you will find my name on it, seeing as I am presenting this evening's event. If you want me to, I'll leave. But when they ask me why I didn't come, I'll tell them that . . . What's your name again?’
Luckily an attendant, with a blonde pageboy haircut and wearing a blue suit, appeared. As soon as she recognised her favourite author, with his rebellious fringe and big green eyes sitting astride the old-style Vespa, she almost fell over.
‘Let him through! Let him through!’ she screeched in a thin, high-pitched voice. ‘Don't you know who this is? It's Fabrizio Ciba!’ Then, her legs stiff with excitement, she walked up to the writer. ‘I sincerely apologise. Oh God, this is so terribly embarrassing! I'm so sorry. I'd just gone off for a second and you arrived out of nowhere . . . I'm sorry, I'm so sorry . . . I . . .’
Fabrizio lavished the girl with a smug smile.
The attendant looked at her watch and rubbed her hand across her forehead. ‘It's very late. Everybody will be expecting you. Please, go, go.’ She shoved the bouncer out of the way, and as Fabrizio passed by her she shouted: ‘Afterwards, would you mind signing a copy of your book for me?’
Ciba left the Vespa in the parking area and walked towards the villa, his footsteps as light as those of a middle-distance runner.
A photographer, camouflaged behind the laurel bushes, popped out onto the tree-lined avenue and ran towards him.
‘Fabrizio! Fabrizio, do you remember me?’ He began following the writer. ‘We had dinner together in Milano in that Osteria . . . La compagnia dei naviganti? I invited you to come to my dammuso on Pantelleria and you said that you might come . . .’
The writer raised an eyebrow and gave the scruffy hippie, covered in cameras, the once over.
‘Of course I remember . . .’ He didn't have the faintest idea who the man was. ‘Sorry, but I'm late. Maybe some other time. They're expecting me . . .’
The photographer didn't relent. ‘Listen, Fabrizio, while I was brushing my teeth I had a brilliant idea: I want to take some photos of you in an illegal dumping ground . . .’
Standing in the doorway of Villa Malaparte the editor Leopoldo Malagò and the head of public relations for Martinelli, Maria Letizia Calligari, were gesturing to him to hurry.
The photographer was struggling to keep up, with fifteen kilos of equipment hanging around his neck, but he wouldn't be deterred.
‘It's something out of the ordinary . . . striking . . . The garbage, the rats, the seagulls . . . Do you get it? The magazine, Venerdì di Repubblica . . .’
‘Maybe some other time. Excuse me.’
And he threw himself in between Malagò and Calligari. The photographer, exhausted, bent over holding his side.
‘Can I call you in the next couple of days?’
The writer didn't even bother to answer.
‘Fabrizio, you never change . . . The Indian got here an hour ago. And that pain in the arse, Tremagli, wanted to start without you.’
Malagò was pushing him towards the conference hall while Calligari tucked his shirt into his trousers and mumbled, ‘Look what you're wearing! You look like a tramp. The room is full. Even the Lord Mayor is here. Do your fly up.’
Fabrizio Ciba was forty-one years old, but everyone thought of him as the young writer. That adjective, frequently repeated by the newspapers and other media, had a psychosomatic effect on his body. Fabrizio didn't look any older than thirty-five. He was slim and toned without going to the gym. He got drunk every evening, but his stomach was still as flat as a table.
Leopoldo Malagò, nicknamed Leo, was thirty-five but looked ten years older, and that was being generous. He'd lost his hair at a tender age, and a thin layer of fluff stuck to his skull. His backbone had twisted into the shape of the Philippe Starck chair he spent ten hours a day sitting in. His cheeks sagged like a merciful curtain over his triple chin, and he'd astutely grown a beard, albeit not one bushy enough to cover the mountainous region. His stomach was as bloated as if someone had inflated it with an air-compressor. Martinelli obviously spared no expense when it came to feeding its editors. Thanks to a special credit card, they were free to gorge themselves in the best and most expensive restaurants, inviting writers, paper-smearers, poets and journalists to feasts disguised as work. The outcome of this policy was that the editors at Martinelli were a mob of obese bons vivants with constellations of cholesterol molecules floating freely through their veins. In other words, Leo – despite his tortoiseshell glasses and his beard that made him look like a New York Sephardim and his soft, marsh-green-coloured suits – had to rely on his power, on his unscrupulousness and his obtuse insistence for his romantic conquests.
The same did not apply to the women who worked for Martinelli. They began working in the publishing house as frumpy secretaries, and in the aggressive years they improved consistently thanks to enormous investments in themselves. By the time they reached fifty, especially if they had a high-profile position, they became algid, ageless beauties. Maria Letizia Calligari was an emblematic example. Nobody knew how old she was. Some said she was a young-looking sixty-year-old, some an old-looking thirty-eight-year-old. She never carried any identification with her. The gossipmongers whispered that she didn't drive simply to avoid having to carry her driving licence in her purse. Before the Schengen treaty came into force, she would go to the Frankfurt Book Fair by herself so that she didn't have to show her passport in front of any colleagues. But she had slipped up once. At a dinner party at the Turin Book Fair she accidentally mentioned that she had met Cesare Pavese – dead since 1950.
‘Please, Fabrizio, don't rush poor Tremagli as soon as you walk in the door,’ Maria Letizia urged.
‘Go on, show us your stuff. Kick his arse.’ Malagò pushed Fabrizio towards the conference hall.
Whenever Ciba walked into a venue, he used a secret ritual to get himself pumped. He thought about Muhammad Ali, the great boxer, about how he shouted and moved towards the ring encouraging himself: ‘I'm gonna kill him! I won't even give him the chance to look at me before he'll be down for the count.’ He did two little jumps on the spot. He cracked his neck. He tousled his hair. And, as charged as a battery, he walked into the grand affrescoed room.
3
The leader of the Wilde Beasts of Abaddon was at the wheel of his Ford Mondeo amidst traffic moving towards Capranica. The stretch of road was lined with shopping centres that stayed open late, and there were always delays. Usually, waiting in a traffic jam didn't worry Saverio. It was the only moment of the day when he could think about his own business in peace and quiet. But now he was running very late. Serena expected him for dinner. And he had to stop by the chemist's, too, and pick up some paracetamol for the twins.
He was thinking about the meeting. It would have been hard for it to go any worse than it did, and as per usual he had got himself into trouble all on his own. What made him think he should say that if he didn't bring in a plan within a week the sect could disband? He didn't have even a scrap of an idea, and it's common knowledge that laying down the guidelines for a Satanic mission takes time. He had recently tried to come up with some kind of plan, but nothing had occurred to him. Even the super-bargain month he'd organised at the furniture shop had been a washout, and he was still stuck there from morning till night, with the old man all over him as soon as he tried to take one step.
He had, though, stumbled on a bit of an idea a while ago:
