Actually his client had been out of the office when Tony called, but he had handed the sealed envelope, marked ‘Urgent, Private and Personal’, to a receptionist whose looks and manner suggested that her rates would put a high-class hooker to shame, with instructions to hand it to l’avvocato immediately on his return. For form’s sake, he had then flirted a bit with the leggy lovely, who had coyly pretended to be interested only in her work, before returning to the mean streets.
After lunch he would phone Amadori senior and press for immediate payment of the fee they had agreed, as well as his substantial expenses to date, including of course the Maker’s Mark, of which he ordered another glass. In short, everything was great, except for the gnawing sense of existential emptiness that always came over him once a case was closed. How much longer before the day came, as he knew it must, when the moral and physical strain became too much to bear? Tony had been a gumshoe for over twenty years now, ever since the day he was dismissed from the police force after shooting two passersby while failing to arrest a sneak thief who had fled with a pocketful of discount coupons after holding up one of the cashiers in a Conad grocery store. Twenty years was a long time in this filthy trade.
He knocked back the second bourbon and lit another Camel. Hell, he was good for another twenty, as long as his luck held and he didn’t stop a shell from some punk in a speakeasy down by the docks. Actually there weren’t any docks in Bologna, but one of his cases might take him down the road to Ravenna some day. Now there was one tough town. But that was the way it was with this stinking job. You never knew what was coming your way next, except that it wouldn’t be good news.
As if to demonstrate this, he caught sight of something in the big mirror at the rear of the bar, which reflected the front window and the street beyond. He threw some cash at the barman and hustled out. There, about ten metres away, was the unmistakable battered black leather jacket bearing the crest of the Bologna football club on the back. Tony began to follow circumspectly. It was good to see that Vincenzo had started wearing the bugged garment on occasions other than his visits to the stadium. That would make life so much easier if l’avvocato decided to hire Tony for the long-term maintenance service that he always recommended to his clients in the interests of their continuing peace of mind.
The man in front turned left and cut through the side streets to Via Zamboni, Tony keeping a constant ten metres back. Then it was left again, past the church of San Giacomo and the theatre to the university, where the subject ran up the steps and into the main building. At this, Tony shrugged and turned back. He couldn’t possibly keep up a covert tail in that maze of corridors packed with people half his age. What was the point, anyway? Apparently Vincenzo Amadori had decided to start studying again. Fine. That would be some good news that Tony could use to sweeten the pill when he called the kid’s father to demand his money, while the fact that he was aware of it provided conclusive proof that he was tirelessly on the job, fulfilling his promise to provide the assurance of knowing everything, always!
20
‘When I speak of mimicking mimesis, an exact parallel is to be found in contemporary cosmology, where there is much discussion about the problem of the apparent “fine-tuning” of our observable universe. Since any appeal to a divine author, with an independent existence hors du texte, is clearly out of the question, scientists have advanced and indeed largely accepted the so-called multiverse or “all possible worlds” theory. This postulates an infinite number of parallel universes exhausting every conceivable permutation of the physical constants. It is thus unsurprising that we happen to find ourselves in the statistically insignificant instance where those constants are such as to make human life possible. This is the only universe that we can experience, but in order to make sense of its apparently purposeful calibration we must–I repeat, must–presume the existence of all possible variants, since any other outcome is a nonsense a priori.
‘By analogy, each text necessarily implies the existence of an infinite number of other and in many cases contradictory texts. Over a century ago, Nietzsche proclaimed that “There is no such thing as facts, only interpretation”. In one or another parallel universe, Noam Chomsky’s notorious example of a grammatically correct yet semantically meaningless statement, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”, would sound as banal as “The cat sat on the mat”. Hence the inherent instability of any given interpretation, despite the competing claims of the various class, power and gender structures that it might appear to endorse.’
The lecture hall was a classic seventeenth-century aula resembling the theatres and opera houses of that period: chaste, intimate, and with perfect acoustics. Professor Edgardo Ugo’s conversational voice carried, without any effort or amplification, to the seat high in the back row where Rodolfo Mattioli sat. He knew that he would be invisible to Ugo from there, but he was in any case wearing Vincenzo’s scuffed leather jacket once again, this time to avoid recognition.
Professor Ego, as he was known to students and fellow academics alike, had now reached his peroration. Characteristically, this combined witty and learned references to Eugenio Montale, the video game Final Fantasy X-2, Roman Jakobson, the Schrödinger’s cat paradox, St Thomas Aquinas, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, transcendental number theory and the Baghdad blogger. He then accepted the plaudits of his audience with an equally characteristic gesture indicating that while he understood, as they of course did, that none of this was of any real importance, they also understood that nothing else was either. Or as Ugo liked to put it, adapting Oscar Wilde, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us no longer pretend to be looking at the stars’.
