Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: "Where's my suitcase?" he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. "Shit." He can't see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it's on its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands – that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam's imprimatur on them – and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. "Where's the fucking suitcase?" He takes the phone off hold. "Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think."

"I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't evade your responsibilities forever. You've got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for —"

"A daughter?" That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the suitcase.

"Didn't you know?" Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. "She was decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I thought you knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I'll just leave you with this thought – the sooner you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Good-bye."

The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette's dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it; at the moment, it's easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, Annette's sulk, his wife's incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. "C'mon over here, you stray baggage. Let's see what I got for my reputation derivatives …"

Anticlimax.

Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.

Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.

He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. "I don't understand what they're on about," he complains. "There's nothing that tipped them off – except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong."

"Mais oui." She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. "I try to tell you this, but you are not listening."

"I am now." Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. "I'm sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your life."

"No!" She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. "I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in."

"I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!"

"You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do," she observes. "You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me manage for you!"

Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. "The company matrix isn't sold yet," he admits.

"It is not?" She looks delighted. "Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To —"

"I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party," he says. "It's a pilot project. I was working on selling it – I need the money for my divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage – but it's not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing – someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator with experience of working for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally planned enterprise to the outside world." He looks at her with suddenly dawning surmise. "Um, are you interested?"

Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat's embedded systems people have always written notoriously wobbly software.

Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They're stuck on a tourist channel and won't come unglued from that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn't feel like a struggle right now. He feels like he's been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn't had a patentable idea all day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he's due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office and get Pam's lawyer off his back. But somehow he can't bring himself to worry too much: Annette has been good for him.

The ex-minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni's front door, he isn't expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and peaked leather cap, to answer.

"Hello, I am here to see the minister," Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian.

"It's okay, I'm from Iowa," says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache: "What's it about?" Over his shoulder: "Gianni! Visitor!"

"It's about the economy," Manfred says carefully. "I'm here to make it obsolete."

The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously – then the minister appears behind him. "Ah, signore Macx! It's okay, Johnny, I have been expecting him." Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe: "Please come in, my friend! I'm sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something stronger?"

Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone – even his enemies – agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime \emdash valuing truth over power.