In the lobby she found today’s Corriere della Sera and entered the quiet dining hall with its high ceiling, where she attracted the inevitable, polite attention from the other very differently dressed guests. Sabrina didn’t care. After turning up as an emo in Emporio di Massimiliano Di Luca, nothing would ever be as embarrassing again.
People instinctively avoided her at the colossal buffet, and she forced herself to pile her plate high with scrambled eggs, bacon, bread, cheese, butter and jam.
She drank juice and coffee, munching her breakfast mechanically without tasting it as she flicked through the newspaper. She found the ad halfway down the third column, and was about to turn over when she spotted an almost identical ad a little further down. Only two stars after the word ‘Minerva’. No telephone number. No ‘Milan’ or other geographical location. Sabrina checked her new mobile. There had been no calls while she showered.
In the absence of any better interpretations, she had assumed that the number of stars after ‘Minerva’ referred to the four weeks in a month. Today was the 11th of September; the front page of the newspaper was divided between the ninth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, the murders on the Como Express and a suicide bomb in a market in Baghdad, so perhaps she should have limited her entry to two stars. But then again the number of stars – which she was sure wasn’t coincidental – could mean so many things.
She folded the newspaper, glanced around the dining hall without noticing anything unusual, and stroked the newspaper absent-mindedly with a finger.
A hotel side exit took her to Via Agnello; she pulled her hood up and walked slowly around the back of the building and into Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. There were few people in the shopping arcades so early in the day, which suited her fine. Identifying potential tails when the streets were practically empty was much easier. At one point her heart skipped a beat when out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure who could have been Nestore Raspallo. The acute joy ambushed and shocked her, and she cursed herself – yet she could not help turning around to look for him while forbidden joy bubbled up inside her despite her self-reproach. But the figure was gone.
She ended up in front of an exclusive menswear shop. The shop assistants were getting ready to open. Behind the counter she spotted one of the two surveillance cameras that had been the mute eyewitnesses to the disappearance of Lucia and Salvatore Forlani – accompanied by her beloved father. She turned around and examined the lifts opposite. There were four, with stainless steel doors and two sets of illuminated buttons.
She went over to them.
One of the lifts opened with a ping and startled her.
A Filipino cleaner looked at her in surprise. She wheeled her cart out of the lift and Sabrina looked inside. No power on earth could make her enter that lift. She smiled to the woman and began a short conversation, which despite some language problems resulted in the cleaner photographing Sabrina with her own mobile next to the lifts with many smiles and gestures.
Sabrina thanked her and offered the small woman a €10 note for her troubles, but she refused to accept it.
*
The zombie behind the counter of the Internet café recognized her and nodded when the door closed behind her. Sabrina could have sworn that the two boys from the other day hadn’t moved an inch from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in her absence.
He handed her a frosted can of Coke from the fridge without asking, and she sat down in front of a vacant computer and transferred the photograph taken in the Galleria to the PC via her mobile’s mini USB cable. Sabrina knew that she was exactly 167 centimetres tall. Her boots made it 168.5 centimetres. She had been standing close to the lift door when the cleaner had taken the picture and with the help of a simple drawing programme she could calculate the height of the lift door accurately.
According to her father’s passport he had been 175 centimetres tall in his stockinged feet. She cut and pasted the old recording from the surveillance cameras into the photo-editing programme and froze the sequence at the moment when her father passed the lift door and confronted Lucia and Salvatore Forlani. She moved the grid over the image. The man in the oilskin jacket was exactly 176.5 centimetres tall. Her father would obviously have been wearing shoes or boots. She sighed, and drained the Coke. Her father’s flat cap matched the one in the pictures exactly. Everything added up. Her own father had been the last person to see Lucia and Salvatore Forlani alive. Apart from L’Artista, of course.