Rodolfo filed out with the rest of the auditors, several of whom glanced at him with embarrassment, and then looked away. The news of his expulsion from Ugo’s course had clearly got around the other students involved. He was now taboo. If only they knew, he thought, fingering the pistol pocketed in the leather jacket. The previous evening Rodolfo had extracted and carefully examined the weapon he had discovered concealed behind the books in his room. It was a very high-quality piece of hardware, of Soviet origin judging by the red star on the grip, and to all appearances brand-new, but a faint odour of cordite in the barrel and the fact that there were only seven cartridges in the magazine, which was designed to hold eight, suggested that it had been fired at least once.
Rodolfo was no novice when it came to guns. On his arduous ascent through the lower echelons of the post-war construction business in Puglia, his father had been obliged to learn how to maintain and use a variety of firearms. He had passed this knowledge on to Rodolfo as a father-son bonding exercise, taking the boy out into the wilds from their country property for target practice. He had graduated from cans and bottles to vermin and birds, and in hopes of pleasing his father had developed into quite an accomplished shooter.
Well, today he was going to put those long-neglected skills to the test. He walked down the corridor and staircases with the rest of the student throng, amusing himself abstractly with the thought that at any moment he could kill seven of them. That wasn’t going to happen, of course. Apart from anything else, the random, motiveless crime was so last century, one of the great clichés of modernism both artistically and politically. Someone like Vincenzo, who hadn’t realised that the only stars he could see were the flashes in his head as a result of collapsing in the gutter, might still get a kick out of that sort of thing, but not Rodolfo. His acte was not going to be gratuite so much as in omaggio. His gestural rhetoric would be flawless, and then he would catch the first southbound train, turn up on the family doorstep at dawn, admit his academic disgrace and humiliation and beg his father to give him a real job.
After his weekly lecture, Rodolfo knew, Edgardo Ugo left the building by a side door leading to the bicycle shed reserved for the faculty. There the professor retrieved his machine and cycled the short distance to his town house to relax and prepare for lunch. Rodolfo therefore posted himself at the gate lead
ing from this area to the main street. He himself didn’t have a bicycle, but he had noted in the past that, in keeping with the traditions of his city, Ugo proceeded on two wheels at a civilised, leisurely pace barely faster than a brisk jog. What with the inevitable traffic delays, Rodolfo had no doubts about his ability to keep up with his quarry for the kilometre or so separating the university from Ugo’s bijou residence in Via dell’Inferno. And there, he thought to himself, remembering Vincenzo’s taunting remark, I’ll give the smug bastard something to interpret.
21
Gasping in pain, he lurched to his feet, overturning the row of stools like so many dominoes, and ripped open his shirt. Beneath the violated fabric of his belly, mighty worms stirred. The flesh glowed incandescently red and yellow, casting into black outline the scalpel scar curved like a question mark about his navel. Then the overstrained sutures finally unclasped, releasing a scalding discharge of foul-smelling pus and blood that drenched the other diners, all of whom carried on eating and chatting as if nothing at all had happened, which in fact it hadn’t.
‘Caffè, liquore?’ enquired the waiter.
Zen shook his head peremptorily. There was a sudden burst of laughter and one of the people perched at the counter near by pointed to the huge flat-screen television displaying images of a bearded man dressed as a chef running wildly about in a kitchen on fire. The dangling TV was all of a piece with the high concept behind the eatery, in effect a very pricey snack bar with deliberately uncomfortable furniture, a selection of wines by the glass at by-the-bottle prices, and patrons who apparently relished colluding with the staff in creating a spuriously sophisticated atmosphere of mutual disdain. All this tucked away on a narrow cobbled street that went nowhere in particular, with a frontage that was diffident in the extreme. Not for the first time, Zen reflected that while prostitution might be the oldest trade in the world, the catering business ran it a close second, and that there were other similarities.
But none of this was of any importance compared with the fact that he was still alone. Well over an hour now, and no sign of Gemma. He had tried repeatedly calling her mobile, but either the battery had run out or it was switched off. After waiting thirty minutes, he had ordered the dish of the day–he couldn’t even remember now what it had been–and eaten it with a morose appetite. He checked her text message again. There it was, the name and address of this ghastly place, even the phone number. Impossible there could be any mistake. Anyway, she had the number of his mobile, which he had left turned on all this time. The only possible conclusion, therefore, was that she had deliberately stood him up. He hadn’t expected anything quite so crude from Gemma, even at her worst, but there it was.
He had already asked for his bill when the door opened and in she walked, wearing a stylish but rather stern outfit. Her face, by contrast, was flushed and open, and her manner bubbling with barely suppressed hilarity.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she cried, collapsing at the table and lighting a cigarette. ‘You’ll never guess what happened! Or did you see it?’
She burst into laughter, which turned to a long series of coughs, during which the supercilious waiter appeared.
‘Nothing, thanks,’ she said, waving him away.
‘You don’t want to eat?’ asked Zen.
‘I grabbed a panino at a bar near the exhibition grounds while I was waiting. There wasn’t a taxi to be had for ages, of course.’
She erupted with laughter again.
‘Did you see what happened?’
Zen stared at her, still half-suspecting a trap, but her defences were clearly down. The only problem was that he still had no idea what she was talking about.
‘See? Where?’
