Cabal - 3 (30 page)

Zen raised his eyebrows, genuinely disconcerted.

‘Well, well.’

‘It’s my little indulgence.’

‘Not
that
little. You must be doing well.’

She nodded.

‘We are. Very well. But I’m increasingly realizing that the future is in the south. Up here, agriculture is getting more and more commercialized, more industrialized and centralized. You’re no longer dealing with individual producers but with large agribusinesses or cooperatives whose managers think in terms of consistency and volume. The south has been spared all that. It’s just too poor, too fragmented, too disorganized, too far from the centre of Europe. Those factors are all drawbacks for bulk produce, but once you’re talking designer food then the negatives become positives …’

She broke off, catching sight of his abstracted look.

‘I’m boring you.’

He quickly feigned vivacity.

‘No, no.’

‘It’s all right, Aurelio. There’s no reason why you should be interested in the wholesale food business.’

He pushed the last piece of veal cutlet around his plate for a moment, then laid down his knife and fork.

‘It’s just a shock to find that you’re so … so successful and high-powered. It makes me feel a bit dowdy by comparison.’

If his words sounded slightly self-pitying, the look he gave her immediately afterwards was full of determination.

‘But that’s going to change.’

‘Of course. You’ll soon get used to it.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘You’ll see.’

A pair of Carabinieri officers in full dress uniform strode by, murmuring to each other in a discreet undertone. With their tricorn hats and black capes trimmed with red piping, they might have passed for clergy promenading down the apse of this secular basilica, oriented not eastward, like the crumbling gothic pile in the square outside, but towards the north, source of industry, finance and progress.

‘So he works for you?’ asked Zen, lighting a cigarette.

Tania pushed her plate aside.

‘Primo? No, no, we don’t pay salaries. Piece-rates and low overheads, that’s the secret of success. Look at Benetton. That’s how they started out. Run by a woman, too.’

She took one of her own cigarettes, a low-tar mentholized brand. Zen had tried one once. It was like smoking paper tissues smeared with toothpaste.

‘No, Primo works for the EC,’ she said. ‘He goes round farms assessing their claims for grants. We pay him on a commission basis to put us in touch with possible suppliers.’

He nodded vaguely. She was right, of course. He wasn’t interested in the details of the business she was running. He
was
interested in the results, though. Tania had rejected the idea of moving in with Zen, on the grounds that his flat was too small. But if he could bring off the little coup he had planned for that evening, he would have the cash for a down-payment on somewhere much larger, perhaps with a separate flat for his mother across the landing. And as a double-income couple, they could pay off the loan with no difficulty.

He looked around the Galleria, smoking contentedly and running over the idea in his mind. This was a new venture for him. He had cut corners before, of course. He had bent the rules, turned a blind eye, and connived at various mild degrees of fraud and felony. But never before had he cold-bloodedly contemplated extorting a large sum of money for his personal gain. Still, better late than never. Who the hell did he think he was, anyway, Mother Theresa? Not that there was any great moral issue involved. Antonia Simonelli might succeed in embarrassing the Vatican, but she had no real chance of making a case against those responsible for killing Ludovico Ruspanti. One of them, Marco Zeppegno, was already dead, and with his death the other man had put himself beyond the reach of justice. But not beyond the reach of the Cabal, thought Zen.

He leant back, looking up at the magnificent glass cupola, a masterpiece of nineteenth-century engineering consisting of thousands of rectangular panes supported by a framework of wrought-iron ribs soaring up a hundred and fifty feet above the junction of the two arcaded aisles. The resemblance to a church was clearly deliberate: the four aisles arranged like an apse, choir and transepts, the upper walls decorated with frescoed lunettes, the richly inlaid marble flooring, the vaulted ceilings, the central cupola. Here is
our
temple, said the prophets of the Risorgimento, a place of light and air, dedicated to commerce, liberty and civic pride. Compare it with the oppressive, dilapidated pile outside, reeking of ignorance and superstition, and then make your choice.

‘What now?’ asked Tania.

He gave a deep frown, which cleared as he realized that she meant the question literally.

‘I’ve got to go to the airport.’

