‘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.’
CHAPTER 18
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.’
Sabrina nodded.
‘I don’t feel sor
ry for the fashion industry, Signor Di Luca. You failed to act because everyone could tell a cheap fake from the real thing. Besides, the Camorra handled recruitment and disciplined your workforce, they murdered trade union leaders and local politicians and mayors, they circumvented all environmental regulations for you, thus helping you to keep down production costs in Di Luca’s factories. Way down.’
The designer narrowed his eyes. As if she had been a little out of focus before.
‘That’s the popular version, but there is a simpler one, signorina: mortal fear. Rubens Daniele was the most principled of all of us and he refused the Camorra its pound of flesh. He was with me for several years and he took my best model, Mona, from me and married her. Mona was my model for ten years. I thought about her when I designed. Lagerfeld has Daria Werbowy and Raquel Zimmermann, Valentino has Karolina Kurkova and Oscar de la Renta has Jacquetta Wheeler. They’re essential.’
He looked down.
‘Mona disappeared exactly like Lucia Forlani, and Rubens subsequently committed suicide. Something like that makes an impression. Inevitably. That day I promised myself to drive the Camorra out of La Camera. I pinned my hopes on Nanometric for that reason.’
He looked at Sabrina.
‘The killings also sent another message. There were no repercussions. No one was ever charged.’
‘You’re right,’ he continued. ‘At the start we didn’t think bootleg copies were a problem. Anyone could see the quality of the fake products was poor and the people who bought them were teenagers, glamour models, Filipino maids, trainee hairdressers or office juniors. Not a clientele we would ever want to serve. Today no one can tell the difference. The same seamstresses, shoemakers, leather workers who make official Armani products during the day carry on working for the Chinese at night. Why? Because they’re the best in the world. You’ve heard the astronomical figures, signorina, and they’re correct. Members of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana employ 700,000 people in 7,000 businesses in this country with an annual turnover of €54 billion. But the bootleg industry is snapping at our heels and their turnover has risen by 1,700 per cent since 1993. The Camorra are close to slaughtering the golden calf. Us, that is.’
Di Luca chewed the inside of his cheek.
‘And who can really blame a young woman for paying €300 for a fake Gucci bag in a garage rather than the official €1,300 in the flagship store down on Via dei Condotti if there is essentially no difference?’
‘It just seems insane and short-sighted,’ Sabrina said, and blushed. She was herself the owner of a Prada bag and an Alberta Ferretti dress with a rather dubious provenance.
‘You think that because you’re simultaneously underestimating and overestimating the Camorra, signorina. The Cosa Nostra don’t try to keep addicts alive so they’ll carry on buying heroin. Customer service isn’t a concept they’re particularly worried about. When our industry has died, they’ll start selling coffins, bridges, roads, wind turbines, CO2 quotas or drinking water. It makes no difference. It’s merely a question of restructuring.’
CHAPTER 19
The Bentley pulled up outside Dal Pescatore and Massimiliano Di Luca walked across the restaurant’s shaded courtyard like a watch about to stop. Before they had left the car Sabrina had told him where Lucia and Salvatore Forlani had been found and how they had died.
Conversations between the other restaurant guests died in their wake. Of course everyone recognized Massimiliano Di Luca, but his hooded companion with the sunglasses was delightfully enigmatic. An unknown daughter? A charity case? A new wunderkind to replace his recently departed chief designer? This month’s flavour of puttane? Boy or girl?
The fashion king’s private dining room was bare like a monastic cell, furnished purely with the essentials. The only object in the room that had no useful purpose, strictly speaking, was a Swiss cuckoo clock in the corner, the home of an ancient wooden cuckoo that carried out its duties with breathtaking inaccuracy.
The table was set for one person only.
Massimiliano Di Luca stopped just inside the door, which closed silently behind them and looked at the table.
‘Did you know that I kept having the table set for Giulio for many months? I kept thinking that he would come back one day.’
He gestured to the empty chair.
‘Though there is no need to point this out, I’m not very tall, but Giulio was a giant. The furniture represents a compromise. My feet dangled an inch above the floor and Giulio’s knees scraped the tabletop. That’s the nature of compromise. A state that satisfies no one, but which leaves everyone with the consoling certainty that everybody else has also been screwed.’
