Let the Games Begin (14 page)

The image of J.D. Salinger, the wonderful author of
Catcher in the Rye
, came to mind.
Jerome . . . you really are the best. Just like me, you barely wrote three books. Just like me, you wrote your masterpiece, then you disappeared and became a legend. I should do the same thing as you. With the royalties from
The Lion's Den,
in theory I could get away with it. I'll have to reduce my living expenses, though
.

Fabrizio Ciba spent, a piece of crap here, a bit of mucking around there, fifteen thousand euro a month. Even if his last novel,
Nestor's Dream
, was published more than two years ago and had sold fewer than two hundred thousand copies, it was thanks to
The Lion's Den
that he could afford that lifestyle. That little one-hundred-and-twenty-page novel was still at the
top of the bestseller lists. It had been translated across half the world and Paramount had bought the film rights.

If Ciba was prudent, he could easily live until he was eighty without having to lift a finger from morning to evening. Sure, he'd have to give up the penthouse flat in Via Mecenate. And he'd have to sell his hideaway on the mountains of Majorca. And most importantly, to keep up that aura of mystery that surrounded Salinger, he shouldn't do any more interviews. No programmes, no guest appearances on TV, no parties, no fucking around. In short, he'd have to transform into a cloistered monk and annoy himself shitless in a solitary hermitude for the rest of his life.

Maybe it can be done in America. Nature, desert, open spaces . . . But where would I lock myself up in Italy? In a one-room apartment on the Boccea? And then I'd be all alone, in a hermitage, without any pussy . . . I'd commit suicide in a couple of weeks
.

The word ‘pussy' thankfully brought him back down to earth.

He had to get away. Spend a couple of days in Majorca. There, in solitude, he would have time to pick up his novel where he'd left it off since . . .

His brain made an undetectable click, as if a safety switch had cut off the circuit. The thought, just as easily as it had appeared, melted away and his attention returned to Majorca.

Sure, but all alone
. . . Who could he take with him? It had to be a woman who would help to give a bit of a boost to his self-esteem. But especially one who wouldn't bore him silly with children, husbands and other mental hang-ups.

Alice Tyler . . . the translator
.

No, too intellectual. And what's more, he'd made such an ass of himself that he wasn't sure she would agree to come.

Instead, he could pick and choose from the wealthy pot offered to him by the LUISS. At least seven female students from his creative writing course would have given up their civil rights to spend a weekend with him. There was this girl, too, Elisabetta Cabras, who was definitely a horny tart. She didn't know how to write for shit, but she had a natural talent for erotic scenes. You could tell that they were real-life experiences. Ciba imagined Cabras wandering naked around the swimming pool, with her big tits and a bloody mary in one hand, in front of the sun that drowned in the Balearic Sea.

He went back inside and sat down at the desk. The surface was messily covered with bundles of printed pages, books, bound papers, cans of beer and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ends. He began looking for Cabras's essay, which he was sure would have included her mobile phone number. He knocked the mouse and the laptop screen lit up. There was the beginning of the second chapter of his new novel:

He had spent three days writing those two sentences, obsessively continuing to change the adjectives, move the nouns, invert the verbs. Unwillingly he re-read it and then gagged on an acidic regurgitation. He slapped the computer closed.

‘What the fuck is this stuff? This was supposed to be the new national novel! I am a tosser!'

And he paced around the flat, kicking the sofa and Moroccan pouffes. He sat down on the bed, gasping for breath. The pain in his temples began tormenting him again. He had to snap
out of it. Deep inside him, buried beneath a sea of useless crap, there was still the spirit of the writer that he had once been. He had to get him to re-emerge. A blank slate, stop drinking, stop smoking and knuckle down and write, with the strength and passion he had at the beginning.

How was it possible? In four years he had abandoned five novels. The great Sardinian family saga seemed like the only novel that made any sense, and yet . . . It was useless, it was bullshit. Absolutely, he really needed to go and spend ten days or so in Majorca to clean up his mind.

