Italian that sounded like I told you so. “We may then continue our conversazione?”

I sat down again.

“I require a favor of you. I have no idea how long we will have together, Andreas, so I must be talking fast. It will be for you to identify il portiere. I have not the word for this in English, a person who stands guard at a doorway.”

“Gatekeeper. Like doorman?”

“Sì, sì,” said Giancarlo; he was eager and urgent. “Il portiere, the gatekeeper, is the catalyst who connects 1841, 1867, 1929 and today — the lost operand who points the way,” said Giancarlo, “mathematically speaking. Alas, my Darling Ada’s equations were not perfect in every respect.”

“Bummer. The woman on the bus — this Ada — she is not the gatekeeper?”

“No. She is but one of an infinite number of Adas. The love of the middle years is a melancholy thing; one requires assistance. You must help me to win the woman I love. Amor vincit omnia. That is Latin, not Italian.” The dapper Italian slumped inside his suit, decidedly droopy and depressed. “She is a nineteenth century mathematician. In terms you will comprehend, dear Andreas, as a man of your marvelous 21st century, she is the nexus of a probability cluster. A line of code, like the “Else” of an “If, Then, Else” contingency.”

“Sure. Why not?”

A lung-clogging vapor of cigar smoke had glided our way from where Sam Clemens sat squatting on his heels, writing in the dust of the tunnel with a pointed stick. It stopped to hover over Giancarlo’s head. He turned red and gasped for breath, then collapsed in a coughing fit. I slapped him on the back until it passed.

“Huh? You mean all we have to do is find this person — this gatekeeper — and we’ll be home free?”

“I knew you would help me. Otherwise we will spend forever with Samuel Langhorne Clemens. We will strangle on his cigars.”

There was the thunk at the base of my neck, a curtain of blue ozone, and an invisible express train came cannonading through, right between my eyes.

* * *

Everything was pitch black.

“You okay in there?” It was the voice of my barber. He hovered in a moist haze that reeked of soap and cologne as he lifted a steaming towel from my face. I was back. And the face was the face of Giancarlo Pieranunzi.

“Uh... Giancarlo?”

“Welcome back Mr. Saperstein. You must have dozed off.”

“Call me Andy. What is your name if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Johnny. You should know that; you’ve been a regular for over two years.” He nodded to a framed license. New York City Dept. Health. Barber. Johnny Pieranunzi.

“Short for...”

“Giancarlo. Gianni, Johnny — they sound the same.”

In the days when 65th and Lex was a palmier neighborhood, when Bloomingdale’s yet flourished and the local hookers bought their bait and tackle at Abercrombie’s, the place where I get my hair cut occupied the mezzanine, rightly floor number 1, of what was once the local firehouse. Cast iron columns sought a vertical climax through neat holes drilled in designer teak genuine hardwood flooring tiles to bloom as cast Corinthian capitals eight feet off the ground. On the wall was plaque with letters incised in gilded bas relief: Parrucchiere Gianni. An oval cartouche framed a sepiatone photograph of a man with a military moustache — my Giancarlo from the 2nd Avenue tunnel.

I thought to play it cagey just in case I had dozed off in the chair and dreamed the whole thing up. “The man... a relative?”

“My great-grandfather.”

“He was a barber?”

“Nope. A university professor — mathematics. I found it buried in the attic when my folks retired to Florida. There were two.”

“And your family hailed from Milan and your great-grandfather was a mathematician, right? Hold on, two pictures...”

“The other was a woman; I figured her for my great-grandmother. Want to see it?” I did.

He rummaged through some drawers muttering “Be patient, I’m looking” sounds under his breath just in case my attention might have strayed. It hadn’t. “Voilà.” He held aloft a portrait — an oval face in a gilded ormolu frame. “A great beauty, they say.” It was the face from the cameo. Cascades of auburn hair framed pale gray eyes with an elfin twinkle. I could swear the picture winked at me.

* * *

Proceed to part 3...