Johnny had coffee in the Hotel La Marina at the portside bar. An old TV was showing a black and white film it looked like. A portable twelve-inch TV, the screen jumping with horizontal static. The picture settled. A bloated well-fed face appeared in close-up. A man with a chin raised, the way a mean geezer can raise his chin, mad that he lost the three-legged race at the picnic. Johnny wondered which Fellini this was, maybe Marcello Mastroianni would appear all drollness and style and romance. The camera pulled back a bit. The bloated face … it could be he was a prelate in, was it La Dolce Vita … or could be a Rossellini, Rome, Open City, a preposterous character actor, perhaps, one of those sat-in-the-back-room guys who had fixers.
The camera pulled way back. Johnny leaned forward on the
