When the Dead Awaken (25 page)

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 formidable 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.

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?'

Sabrina looked around.

‘I'm from here, but I can easily get to Milan, if you prefer. I would really like to talk to you,' she said with a mouth as dry as the Gobi desert. ‘It's important.'

‘To whom?'

‘To everyone,' she said.

‘Are you alone?' the man asked.

His voice revealed no emotion. The tone was exactly as she would have expected it to be in a man who had lost everything.

‘Of course.'

‘If I discover that you're not alone, if I discover that you're not who you say you are, if I discover that you have endangered my very being, I'll kill you. Stay in Bergamo.'

‘Signore …'

The man had hung up.

‘
Porca puttana
,' she whispered, and jumped when the waiter asked if there was something wrong with her linguini.

‘No, no, absolutely not,' she said, flustered. ‘It's delicious.'

The waiter smiled and gestured to her mobile. ‘Bad news, signorina?'

‘I don't know yet.'

She emptied her wine glass and ordered another one,
but pushed her plate away. She interlaced her fingers in front of her face and watched her reflection in the restaurant window for a long time.

On the way home she bought a bottle of Vecchia Romagna brandy and spent the rest of the evening lying on the bed in the B&B staring at the ceiling, while the level in the bottle, for some inexplicable reason, kept dropping.

The man had said ‘very being' and not, for example, ‘my life'. Was he with someone? Did someone depend on him?

When Sabrina finally – and staggering slightly – got up to clean her teeth, Giulio Forlani was a lonely, glowing mark on the E64. He was approaching Erbusco at 225 km/h. Not because he was in a hurry, but because he craved speed. The motorbike wound its way through the slow evening traffic of weaving truck convoys, vans, passenger cars and random police patrols. A couple of ambitious officers from Polizia Stradale had tried to catch him just outside of Brescia. They gave up at the exit to Biasca when the motorbike effortlessly outran them. Giulio had barely noticed the sirens. He just switched off the motorbike's lights and opened the throttle another half-inch. The flashing lights disappeared behind a ridge.

Everything tumbled out of the darkness.