He remembered a green truck and a man in a large black coat with a long black beard and black boots, who had opened the door to the kitchen a couple of days later. He had taken him by the hand and lifted him up into the body of the truck, given him some sacks to cover himself with and a piece of bread to eat.
Ten lean, wild, black dogs were already lying on the floor of the truck. When he woke up, he was warm. He could see through the tear in the tarpaulin that the truck was driving down an endless, snow-covered road; the dogs had snuggled up to him and kept him warm with their bodies.
Later the boy learned that the man with the beard was called Hristo. He sold guard dogs to farmers. He was famous for his dogs all over western Albania – or so he claimed, after the second of his daily bottles of vodka. He had once sold a dog to the boy’s father and since his father’s disappearance he had occasionally stopped by to see the woman on the kitchen bench.
‘What was my mother like?’ the boy had asked once and was rewarded with a clip around the ear that nearly knocked him unconscious.
‘A good hooker,’ the man had said after giving it some thought. ‘Or rather … she wasn’t any good, but she was the only one south of Ohrid!’
He howled with laughter at his own wit and lay down to sleep with the dogs.
One day, while drunk, he had gone outside to urinate and fallen through the ice on a bog. The boy and the dogs had watched from the shore as the man’s face paled and his movements grew slower and less coordinated. He tried to wiggle out of his coat, pull off his boots, while he stared at them, screaming. Eventually Hristo fell silent even though his mouth was still open. Eventually, he was pulled under the ice by his waterlogged clothes. His fur cap continued to float on the surface of the water and the boy fished it out with a long stick. It was a good cap.
At a market in Berat the boy traded the dogs for a dancing bear.
There was another reason. An old restlessness, which other people might call fear, rumbled inside Savelli. For a shipwrecked, orphaned straniero, he had been incredibly lucky. He had had a fantastic career with the Terrasino family. But with great luck came an equally great debt of karma. It was inevitable. Urs Savelli was extremely conscious of the cosmic balance sheet. He knew he would have to pay the bill one day. The art was postponing that day to extreme old age, when nothing really mattered.
Lucia and Salvatore Forlani. Yes, they were dead. He had been there when it happened. And he had seen Baron Agostino D’Avalos shot and killed in the Alpine cabin. The old man had looked into his eyes while his pupils dilated and the last breath left his chest. Even though the Baron was dying, even though he knew he was beaten, Savelli had seen his own freshly dug grave in his fading green eyes. The old man’s gaze had promised him that.
Then there was Giulio Forlani, the genius physicist with his copyright protection invention that would have ruined everything for them.
Savelli closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cold windowpane. He grabbed the makila and swung it through the air. As always, a certain sense of reassurance flowed from the carved ivory bear on the handle, his totem.
Castellarano.
He rang a man in Naples and would appear to have caught him in the middle of lunch, because there was an infernal noise from a television, clattering cutlery, bickering children, and an outnumbered woman trying to control them.
‘Cesare?’
‘Yes.’
Savelli didn’t introduce himself. His voice sufficed. Cesare. Rarely had a name been more ill-chosen. This soldier was anything but aristocratic. A fat, psychopathic toad, who dressed in shiny, colourful sports clothes, also painfully ill-chosen. But Cesare did what he was told to, though his mental capacity would forever keep him in the Family’s lower echelons.
‘Cesare?’
‘Si, signore.’
‘Either you strangle your reptilian children and shoot your wife or you find a quiet place. This instant. Do you hear?’
A door was slammed shut in the flat in the Neapolitan suburb and Savelli could hear himself think again. An irritating slurping noise continued.
‘Cesare?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right now you’re picking semi-masticated beef from your molars with your fingers, am I right?’
‘Yes, signore.’
‘Do you think you could leave the animal alone and go back a few years with me? Do you think you could do that without overtaxing your brain powers?’
‘I think so, signore.’
‘Good.’
Savelli was a vegetarian.
‘Three years ago I gave you an entirely manageable task. You were to stop a green Škoda Octavia on the A7 south of Milan and take out its driver.’
‘And I did, signore.’
‘So you did, my friend.’
Savelli pressed his eyes shut.
‘This man. Are you absolutely sure that he was dead when you left him? Think very carefully before you answer. This is very, very important.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, what?’
‘I’m sure, signore.’
The words rolled out slowly.
‘Because you checked the pulse on his neck? You checked whether his pupils were reactive? That he had stopped breathing?’
‘He was a mess, signore. Completely smashed up. There was blood everywhere. I shot him twice. Once in the head and once in the chest. He was stone dead.’
‘So there was no pulse?’
Cesare was silent.
‘Was there a pulse, Cesare? Did his eyelid twitch? Was he breathing?’ Savelli insisted.
‘I’m sure, signore. Quite sure. I didn’t check those things you mention. I know if a man is dead or not from looking at him. There was no point.’
Savelli sighed.
‘Of course not, Cesare. Go back to your family. Don’t give it another thought.’
Cesare stuttered something, but Savelli ended the call and stretched out on the rough floor boards.
Figlio di puttana!
