Let the Games Begin (30 page)

He began running as fast as he could. The lantern extinguished in his hand and the only light left was the far-off glow from the bivouac.

He was galloping desperately, like he had never done before, with the gravel squeaking against the soles of his shoes and the air whirling down his windpipe.

He hoped Larita was keeping up.

And if she's fallen behind
?

Turn around! Stop! Call her name!
his head yelled at him.

He wanted to do it, but all he could do was run and pray that she was doing the same.

After a couple of dozen metres, he heard her scream.

They've got her! Fucking bloody hell, they've got her!

As he ran, he turned his head. Everything was sunk in darkness, and in the blackness he heard her moans and the guttural sounds of the monsters. ‘Fabrizio! Help me! Fabrizio!'

He stopped, bent over in two out of breath, and sighed. ‘I'm too old for this shit.' Then, with unexpected courage, he screamed: ‘Leave her alone, you bastards!' And he ran back, his fists closed, his eyes closed, twirling his arms, hoping to scare them off, to chase them away, to annihilate them.

But he tripped, fell to the ground and slammed his jaw into the gravel. Despite the pain he got up again, blood between his teeth . . . And just as he was getting up, a fist, a stick, something heavy, slammed down with unheard-of violence on his right shoulder and he found himself back on the ground. Screaming, he tried again, obstinately, to get up, but another fist sank into his stomach.

Fabrizio Ciba sagged like a torn football, and thousands of little orange lights exploded before his eyes. He pushed out all the air in his body, and while he was there dying he felt enormous hands grab hold of him and lift him with the same ease that a human being lifts a bag full of groceries.

He held his breath as he lay placed over the shoulder of the being that was walking. He unclenched his eyes. The pink sky
was above him – he could reach out and touch it – and he heard the wheezing of his crushed lungs, which, like empty plastic bags, sucked in air.

And while he was saying to himself that he would find a way to not die, he realised that the darkness was something more than the simple absence of light. It was the substance that he would drown in.

A blow to the back of his neck tore away that last thought.

 

61

‘What are you eating? Give us a bit. Don't be a greedy guts.'

Saverio Moneta saw three guys poking their heads in through the door. The tall one with the big fringe and the frameless glasses was definitely someone he'd seen on TV. He must be a presenter. The other, dumpy and with a forehead two fingers high, had to be a politician. And the third, hmph . . . He didn't know who he was.

With their hunting uniforms designed by Ralph Lauren, their hair full of gel and bottles of champagne in hand, they thought they were God Almighty, but they were just three drunken pieces of shit.

Saverio was an expert on pieces of shit. He had had experience with them early on in life, during his school years. They usually travelled in groups to back each other up. And if they homed in on you, if they worked out that you wanted to be left alone, they would circle you like hungry hyenas.

If things went your way, they would wait for you outside school and, at the first chance, they would pick a fight, beat you and leave it at that. Other times they used to pretend they were your friends. They were funny and polite, and they made
you think that you could be one of them – and that's when, like an idiot, you let your defences down and they broke your heart by making fun of you. Then they threw you away like a broken toy. On Sundays, though, they would go to church with their families and would share in the communion. After finishing high school, under the patronage of the family's wealth, they would go overseas to study. They would then clean up, and when they came back to Oriolo they were lawyers, accountants, dentists. They looked like good people, but deep down they were pieces of shit. They often found their way into politics, and they talked about God, family values and country. These were the new cavaliers of the Catholic culture.

Saverio stuffed Zombie's note deep down in his trouser pocket. He squinted and his lips pulled into a sardonic sneer. ‘Do you want to see what I'm eating?'

The guy with the goatee gloated. ‘You and me, we understand each other, brother. Show me the treasures you're hiding.'

And the politician added: ‘Share it with your friends.'

Saverio turned around with wild eyes. He picked up Zombie's body off the ground. He was shocked at how little it weighed. ‘What do you prefer, a drumstick or an arm?' And he showed them the charcoaled remains.

