Let the Games Begin (2 page)

‘Yeah, so?'

‘The Children of the Apocalypse did it. They picked her up at a bus stop and then Kurtz decapitated her with a double-headed axe.'

Saverio couldn't stand Kurtz, the leader of the Children of the Apocalypse from Pavia. He always had to be top of the class. Always the one coming up with extravagant stuff.
Good on you, Kurtz! Congratulations! You're the best!

Saverio wiped his hand across his face.

‘Well, guys . . . Don't forget how much of a hard time I've been having lately, what with the birth of the twins . . . the bloody bank loan for the new house . . .'

‘That reminds me, how are the little darlings?' asked Silvietta.

‘They're like drainpipes. They eat and shit. At night they don't let us get any sleep. They've got the measles, too. On top of it all, Serena's father had hip-replacement surgery, so the whole furniture shop is my responsibility. You tell me when I'm supposed to get something organised for the sect . . .'

‘Hey, have you got any special offers at the shop?' Zombie asked. ‘I want to buy a three-seater sofa-bed. The cat's ruined mine.'

The leader of the Beasts wasn't listening. He was thinking about Kurtz Minetti. As tall as a dick on a tin can. Full-time pastry chef. He had already set fire to a Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesman and now he had decapitated a nun.

‘Anyway, you're all ungrateful.' He pointed to them one by one. ‘I've worked my arse off for this sect. If it hadn't been for me introducing you to the Worship of Hades, you'd all still be sitting around reading Harry Potter.'

‘We know, Saverio, but try to understand us, too. We do believe in the group, but we can't keep going like this.' Murder bit angrily into a
grissino
. ‘Let's just give it up and stay friends.'

The leader of the Beasts slammed his hands down on the table in exasperation.

‘Or how about this? Give me a week. You can't say no to an extra week.'

‘What are you going to do?' asked Silvietta, nibbling on her lip ring.

‘I've been laying the groundwork for a mind-blowing piece of action. It's a really dangerous mission . . .' He paused. ‘But don't think you can just cop out. We all know that talk is cheap. But when it's time to act . . .' He put on a whiney voice. ‘“
I can't, I'm sorry . . . I've got problems at home, my mother's not well . . . I have to work
.”' And he looked hard at Zombie, who lowered his head over his plate. ‘No. We all put our arses on the line in the same way.'

‘Can't you give us a hint?' Murder asked shyly.

‘No! All I can say is that it's something that will send us right to number one on the list of Italy's Satanic sects.'

Silvietta grabbed a hold of his wrist. ‘Mantos, come on. Please. Just a little hint. I'm so curious . . .'

Saverio shook himself free. ‘No! I said no! You'll have to wait. If in a week's time I haven't brought you a serious plan, then thanks very much, we shake hands and disband the sect. All right?'

He stood up. His black eyes had turned red, reflecting the flames from the pizza oven.

‘Now, disciples, honour me!'

The members lowered their heads. The leader raised his eyes to the ceiling and stretched out his arms.

‘Who is your Charismatic Father?'

‘You!' the Beasts said in unison.

‘Who wrote the Tables of Evil?'

‘You!'

‘Who taught you the Liturgy of Darkness?'

‘You!'

‘Who ordered the
pappardelle
in hare sauce?' asked the waiter with steaming plates perched on his arm.

‘Me!' Saverio stretched out his hand.

‘Don't touch, they're hot.'

The leader of the Wilde Beasts of Abaddon sat down and, without saying another word, began eating.

 

2

About fifty kilometres away from Jerry's Pizzeria 2, in Rome, a little three-gear Vespa struggled up the slope of Monte Mario. Sitting astride the saddle was the well-known writer Fabrizio Ciba. The scooter stopped at a traffic light and when it changed to green turned into Via della Camilluccia. Two kilometres further on, it braked in front of a cast-iron gate on the side of which hung a brass plaque that read ‘Villa Malaparte'.

Ciba put the Vespa into first gear and was about to face the long climb up to the residence when a primate squeezed into a grey flannel suit stepped in front of him.

‘Excuse me! Excuse me! Where are you going? Have you got an invitation?'

The writer took off his bowl-shaped helmet and began searching the pockets of his creased jacket.

‘No . . . No, I don't think I have . . . I must have forgotten it.'

The man stood with his legs wide apart. ‘Well, you can't go in then.'

‘I've been invited to . . .'

The bouncer pulled out a sheet of paper and slipped on a
pair of small glasses with red frames. ‘What did you say your name was?'

‘I didn't. Ciba. Fabrizio Ciba . . .'

The guy began running his index finger down the list of guests while shaking his head.

He doesn't recognise me
. Fabrizio wasn't annoyed, though. It was obvious that the primate didn't ‘do' literature but, for Christ's sake, didn't he watch television? Ciba presented a show called
Crime & Punishment
every Wednesday evening on RAI Tre for this very purpose.

‘I'm sorry. Your name is not on the list.'

The writer was there to present the novel
A Life in the World
by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sarwar Sawhney, published by Martinelli, his own publishing house. At the age of seventy-three, and with two books as thick as a law dictionary behind him, Sawhney had at last received the coveted prize from the Swedish Academy. Ciba was to do the honours alongside Gino Tremagli, Professor of English–American Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. That old gasbag had been asked to participate just to give an official tone to the event. It was, however, up to Fabrizio to unravel the ancient secrets hidden within the folds of Sawhney's huge novel and offer them to a Roman audience notoriously thirsty for culture.

Ciba was getting fed up. He lost the polite tone.

‘Listen to me. If you can forget about that guest list for a minute and take a look at the invitation – that white, rectangular-shaped piece of card which I unfortunately don't have with me – 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: vandalise the Oriolo Romano Cemetery. On paper, it was a lovely plan. If carried out properly, it could work out really nicely. But when he'd taken it under closer consideration, he'd decided to abandon it. To begin with, opposite the cemetery there were always lots of cars coming and going, so it had to be done late into the night. The surrounding wall was also more than three metres high and scattered with pieces of broken bottles. Groups of teenagers hung out in front of the entrance gates and occasionally were even joined by the Porchetta sandwich van. Inside the graveyard lived the caretaker, an ex-soldier who was off his rocker. Absolute silence would be needed, but when uncovering graves, pulling up coffins, removing bones and piling them in heaps, a bit of commotion couldn't be avoided . . . although Saverio had even thought of crucifying the ex-soldier head-downwards over the mausoleum of the Mastrodomenicos, his wife's family.