Savelli massaged his eyes and pondered his next move. He could ask Don Francesco for L’Artista. If she was given the job, the nosy little assistant public prosecutor Sabrina D’Avalos would be dead and gone within twenty-four hours. No power on earth could prevent it. But L’Artista was for very special occasions. A last resort. Don Francesco guarded her jealously.
The young woman who had helped them gain entry to Nanometric was an enigma: a fly constantly irritating Urs Savelli’s flank. She was the only person in the world he was scared of. Among the few facts he was allowed to know was that she had a daughter who was around six, that she was married to a disabled painter and that she lived with her family at a former cider press near Brescia. When Don Francesco told him about her over a glass of apricot liqueur, he had warned him under no circumstances to ever try to identify her.
‘She’s for the finer things, Urs. Delicate, difficult things. Things that can’t be solved with a baseball bat, a lupara or plastique, do you understand? And only for special occasions. She’s an athlete. Athletes must rest in order to give their best. I know you don’t like the idea of working with someone you don’t know well, Urs, but in her case you must make an exception.’
The captain had adopted a solemn expression and assured him that he understood – of course he did – while he thought about: (1) how much time the old man had left; (2) that these days no one ever used lupare, crudely sawn-off shotguns, as they had in the old man’s violent youth for close-up, ‘wet’ work, but machine pistols or automatic carbines; (3) that it was a long time since anyone had referred to plastic explosives as ‘plastique’; (4) that his status in the Council was promising when the devil finally decided to come for the old man; and (5) that he wouldn’t dream of working with, let alone trust, someone like L’Artista without knowing everything about her.
But an order was an order and the old man was still as dangerous as a cobra.
So Urs had hired a private detective in Milan to investigate her.
The middle-aged retired policeman had been told to follow the young, dark-haired woman late one night as she left a haulage company in Via Riccardo Pitteri in an eastern suburb of Milan. The haulage company transported eco bales for the Camorra; shrink-wrapped, unprocessed waste, from the city with more than a million inhabitants, was moved from one illegal rubbish tip to another in Italy while attracting generous state and local authority subsidies. An eternal, lucrative circle. The haulier had decided to hold back income from Milan City Council; money the Camorra believed they were entitled to. An example had to be made and Don Francesco had assigned the task to L’Artista.
Savelli had told the private detective to ignore the police scanners and any emergency vehicles that might turn up, and concentrate solely on the woman.
When the gunfire from the Portakabin that served as the haulier’s office died down and columns of flames from the torched trucks coloured the sky, the detective saw a figure leave the haulage company by scaling a high wire fence and jumping on a motorbike.
The detective threw his half-eaten sandwich out of the window, counted to twenty and started his anonymous Volvo.
The woman adhered to every traffic regulation and speed limit on her ride to the centre of Milan and the detective made sure that there were at least three vehicles between him and her motorbike.
He watched from a professional distance as the woman drove down the ramp into a multi-storey car park in Via Melzo. He assumed that she would shortly reappear behind the wheel of a car or on another motorbike. He knew the car park well and the only way in or out was this one underground ramp.
He was wrong.
The detective heard a click from his Volvo’s back door and the cool night air that flowed into the car made the hairs on his forearms stand up.
Three days later Urs Savelli had been woken by a frantic knocking on the door to his secret flat in Rome. He had arrived after midnight and was bleary-eyed when he opened the door to a stream of complaints from a distraught concierge. The woman was wringing her handkerchief in front of her red face. It could not go on. He, Signor Mela, would have to do something … immediately … subito! … There had – handkerchief pressed against the face – been … complaints … many … he couldn’t expect that decent people … the other residents in the block … would be able to tolerate – the handkerchief again – she would alert the authorities at this instant … if he didn’t immediately …
Savelli eventually managed to extract a relatively coherent explanation from her. The letterbox. The residents all had letterboxes in the lobby. He followed her downstairs, breathed in once in front of the square, grey letterboxes and ordered her back up the stairwell, citing a possible risk of infection. He unlocked his letterbox, paled and locked it again.
He decided to deal with the problem himself. He had veterinary training and considerable experience in handling decomposing organic material, he told the concierge. In his flat on the fifth floor Savelli found plastic gloves, tinfoil, bin bags and gaffer tape; he ran downstairs, ensuring that the concierge remained out of sight, and with difficulty eased the head of the private detective out of the letterbox. He wrapped the head in foil and put it in a bin bag, which he sealed with tape. Then he scooped a handful of wriggling, homeless maggots into another bag, dried the inside of the letterbox with copious amounts of kitchen towel and washed it down with ammonia and water.
As he drove away from the secret flat with the head of the private detective in his boot, he thought about the small apple wedged in between the detective’s teeth.
Savelli’s responsibility had been the containment and neutralizing of Forlani and Batista’s new and dangerous invention. He had suggested a political solution to the Council: that influential members of the Camorra should encourage politicians in Rome – a braying herd, as Don Francesco, ever the peasant, had called them – to suppress the technology in the usual manner: by appointing a government committee and producing an endless stream of white papers, considerations and provisional circulars until the Camorra had found a final solution.
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.’
CHAPTER 17
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.
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