At first the three of them didn't understand what sort of stuff it was. The guy with the goatee took a step forwards and then one backwards in a sort of clumsy tarantella.

‘Oh god . . .'

‘What the fuck is it?' The politician grabbed the presenter's arm.

‘It looks like a roasted dead body. That's disgusting,' said the third man, letting go of the Champagne bottle, which smashed into a thousand shards.

Saverio placed Zombie on the ground, then grabbed the
Durendal with two hands and lifted it above his shoulder. ‘So, what shall I cut you? An arm? A leg?'

The three losers ran off, pushing at each other to get out of the gate first. The politician let out a desperate scream and sunk up to his chest in the ground, which opened like a mouth to swallow him. The poor guy began to wave his arms around but something, from below, was pulling at him. He tried to hold out, but a moment later he disappeared into the black hole.

The other two stayed where they were, standing on the edge with vacant expressions on their faces, not knowing what to do. Then the presenter found his courage and leaned out over the hole for a second; but a second was enough for a huge arm to grab him by the beard. The man, headfirst, was dragged down into the hole and he, too, was sucked into the bowels of the earth.

The third guy was about to run off when a hand popped out of the hole and grabbed him by the ankle to pull him in. The man fell to the ground and began kicking to free himself of the vice-like grip. With his other foot, he struck the big hand wrapped around his leg. But it did nothing. Those fingers as big as cigars, with their black fingernails, were numb to the pain. He tried to put up a fight, digging his hands into the ground and begging: ‘Help me! Please! Help me!' He managed to grab on to one of the gateposts. But then another hand took hold of his free leg, and there was nothing he could do as he too disappeared into the hole.

Saverio Moneta, standing in the cabin doorway petrified, had seen the whole scene. It had taken less than three minutes.

Fuck . . . Fuck . . . Fuck
. . . It was the only word that his brain was able to conceive while he watched as slowly, with little effort, two arms as big as legs of ham came out of the hole,
followed by a small, bald head set into two rounded shoulders, and then the rest of the enormous human being wrapped in tyres of fat. It looked like it was wearing a green Sergio Tacchini tracksuit.

It must weigh at least two hundred kilos
.

Saverio had read a number of treaties on the use of mêlée weapons in feudal Japan, and he knew that there was a mortal blow that the sixteenth-century master Hiroyuki Utatane had called ‘The Wind in the Lotus'. It required considerable balance, but if done correctly it made you capable of cutting the head of the adversary clean off.

He screamed, raised one foot, jumped in the air and at the same time did a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pirouette, holding the Durendal straight out in front of him.

The sword cut through the air while the creature, with the speed and grace of an overweight ballerina, took a step backwards, stretched out a hand and grabbed the blade.

Saverio, thanks to the recoil, flew back and ended up against the wall of the building. He was still holding the hilt in his hands. But the rest of the sword was held tight in the fist of the creature, who now threw it to the ground like a piece of rubbish.

The same old shit from eBay
. . .

Saverio threw away what was left of the sacrificial sword.

I don't think I'll have the chance to give those arseholes from The Art of War of Caserta negative feedback
.

The big beast stood less than a metre away. Its huge tonnage hung over Saverio.

The leader of the Wilde Beasts of Abaddon raised his head to look at him. An emaciated ray of moonlight shone in the little red, expressionless eyes of the monster, which shook its head and smiled, showing a row of crooked, decayed teeth.

Saverio felt himself being grabbed by the arms and lifted up high. He closed his eyes, trying to suck all the pain into his lungs.

He could smell the rotting breath of the monster. He would have enjoyed spitting in its face, but his mouth was dry.

It doesn't matter
. He was ready to die. He wouldn't pray, he wouldn't beg. He would die like Mantos, the Etruscan god of death.

The monster threw him against a tree, and the last thing that Saverio saw before slamming against the trunk was the moon, round and immense, which had managed to find passage through the milky white veils of clouds.

It was so close.

