Chapter 98
I REINTRODUCED PAUL TO TEO during the break. The men were civil to each other, but I could tell Paul was uncomfortable and still confused as to why I was at the conference at all.
Luca’s talk was crowded, but we nabbed seats near the back of the room.
It was Paul, then me, then Teo, all in a row, and we did our best to keep the conversation going.
Teo asked Paul about the Golden State Warriors, who were doing so well in the NBA Finals that even Europeans had started paying attention, and Paul asked Teo what he knew about a string of bank robberies in Rome.
While I was grateful to them both for trying, the whole thing was so painful that I began to regret coming to the conference at all.
But then Luca approached the lectern, and a hush fell over the room.
I could tell he was nervous; there was more shuffling of papers than was technically necessary, and he kept pushing his glasses up on his nose, even though I was pretty sure that they were as far as they could go.
He was looking out at the audience with this panicked expression, as if waiting for us to tell him it was time to begin, and finally, Bruno gave him an encouraging nod from the front row, and he cleared his throat and squeaked out a “Buongiorno.” By the time he’d begun to list his collaborators, he had found his footing.
I understood much of what Luca was saying, and when I didn’t understand something, I was sitting next to not one but two willing translators. “He’s doing good, right?” I said to Teo or Paul or both.
Luca put a black-and-white map of La Maddalena on the overhead projector and ran through the results of the team’s Rhodamine B tests.
In total, the team had come up with about a dozen testing sites, which were marked with little X’s.
He explained that when they had returned to the island in January to collect samples as part of their biannual testing program, they’d used these new—more effective—testing sites.
Luca put another transparency on the projector. This one featured a table that listed the new testing sites and the corresponding amounts of cobalt-60 and manganese-54 that had been discovered at each location. All the sites within the vicinity of Santo Stefano Bay were registering high.
I could feel Paul tense.
Teo had opened his notebook to the same page he’d been doodling on at the plenary session and began to copy down the numbers on the screen.
He wrote furiously and was so consumed with the task at hand, I don’t think he noticed that the line drawing of me in my bathing suit was still sitting there at the top of the page.
But Paul noticed, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach as I watched him read the caption.