Their dark old mahogany walls had absorbed all kinds of lunacy.

Massimo jabbed his sandwich in the dip and licked his fingers. “So, if I leak a memristor chip to you, nobody will ever stop and say: ‘some unknown geek eating a sandwich in Torino is the most important man in world technology.’ Because that truth is inconceivable.”

Massimo stabbed a roaming olive with a toothpick. His hands were shaking: with rage, romantic heartbreak, and frustrated fury. He was also drunk.

He glared at me. “You’re not following what I tell you. Are you really that stupid?”

“I do understand,” I assured him. “Of course I understand. I’m a computer geek myself.”

“You know who designed that memristor chip, Luca? You did it. You. But not here, not in this version of Italy. Here, you’re just some small-time tech journalist. You created that device in my Italy. In my Italy, you are the guru of computational aesthetics. You’re a famous author, you’re a culture critic, you’re a multi-talented genius. Here, you’ve got no guts and no imagination. You’re so entirely useless here that you can’t even change your own world.”

It was hard to say why I believed him, but I did. I believed him instantly.

Massimo devoured his food to the last scrap. He thrust his bare plate aside and pulled a huge nylon wallet from his cargo pants. This overstuffed wallet had color-coded plastic pop-up tags, like the monster files of some Orwellian bureaucracy. Twenty different kinds of paper currency jammed in there. A huge riffling file of varicolored plastic ID cards.

He selected a large bill and tossed it contemptuously onto the Elena’s cold marble table. It looked very much like money-it looked much more like money than the money that I handled every day. It had a splendid portrait of Galileo and it was denominated in “Euro-Lira.”

Then he rose and stumbled out of the cafe. I hastily slipped the weird bill in my pocket. I threw some euros onto the table. Then I pursued him.