 

 

PART THREE

Katakumba

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, born in Paris in 1863, is remembered for having coined the odious phrase: ‘It's not winning that's important, but how you play the game.' (The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well – which, by the way, is not his, but a Pennsylvanian bishop's). Other than that, de Coubertin is known for having reformed the French schooling system and for having resuscitated the ancient Greek Olympic Games in the modern world. A great supporter of the role of sport and physical activity in forming the personality of young people, the Baron was charged by the French Government with founding an international sporting association. After consulting fourteen nations, he set up the International Olympic Committee, which, in 1896, organised the first modern Olympic Games in Athens. It was an enormous success, repeated four years later in Paris. The third Olympic Games was held in 1904 in St Louis, in the United States. For the fourth edition, the Baron hoped to bring the Olypmic Games to Rome, in the hope of recreating the legendary rivalry between Rome and Athens, the two powers of the ancient world. But at that time Italy had economic problems (no change there), and declined the offer
.

On the 16th of June 1955, the dream of Baron de Coubertin finally became reality: the city of Rome, after having won an exciting head-to-head with Lausanne, won the right to host the Games of the Seventeenth Olympiad planned for 1960
.

The Italian Government invested approximately one hundred billion lira to prove to the world that Italy was part of the exclusive club of rich countries
.

The Eternal City turned into a construction site in preparation
for the event. New roads were laid and, between Villa Glori and the banks of the Tiber, a huge Olympic village for hosting the athletes was built, comprising many modern buildings immersed in greenery just a few kilometres from the historical town centre. Two brand-new stadiums were erected, and the Olympic stadium was rebuilt to hold up to sixty-five thousand spectators. And then new swimming pools, velodromes, hockey fields. And for the first time in the history of the Olympics, images of the races would be broadcast across Europe by the RAI
.

Rome stood out all over the world for the beauty of its playing fields: the Terme di Caracalla hosted the gymnastics events, the Basilica di Massenzio held the wrestling, while the marathon took off from the Capitoline, followed the Appia Antica, and ended under the Arco di Costantino. And it was during the marathon that something extraordinary happened. Abebe Bikila, a small athlete of the Imperial Ethiopian Guard, won the race running barefoot. He crossed the finish line with the new world record
.

With an astonishing medal count of thirty-six, Italy came third on the medal board, behind the Soviets and the Americans
.

All of this is common knowledge. What few people know, however, is what happened to a small group of Soviet athletes during the closing night of the Games
.

The USSR had only started participating at the Olympic Games in Helsinki, in 1952. Before then, the leaders of the Communist Party said the Games were ‘a means for distracting the workers from the class struggle' and providing participants with ‘training for new Imperialistic wars'. In reality, the mistrustful behaviour of the Kremlin veiled the Soviets' intention to show themselves in the Olympic limelight only when the USSR had the possibility of playing a starring role. So from 1952 onwards, the two global superpowers, frozen in the cold
war, found, in the Olympic Games, the perfect battlefield for showing all of their strength. On one side the Soviet Union, with an ironfist paramilitary organisation consistently improved through scientific studies, causing suspicion and insinuations about the use of medicines to improve their athletes' performances. On the other side, the United States, star of every edition of the Games from 1896 onwards, supported by the possibility of choosing the best from thousands of college and university athletes
.

Humiliated during the Olympics in Helsinki, and winners by a long shot in Melbourne, the Soviet Union came to Rome with the intention of proving the superiority of the Communist regime
.

The Soviet representatives were separated from all the others and occupied private apartment buildings. The athletes were not allowed to have any contact with people from other nations, who were the epitome of the corrupt capitalism of the Western world. They were under the constant control of Party employees
.

The athletes included Arkadij and Ljudmila Brusilov. He was a javelin thrower, she an artistic gymnast. They had married in 1958 in Kutuko, a town near Moscow. Both of them held a dream in their hearts: to abandon the USSR and go live in the West. They hated the authoritarian Communist regime, and they wanted to give birth to their children in the free world. But that was only a dream, for no one could leave their country. This applied even more so to those athletes considered to be official representatives of Soviet ideology and strength in the wider world
.