When the Dead Awaken (15 page)

But in vain. The Council opted for a conservative – that is, violent – solution.

Celebrities such as Giulio Forlani and Massimiliano Di Luca would be the death of him, Savelli feared. Impossible to eliminate without a public outcry from a world where people lived their lives through celebrities, rather than living their own. The container catastrophe on the Vittorio Emanuele II Quay had caused outrage. The Council usually preferred to do business without attracting attention, lurking in the shadows of centuries: Savelli agreed with them. But there were certain things – coincidences,
one-in-a-million chances, twists of fate bordering on the miraculous – which no human being could predict. Incidents that defied every attempt at careful planning. Like now with this blasted, defective American container crane, the English camera crew, Assistant Public Prosecutor D'Avalos's tail in Milan – and Cesare.

Savelli undressed and took a cold shower. He called his driver in the gatekeeper's house down by the road and told him to get the car ready.

‘Where to, signore?'

‘Milan. I have an appointment with a doctor.'

Milan

Massimiliano Di Luca was shorter and looked older and thinner than Sabrina had expected. In fact he proved to be something of a disappointment as a fashion icon. It took a couple of seconds before she recognized his luminous blue eyes, tanned face and the long grey hair that reached his shoulders in a ponytail. He called out orders to the slaves down on the floor below in English, Italian, German and French. The fashion king met her on a white gangway under a glass ceiling, suspended several metres above the floor in a building that had once been northern Italy's biggest cotton mill. The colossal looms, which could only have been removed by tearing down the walls, had been sandblasted and spray-painted in a range of neutral colours so they now looked like prehistoric monsters, their wild outlines sharp against the matt black floor.

The designer smiled at the slim goddess who had escorted Sabrina from Di Luca's flagship store on
Via Alessandro Manzoni through long corridors, design studios, workshops and halls where seamstresses and designers worked frantically at tables overflowing with fabrics, leather and brocades. The girl was mixed race and like all the other store assistants and secretaries at least a head and a half taller than Sabrina.

If Di Luca felt any surprise at Sabrina's peculiar emo outfit he didn't show it.

Sabrina knew she would remember the events leading up to their meeting in painful detail. The security guard at the door with his mouth hanging open. Outraged, whispered conversations erupting between the beautiful women of all ages who moved around the store with lazy familiarity. The dreadful moment when she passed a mirrored wall and realized that she had forgotten to change for the appointment; when she remembered the elegant suit and the smart, high-heeled shoes at the bottom of her shoulder bag. Her mascara and her heavily kohl-rimmed eyes staring out from under the hoodie, making her look like a raccoon with dangerous intentions. Federico Renda would have shuddered. And then sacked her on the spot.

Nevertheless she had summoned up a beaming smile when she addressed one of the store assistants with her highly unlikely claim to have an appointment with the designer. The girl had quickly – as if Sabrina were radioactive – passed her on to a secretary from further inside the emporium.

This secretary had carried out a hushed conversation via her headset before welcoming her with a nervous smile.

The next mortifying incident occurred when a security guard insisted on scanning her with a hand-held metal detector. The detector howled when it picked out the Walther and the Colt. Sabrina waved her warrant card with her arm outstretched – a centimetre from the guard's nose – and intimidated him with her best lion-taming gaze.

Di Luca held out his hand and they introduced themselves. He then rested his forearms on the railing of the gangway. The entire end wall had been replaced by an ingenious system of glass, aluminium, and rainbow-coloured slats, which could be turned on their own axes by dozens of small electric motors under computer control. The system permitted varying levels of daylight on to the monumental runway: the launch pad for Di Luca's collections.

And the hall was vast; it could easily accommodate the audience, journalists, photographers and celebrities, as well as bars, tables piled high with goodie bags, canapés and champagne.

On the runway a director was bossing around a group of whippet-thin models in miraculous dresses, shoes, and hats big enough to block out the sun.

The designer pointed.

‘What do you think, signorina?'

‘They're amazing,' said Sabrina and meant it.

‘And this?'

