A Slow-Motion Credit Check
4 September 2016, 11:38 a.m.
42° 26' 41.6" N, 87° 49' 32.5" W
Since I was planning to return a vehicle I had rented in Germany, I needed to get to the airport in Bologna a good two and a half hours before my flight was scheduled to depart, and to do that, I figured that I needed to leave San Polo d’Enza by 7:45, 7:50 at the latest. Well, it was closer to 8:00 by the time I pulled out of the Villa Albarelli, but once I got on the main highway, A1/E35, the Opel Zafira showed me it could really move when it wasn’t loaded down—or maybe I just drove faster when I wasn’t worried about headlines like “Medieval family killed in fiery autostrada crash… ”
In any case, I made really good time, and arrived at the Aeroporto Guglielmo Marconi with twenty-five minutes to spare.
Well, the GPS on my phone didn’t tell me (until it was way too late) which lane I needed to be in to get to the rental car place, so I had to loop around the whole airport an extra time. But still, when I parked the minivan and went into the little shed to do the paperwork, I was right on schedule.
At first, everything seemed to be going smoothly, but then the clerk asked me to follow him to their main office inside the aeroporto itself. I didn’t mind, because that’s where I was going anyway. The clerk led me inside and through some hallways, and asked me to have a seat in a little room. There was a lot of whispering in the hallway, and when they saw I was listening, they closed the door. I sat there alone for almost an hour, until they found someone who could explain the situation to me in English.
It was a woman in a gray pantsuit, with an accent I couldn’t place. She told me there was a stain on the upholstery of the ultimate bench for sitting, which I figured meant the wayback seat.
I told her that it was probably just... oh, maybe vomit from some drunk… Danish tourist to whom I’d given a lift in… I wasn’t sure where... Turin… maybe?
She wrote something on a piece of paper, took it to the door, and handed it silently to someone outside.
What the hell is going on? I thought. For a moment the guilty dread from the dream returned, the same feeling I had felt that night in Strasbourg, and I became convinced that a whole team of forensic scientists was out there somewhere, analyzing every square centimeter of the Opel’s interior.
I tried to look innocent and nonchalant as the woman in the gray pantsuit closed the door, came back to the table and began asking more questions.
Had I visited a certain ristorante in San Polo d’Enza, two nights earlier, when there had been an argument between some fanatic supporters of the association football club AC from Milano and a group of Low Country people who were playing the board games?
Huh? I said, or maybe grunted.
The thing was, I recognized the name of the ristorante—it was the one where I had taken everyone out to dinner the night before. Or, to be more accurate, it was that place to which I had tried to invite them out for dinner. And now that she mentioned it, I did remember that this ristorante had a back room, where I had seen some people… playing… a board game.
But she wasn’t asking about last night… she was asking about the night before that, wasn’t she?
She confirmed that yes, she was asking the questions about the night that happened two nights ago.
Then… no, I told her, I couldn’t help her. I was familiar with the place, the ristorante, I explained, but I hadn’t been there... the night she was talking about. And I certainly hadn’t… witnessed… any incidents.
I was telling the truth, but I felt like a liar when I denied witnessing anything. That's because, in my mind, I could imagine every detail: I could see the board game being upended, the wine bottles breaking, the game pieces flying around in a whirl of red and black striped jerseys.
Then I realized that she was still asking questions, so I tried to pay attention.
Was I acquainted with a person of the name Gottfried Lothar, an individual with a deformation of the column of the spine, who according to testimony had gone into the gentlemen’s room of said ristorante during said dispute and had not been seen later that night or even the next day?
I told her that I didn't know this Gottfried, but his description sounded a lot like Godfrey the Hunchback, the Duke of Lower Lotharingia, who had been murdered in February 1076, stabbed from below while defecating—which was possible, I added helpfully, because of the way castles were constructed in those days.
I don’t know whether I was trying to show off my knowledge of history, or just being a smart-ass, but she looked at me like I was crazy. She didn’t say a word and left the room. I sat there alone for what seemed like another full hour.
At last there was more whispering in the hall, and the woman in the gray pantsuit came back in.
She apologized for the delay, and explained that because the minivan had been rented at an airport in Germany and was being returned here, at an airport in Italy, of course there were procedures that had to be followed. There were many pages of items with little boxes to be marked with a pen.
Yes… of course, I said. I suppose so.
And one of the technicians, he had the personal opinion that there might be an issue with the key of the ignition.
The ignition key? I said. But that’s… the original… I mean, the key I turned in with the minivan, it’s the same one they gave me. In Mannheim.
Oh yes, she said. It is the original key. That is a fact which we have made effort to confirm. There is nothing at all that is fraudulent about that key.
Okay, I said. Good.
There was one additional matter of concern, she said, and she apologized once again for the delay of time. Really, she said, it should never have taken this long, the checking of the credit, but considering the situation, and all the protocols that must be applied, the rental agency was now requesting from the customer’s pocket a different credit card for the damages.
It took me a while to understand her explanation—eventually I gathered that this Gottfried Lothar had left an unpaid tab at the ristorante, which had somehow become a pending charge on my credit card, the one I had used to check in the minivan, and now that card was too close to its limit.
Once I got the point, I dug out another card, handed it to her, and told her I'd work it out with my bank when I got home.
I felt relieved but also stupid. For a moment or two I had actually thought that I was being interrogated by Interpol, but then it turned out to be just a slow-motion credit check.
Really slow-motion. Ruin-my-day slow-motion. Because by the time I got through security, my flight was already pulling away from the gate. For the next two hours, I was one of those exasperated travelers you see shunted off to the side while you wait in line, the poor soul trying to explain a convoluted dilemma to one ticket agent after another. There was a lot of back and forth about whose fault it was that I was late, and whether I deserved a free re-booking on another flight, but eventually I managed to find a seat on another airline, on a flight that would take off six hours later. Which was just late enough to put me in the path of a gigantic storm moving across the Eastern seaboard of the United States.
Interesting fact: my original flight landed in New Jersey under clear skies, and the connecting flight to Chicago took off under a slight drizzle, two hours before the airport was shut down for three days. But of course my seats on those flights were occupied not by me, but rather by some lucky standby passengers.
As for my actual physical self, after layovers in Rotterdam and Prestwick, I found myself on a transatlantic flight that was rerouted—they made the call while we were in the air, halfway across the ocean—to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I spent two nights in an airport hotel, on what I thought was the airline’s dime.
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