They sat down and Sabrina watched Di Luca’s hands which were busy polishing the already shiny cutlery with the napkin. He arranged the implements with precise accuracy in front of him, and held up his right hand the very second the aubergine-coloured, silk-wrapped menu was placed there by the chef herself, the legendary Nadia Santini.
‘I brought a guest, signora. She’ll be joining me.’
Sabrina smiled politely at the chef.
‘And no, she isn’t a Romanian street orphan I picked up on the way, but an assistant public prosecutor from Naples, PhD law graduate, etc.,’ Di Luca said.
‘With distinction,’ Sabrina added.
‘With distinction,’ he said.
Signora Santini smiled warmly: ‘Of course, dottoressa.’
‘One menu will suffice.’
Di Luca looked at Sabrina.
‘Will you permit me to order for you?’
‘Yes, please.’
The designer concentrated and marked the menu with his Mont Blanc pen before passing it to Sabrina.
‘Do you approve?’
‘It looks delicious. I’m looking forward to it,’ she said.
The designer had marked the chosen dishes with tiny stars.
‘I really thought we had reached a crossroads with Nanometric’s invention,’ he began. ‘That when it was finally fully developed, it would mean an end to bootleg products.’
‘Which would solve the Di Luca Paradox.’
‘Exactly.’
In a famous interview with The Economist, the designer had explained his doctrine, later known as the ‘Di Luca Paradox’: that the distance from the mediocre to the best was always shorter than the distance from the best to the mediocre. If you are used to wearing Di Luca, it is difficult to go back to off-the-peg clothes. If you have lived with a sea view, it is hard to settle for a backyard. The paradox is that in order to appreciate the best, you need to have experienced mediocrity. People privileged from birth valued nothing at all.
‘Nanometric’s concept was beautiful,’ he said. ‘Giulio always said that he knew he was on the right track when the equations started to become beautiful.’
‘And did they?’
‘Yes, but it took him and Batista years. They didn’t make real progress until two international breakthroughs. The first happened at the University of Manchester where Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov invented graphene and later graphane, a man-made substance one atom thick and stronger than steel. The next breakthrough took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Professor Mai Luán and her team began to train nanocrystals to behave predictably. Giulio Forlani had studied at MIT and knew Mai Luán. The two ideas were ideally matched, but it was Giulio and Batista who were able to make them work together.’
He drank from his water glass and Sabrina copied him. Her fingertips left moist, dewy marks on the side of the glass.
‘In our industry as in many others, we’ve tried everything to proof our products against forgery: complicated engravings, watermarks, copper threads, seals, holograms and so on. Without much success. Nanometric’s invention was, quite simply, the answer.’
Sabrina nodded.
Insalata di fagiolini gialli patate e tartufo was slipped in on the service plates and cold Pinot Grigio poured into their glasses. They toasted each
other and Massimiliano Di Luca took the napkin from the table and tucked it into the neck of his shirt. The master ate three microscopic mouthfuls, which he chewed at the front of his mouth. He pushed the plate away and looked at Sabrina who was also eating like an ailing monk. ‘We’re like two ten-year-olds at a high-class brothel,’ he said. ‘A total waste. And, anyway, the beans are too salty. I’ve said so before.’
‘Are you feeling unwell, maestro?’
He looked up and smiled.
‘A little, signorina.’
‘The nanocrystals. How do they work?’
‘They must be triggered by a ray of light. Like a clock being wound up. It’s photo-induced conversion of nanoprisms, to be precise. The technology behind it is simultaneously very complicated and very simple. The crystals or the prisms have been extracted – “chipped” – by silicium, silver and glass. They’re invisible as single strands, but can be arranged in vast crystal grids by charging the ions on their surface. They merge and become visible to the human eye.’
Sabrina opened her purse and pushed the magic strip across the table. Massimiliano Di Luca stared at it. Carefully he picked it up and his eyes grew moist.
‘May I ask how you got this?’
‘Of course, but I can’t tell you.’
He nodded and examined the black film. He emptied his wine glass and a noiseless waiter refilled it immediately.
‘Leave us, please,’ Di Luca said.
Sabrina sipped her wine. It was starting to take effect. She pushed the wine glass away and picked up her water glass instead. Her fingers were dry now.
‘Batista and Giulio were able to make the grid or the strings form numbers and letters,’ Di Luca said slowly. ‘They could make them change colour and shape with the precision of an atomic clock.’
‘Every night at midnight,’ she said.
When the Dead Awaken Page 12