*
The streets were already filled with cars, trucks, scooters, motorbikes and pedestrians, the deafening noise of traffic and voices; Sabrina felt overwhelmed, invaded, breathless. She knew that even the cathedral, her usual place of refuge, would be packed with tourists, gesticulating guides, nuns on pilgrimage and groups of schoolchildren. So without further ado she continued across the cathedral square, hailed a cab and asked to be taken to Milan’s Lambrate Station. She went into the ladies’ lavatory and left immediately. She was hoping to wrong-foot anyone who might be watching her, but no one at the busy commuter station staggered, turned around, changed direction or behaved suspiciously.
She drank some more coffee, bought a one-way ticket and found a vacant seat on the 11.25 a.m. regional service to Bergamo, forty kilometres north-east of Milan; the D’Avalos family’s ancestral home for the last 1,200 years, and a town she knew inside out.
The fashion house had taken a deep breath – and was holding it: in twenty-six days, four hours and twenty-two minutes the carnival procession would dance through the streets of Milan unveiling Di Luca’s summer collection. Everyone expected it to be the triumph it always was. Front and centre pages in every exclusive fashion magazine would be cleared by those editors and photographers who had been lucky enough to be invited and the designs would make every rival designer contemplate suicide or a career change. A gigantic digital clock suspended in the old factory hall showed the countdown to a hundredth of a second. The mood was tense and heightened, but not feverish. The fever would set in three or four days before the procession. Assistants, stylists and seamstresses would dart around with their pin cushions, beauty boxes, tape and scissors, tear around the city in taxis or riding pillion on messengers’ scooters, their mobiles glued to their ears, clutching bottles of Evian water and labelled bags with G-strings, bras, dresses, shoes and stockings for each model’s change. Some models would change up to eight times behind the runway, redo their hairstyle and makeup, and replace every item of clothing, shoes, bags, accessories and jewellery.
Of course everyone loved the hysteria, the rows, the occasional fist fights between the prima donnas – male and female – the tweaking, the improvisations, the disasters and the last minute rescues – as long as the collection was a success. In the days that followed the show and its after-parties everyone would lie comatose in their own homes, in the beds of total strangers, in hotels or in flats commandeered at short notice before they would be summoned back to work and the models would move on to new assignments like flocks of exotic migrating birds.
But now, when the staff needed their maestro more than ever, their great helmsman, Massimiliano Di Luca, was strangely absent-minded, irritable and distracted and the stress spread like ripples in the water.
‘Yellow? Chintz, organza or organdie, maestro?’
The head seamstress, Signora Zeffirelli, watched him as she waited and the nervous junior designers held their breath, adjusted their large spectacles and exchanged looks. For some reason all the men in the Emporium this autumn wore their hair short and sported large glasses even if they had perfect vision, dressed in cheap T-shirts, but expensive Seven jeans. Di Luca assumed they were all hoping to be mistaken for Marc Jacobs. Balancing on towering heels, and motionless in the middle of the enormous work table in the central dressmaker’s workshop, the tall model watched the Venetian like everyone else. She held up a hand to stifle a yawn. She was wearing what everyone expected would be the collection’s pièce de résistance, a formidabl
e rebuttal of every rumour of the master’s waning sense of style and creative powers, his bravura number: the wedding dress. A dream of silk, organza and organdie, layer upon layer of light, clearly defined, more architecture than haute couture, a masterpiece both in terms of artistry and engineering. The thirty-something petticoats had been made weightless and kept their shape through a system of unique, vertical organza pockets while the silk bodice wrapped itself lovingly and asymmetrically around the model’s torso. A lattice of black velvet ribbons embroidered with brilliants and pearls wound its way through the bodice and the crackling white petals that covered the petticoats. The dress was adorned with 1,250 brilliants and 1,400 small pearls.
Massimiliano Di Luca walked slowly around the table, and the seamstresses and junior designers stepped aside. He nodded to an engineer from Aero Sekur, one of the world’s leading parachute manufacturers. The man returned his smile. His daughter was one of Di Luca’s assistants and it was she – an experienced parachute jumper – who had drawn Di Luca’s attention to the new types of parachutes with air-filled pockets whose fabric had a rigidity that kept the parachute open even under varying wind conditions.
