Let the Games Begin (33 page)

That fatty meat was so tasty, boiled together with potatoes, black cabbage and horseradish. He didn't know what he would have given to experience again the sensation of those fillets melting in his mouth and the horseradish tickling his nose.

Aleksej found himself back in the fishing hut lit by just a kerosene lantern and the glare from the wood-fired oven. Papa gave him a glass of vodka to drink, told him it was fuel for his runner's body, and then they got into bed together, beneath layers of rough blankets smelling of camphor. One next to the other. And then Papa would hug him tight and whisper in his ear, with his breath stinking of alcohol, that he was a good boy, that he ran like the wind and that he didn't need to be afraid . . . That it was a secret just between the two of them. That it wouldn't hurt, in fact . . .

No. I don't want to. Please
. . .
Papa, don't do that to me
.

Something snapped in Aleksej Jusupov's mind.

The wholesome warmth disappeared from his limbs and
terror doused him like a cold shower. He squeezed his tear-filled eyes, and standing before him he saw his father dressed as a monk.

‘
Пошёл вон
!
Я тебя ненавижу'
¹
, said Aleksej and, channelling all the strength he had in him, he thumped the perpetrator of those days with the solid, reinforced-steel tray.

The unpredictable Bulgarian chef, incredulous, fell to the floor and the Russian athlete finished him off by walloping him with the tray again.

¹
‘Go away! I hate you'

Fireworks display by Xi-Jiao Ming and the Magic Flying Chinese Orchestra

65

The ex-leader of the Wilde Beasts of Abaddon woke up in the pitch black, being tossed about like a sack of potatoes.

It took him a while to realise that he was over the shoulder of the monster that had slung him up against a tree. He kicked his legs, trying to free himself, but an arm squeezed him so hard that he understood it was best he behave, if he didn't want to suffocate. The fatso was marching along at a fast pace without tiring, and he seemed to see perfectly in the darkness, turning right and left as if he had been born in that labyrinth. Every now and then a sliver of moonshine managed to slip through the cracks above the vaulted ceiling, and from the shadows little skeletons lying in niches along the long underground tunnel appeared.

I'm in the catacomb
.

The ex-leader of the Beasts was familiar with the Catacomb of Priscilla. At middle school he had gone there on a trip. Back then, he was in love with Raffaella De Angelis. She was as skinny as a sardine, with long brown hair and a pair of silver braces stuck to her teeth. He liked her because her father had a dark blue Lancia Delta with light blue Alcantara seats.

In an attempt to be funny, while they were walking through the catacomb, Saverio had snuck up behind Raffaella and pinched her calf muscle, whispering: ‘The Etruscan kills again.' And she'd let out a scream and flapped her arms in terror. Saverio had been hit in the hose and fainted.

He remembered, like it was yesterday, waking up in the Cubicle of the Velata. All of his classmates had gathered around him, Mrs Fortini was shaking her head, the old nun from the convent was making the sign of the cross, and Raffaella was telling him he was an idiot. Despite the pain, he had realised that for the first time in his life he was the centre of attention. And he had understood that you needed to do something extraordinary (but not necessarily intelligent) to get noticed.

Raffaella's father had driven him home in his Lancia Delta, which had that lovely new-car smell.

He wondered where that cute girl had ended up?

If he hadn't played that stupid joke on her, if he'd been nice to her, if he'd been more confident, if . . . Maybe . . .

‘IF' and ‘MAYBE' were the two words that they could carve on his tombstone.

Saverio Moneta threw back his head and let himself relax on the shoulder of his kidnapper.

 

66

Fabrizio Ciba studied the vault of a cave lit up by the red flashes from a fire. The ceiling had a crude geometrical shape. A crypt carved into the rock. A torch hung from the wall, its thick black smoke floating upwards and channelled through holes that worked like flues. Carved into the walls were dozens of little niches, in which piles of bones accumulated.

Matteo Saporelli kept annoying the shit out of him.

‘So . . . How are you? Are you able to stand?'

Fabrizio continued his inspection, ignoring Matteo.

