The Red Death by Abraham Kawa

Author:Abraham Kawa [Kawa, Abraham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

25

The dozens of men in shirtsleeves listened in silence as babble and shrill whining leaked out of headphone sets that matched the starched white of their shirts. They listened mechanically, at recordings spinning on tape, at live conversations being recorded. They were jotting down, rewinding. It was impossible to think in this noise. Noise, Nero knew all too well, was a conductor of authority, not thought.

He felt under his shirt for the gold cross and coin around his neck, and resisted the urge to cross himself on power’s hallowed ground as he waded through the long aisles of workstations. To be unobserved in a surveillance centre — an irony and yet the very point. This was the backstage to Rome’s eternal theatre, its apparatus long evolved since the days of gods from the machine. Today’s play was situation — the construction of how to catch the criminal — with means at the limit of what was deemed acceptable. The sign at the door on coming in read simply CENTRO ORGANIZZAZIONE E MECCANIZZAZIONE DELLA POLIZIA — a blatant obfuscation of what everyone here knew as the wiretapping and filing section. Behind euphemism and practice both, the backstage was the true show, where power was written and the carnival set up.

With nothing to do but wait, Nero wandered behind the shirt-clad men in contemplation of tapes spooled back and forth, volumes adjusted for that ambience-blurred phrase. The white headphone sets looked like switchboard operators’ but were muscular in size; a fitting detail in a room with no female personnel at all, from operators to the suit-and-tie-strict supervisors. Surveillance was a man’s province, like power over thought, like limits of the acceptable, like legalised violence.

Take legalised violence. A man — an anarchist — thrown down a staircase. He had rushed from his desk to the commotion only to find Teti and the men staring down the stairwell. Of Pisu was left only his shoe, some five to six metres from the rail. As Nero looked at the carnage below, Teti picked the shoe up and tossed it over. Nero never asked him if he’d been there. That’d be useless. Six metres from the rail. One shoe made it murder.

Nero did wonder whether his being here now was also a witnessing after the fact.

Thick glasses loomed at the edge of his perception, the head supervisor’s face a blur behind them. ‘Dottore.’ Nero followed him from drone to library-silent corridors lined with dossiers on shelves. Communists, partisans, Trotskyites, Maoists, anarchists, all watched, all on file. They emerged from this archive of eavesdroppings into an office cut apart from the surveillance centre by orange-tinted panes, its walls crowded with enlargements — photo prints, fingerprints, footprints, eyes, faces, palms, graphs, and modi operandi competing for display — while the floor was bare except for the chair and table with the magnetic tape player on it. Teti stood by the table, nodding at Nero as they walked in.

A snap of Nero’s fingers and the supervisor passed him a dossier.

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