He pointed to a gigantic aquarium on wheels in which other models, dressed in gauzy mermaid dresses floated around gracefully. Another director was directing these girls; photographers and assistants on ladders and walkways were lighting, photographing and shouting out words of encouragement.

‘A bucketful of piranhas and an electric eel would work wonders.' Sabrina smiled and could have bitten off her own tongue. ‘Liven it up a bit, I mean,' she mumbled.

Di Luca looked astonished. Then he threw back his head and laughed out loud and Sabrina could see a small fortune revealed in his dental work.

She smiled back. The fashion god was wearing a pair of worn, light brown cords, a washed-out polo shirt and had stuck his tanned feet into a pair of down-at-heel deck shoes. Each hand was rough and calloused between his thumb and index finger.

‘Do you sail?' she asked.

He held up his hands and looked at them.

‘As often as I—'

He was interrupted as a row of women in full Rio costume, sequinned dreams, white teeth and ostrich feathers, sambaed into the hall. Behind the women followed virile, athletic men, their torsos naked, who accompanied them on flutes, drums and marimbas. It was impossible not to move your hips to the rhythm of the music.

‘My autumn collection.
Carnevale
. A caravan of sensuality moving through the streets for the Milan Fashion Week at Rho Fiera. Snapshots of Rio, New Orleans and Venice, my hometown. Plenty of pomp and circumstance … to disguise a total lack of originality, of course.' He smiled bitterly. ‘My chief designer took that with him when he left. The press is right.'

‘I don't think, maestro, that anyone believes that you can't still create wonderful—'

‘When you create you're nothing but a worm. If you want to dress women, all you have to do is look at Dior's drawings and you want to kill yourself. If you want to write, all you have to do is read ten pages of Elsa Morante or Hemingway and you want to stick your head in the nearest gas oven. It's a doomed enterprise.'

‘Not when you succeed,' she said.

‘You never fully succeed; not if you're really passionate about something.'

She wondered if Massimiliano Di Luca was in a relationship. Most people believed that
il maestro
was gay, but the paparazzi had never succeeded in identifying a lover. Di Luca loathed physical intimacy. Colleagues, models, photographers, stylists and journalists were made aware that a kiss on the cheek or attempt at a hug meant a one-way ticket to the outer fringes of the galaxy as far as the Milan fashion world was concerned. Massimiliano Di Luca was a direct descendant of the Doges of Venice and regarded
others as inferior. But the main cause of his isolation was anxiety about the purity of his voice. He regarded himself as a randomly chosen medium for a divine talent. Like Mozart. The least he could do was to let the voice ring clear in a cathedral rather than in an attic room filled with lovers, children, pets or spouses.
If you hear everybody else, you'll hear yourself last
was one of his mottos. Perhaps that was why he sailed. Di Luca was said to have had a difficult childhood in the family tailor's shop in Rome, but he had also said that a happy childhood was anathema to creativity and that he had always been and always would be the black sheep of the family.

‘We've found Lucia and Salvatore Forlani, signore.'

He didn't look at her. He looked at the multicoloured daylight that fell through the slats, across the black floor. It reached his face the same moment as the information and Sabrina noticed hundreds of fine lines, wrinkles and tiny white stubble that covered his chin and cheeks. Her words switched off the electricity in his blue eyes.

‘They're dead, aren't they?'

‘They are,' she said.

‘Where?'

‘Do you have somewhere we can speak in private, signore?'

The women kept dancing, the instruments sounded without rhythm, echoing, out of tune. The models in the aquarium looked as if they were drowning.

Di Luca looked at his hands gripping the white steel railing.

‘Are you hungry?' he asked.

‘No.'

‘Me neither. But I know a quiet place, signorina.
Per favore
,' he said.

Quiet, like a prayer.

‘Of course.'

He led her through narrow corridors, up and down stairs until they emerged under the open sky on a sunny courtyard. A dozing driver in a bottle-green Bentley jerked upright at the sound of Massimiliano Di Luca's knuckles on the roof. The man extricated himself from the driver's seat, got out and smiled at Sabrina. He had a handsome, broad, tanned face. He opened the doors for the designer and his strange-looking guest.

