Free Three-Card Monte by Marco Malvaldi, Howard Curtis Page B

actions, as witness the childish casualness with which, all too often, we attribute the disastrous outcome of our stupidity to fate.
    It was an accident.
    It was an accident, he was coming back from a wedding and had drunk a few too many toasts, and besides what was that woman doing in the middle of the road? It was a piece of bad luck, he ate a big meal and then went for a swim to help his digestion and had a heart attack. It wasn’t his fault, he simply lit a fire next to a pine grove in the middle of August.
    That kind of statement really pissed Massimo off. It’s all a matter of probability. If you behave in a certain way, the probability that something will go wrong increases. The fact that you didn’t want to cause trouble doesn’t diminish the fact that, objectively, you’ve caused a lot of trouble. You just have to think about it for a moment. It’s why rules of safety, rules of behavior, exist. 99.9% of the time you don’t need them. You only need them in the 0.1% of the time when something goes wrong. If you had kept your brain alert and stuck to the rules like a good boy, maybe nothing would have happened.
    â€œJust shut me up, it’s best for everyone.”
    â€œYou don’t have to worry, Massimo,” Snijders said. “I don’t intend to tell anyone at the conference. I have my reasons. Now that you’ve told me, I need to speak to that inspector as soon as possible.”
    â€œWhat?” Massimo asked, while four arthritic necks, whose owners had understood perfectly well what was about to happen, turned toward the professor.
    â€œI need to speak to him. I heard something yesterday at the conference that might be important.”
    Silence. Total silence. Sometimes, very rarely, there are times, some shorter, some longer, when you don’t hear a single sound. The rain had stopped pouring, no car was passing along the avenue, no housewife was torturing an old tune, in other words none of the noises that constituted the normal if tiresome morning background of the bar allowed themselves to disturb the peace. It seemed as if nature had coordinated things in such a way as to have a little tranquility, because people were talking here. For a second or two Massimo savored this wonderful lack of sensation, before Snijders broke the silence by clearing his throat and launching into what showed all the signs of being a long preamble.
    â€œYesterday, I heard Asahara talking with a group of American professors. They were talking mainly about other people, what they were doing as research and so on. After a while, the name Watanabe was mentioned.”
    A pause, and a sip of cold cappuccino that made Massimo shudder just to see him take it.
    â€œMasayoshi Watanabe is a professor in Kobe. A theoretician, like me and like Asahara. He’s a well-known scientist, publishes a lot, and does things that are very, let’s say, elaborate. He has at his disposal a cluster of a few thousand processors that for all intents and purposes are used only by himself and his students. He mainly does large-scale parallel simulations of the mechanical behavior of polymers and biological materials.”
    We haven’t understood a damned thing, the faces of the old-timers said in unison. Becoming aware of this, Snijders brought his speech down to earth:
    â€œIn other words, he does some very demanding and very expensive research that uses lots of computers. I know him by sight, like Asahara, but I’ve had only a few opportunities to talk to him. It’s no secret, though, that a lot of people in Japan don’t like him. Especially Asahara, who was a theoretician of the old school and never liked Watanabe’s way of doing research. The fact is, a large percentage of the funding that the Japanese government allocates for research goes to Watanabe and his center. And if it goes to him, it doesn’t go to the others.”
    â€œI see,” Tiziana said