Three-Card Monte Read Online Free PDF

have between one and two hours at their disposal. Finally, the conference resumes in the afternoon, continuing from 3:00 until 4:30, when there is a second coffee break, followed by the final installment of lectures, at the end of which, unfortunately, nothing has been planned.
    Coffee breaks are essential for restoring the spirits of the conference delegates, exhausted by two hours of hard listening sitting on theater-style seats in a half-lit room. Usually in these circumstances, most of the academics lose every semblance of restraint: they hurl themselves at the trays, fill their plastic plates with precarious pyramids of breadsticks and sandwiches, and, gobbling down what they have conquered, listen to whichever colleague happens to have ended up next to them talking with their mouths full, while they chew enthusiastically.
    In all this, Massimo and Aldo, impeccable in their uniforms—of waiter and maître d’ respectively—are extras, acting at different speeds and in different styles: Massimo pours and Aldo decants, Massimo nods and Aldo approves, Aldo offers and Massimo serves. At first, obviously, they don’t exchange a single word: they have to cope with the mad scramble of scientists. Subsequently, when most of the food has been plundered, the situation calms down and it becomes possible to exchange a few words.
    â€œI didn’t think there’d be so many people.”
    â€œThere aren’t so many really. Maybe about two hundred. I’ve seen conferences with more than a thousand people.”
    â€œA thousand people? I was thinking of those photographs of old conferences, the ones you see in the newspapers when there are anniversaries, obviously. The Solvay Conference, or something like that. Twenty, thirty people at most.”
    Aldo smiles and serves coffee to two Japanese who thank him and return his smile, then continues:
    â€œApart from anything else, not that I know about these things, but what’s the point of a conference with a thousand delegates? How are you going to discuss anything?”
    â€œThis isn’t the Congress of Vienna, Aldo. Anyway, to judge by the few I’ve been to, you don’t really get serious discussions at conferences.”
    â€œYou’re right. There aren’t many discussions at conferences. Could I have a coffee?”
    The person who has spoken is a short man in a yellow T-shirt and a pair of surfing shorts. Although he spoke in Italian, his accent and appearance classify him as Nordic. Sure enough, the badge hanging from the bottom of his T-shirt identifies him as A. C. J. Snijders, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands. Massimo, who takes an immediate liking to him, pours what he has requested into a plastic cup and as he does so says, “If you can call this coffee . . . ”
    â€œThanks. Look, as long as it has caffeine in it, it’s fine by me. I need to wake up.”
    â€œBoring in there?”
    â€œA little. The thing is, it’s not my field. I’m a theoretician, and this morning it’s the experimental scientists who are talking. The first speaker today, the one who opened the conference, was a theoretician. A really good one.”
    He takes a sip of his coffee, and makes a face that seems to mean: “It’s not so bad.”
    â€œKiminobu Asahara. A Japanese,” he says as if this explains everything.
    â€œWho’s that?” Aldo butts in, just to have something to say.
    â€œThe old man over there, in that group. The tall one.”
    The little group indicated by Snijders is composed exclusively of Japanese men old enough to have bombed Pearl Harbor, so it’s lucky that in pointing him out Snijders has specified that Asahara is tall. Sure enough, one of the elderly Orientals is a whole head taller than the group average. This particular individual has a glass in his hand and seems to be in a state of catalepsy: as he is being spoken to, his eyes close and his