‘On TV.’
Gemma pointed to the screen, now showing the President of the Republic inspecting a guard of honour in the quaintly ornate capital of some eastern European state which had recently come in from the cold war.
‘Caffè, liquore?’ enquired the waiter, surfacing again with such animus that they both relented to the extent of ordering coffees.
‘You have no idea what I’m talking about, have you?’ said Gemma, laughing again. ‘You must be the only person in the country who doesn’t!’
She reached over and touched Zen’s wrist on the tabletop, only for a moment, but enough to set off another of the intestinal twinges which reminded him again of that scene from a science fiction film they had once rented on video, where one of the crew of a spaceship discovers in the most unpleasant way that an alien parasite is nesting in his innards.
‘You know that TV show you hate?’ she went on blithely. ‘Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta? Well, I’d heard that the star was going to be performing live today at the food fair that’s on here, so I naturally took advantage, seeing that I was coming up anyway.’
Zen nodded.
‘To see me,’ he murmured.
Gemma’s expression blurred for a moment.
‘Well, actually Stefano asked me to come up over the weekend. Some domestic business he wants to discuss. You know about him and Lidia, right? They’re living here in Bologna and apparently something has happened. I’m pretty sure I can guess what it is, but of course they want to make a big fuss about it, and rightly so. Anyway, it meant I could see you, and also drop in on this mano a mano between Rinaldi and Ugo. Of course no one thought that it would be any contest. I mean, the biggest celebrity chef in the country up against a total amateur!’
She laughed, throwing back her head and revealing her beautiful throat.
‘Well, guess what? It was indeed no contest, because the contest never took place!’
Their coffees were gracelessly delivered. Zen slurped his, lit a cigarette, and tried his best to enter into the spirit of whatever this was.
‘Did one of them cancel at the last minute?’ he asked.
‘Much better than that. Or worse. Ugo just pottered around his kitchen, getting on with the job and not making a fuss about it. In fact I sort of liked him. He looked all sweet and cuddly and a bit incompetent, not at all what I’d imagined from trying to read that impossible novel that everyone bought and then pretended they’d read. In fact I wouldn’t mind running into him while I’m here in Bologna.’
‘I don’t imagine there’s much chance of that.’
‘Of course not, but a girl can dream. Anyway, over on the other side of the stage, Lo Chef was doing his usual act, all very dramatic and “look at me”, chatting up the audience the whole time and then breaking into some fake operatic aria. Unfortunately he gets so carried away that he forgets he has left a pan full of oil on the stove, and right in the middle of one of his big numbers it goes up in flames! The set itself was obviously cobbled together at the last minute from flimsy wooden panels and they’re ablaze before anyone can do anything about it. Next thing, the auditorium is filled with smoke, fire alarms are going off everywhere and the whole place has to be evacuated. And I mean the whole fiera site, the entire Enogastexpo show! Thousands of people milling around in the car parks, the fire engines pouring in, police helicopters overhead, utter chaos!’
Zen let a few moments elapse before saying, ‘So tonight you’re seeing your son and his…’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s that about?’
Gemma looked at him with a slightly coy smile.
‘Well, Stefano didn’t want to say on the phone, but I have a feeling that I may be going to become a grandmother.’
Zen grazed on this thought for some time.
‘Which would make me…’ he finally began.
‘Nothing.’
They confronted each other for a moment over this.
‘Nothing at all,’ said Gemma in a harder voice. ‘We’re not married, and for that matter neither are they. So it’s of no consequence at all, really. To you, at least.’
Zen tried to think of something suitable to say.
‘Are you staying the night?’ he managed at last.
Gemma shook her head.
Zen gave her the look he often used on a suspect who had just revealed more than he knew.
‘So she wears the trousers,’ he said.
Another moment of confrontation.
‘They’re a couple,’ Gemma said very distinctly, as though speaking to a foreigner with a limited understanding of the language.
‘But she’s in charge,’ Zen insisted.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘She owns the house, cara. Just like you.’
Their eyes met, and he instantly realised that he’d gone too far. A moment later he felt another pang in his gut and saw a chance to lighten the mood.
‘Get out!’ he ordered the imaginary resident alien with an exaggerated gruffness that was intended to be comic. ‘Get out, get out!’
But Gemma had forgotten the movie involved in this reference and couldn’t have been expected to understand the connection anyway. Assuming that Zen was addressing her, she sprang to her feet and ran to the door.
22
Edgardo Ugo was cycling home, when something happened.
He was feeling serene and light-hearted, totally at ease with himself, with the city he knew so well and loved so much, and with life in general. To his utter amazement, he had scored an incontrovertible triumph in the much-publicised contest with Rinaldi. Admittedly this had been due to the other man’s unbelievable incompetence, but the result had been no less conclusive. Let the bastard try and sue him now! After that, refusing to comment on the proceedings to the throng of journalists clustered outside the evacuated exhibition centre, he had taken a cab straight to the university and delivered his famous weekly lecture with his usual calm professionalism, as though he’d just returned from a visit to the library.
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