‘You’re not leaving already?’

‘No, no. I have to pick up something which is being air-freighted up here. Something I need for my work.’

‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

He shrugged.

‘Just following up some ramifications of the Ruspanti affair. Nothing very interesting.’

She signalled the waiter and asked for two coffees and the bill. Zen raised his eyebrows slightly.

‘I’ll put it on expenses,’ she said.

‘Fiddling already?’

‘Actually I’m saving money. If I hadn’t bumped into you, I’d be lunching Primo instead, the full five courses somewhere they really know how to charge.’

‘Whereas I get a snack in a café, eh?’ he retorted in a mock-surly tone.

Tania smiled broadly and stroked his hand.

‘I’ll make it up to you tonight, sweetheart.’

His face clouded over.

‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

‘Well, I may not be free until nineish.’

She patted his hand reassuringly.

‘That’s all right. I shall just have to go and buy some very expensive clothes to while away the time. There’s a wonderful new outfit by Falco I just
crave
. Jagged strips of suede and silk and fur arranged in layers like a pile of scraps, just odds and ends, but somehow holding together, though you can’t see how. Did you see it in that shop, towards the back?’

He smiled mysteriously.

‘I’ve seen it, but not in a shop.’

She looked at him with interest.

‘You’ve seen someone wearing it?’

‘Not exactly.’

The waiter arrived with the coffee, and Zen took advantage of the interruption to change tack slightly.

‘Are his clothes very expensive?’

‘Hideously!’ she cried. ‘But each one is an original creation. It’s an investment as well as a luxury, like buying a work of art.’

Zen’s mysterious smile intensified.

‘All the same, if I were you I’d put my money into something else. I have a feeling that the market in Falco creations might be about to take a tumble.’

Tania patted his hand indulgently.

‘Aurelio, you’re a dear, sweet man, but you haven’t a clue about fashion.’

The man stepped off the exercise bicycle and surveyed himself in the mirror. His lithe, slender body was covered with a pleasing sheen of sweat, creating highlights and chiaroscuro and emphasizing the contours of the evenly tanned flesh, hardened and sculpted by workouts such as the one he had just completed. So satisfied was he by what the mirror showed him that he lingered there a moment longer under the spell of that unattainable object of desire.

‘Without my clothes, I feel naked,’ he had once remarked to an interviewer, who had laughed uproariously at this witticism. It was in fact the literal truth. Even his own nudity was only tolerable when reflected back to him from the mirror. The idea of other people’s was quite repugnant to him. His secret fantasy was to
become
that glistening image, to break through the glass and merge with that substanceless child of light, for whom being and seeming were one and the same. As for the others, as imperfect as himself, and a good deal less fastidious in most cases, he did not particularly care to share a room with most of them, never mind anything more intimate. With a final, flirtatious glance at the mirror, he turned away and flounced off to the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, he walked through to the adjoining pair of offices. The clock on the wall showed twenty to seven. The suite was located on the top floor of a block backing on to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, and commanded a striking view of the great glazed cupola, swelling up into the night sky like a luminous balloon. He had switched off all the lights, and this background glimmer, softened by the thickening fog, was the only source of illumination. Feeling a prickle of sweat break out on his stomach and back, he opened the window slightly. Coolness was the key to everything. The secret of his success lay in the ability to remain perfectly calm whatever happened, to manipulate events and perceptions so that people saw only what he wished them to see.

He picked up a canvas bag lying on the desk and went into the workroom next door. The walls were covered with sketches and photographs, the floor littered with irregular off-cuts of the fine paper used for sizing garments. Only a tiny fraction of the light from the Galleria penetrated to this internal room, but he moved through it with total confidence, skirting the pin-studded mannequins and sidestepping the benches draped with silk and velvet, cashmere and wool, leather and tweed. As he passed each one, he let his fingers run over the material, and shivered sensuously.

The one way in which he revealed himself to be his father’s son was his passion for materials: their look, their feel, their smell. Umberto used to bring samples home from the mills at Como and stroke the boy’s infant cheeks with them. The idea was to train Raimondo from the earliest possible age for his future role as heir to the family textile business. But the child had misunderstood, as children are prone to do. He thought his father was caressing him, expressing a love that so rarely manifested itself on other occasions.

