Cabal - 3 (31 page)

He placed the gun on the desk within easy reach and lay back in his swivel chair, thinking about his father. His parents were not often in his thoughts. Indeed, people had called him cold and unnatural at the time of the tragedy, but it would be truer to say that he felt little or nothing, and refused – this was the scandal, of course – to pretend that he did. He had never tried to get anyone else to understand his views on the subject, which all came down to the fact that he did not consider Umberto and Chiara to be his parents at all, except in the most reductive genetic sense. Their children were Raimondo and his sister Ariana. He, Falco, owed them nothing.

His cousin Ludovico Ruspanti had been an early inspiration. He had made everyone else in Raimondo’s circle seem wan and insipid. When Umberto and Chiara became martyrs of the class struggle, his father dying in a hail of machine-gun fire sprayed through the windscreen of their Mercedes, his mother succumbing to her injuries a few days later, he had remembered Ludovico’s deportment on the occasion of his own bereavements. He must have handled it badly, though. No one had criticized Ludovico’s play-acting, even though he had turned to wink broadly at his cousin after making some fulsome comments about his late brother, as though to say ‘We know better, don’t we?’ Raimondo, on the other hand, had made the mistake of being frank about his feelings, or lack of them, and for this he had never been forgiven.

What no one could ever deny was that he had coped extremely well with orphanhood, while Ariana had been broken. She had worshipped her parents, particularly her mother, to whom she had always been close. Raimondo had made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of her child-like dependency, of that physical intimacy prolonged well into adolescence. He found it cloying and excessive, and he had been proved right. When the walls of her emotional hothouse were so brutally shattered by the terrorists’ bullets, Ariana had collapsed into something very close to madness.

This fact had been hushed up by the services of exclusive and discreet private ‘nursing homes’ which existed for just this very purpose, and by the use of such euphemisms as ‘prostrated by grief’ and ‘emotionally overwrought’. The plain truth was that Ariana Falcone had gone crazy, as her brother had not scrupled to tell her to her face shortly after the funeral. Enough was enough! He had always resented the exaggerated fuss which had been made of Ariana, the way her every wish and whim was pandered to. This excessive display of temperament was just another blatant example of attention-seeking, and in extremely poor taste too, trading on their parents’ violent deaths for her own selfish ends, and trying – with a certain amount of success, moreover – to make him look cold and heartless by comparison. The sooner she faced up to the realities of the new situation the better. Their parents were dead and he was in charge. What Ariana needed was a series of short, sharp shocks to bring this home to her, and it was this which he had set out to provide.

Although he had applied his treatment rigorously, Ariana stubbornly refused to respond. On the first anniversary of the killings, he had given her one last chance, ordering her to appear at a memorial service which was being held at their local church. Not only had she refused, but the only reason she deigned to give was that she wanted to play with her collection of dolls which were kept in the beautiful wooden toyhouse which her parents had given her for her eighth birthday. Her brother’s response had been swift and decisive. Tying her to a chair, he had doused the doll’s-house in paraffin and set fire to it before her eyes, with the dolls inside.

But Ariana’s petulance seemingly knew no bounds. Far from accepting that it was time to stop these embarrassing and self-indulgent games, she had sunk into a condition verging on catatonia. Eventually Raimondo found a doctor who was prepared to prescribe an indefinite course of tranquillizers which kept Ariana more or less amenable, and their Aunt Carmela was brought in to act as minder. Raimondo moved out to a small modern flat near the university, where he had been re-enrolling for years without ever taking his exams. The huge palazzo which Umberto’s father had bought in the twenties was turned over to Carmela and Ariana. A new playhouse was obtained and stocked with dolls. It was not quite the same, but Ariana showed no sign of noticing the difference, or of remembering what had happened to the original. She spent her days happily sewing clothes for her dolls based on ideas culled from Carmela’s discarded magazines.

