Chapter 1
“Mr. Winterle? May I take your tray?”
“Oh yes, please. I’m finished.”
“We shall be serving a variety of teas and coffee, including a French press, shortly. In the meantime, may I offer you a hot towel for your hands?”
“Thank you.”
“A splash more of Moët?”
“Absolutely…”
“Cathay Pacific would like to thank you for flying regularly with us, Mr. Winterle. Please let me know if there is anything else I can bring you to make your flight more comfortable.”
I was sitting in my very comfortable Poltrona Frau armchair and had dozed off just long enough to have this vivid memory projected somewhere in the recesses of my brain. Not unusual, I thought, that this particular recollection would come to mind considering the existing predicament I found myself in. Reminiscing about the glory days, either awake or dreaming, provided some temporary comfort. Those little hot towels, at forty-thousand feet in the stratosphere, were part and parcel of a world that I had come to take for granted for almost fifteen years—flights in first or business class; chauffeurs awaiting my arrival at airports in cities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, and New York; five-star hotels; Nine Days in Rome 14 membership at some of the best spas and athletic clubs; as well as exquisite cuisine in Michelin-rated restaurants. On the rare occasions when I was not on a plane, I would drive to my spacious office in the center of Milan, Italy, in my company car—a Mercedes E350 AMG sedan—which was always at my disposal. While I was light-years away from being a Jack Welch or a Sergio Marchionne, I was very much at ease in my role as country manager in Italy for a manufacturer of a multimillion-dollar fashion accessories company. I had a great salary, a generous bonus potential, a lucrative stock option plan, and a comfortable retirement scenario. I was on top of the world. But just like Leonardo DiCaprio on the Titanic, feeling like you’re “on top of the world” can have disastrous consequences. In juxtaposition, I had a well below-average marriage, which ended up crashing to the ground in flames. The causes, according to my ex-wife, were the excessive travel, long working hours, and my general apathy when in her company. Apart from this last observation, which was accurate, I had a completely different opinion as to why our union dissolved— reasons that seemed important to me but not to anyone else. So be it. Then again, in these modern times, wasn’t this scenario a predictable outcome for marriage? For one reason or another, remaining legally or religiously bound to one another for even five or six years (if that long) has become a rarity of sorts. My wife and I were just another checkmark in the column for failed marriage statistics. Our brief union, however, had brought two beautiful children into the world, a boy and a girl who made life worth living. I had the money to spoil them and made sure to do so, especially when I left home to live in a much smaller apartment nearby. The children were with me on those weekends when I wasn’t traveling for work, and the time I spent with them was priceless. We would go to the movies, kick a soccer ball Julian Gould 15 around in the park, do a little shopping, always find time for a gelato, and then come home and play board games until they fell asleep. There was never a boring moment. I had my career and quality time with my children. I considered myself fortunate and blessed. Then came that fateful day when I lost my job, and everything took a turn for the worse. For no apparent reason, my ex-wife started limiting the number of weekends I could have with the children, while my new companion began suggesting, then insisting, that we spend more time on our own. Decisions were being made with little, if any, regard to what I felt or wanted. This all seemed very long ago, but a glance at the free-standing calendar on my nearby desk showed that little more than a year had passed since I had been laid off. Not even the blink of an eye in the larger sweep of time, but a never-ending, torturous state of limbo for me. Screw you, Lehman Brothers! Go to hell, AIG! And up yours, Fanny Mae, along with your subprime mortgages! These conglomerates and the avarice of those at their command were the direct cause of my being graciously told to leave the company where I had worked for five years. The ensuing worldwide panic, sparked by the collapse of this financial house of cards, took a stranglehold on consumers, lenders of credit, importers, exporters, and businesses of all