Dior. Di Luca had returned to Christian Dior – for whom he harboured colossal respect – as he always did when he was in a crisis, felt exhausted, lost for ideas and drained of inspiration. The brilliant Frenchman had been active for only ten short years, but in Di Luca’s opinion he had never been surpassed. He had borrowed the principal idea behind the layered petticoats from a Dior wedding dress and had made the construction even lighter using the new parachute technology.
He completed his journey without generating a single constructive thought. His eyes kept returning to the open copy of today’s Corriere della Sera on the table. His mobile had rung three times from three different numbers, all unknown, which in itself was a form of identification: Giulio Forlani.
Slowly he ran his hand across his face. The stubble rasped against his palm. Approximately twenty pairs of eyes followed his hand. He folded his arms across his chest and pinched the bridge of his nose hard with his thumb and index finger.
He looked at Signora Zeffirelli, whose mouth opened slightly. She leaned forwards, afraid to miss a single syllable. He seemed to wave her away with his fingers and instead turned his gaze to Kevin, a new talent from Liverpool and the only one of those present in whom Di Luca saw any kind of potential. He was also the only one not wearing glasses. Kevin looked at him without expression. As far as Di Luca knew, the young man was happily married and heterosexual – the only complaint he had about him. Everything was so much easier when everyone had the same sexual orientation.
Personally, he had never really understood the appeal of the fashion industry. Young, star-struck people flocked to the houses in Milan and Paris like lemmings to a cliff edge, bringing with them their portfolios and dreams. Now more than ever, it would seem. He was besieged. But then again we live in a narcissistic age, he thought to himself, which in turn was probably what made it so hard for young people today to love each other or devote themselves to anything. It required a soul – or a personality at least – to lose yourself in something bigger. These days everyone was conceived in fertility clinics, designed to certain specifications and their unimaginative provenance gave them the mistaken belief that they were somehow unique, interesting or especially precious.
He shook his head.
Looked again at the open newspaper in the corner.
He beckoned the Englishman closer.
‘What would you have been doing now, Kevin? If you hadn’t ended up here, I mean.’
‘Designing cars.’
The young man smiled.
‘And you, maestro?’
Behind them the room exploded in shock.
‘You’ll probably find this hard to believe, Kevin, but once upon a time I was quite a talented basketball player.’
The boy looked the short fashion designer up and down.
‘I can see that, maestro,’ he said with a wide grin.
On the table the model swayed. She looked as if she had fallen asleep, or perhaps her blood sugar was low.
‘I’m taking the rest of the day off, Signora Zeffirelli,’ Di Luca said casually.
Everyone stood rigid as pillars of salt.
Signora Zeffirelli started to cry.
‘The collection, maestro?’
‘There’s plenty of time,’ he said, which everyone knew was a lie.
‘Yes, maestro.’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Kevin, you finish the wedding dress and the samba costumes. You know what to do.’
‘Of course, boss.’
‘Good. The rest of you do what Kevin tells you. No questions, no fighting, no backstabbing. Show some restraint and be professional – even though it’s not in your nature.’
Di Luca handed a handkerchief to Signora Zeffirelli so she could dry her tears, turned on his heel and disappeared.
But not without taking the newspaper with him.
CHAPTER 30
Bergamo
For Sabrina, Bergamo was where everything started.
She left the railway station and headed towards Città Alta – the upper, older town – with its impregnable city wall and the towers of Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica, the church where she and every other child in the D’Avalos family had been baptized.
The sand-and ochre-coloured house fronts were stacked on top of each other from the foot of the mountain to the old city behind the Venetian wall and, almost defying gravity, further up to the bell tower of Palazzo della Ragione. The evening sun stood at right angles to Bergamo’s pale walls and Sabrina knew that Città Alta lit up the west-facing Lombardy plain like a mirage.