Gathered against the walls, all of them curled up on the ground, he could see the silhouettes of a heap of people. Looking
more closely, he realised that they were all guests from the party, waiters and a couple of security guards. He recognised a few actors, Sartoretti the comedian, an undersecretary from the Ministry for Cultural Heritage, a showgirl. And, strangely enough, no one was talking, as if they had been forbidden to do so.

Matteo Saporelli instead continued to torment him in a quiet voice.

‘So? What do you say?'

Worn out from the constant questioning, Fabrizio turned around and saw the young writer. He was in a bad way. With a black eye and that cut on his forehead, he looked like the poor man's version of Rupert Everett knocked about by someone bigger and nastier.

Fabrizio Ciba rubbed his aching neck. ‘What happened to you?'

‘Some fuckers kidnapped me.'

‘You, too?'

Saporelli patted his swollen eye. ‘They beat me when I tried to escape.'

‘Same here. I hurt all over.'

Saporelli lowered his head, as if he had to admit to a terrible sin. ‘Listen . . . I didn't mean to . . . I'm so sorry . . .'

‘For what?'

‘For this whole mess. You've all been involved because of me.'

Fabrizio turned so he could look at him better. ‘What do you mean? I don't understand.'

‘Exactly one year ago I wrote a snappy little essay on corruption in Albania for a small publisher from Foggia. And now the Albanian mafia wants to make me pay.' Saporelli brushed his injury with the tips of his fingers. ‘Anyway, I'm prepared
to die. I will beg them to save you, though. It's not fair for them to take it out on you. You've got nothing to do with this.'

‘I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but I believe you're making a mistake.' Fabrizio patted himself on the chest. ‘It's all my fault. It's a subversive group of Finnish woodcutters who have kidnapped us. I exposed them for the havoc they were reaping in the thousand-year-old forests in Northern Europe.'

Saporelli burst into laughter. ‘Oh, come on . . . I heard them talking before, they're speaking Albanian.'

Fabrizio looked at him with a perplexed expression on his face. ‘Of course, because you speak Albanian now?'

‘No, I don't speak it. But it sounds just like Albanian. They use those consonants typical of the Balkan languages.' He kept on tapping his bruise in an obsessive manner. ‘Listen, tell me the truth: how do I look? My face is disfigured, isn't it?'

Fabrizio looked at him for a second. He didn't look too bad, but he nodded slowly.

‘But will I go back to normal?'

Ciba gave him the bad news. ‘I don't think so. It's a bad blow . . . Let's hope your eyesight isn't affected'

Saporelli collapsed. ‘My head is throbbing. You don't have a Saridon? Ibuprofen?'

He was about to say no, then he remembered the magic pill that Bocchi had given him. ‘You're the same old lucky guy you ever were. I've got this pill. You'll feel so much better afterwards.'

The young writer examined it with his healthy eye. ‘What sort of stuff is it?'

‘Don't you worry. Swallow it.'

The Strega winner, after a moment of hesitation, swallowed.

At that moment, from the depths of the dark tunnel they
heard the slow sounds of percussion instruments. It sounded like a heart beating.

‘Oh God, they're coming. We're all going to die!' shouted Alighiero Pollini, the undersecretary for Cultural Heritage, and he hugged Magic Daniel, the famous illusionist from Channel 26. The showgirl began to whimper, but nobody made any effort to comfort her. The beating was getting louder and echoed around the crypt.

Fabrizio, overcome with fear to the point where even his fillings ached, said: ‘Saporelli, I . . . I . . . I admire you.'

‘And I consider you to be my literary father. A model I try to imitate,' the young man answered in a moment of sincerity.

The two of them hugged and stared at the entrance to the tunnel. It was so black that the darkness seemed tangibile. As if millions of litres of ink were on the verge of overflowing inside the crypt.

The tribal rhythm, hidden by the shadows, seemed to be made up of percussion instruments and drums, but also hands clapping.

Slowly, as if freed from the darkness that imprisoned them, some figures appeared.

Everyone stopping whining and complaining, and kept silent to watch the procession.