At the door leading to the hallway, he paused briefly and listened. All was quiet. He unlocked the door, went out and closed it behind him, pulling until the lock engaged with a precise click. He removed a pair of disposable rubber gloves from the bag and put them on, then took out the cold chisel and hammer. Working the chisel into the crack between the lock and the jamb, he struck it repeatedly until the lock shattered. Then he replaced the chisel and hammer in the bag, peeled off the rubber gloves with a shudder of disgust – they reminded him of condoms – and went back inside, leaving the door slightly ajar.

As he passed one of the worktables, his fingers touched a garment which he could not for a moment identify. He paused to stroke it delicately, grazing the surface of the fabric like a lover exploring the contours of his partner’s body. A languid smile of recognition softened the normally rigid contours of his lips. Of course! It was the model for the new line of jeans which he was going to unleash on the world next year, a move calculated to reaffirm the atelier’s revolutionary reputation. Not that demand for the existing lines had in any way slackened. On the contrary, business was booming. But he knew that the time to abandon a successful formula was before it began to pall. That way, you retained the initiative. You weren’t running for cover, you were ‘making a statement’.

In the present instance, this meant abandoning the complex, multi-layered pyrotechnics for which he’d become famous in favour of something plain and popular, something strong and simple, something
ecological
. Jeans were all these things, of course, but their appeal was fatally diminished by the fact that they were also durable, and cheap. The response of the leading designers had been to price them up, to sell the price rather than the garment.

Such a solution was worthy of the shallow, conventional minds who ran the major fashion houses. Anyone could license a line of designer denims and sell them at a five hundred per cent mark-up – at least, anyone with a name like Armani or Valentino could. It had been left to him, the newcomer, to achieve a truly creative breakthrough. His fingertips caressed the soft brushed silk which he’d had tinted to resemble worn and faded denim. Naturally no one in their right minds would be prepared to pay Falco prices for real denim, which would last for years. These, on the other hand, although virtually indistinguishable from the real thing to the naked eye, would tolerate only the most limited wear before falling apart. People were going to
kill
for them.

Back in his private sanctum, he sat down at his desk and held his watch up to the glimmer from the window. Five to seven. He opened the middle drawer of the desk and took out the pistol he had brought from home. The gun had belonged to his father, a service-issue revolver which he had retained illegally at the end of the war as a souvenir. As far as he knew, Umberto had never used the weapon in anger, not that it would have done him much good against the Red Brigades’ Kalashnikovs. But that would just make the authorities more sympathetic when his son acted a trifle hastily in a similar situation. Not that anyone was likely to think twice about the matter anyway. Break-ins and muggings were everyday events in the junkie-ridden centre of Milan. What was more natural than that he should keep his father’s old service pistol at the office where he often worked late and alone? Or indeed that he should use it when the need arose?

‘I was walking towards my desk, officer, when I heard a sound in the outer office. I’d just had a shower. I suppose that’s why I hadn’t heard the noise of the door being forced. I ran to the desk and got out the pistol I’ve kept there since the building was broken into last week …’ After that, it would depend on whether his visitor proved to have been armed, something which he could easily verify after shooting him dead. If he wasn’t, then it might be marginally more difficult, although accidents did notoriously happen in these circumstances. But this was unlikely. The overwhelming probability was that the intruder would have a gun too. He sounded like Zeppegno, a wannabee thug full of tough talk and cheap threats. To scum like that, a gun was like an American Express card. It said something about you. People treated you with respect and said, ‘That’ll do nicely, sir.’ You didn’t leave home without it. All he needed to do was put on the rubber gloves and fire a few rounds from the victim’s gun into the walls and furniture, then transfer the sheaths to the dead man’s hands, thus explaining the lack of fingerprints, and call the police. If he got anything more than a fine for possessing an unregistered firearm, there would be a universal outcry among the good burghers of Milan. What, an eminent designer could be threatened by some doped-up hoodlum in his own office without even being permitted to defend himself? What was the world coming to?