While he began looking for Cabras's number again, the landline rang. He was sure that on the other end of the line there was definitely a pain in the arse. But he decided to answer anyway. It might be that bitch, his agent, ringing to apologise.

He put on an annoyed tone of voice.

‘Hello? Who's speaking?'

‘Ya poofter!'

Fabrizio closed his eyes and bent backwards, like a football player who stuffs up a penalty kick.

Paolo Bocchi. The quintessential pain in the arse. For reasons beyond his understanding, that creature kept buzzing around him like a mosquito thirsty for blood. Professor Paolo Bocchi always had access to any psychoactive substance that either nature or chemistry offered humankind.

A little bit of grass in Majorca, to be honest, wouldn't hurt at all
.

‘So, you old poofter, how are you?'

If there was anything which deeply annoyed him, it was the heavy high-school attitude that Paolo Bocchi had towards him. Just because they'd been in the same class together at San Leone Magno high school . . . That didn't give him the right to be so intimate with him.

‘Come on, Paolo, I'm not in the mood today.' Fabrizio tried to keep calm.

‘Tell me about it. Today I did two nose jobs and a lipo. I'm whacked.'

Professor Paolo Bocchi was head plastic surgeon at the San Roberto Bellarmino clinic. He had studied under the great Roland Chateau-Beaubois and was considered to be number one in the capital's plastic surgery field. He had restored the youthfulness to many old biddies. His only problem was that he sucked it up like an old woodfired oven.

‘Hey! I did it! I read
The Lion's Den
. Can I give you my opinion? Fantastic!'

‘Congratulations, it came out eight years ago.'

‘How do you get into people's heads like that? You can really see them, the characters. I swear, better than a film. The nurses didn't believe I could read a whole book . . .'

‘Well,' Fabrizio tried to cut him off, ‘listen, I'm busy at the moment, I'm about to leave for Spain. In fact . . .'

A scream: ‘What? What about Chiatti's party?'

Fabrizio smacked himself on the forehead. He had completely forgotten about Salvatore Chiatti's party. The invitation had come two months ago. A piece of square Perspex with gold letters written in bas-relief, strictly personal.

For a year everyone had talked only about that party. According to what everyone said, it was shaping up to be the most exclusive and over-the-top event of the last few decades. Missing that sort of affair seriously damaged one's VIP status. But Fabrizio just wasn't psychologically prepared to face mundane situations. To get through a social test like that, you have to be one hundred per cent, witty and chirpy as never before. And at the moment he was as witty and chirpy as a Ugandan refugee.

Salinger. Concentrate on Salinger
.

Fabrizio shook his head. ‘Naaaah, that megalomaniac mafioso builder? Never! It's so tasteless.'

‘Are you out of your mind? You don't understand how much that crazy megalomaniac has spent. We're talking about millions, here! You can't miss something like this. Everybody'll be there. Music, arts, football players, politicians, models, everyone! The world's greatest circus. You could write a novel about it.'

‘No listen, Paolo, I know these parties by heart. They bore you shitless. And it's exactly this sort of attention-seeking that I have to avoid. Think of Salinger . . .'

‘Who?'

‘Forget it. Anyway . . . I'll give you a call when I get back, right . . .?'

‘Are you sure?' Paolo Bocchi was incredulous. ‘I think you're fucking-up big-time. There'll be . . . how can I say it . . .' The great surgeon was a wizard with the scalpel, but a lexical disaster. ‘You just don't get it . . . They'll be throwing pussy at you. Two days of drinking and screwing in the park. You're crazy.'

‘I know, I know. Look, I've got problems with my publishing house. And I'm just not in the right mood.'

‘Relax, I'll fix it for you.' Paolo Bocchi laughed deeply.

‘Leave it. I've stopped using that stuff.'