They were enormous. As white as chalk, with small heads set into rounded shoulders. Rolls of fat hid their waistline; their arms looked like legs of ham. Some of them were holding bongos under their armpits and the others beat their chest, creating the ancestral rhythm. There were women, too, shorter and with tits like flat, wide mozzarellas. And children – barge-arses, too – who held their mothers' hands in fear.

Slowly the shy, clumsy gang came forward. They were wearing bits and pieces of tracksuits, stretched sweatshirts, the
remains of a gardener's uniform. On their feet they had trainers that were out of shape and sewn back together with pieces of string and metal wire. Around their chubby biceps, dog collars. Some of them were wearing broken headphones with charms hanging from them: bottle tops and dog tags, with names and telephone numbers. Others had bicycle tyres around their chests.

Their skin had no pigmentation and their small eyes, red and beady, seemed annoyed by the light. Their colourless hair had been braided with the strips of red-and-white plastic tape used to cordon off workmen on building sites.

Suddenly, all together, they stopped beating and stood silently in front of the guests. Then they divided into two wings to let someone through.

A group of old people so spindly they looked like they'd walked out of a concentration camp, moved between the fat people. They were extremely white, but not albinos. Some of them had dark hair.

The fatsos got down on their knees. Then a man and a woman were placed in the middle of the room, on white plastic chairs.

The old man was wearing an ornamental headdress that looked vaguely like the ones the American Indians used, made up of Bic pens, little bottles of Campari Soda and coloured plastic spoons. Huge Vogue sunglasses covered nearly his whole face. On his chest he was wearing an armour made of colourful plastic frisbees.

The woman was wearing a blue sandbucket on her head, and big cords of hair plaited together with inner tubes and pigeon feathers framed her face. She was wrapped in a disgustingly dirty North Face down jacket, with two skinny legs with varicose veins sticking out the bottom.

The king and the queen
, Fabrizio said to himself.

 

67

Those two are the king and queen
, Saverio said to himself, on the other side of the crypt.

The fatso had put him down among all the other guests. They were silent and shook their heads in unison, like dolls on a car dashboard. Larita was in a corner, curled up on the ground, and she didn't look too good. She kept wiping her face and neck obsessively, as if they were covered in insects.

Saverio felt strangely peaceful. A terrible sense of tiredness had fallen upon him. Having to pick up Zombie's charcoaled cadaver had made him insensitive. Like a Buddha, he sat still, his face relaxed, beside the faces of fear, twisted with tears, of the other guests.

Perhaps this is the spirit of the samurai that Mishima talks about
.

There was a substantial difference between him and those people. Unlike them, he didn't care about life any more. And in a certain sense he felt closer to these monsters who had appeared like a nightmare from the earth's entrails. Except that they had succeeded in doing what he and the Beasts had not managed to do: bring terror to the party.

A fatso holding a bicycle wheel as a shield thumped a stick on the ground and spoke in a foreign tongue: ‘
Тише
!'
²

The old king, sitting on his plastic throne, observed the prisoners and then, with a sliver of voice, he murmured: ‘
Вы советские
?'
³

Saverio would have liked to be one of them, he would
have undergone any sort of initiation necessary, he would let them hang him up with hooks in his skin to prove he was a valid element, a fighter. A member of the people of the darkness.

The guests looked at each other, hoping that someone understood that weird language.

A guy with a fringe, a black eye and a gash on his forehead stood and asked for silence. ‘Friends, relax, they're Albanians. They're here for me. I will set you all free. Does anyone here know Albanian and can translate for me?'

Nobody answered. Then Milo Serinov, Roma's goalkeeper, said: ‘
Я русский
.'
⁴

The old man gestured at him to stand up.

The football player obeyed and the two began chatting amidst the general surprise. Then finally Serinov turned towards the kidnapped guests. ‘They're Russians.'

‘What do they want from us?', ‘What have we done to them?', ‘Why won't they let us go?', ‘Have you told them who we are?' They were all asking questions, all wanting answers.

Serinov, in his shaky Italian, explained that they were dissident Russian athletes who escaped during the Rome Olympics and have been living in the catacomb for fear of being killed by the Soviet regime.