of spontaneity that he bestowed upon his listeners. His mind was a forge open twenty-four hours a day. There was no filter, there was no depot, and when he started in on one of his monologues he captivated everyone: from the fisherman from Mazara del Vallo to the ski instructor from Cortina d'Ampezzo.
But that evening a bitter surprise was awaiting him. He read the first three lines of the summary and blanched. It spoke of a saga revolving around a family of musicians. All of them forced, thanks to an unfathomable destiny, to play the sitar for generations and generations.
He grabbed the Indian's book. The title was The Conspiracy of the Virgins. So why was the summary about A Life in the World?
A terrible realisation. The friend from Catanzaro had made a mistake! That dickhead had cocked it up and done the wrong book.
He devoured the blurb in desperation. There was no mention at all of sitar players, but of a family of women on the Andaman Islands.
And at that very moment, Tremagli terminated his monologue.
5
He was crushed that the Durendal which had cost him three hundred and fifty euro would end up above his father-in-law's fireplace. Saverio Moneta had bought the sword with the idea of slaying the caretaker of the Oriolo Cemetery, or in any case with the idea of using it as a sacrificial weapon for the blood rites of the sect.
The traffic moved forward at a walking pace. A row of palm trees, burned by the winter, were covered in coloured lights that twinkled on the bonnets of the Mercedes and Jaguars sitting in dealerships’ forecourts.
There must have really been an accident.
Saverio turned on the radio and began searching for the traffic station. A part of his brain was working ceaselessly in search of another plan of action to propose to Murder and the others.
And what if, for example, we murdered Father Tonino, the priest from Capranica?
His mobile began ringing again. Please . . . Serena . . . Not again? But the screen displayed the words ‘PRIVATE NUMBER’. It had to be the old bastard hiding his number in an attempt to fuck him over.
Egisto Mastrodomenico, Serena's father, was seventy-seven years old and yet he tapped away on the mobile phone and the computer keyboard like a sixteen-year-old boy. In his office on the top floor of the Furniture Store of the Thyrolean Master of the Axe, he had a whole battery of computers connected to video cameras, the likes of which would have made a Las Vegas casino-owner jealous. The productivity of the fifteen salesmen was monitored throughout the whole day, worse than being inside a reality TV show. And Saverio, who was the department manager of the Thyrolean furniture shop, had four cameras pointed on him alone.
No, I can't bear having to talk to him this evening. He turned the volume of the car radio up, trying to silence the phone.
Mantos hated his father-in-law with such intensity that he had got irritable bowel syndrome. Old Mastrodomenico used every opportunity to humiliate him, to make him feel like a poor wimp, a freeloader who held his job at the furniture store simply because he was married to the old man's daughter. He would insult him not just in front of his colleagues, but even in front of customers. Once, during a spring sale, he had called him a moron, shouting it into the overhead speaker system. Mantos's only consolation was knowing that sooner or later the bastard would snuff it. Then everything would change. Serena was an only child, which meant he would become the manager of the entire furniture shop. And yet a part of him had even started to wonder if the old man would ever die. He'd gone through it all. They'd removed his spleen. They'd ablated a sebaceous cyst from his ear and he nearly went deaf. He had an eye ravaged by cataracts. At the age of seventy-four years he had slammed his Mercedes at two hundred kilometres an hour against a tip-up truck waiting at the Agip petrol pump. He was in a coma for three weeks and he had come-to even more pissed off than before. Then they diagnosed him with intestinal cancer, but seeing as he was elderly the tumour was unable to spread. And if that didn't suffice, during the twins’ christening he had slipped on the steps in front of the church and broken his pelvic bone. Now he lived in a wheelchair and it was up to Saverio to take him to work in the morning and take him back home in the evening.
The phone kept ringing and throbbing in the tray next to the gearstick.
‘Fuck you!’ he growled, but that bloody sense of guilt written in his chromosomes forced him to answer. ‘Papa?’
‘Mantos.’
It wasn't the old man's voice. And there was no way that he knew about his Satanic identity.
‘Who's this?’
‘Kurtz Minetti.’
Upon hearing the name of the high priest of the Children of the Apocalypse Saverio Moneta closed his eyes and reopened them. He squeezed the steering wheel with his left hand and with his right the mobile phone, but it slipped out of his hand like a wet bar of soap, ending up between his legs. He took his foot off the clutch to get to the phone and the engine began hiccuping and turned itself off.
Behind him horns were honking while Saverio shouted at Kurtz: ‘Hang on . . . I'm driving. Hang on while I pull over.’
A motorcyclist on a big three-wheeled scooter knocked on the passenger window: ‘You realise you're a fuckwit?’
Saverio picked up the phone, started the engine again and managed to pull over.
What did Kurtz Minetti want from him?
6
As soon as Tremagli concluded his speech, the audience began pulling themselves up in their seats where they had cuddled up, stretching their numb legs, patting each other on the back out of solidarity at having survived such a gruelling test. For a second Fabrizio Ciba hoped that it would end there, that the professor had used up all the time available for the event.
Tremagli looked at Sawhney, convinced that he would comment, but the Indian smiled and, once again, lowered his head in a sign of recognition. At that point the poisoned chalice was passed to Fabrizio. ‘I believe it's your turn.’
‘Thank you.’ The young writer rubbed his neck. ‘I will keep it short.’ Then he turned towards the audience. ‘You all look a little worn out. And I know that, over there, a delicious buffet awaits.’ He cursed himself the moment the words came out of his mouth. He had offended Tremagli in public, but he recognised in the eyes of the audience a spark of approval that confirmed what he had said.
He looked for a way in, any nonsense to get him off to a start. ‘Ahhhh . . .’ He cleared his throat. He tapped the microphone. He poured himself a glass of water and wet his lips. Nothing. His mind was a blank screen. An emptied chest. A cold starless universe. A jar of caviar without the caviar. Those people had come here from all across the city, facing the traffic, struggling to find a parking space, taking half a day off because of him. And he had fuck-all to say. He looked at his audience. The audience that were waiting with bated breath. The audience that were wondering what he was waiting for.
La guerre du feu.
A fleeting vision of a French film, seen who knows when, came down into his mind like a divine spirit and tickled his cortex, which released swarms of neurotransmitters that rained down on the receptors ready to welcome them and to awaken other cells of the central nervous system.
‘Forgive