‘Whatever, do whatever the fuck you wanna do. But just so you're clear on this: Larita will be singing, too. It's the only thing that has leaked about the party. Do you get what that means?'

‘Larita? The singer?'

‘No, Larita the dry cleaner! Of course, the singer.'

‘Who cares?'

‘She's won I don't know how many Grammies and platinum discs.'

Fabrizio wanted to hang up. ‘All right, Paolo, I'll think about it. Now just let me go.'

‘Good boy, think about it. Nurse, hurry with that drain, it would be good to get out of here before Christmas . . .'

‘Where the hell are you?' asked Ciba, speechless.

‘In the operating room. Don't worry, I'm using earphones. See ya, mate.'

And the phone went dead.

Ciba went back into the living room to look for Cabras's essay. And he noticed a piece of paper stuck to the desk lamp.

Fabrizio lifted his t-shirt. And he saw, in the region of his left buttock, the unreadable remains of a phone number. ‘No! The shower!' He continued reading.

Fabrizio Ciba re-read the note three times, and with each reading he felt his body and his spirit perk up.

He said to himself, fully satisfied: ‘You are the best. You are always the best, everyone else is one hundred metres below you. I could have taken advantage of you.' He pointed at the window and said: ‘I love you, sweet Lisa.'

That's who Fabrizio Ciba is! Fuck you all!

He had the childish desire to scan the letter and send it to that bastard Gianni & co., but instead he turned the stereo on and slipped in a CD of an old live recording of Otis Redding. The woofer in the huge Tannoy speakers began to shake and the little blue VU meters of his old McIntosh amplifier began to sway as the singer from Georgia struck the first notes of ‘Try A Little Tenderness'.

Fabrizio loved that song. He liked the fact that it began softly, relaxed, and then slowly grew until it changed into an unstoppable rhythm with the husky, kneaded voice of old Otis acting as a counterpoint.

The writer took a beer out of the fridge and began dancing naked in the living room. He jumped around like the great Muhammad Ali before a fight and yelled at the entire universe: ‘Fuck you! Fuck you! I am Ciba! I am the coolest of them all!' Then he leaped up on the Gae Aulenti coffee table and, using the can as a microphone, began to sing. At the end of the piece he flopped down on the sofa, exhausted. He was breathing heavily, his stomach as swollen as the hull of a boat, but he
was still strong. It took more than this to cut him down. He wouldn't run off to Majorca with his tail between his legs. It came naturally to him to think of the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. He'd lived his life in sin, between wonderful parties and beautiful women.

He was back again. The old fighter.

Fabrizio Ciba began to hunt, amidst the papers and the mail that crowded his desk, for his invitation to the party.

 

25

The Wilde Beasts of Abaddon, on board their leader's Ford Mondeo, were stuck in traffic. The GPS navigator told them that they were a kilometre and a half from Villa Ada, but the road blocks on Via Salaria had created a traffic jam on the Olimpica and on Via dei Prati Fiscali.

Mantos, at the wheel, observed his adepts in the rear-view mirror. They had been very good. They had removed their piercings and washed up. Silvietta had even dyed her hair black. But ever since they had left Oriolo they had been quiet, long-faced, wearing worried expressions. He needed to rouse them; that was what a leader did.

‘So, guys? Are you ready?'

‘A little worried . . .' Murder's mouth was dry.

Silvietta nibbled at her lip. ‘I've never been this nervous, not even for the General Psychology exam.'

Mantos put the indicator on, pulled over to one side of the Olimpica and looked at them: ‘Do you trust me?'

Zombie's face had the same complexion as a boiled cauliflower. ‘We do, Master.'

‘Listen to me. The mission, as you know, is a suicide. There
is still time for you to drop out. I'm not forcing anyone. But if you decide to stay, then we have to be a perfect team, as synchronised as a Swiss watch. We have to be ruthless and have faith in the Evil One who watches over our heads.'