When the Dead Awaken (16 page)

Sabrina nodded.

‘I don't feel sorry 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, CO
₂
quotas or drinking water. It makes no difference. It's merely a question of restructuring.'

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.

‘At midnight or at noon, depending on how you calibrated the crystals.'

‘But surely the changing of the numbers and dates must depend on time zones, datelines, magnetic fields?'

‘I'm not a physicist, dottoressa. Far from it. I'm just trying to repeat Giulio Forlani's version of the holy text. How that man suffered whenever he had to explain the details to me! Well, the crystals are activated by a specially encoded lamp whose light is within a very few angstroms of a particular light in the electromagnetic spectrum,' Di Luca continued. ‘We imagined that authorized dealers would be issued with their own personalized lamp to trigger the process. In the form of a subscription. When the customer had selected their product, the shop assistant would activate the crystals for the actual geographical location and the day's actual wavelength. If you bought
your Gucci bag in Rome airport precisely at twelve midnight on your way to Moscow, for example, the date would obviously not change exactly at midnight the following day, but be staggered with the two Eastern time zones between Rome and Moscow, that is to say at two o'clock in the morning. Do you follow?'

She nodded.

‘The lamp terminals in the shops would be linked up to a central computer that would change wavelength and amplitude daily. When the system was up and running it would network like ATMs.'

‘But computers can be hacked, optical fibre cables can be tapped,' Sabrina objected.

Di Luca shook his head.

‘Every terminal would be unique,' he said. ‘It would refer to three satellites in the US Air Force's GPS system. And the satellites would get their encrypted radio signal from the aforementioned computer, which would be unconnected to the rest of the world.'

Sabrina hiccupped and dabbed her lips with her napkin.

‘Pardon me. Please continue, maestro.'

‘As the position of the lamp is fixed, the satellites would react if it was moved from its position – in case of theft, for example. If it was activated at unauthorized times of the day or night it would shut down and remain inactive until it was found or reactivated. The name of the manufacturer and the serial number would obviously form a
part of the labelling and the strip would be mounted where it's visible to all.'

The waiters replaced their barely touched starters with
Risotto al Barolo e Castelmagno
. Their glasses were filled with Giuseppe Mascarello Barolo. 1993.

They didn't do justice to this dish either.

Di Luca tasted it, turned the plate around and looked at the food with a kind of tortured yearning. Like a dog looking at an unattainable squeaky toy.

‘Excessive use of Barolo,' the Venetian declared. ‘Wouldn't you agree?'

‘I think it tastes wonderful, maestro,' Sabrina said politely. ‘Would you excuse me please?'

She rose and Di Luca got to his feet.

‘Down the hall to the left.'

‘Thank you. May I?'

‘Of course.'

He handed her the date strip, which she returned to her purse.

She marched to the ladies' lavatories and began to panic, realizing that there were no available cubicles. Sabrina had gone to the sinks to throw up when a young, faketanned, platinum-blonde trophy emerged from a cubicle at the far end. The woman watched her nervously and took a step to the side as Sabrina passed her.

Sabrina fell to her knees and sacrificed Signora Santini's masterfully composed dishes to the toilet bowl. She lay there for a long time with cold beads of sweat on her forehead. If death had a taste, it was the taste of gall, she thought. ‘Oh God, oh God,' she mumbled into the bowl as the sight of her own vomit made her throw up again.

She pushed up limply, flushed the lavatory and slumped down on the toilet seat. Dark clouds closed around her head. She knew that she would never be able to crack the case, or even produce any useful leads. She would never find out who killed her father.