What happened next was completely unpredictable. Appropriately enough, the whole thing had been intended as a joke. Paolo, one of Raimondo’s student acquaintances, had always dreamt of becoming a fashion designer, much against his parents’ wishes. It was he who told Raimondo about the competition being run by a leading fashion magazine to find the ‘designers of tomorrow’. He was submitting a portfolio of drawings and sketches, which he described to his friends at every opportunity. If he won, he explained, then his parents would be obliged to let him follow his genius instead of taking a job in a bank. Paolo went on at such length about it that Raimondo finally decided to play a trick on him. One evening when Ariana had gone to bed, he borrowed a dozen of her dolls, complete with the miniature costumes she had made for them, removed the heads to make them resemble dressmaker’s mannequins, and then photographed them carefully with a close-up lens. Next he took the prints to a commercial art studio and had them reproduced as fashion sketches, which he triumphantly showed to Paolo as
his
entry.

If Paolo had taken the thing in the spirit in which it had been intended, Raimondo would have admitted the truth, had a good laugh, and that would have been that. To his amazement, however, Paolo reacted with a torrent of vituperative abuse. Raimondo’s designs were impractical nonsense, he claimed. No one could ever make such things, let alone wear them. In short, it would be an insult to submit them for the competition. Until that moment, Raimondo had not had the slightest intention of doing so, but Paolo had been so unpleasant that he sent the drawings in to spite him. When the results were announced three months later, he was awarded the first prize.

His first reaction was one of incredulity. The joke had gone far enough – much too far, in fact. He must put a stop to it at once. But that wasn’t so easy, not with all Milan beating a path to the door. Paolo couldn’t have been more wrong, it seemed. The designs Raimondo had submitted were judged to be daring but accessible, refreshingly different, striking just the right balance between novelty and practicality. He was offered contracts, more or less on his own terms, with several of the city’s top fashion houses.

If Ariana had been in her right mind, he would have let her take the prize and the fame and fortune that went with it. As it was, this was out of the question. His sister was quite incapable of sustaining the ordeal of public exposure. Apart from Aunt Carmela and Raimondo himself, the only person she ever saw was her cousin Ludovico, on whom she seemed to have developed a schoolgirlish crush. She always brightened up before, during and after his visits, which had grown quite frequent. Apparently Ludo had some business interests in Milan, although it was never very clear what they were. When he was around, Ariana could almost pass for normal, but this was an illusion. Ariana lived in a self-contained world, talking to no one but her dolls. She had never watched television or read the papers since the day a report about some terrorist atrocity had caused a lengthy relapse. Her world had a lot to recommend it, from her point of view. It was warm, stable and quiet. There were no nasty surprises. Love might safely be invested, secure in the knowledge that no harm could befall.

For Raimondo to admit the truth would only have served to kill a goose whose eggs, it seemed, were of solid gold. But it wasn’t really a question of money. The Falcone family fortunes, although no longer quite what they had been when Umberto was running the business, were still in an altogether different league from those of their Roman cousins. No, it was the original element – that of the practical joke, the elaborate prank – which swayed him in the end. If fooling Paolo had seemed a worthwhile thing to do, the idea of fooling
everybody
was completely irresistible.

It took him a while to find his feet. The freelance contract didn’t work out in the end. When the house involved requested small changes in various details, he’d had to refuse, for the simple reason that he was unable to draw. His arrogance and intransigence attracted criticism at the time, but in the long run the episode merely strengthened his hand, increasing his reputation as a wayward, uncompromising genius who worked alone by night and then appeared with a sheaf of sketches and said, ‘Take it or leave it!’

When he launched his own ready-to-wear line the following March, it was only a modest success. The fashion world in Italy is dominated by a handful of big names whose control is exercised through exclusive contracts with textile producers, insider deals in which the fashion press allocate editorial space in direct proportion to the amount of advertising bought, and licensing arrangements for perfumes, watches, lighters, glasses, scarves and luggage which make such ‘conces-sion tycoons’ multi-millionaires without their having to lift a finger. What was being sold was an image created by the designers’
haute couture
range, shown three times a year in Rome and abroad. Such garments, selling for tens of billions of lire, were out of reach to anyone but the super-rich, most of them in America and the Gulf oil states, but the image of luxury and exclusivity were available to anyone prepared to pay a modest sum for a ‘designer-labelled’ product which might in fact have been produced in a Korean sweat shop. The sweat didn’t stick, the chic did. That was the trick of it.