sizes, bringing on a tidal wave of spending cuts that placed the heads of millions of employees on the chopping block. How ironic and, in fact, prescient that one usually speaks of the headcount in an organization and not the number of people (individuals). My spacious office, the Mercedes, the international travel, the chauffeurs, the five-star hotels, the Michelin-starred restaurants—all became pleasantries of the past, along with those little hot towels on Cathay Pacific. And even though it matters a great deal whether you diligently save money for Nine Days in Rome 16 hard times (which, you can rest assured, will manifest sooner or later), the real trauma comes from that all-enveloping sense of impotence that starts the day you walk out of your office, carrying framed photos of your children in a plain cardboard box. You have been unceremoniously told that your contribution to the working world is no longer required. Don’t you understand that you’re out of the picture? Your input is neither vital nor sought after. No more board meetings, no more three-to-fi ve-year business plans, no more decisions on yearly budgets, production timetables, supply chain issues, ex-factory/wholesale/retail margins, retail pricing, marketing plans, media/ad spend, distribution agreements, contractual obligations, account receivables, and end-of-month reporting. Gone are those periods of the year where you spend sixteen hours a day in the office bitching about everything, including not being able to find decent sushi at two o’clock in the morning. All history! You have become a nuisance. “Wow, let’s slow down here,” I said out loud, addressing the air. My heart was galloping, and my palms were sweating. I sat up and realized I was again approaching the “black hole,” as I called it—that dark, deep pit in my subconscious where I could see, feel, and hear nothing, except for a harsh, menacing, critical voice continually berating me. Here, time and space meshed into one dimension, and extraterrestrial forces glued me to my armchair. Welcome to the Twilight Zone. Cue eerie music. This was a place where all my fears took over my thoughts, a place where I began to believe that I was indeed a failure. A failure in my career, to my children, to myself, a failure at living up to my responsibilities. This was a dark, foreboding gorge that I tumbled into far too easily and climbed out only with great difficulty. I had plummeted into this frightening state of mind over the past months much too frequently, and sometimes I remained there for days. I had to thank Francesca, my live-in companion, for pulling me out of these dark holes with sympathetic remarks: “Get up and stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself!” “I can’t take this situation anymore!” “Get out there and do something with yourself, for Christ’s sake!” Yes, she could really be a bitch at times, but it worked. Francesca wasn’t here now, though, so I had to get my act together and avoid falling over that precipice. I poured myself a second glass of a pretty decent 2005 Chianti into the wine goblet that stood on a beaten-up English drop-leaf table I had purchased at a flea market in Heidelberg many moons ago. I took a large gulp and attempted to focus my mind more constructively on the interminable emergency at hand—the need for a job, any job! Since September 2009, I had been in touch with over twenty-five executive search firms from Milan to Hong Kong, and London to New York. I had beefed up my LinkedIn account, and joined the A Small World and Naymz networking domains. All this had landed me several interviews with various companies that seemed willing to get to know me better and, possibly, make me an offer. However, due to “the current worldwide economic downturn, an “unexpected” budget freeze, “internal advancement,” or a “change in strategic planning,” the offers did not materialize. I was also aware, strange as it may seem, that my name was a bit of a handicap when looking for employment, especially in a foreign country. My mother had fallen in love with the book To Kill a Mockingbird when she was pregnant, and, yes, if you’ve read it, you can guess what happened—she named me Atticus. Atticus Winterle. My mother wanted a unique first name, something other than the ubiquitous Joe, Bob, Jim, or Billy. Well, she found what she was looking for. Would it have been better if she had been reading some other literary Nine Days in Rome 18 work? I doubt it. Had it been Moby Dick, I have no doubt she would have called me Ishmael. Or maybe Moby.
