Three-Card Monte by Marco Malvaldi, Howard Curtis

on.”
    â€œAmong the younger Japanese, there are some who speak excellent English. I heard them during the coffee breaks. One in particular. We could ask him to work with us for the most difficult cases. It’ll be like a relay. I’ll translate from Italian to English, and then he’ll translate from English to Japanese, and vice versa.”
    Fusco muttered something, then slowly began to nod. “All right. Let’s do it. What’s this fellow’s name?”
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    Koichi Kawaguchi was nervous. Very nervous. Firstly, he was nervous because he liked Italian espresso very much, and had not taken into account the fact that the intensity of the flavor went hand in hand with the concentration of caffeine, which was why after three days the ration of six cups a day he’d been sticking to, apart from keeping him awake with his eyes wide open two nights in a row, was starting to give him a touch of tachycardia and hands as sweaty as sponges. Secondly, he had been summoned to the police station together with all his countrymen for some reason he was unable to ascertain, but which some maintained was connected with the death of Professor Asahara. Thirdly, they had called him aside after a while and explained to him that, in collaboration with another person, he would have to help the Italian police to question some of his colleagues who had difficulties with English. Although from one point of view this had filled him with pride, it hadn’t helped to make him any calmer. In a way, singled out from his compatriots like this, he felt a bit of a traitor, even though he was aware he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Last but not least, the other person was the man with a face like a Taliban fighter whom Koichi had seen first behind the counter during the coffee break, as if he were a waiter, and who was now present at the police interviews.
    Putting two and two together, Koichi had become convinced that Massimo belonged to the Secret Service, and that he had been keeping some of the conference delegates under surveillance for quite a while. And this was the thing that made him most nervous of all.
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    â€œDid you know Professor Asahara?” Fusco asked, taking his eyes off Professor Watanabe and reading the prepared question from a sheet of paper.
    I bet you did, Massimo thought.
    Masayoshi Watanabe was a small man in his sixties, no more than five feet tall, impeccably dressed in gray and as stiff as a pole, with a motionless, rigid, contemptuous expression, vaguely reminiscent of an Indian chief with an ulcer. His whole person gave off a mixture of moral rigor, severity, and irritation that, in spite of his ridiculous height, made you uncomfortable just to look at him.
    The question was turned into English by Massimo and reformulated by Koichi in Japanese with one or two extra bows by way of punctuation. Watanabe, apparently without taking his upper teeth away from his lower teeth, replied in a kind of rapid, monotone growl composed almost exclusively of consonants, in which Massimo thought he made out the word “Asahara.” Koichi carried the reply back from Kyoto to London, and Massimo accompanied it from England to Pineta:
    â€œHe says Professor Asahara had honored him with his friendship for many years, and that his death is a terrible loss to science and to all who knew him.”
    The interview went on like this for a while: Fusco asked his questions in an impersonal voice, Watanabe growled sentences that seemed for all the world like complicated and highly contemptuous insults, and Koichi passed on very polite and appropriate answers that Massimo translated faithfully for the inspector.
    After a few minutes of this curious wireless telephone, Fusco said, “On the first day of the conference, the victim referred to the contents of his computer, saying with a great deal of certainty that the said contents would be able to destroy you. This has been ascertained thanks to the