As sole owner of a large textile mill, Raimondo Falcone was in a unique position to break the cartel on raw materials. The problem lay in generating the desirable image. He clearly couldn’t go into
couture
. As the word implies, this means being able to cut, to go into a fitting room with the client, pick up a length of cloth and a pair of scissors and produce something which looks like it has grown there. This was clearly not a possibility for Raimondo, who couldn’t cut a slice of
panettone
without wrecking the entire cake. Then he had his inspiration, one day when he was being interviewed on television. His sudden emergence on to the fashion scene, as though from nowhere, was already the stuff of legend. People were naturally curious about him, his background, his working methods, his philosophy. While he was telling the interviewer a pack of lies – ‘I always thought of it as a hobby really, I used to scribble ideas on the back of an envelope and then lose it somewhere …’ – it occurred to him that what people really wanted from their clothes was the kind of miraculous transformation like the one which so fascinated them about him. They wanted to be able to put on a new personality like putting on a shirt. Fashion wasn’t just about attracting sexual partners or showing off your wealth. It was a search for metamorphosis, for transcendence. And who better to offer it than a man who appeared unfettered by the constraints within which ordinary mortals were forced to operate?

From that moment, he had never looked back. It took no more than an occasional grudging, condescending word of praise from him to keep Ariana busy. Censored extracts from fashion magazines, from which all reference to Falco designs had of course been removed, kept her fantasy world in touch with the colours, lines and fabrics which were currently in vogue. Once he had succeeded in convincing her that she needed big dolls to play with now, being a big girl herself, the trick-photography and out-of-house sketches could be dispensed with. From time to time he removed a selection of the garments she made and handed them over to his subordinates, a tight, highly-paid and very loyal team who relieved the maestro of the tiresome day-to-day business of putting his creations into production from the original models. All he had to do was tour the country, appearing at shops and on television, telling people that they were what they wore, and that in the late twentieth century it was ideologically gauche to suggest otherwise.

He sat upright suddenly, listening intently. Then he heard it again, a distant metallic sound somewhere far below. Once again, a smile bent his lips. He knew what it was: the discarded filing-cabinet shell which had been sitting on the landing of the first floor for as long as anyone could remember. When he arrived, having smashed off the padlock used to secure the emergency exit since the break-in, he had pulled the metal cabinet out from the wall so that it all but blocked the way upstairs. Its faint tintinnabulation was as good as a burglar alarm to him.

He picked up the pistol and walked with rapid, light steps into the workroom, where he knelt down behind one of the tables with a clear view of the door. The moment it opened, the intruder would be framed in a rectangle of light, peering into a dark, unfamiliar territory where the only recognizable targets were the mannequins. But
he
would be ready, his eyes perfectly adjusted to the fog-muted glimmer from the Galleria outside, the pistol steadied against the edge of the table and trained on its target. It would be like shooting rabbits leaving the burrow.

Then a miracle occurred. That, at least, is how he explained it to himself in that initial instant of wordless awe. After that it was pure sensation, pure experience. Later he realized that the whole thing could have taken no more than a few seconds, but while it lasted there was nothing else, only the noise and the light. The light was the kind you might see if they skinned your eyeballs, pickled them in acid and trained lasers on them. As for the
noise
…

When he was a boy, he had once been allowed up the campanile of the family church. After endless windings, the spiral staircase broadened into a chamber where the bells hung, great lumps of dull metal, seeming no more resonant than so many rocks. Yet when the clapper struck, they could be heard over half the city. He had wondered ever after what it would have sounded like if they’d started pealing while he was standing there. Now he knew. His whole body thrilled and jangled, every cell and fibre quivering in exquisite agony as the overtones and reverberations of that blow died away. Another such would kill him, he thought as he lay in a heap on the floor, clutching his head. But there wasn’t another. This puzzled him at first. Once the clapper was set swinging with that kind of violence, it was bound to come back to strike the other side, just when you were least expecting it.