What unnerved me the most about job hunting was repeatedly getting the comment, “Yes, we find your resume very interesting, but we were looking for someone a bit younger.” The fact was, in Italy, as well as in most other European countries, “age-centric” discrimination was still commonplace, along with being denied a position due to physical appearance. Fine. I could understand that my fi fifty-four years on this earth didn’t put me in the spring chicken category, but damn it, I had the know-how! To put somebody recently out of college in a middle to high position of seniority, with loaded guns of responsibility in their face ten to twelve hours a day, was just asking for trouble. Along with the pressure, fear, ignorance, and lack of on-the-job experience, as well as a total absence of people-management skills, it was inevitable that the result would be an array of very unsound business decisions. I certainly wasn’t aware of any first-year medical students performing quadruple bypasses. Why should it be different in the business world? These rookies can have so much gray matter that it oozes out of their left ear, but experience equals the amount of time in a work environment and the number of instances that one’s head has, figuratively speaking, slammed against the wall after making a wrong decision. That is what tempers a person to take on those tough choices in the business world. Sure, you can pay these newcomers less, maybe even eliminate the bonus, and give them a Fiat instead of an Audi A4, with the promise of a corporate credit card after three years of employment. But where is your company going to end up if you eliminate your experienced staff, replacing it with youngsters who until yesterday were reading volume 1 of Philip Kotler’s Marketing Management? “Okay, Atticus,” I muttered. “Get a grip on yourself. This isn’t an appropriate way to approach the problem.” I was angry and frustrated, but I knew that these negative thoughts weren’t going to get me anywhere. What’s done is done. I just needed to keep communicating with every serious executive search firm I could find, continuing to get my resume in front of them—and fast. Luckily, I had put some money away for a rainy day. Unfortunately, the day in question turned out to be over a year, and with alimony payments, monthly rent, and all the smaller day-to-day expenses, my resources were drying up. What was it that the inimitable John Barrymore said? “You never realize how short a month is until you pay alimony.” Francesca’s job for the time being seemed airtight, given that she was head of the general affairs department of a large consumer goods company. It was her job to implement those spending cuts, so fervently introduced in this new, high-anxiety corporate reality. Once it was decided which heads were on the chopping block, she had to handle all the legal issues with the lawyers and the unions—no simple matter in a country like Italy. I didn’t believe for a moment that she was enjoying doing this to her fellow employees, but if she, in the end, was going to be axed, it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. With her salary, we weren’t going to starve, but clearly, the situation had to change, and fast, if only to restore stability to my very fragile state of mind. On top of everything else I had to deal with, yet another situation had arisen that I had to confront sooner rather than later. The very thought of it made me apprehensive and uneasy. Outlandish as it might seem, I did have a transitory job waiting for me (if anyone in their right mind could call it a “job”). I didn’t want to even consider it, let alone accept it. I had tried every excuse imaginable with my friend Marco, who had gone out of his way to offer me this “opportunity,” as he called it. Mind you, I had sound reasons for steering clear of Marco’s proposal. First of all, it was going to take precious time away from searching for a real job. Second, and more importantly, I had no experience in this line of work, nor did I want to have anything to do with the target audience. In the end, however, mainly because of Marco’s concern for me and his maniacal insistence, I regretfully accepted. It certainly wasn’t for the money—seventy-five euros a day wasn’t going to put me on Forbes’s list of the richest men in the world, even with the expenses covered. But a little extra cash in this particular period wasn’t going to hurt. Also, I wouldn’t be seeing the children for the next two weekends since they were with their mother visiting friends in Switzerland. After my divorce four years earlier, my Saturdays and Sundays with the children had become as close to an addiction as I had ever experienced. Not seeing them for fourteen days was going to be particularly hard on me. Francesca was also going to be away for almost three weeks. She was on a job rotation program and had switched places for a month with her counterpart across the pond in their New Jersey office, where I guessed she would learn how to fire people the American way. Sadly