‘Dal Pescatore, Alberto.'

‘As you wish.'

The engine must have been running already because the car moved off immediately. The creamy leather seat continued to swallow up Sabrina until she began to worry that she would end up in the boot. She had heard about the restaurant with Italy's only female chef to have three stars in the Michelin Guide, the formidable Signora Santini. Together with El Bulli, Dal Pescatore was every gourmet's Holy Grail.

‘You were waiting for Giulio Forlani in the bar of Dal Pescatore that day, signore? On the fifth of September 2007.'

‘Yes. We used to meet there every Tuesday.'

‘What was he like?' she asked.

‘Funny and serious, only more so than other people. Shy and brilliant. A gentle giant with enormous hands. Perhaps we should talk about Giulio Forlani once we've eaten?' And yet he added: ‘Giulio wasn't autistic … as such … Asperger's? Definitely. You don't get his mathematical skills without giving up something in return. He didn't have the gift of imagination, for instance. His world was absolutely concrete. It was what he could see and measure. He wouldn't know what an association was if it bit him on the bum. If his life became unbearable, he couldn't compensate like the rest of us. It was demanding, not least for the people around him. I've never met a more vulnerable person.'

‘Vulnerable?'

‘Yes. What do you know about fashion, signorina?' Di Luca asked.

Sabrina looked herself up and down.

‘Nothing, clearly.'

‘Do you think it's an art?' he asked.

‘Definitely.'

Massimiliano Di Luca nodded with satisfaction.

They passed Giardini Pubblici on their way down the stately Corso Venezia.

‘You're from Venice, signore?'

‘The Di Lucas are mentioned in the
Golden Book
as one
of the ten families that founded Venice,' the master said proudly. ‘In the year 965.'

Sabrina smiled, impressed. She omitted telling him that the D'Avalos family was listed in church records in Bergamo in Lombardy in the eighth century.

‘Was there ever a happier and more carefree decade than the 1950s, signorina?' Di Luca asked. ‘After the war the Marshall Aid Plan was like a saline drip into the veins of our poor country. Everyone got fridges, optimism, Vespas and televisions, and the tourists flocked to the Eternal City. Fellini and Rossellini made Italy chic. There was no fashion industry fifty years ago. The textile factories made uniforms, the rich had their tailors – my father was one of them – and the poor made their own clothes. Now it's one of the biggest commercial operations in the world. It started with the Fontana sisters who dressed Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
. It continued with Ava Gardner and that crazy Swede … Ekberg.' His face cracked into a dreamy smile. ‘Such modest beginnings. And yet so formidable. Roberto Capucci, Simonetta Fabiani, Fernanda Gattinoni. An amazing generation.'

‘Designers discovered the New Woman who worked outside the home,' Sabrina said, ‘who wanted to look elegant and feminine when she went to work, at the factory or at the office, and who now earned her own money.'

He nodded enthusiastically.

‘She was the best invention of the war! But not just the
woman at the factory or the office – there are also those we today would call international trendsetters. Icons. Stars! Jackie Kennedy was a Democrat so she wore the same clothes – almost – as the masses. Her body preferred Fontana, she said. Elizabeth Taylor was another like her.'

He nodded to himself.

‘But we were also a bunch of pathetic, narcissistic children. We played sun kings, we pranced around in our perfumed ivory towers, we let our power and our self-importance go to our heads. Armani, Gucci, Fendi, Prada, Ferragamo, Versace, Di Luca; we created, idolized and celebrated each other and left the rest to the Camorra. They made our holy works in terrible factories in Naples, imported fabrics and leather into the country, exported clothes, shoes and bags out of it. Factories where we would never set foot for fear of being contaminated by reality. We whinged about the explosion of bootleg copies, but still we delivered the sketches for next year's collections to the Camorra and the Chinese in plenty of time for them to produce our products in even more appalling factories in India, Korea and China. Same quality, same season. Made in Italy. The fashion industry in Italy lost 40,000 jobs last year. And they won't come back. Last year Italians spent €6.3 billion on bootleg goods. But, of course, you already know that.'