She walked through Città Basso – Bergamo’s lower town – along Viale Vittorio Emanuele II. Everything was named after that man, she thought; from the container quay in Naples to the Galleria in Milan. Together with Giuseppe Garibaldi he was the architect behind the united Italy and the country’s first king. As far as Sabrina recalled, his primary stroke of genius had been to appoint Count Camillo di Cavour as Prime Minister and leave the running of the country to him. After which he could spend his time tending to his monumental beard and sit for portraits and equestrian statues.
In Via Porte Dipunta she bought a ticket to the one-hundred-year-old orange funicular that rode up the mountain, through the city wall to Piazza Mercato delle Scarpe. An elevation of only fifty-eight metres, but a journey through six centuries.
She thought Di Luca would have felt at home on the chequerboard that was Piazza Vecchia. This square was Venice without the canals, flooding, exorbitant prices, Russian and Chinese nouveaux riches and gondolas. Crisp, light, Venetian-style buildings surrounded the square; architecture better suited to exquisite patisserie, she had always thought.
Sabrina walked across to the Contarini Fountain, tossed a coin in the water and made a wish as always. She would never have believed that she would be making today’s wish, or that it would be the most pressing of all her desires.
She walked through Città Alta’s narrow streets as darkness fell over the city and the spotlights under the monumental buildings were turned on. Too restless to sit, too restless to eat or drink. Instead she sought out the old buildings, statues, streets, steps and views that had made up her own private world from her earliest childhood, when her family visited the town. When she was a student she would often catch the afternoon train to Bergamo when Milan became unbearably noisy, crowded, alien and hot. And Sabrina experienced a strange feeling of invincibility when she found everything in its rightful place.
The family’s old house in Via Solata was now a spa and beauty salon. An overconfident great-grandfather had placed the deeds to the house on black rather than red in accordance with an infallible mathematical system of his own invention at the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo. His bones now rested in the small, picturesque cemetery behind the casino in the company of other incurable and ruined gamblers who had
put a bullet through their brains on the casino’s terrace – but the house remained lost, and his bitter descendants had torn his photos out of the family albums and exiled him from their history. The D’Avalos family still fasted each year on 13 December, the day when her great-grandfather’s fatal error of judgement had forever and shamefully driven the family from Bergamo.
Sabrina looked at the front of the house and, on impulse, went inside. The place did exactly what she had hoped for: switched off her brain for an hour and a half, as she discovered that she also had a body. A body that was waxed, exfoliated, massaged, moisturized, awakened and spoiled rotten.
Glowing, she left the sanctuary and went back to Piazza Vecchia. It might be because the streets sloped downwards or it might be the skilful massage therapists and beauticians, but later she couldn’t remember touching the cobblestones as she floated across the square. She found a vacant room in a B&B in Via Salvecchio. The woman who checked her in was also running a small bar crammed with impatient and thirsty students. Bearing in mind the words of He Who Must Not Even Be Thought About, she paid cash and the woman was too busy to ask for ID.
She got her key, walked up the stairs, threw her rucksack on the bed and went out again immediately.
She found a quiet corner in a restaurant near the hotel and was halfway through a portion of linguini and a welcome glass of Brunello when her mobile rang. She accidentally bit the inside of her cheek.
‘Pronto?’
‘Janus?’
A man.
‘Er … yes. Yes. Minerva?’
An almost inaudible sigh. Sabrina could hear traffic noise in the background.
‘I’m Minerva. Who are you?’
‘I’m Assistant Public Prosecutor Sabrina D’Avalos from the public prosecutor’s office in Naples, signore.’ The words nearly tumbled over each other. ‘I have—’
‘You’re in Milan?’ he interrupted her.
‘Bergamo, signore.’
‘Why Bergamo?’
When the Dead Awaken Page 19