amusing, I thought, finding this unintended oxymoron quite appropriate. Settling back into my armchair, I accepted that I had no respectable way to reject Marco’s offer, especially at this late stage. I reassured myself that the experience I was about to embark on was not going to be the nightmare I fully expected it to be. “Rome is like playing in my backyard,” I said. “Sure, I left seven years ago, but the twelve years I lived there count for something. There are going to be three other adults in the group, so I don’t have to shoulder all the responsibility. All the travel arrangements have been made, the hotel and Julian Gould 21 restaurants have been booked in advance, and we’ll have a bus at our disposal the entire time. So what’s the big deal?” As I talked to myself, I realized I had an attentive audience: Cleo and Mao Mao, both of whom I found as kittens four years ago, abandoned on the hot asphalt under a dilapidated, municipal garbage bin. Cleo, a jet-black cross between a Siamese and a gray tabby, sat like a statue on the bookshelf, looking at me with an expression in her emerald-green eyes that, when translated from cat-olese to “humanese” meant “I shall miss you while you’re away, and I shall be feverishly waiting for your return.” In temperament, Cleo was more like a faithful dog than a cat. By contrast, Mao Mao’s demeanor as he watched me from his cherished throw pillow was more feline in character and, therefore, much more to the point: “Who the hell is going to feed us, change our drinking water, and clean the litter box while you’re traipsing around Rome for the next two weeks?!” I finished my third and rather large goblet of dark-red Chianti. I had not eaten, and I was feeling slightly inebriated. So I continued with my one-man show. “No panicking, please. Rosanna and her husband from next door have the key to the apartment and shall be coming every day to feed you and change your water. But don’t expect them to go and buy fresh fish and chicken livers at the market. It’s going to be canned and dried food for you both until I get back.” Nobody has ever been able to convince me that cats don’t understand humans—when they want to, of course. As soon as they heard “canned” and “dried food,” Cleo and Mao Mao jumped off their respective perches and bolted out of the room. “Spoiled brats,” I muttered as I went into the kitchen with the empty wineglass to find something to nibble on. Living just a block away from a very well-furnished outdoor food market had not only lifted the bar for Francesca’s and my culinary choices but also contributed greatly to our cats’ Nine Days in Rome 22 absolute refusal to go near anything in a box or hermetically sealed container. Rummaging in the pantry, it dawned on me that I had not gone out food shopping in almost a week. I found a canister of rosemary-flavored crackers and a half-empty bag of stale pretzels, both of which Francesca had brought back from a business trip to Switzerland. Pouring the last contents of the bottle into my glass, I contemplated opening another. I glanced at the wall clock. It was almost ten o’clock. I had to meet Marco at Rome’s Fiumicino airport at fi fteen past eleven in the morning. Over the past few weeks, he had repeatedly phoned me to try and give me detailed briefi ngs regarding the who, how, where, and when of the “job.” The thought of this encouraged me to go ahead and uncork another bottle of wine, this time a 2006 Barbera d’Alba from the Barolo region of Italy. Glass in hand, I walked out of the kitchen onto the balcony. The night was warm and balmy as was common for the month of May in Milan. I sat on a cushioned, wrought-iron rocker that I had picked up at a garden center a few miles away. The view was more breathtaking than usual, as were the delicious scents wafting from the family-run restaurant, La Pineta, next door, where they were cooking a variety of meats on two large open-air grills. The soupy smoke reached all the way up to the third floor. Occasionally, a very light breeze whirled around the apartment and blew away the strong smell of charred pork sausages, lombata di vitello (the Italian rendition of veal chops), and roasted chicken. Even if the haze from La Pineta (“pine forest” in English) obscured my view, there was nothing much to look at from here, least of all, a forest. My apartment block was one of many that had sprung up on the outskirts of Milan since the late 1980s. These nondescript structures reflected the sad demise of most residential areas on the outskirts of European cities. The buildings’ architecture held no charm, comprising a Julian Gould 23 congestion of four-, six-, and eight-story light-gray cement structures with narrow potholed roads coiled around them like a mass of freshwater eels. They were an eyesore, a showcase for graffiti terrorists, and a nightmare for parking if you didn’t have a garage (which I fortunately did). Nonetheless, I wasn’t opposed to living here. My children loved it because they each had their own room when they were with me on the weekends. The apartment had over 2,300 square feet of living space. An apartment that size anywhere else in the city of Milan would have been unaffordable. Francesca only supported the idea of living here because the place was big enough for her to have one room totally for herself and her hobby—painting. Even so, she had wanted to move farther out of the city center, to a small town called Lodi, about twenty-five miles southwest of Milan. She persisted to the point where I gave in, and we went to see a townhouse that she loved (and that I barely approved of). We were just about to make an offer when doomsday hit, and I found out that I wouldn’t be seeing another monthly paycheck for quite some time. Francesca reluctantly accepted the situation for now, so we were going to have to stay in our spacious yet drab abode. My thoughts were interrupted by another eddy of sausage smoke from La Pineta. Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was almost eleven o’clock. That allowed me six hours of sleep before I had to get up, shower, shave, and jump into a cab for the airport. I pulled myself out of the rocker, swallowed a last mouthful of wine, threw the stale pretzels in the small outdoor trash can, and went back into the kitchen. It was too late to eat anything substantial, so I just had a slice of bread with some fresh Parmigiano cheese. The cats followed my example and finished off the last pieces of calf liver in their baby-blue ceramic bowls. After a quick visit to the bathroom, I went to the bedroom. The bed was almost hidden by piles of not-so-clean clothes, magazines, Nine Days in Rome 24, and books that I had heaped on it since Francesca’s departure. It was like a detonation area for unearthed land mines. Our sleeping quarters were one of the biggest issues that Francesca and I had to contend with when we decided to move in together a year and a half ago. We both had previous live-in arrangements and marriages punctuated by rather long periods of being single, so we needed to adjust to each other’s habits of orderliness, or lack thereof. My pet peeve was the kitchen, where absolute cleanliness and order are of the utmost importance (unless, of course, one is preparing a particularly difficult recipe). Olive oil, vinegar bottles, and those small look-alike spice jars need to be positioned on the right-hand side of the burners, and the cooking knives and various kitchen utensils placed upright in their granite, cylindrical containers on the left, hence leaving ample space on the marble countertop for dicing, cutting, and chopping. The pots and pans must be neatly stored in the ample cupboard space, the Le Creuset castiron cocottes in a straight line on the counter, and plates and cutlery stored in the appropriate drawers. The living and dining room areas must be free of excessive clutter, but a bit of dust on the many bookshelves was acceptable. As far as the bedrooms and bathrooms were concerned, I only become slightly annoyed when nocturnal insect-like creatures begin to crawl on the night tables, vanity, and the bathroom sink. Francesca, however, had an altogether different point of view regarding the above-average square meter space we called home. For her, the bathrooms and bedrooms needed to be perfectly tidy, always ready to undergo the white glove test. Floors and ceramic tiled walls in the bathroom had to be glistening, towels always in the correct place on their holders and folded so that the corners met exactly, and toothbrushes standing bristles up in their Murano glass holders. Even the Julian Gould 25 first tissue popping out of the crochet-covered Kleenex box had to be puffed up just right. In the bedroom, not a piece of clothing was to be lying around, having all been folded and placed in their cubicles. The bed was to be made to marine-corps standards. All the items on the dresser were to be spaced with mathematical precision. The living and dining room areas took a back seat to the bedroom for Francesca and could be orderly or disheveled. Finally, there was the kitchen—a place where my Francesca took an enormous amount of pleasure in spilling various sticky substances on the floor or the counters, where dirty dishes could gather in the sink until they formed a towering, multicolored mass resembling something out of a Wes Craven horror flick and where, even worse, the olive oil and vinegar bottles remained on the left-hand side of the burners. It’s difficult to imagine that a loving and respectful relationship between two people could come to a screeching halt in front of a pile of dirty dishes and bathroom mold. But at times, the nasty temper tantrums that erupted over such trivial matters could last hours. In hindsight, this should have set off alarm bells. It was rare that Francesca and I would end these moments of tension with a good laugh. Even though the windows in the bedroom were open because of the very warm evening air, there was no discernible breeze, just heat leaping off the asphalt below, with an occasional whiff of sausage smoke
