Let the Games Begin (27 page)

And now he'd discovered that she was marrying Murder.

Muffin
.

There wasn't much else to say, except that there was no sense in living any more.

 

50

Not even this time did good fortune abandon Fabrizio Ciba. He landed on the flabby stomach of the elephant, which was lying on its side in a rivulet that flowed between stones and ferns. Larita, tangled in a ball of ivy, fell down next to him one second later. The two of them lay there, without moving, grazed, aching and lost for words, incredulous at the idea that they were still alive.

Then Fabrizio pulled himself up, helped Larita to get down off the elephant, and looked around. They were at the bottom of a narrow ravine covered in vegetation. A gravel path stretched right through the middle, dotted with street lamps that created little shiny domes. Everything else – beside them, above them – was wrapped in darkness.

He couldn't bear to think about what had just happened to them. If an elephant hadn't been there to cushion their fall, they would be dead as dodoes right now.

Who organises a safari in Villa Ada? Only a crazy megalomaniac like Chiatti can come up with such a stupid idea
.

But it wasn't Chiatti's fault if he'd almost lost his skin.

It's mine. It's my fault for coming to this party. I shouldn't have come. What the fuck am I doing here? How the fuck did I let them convince me to get on that animal? With all those monsters? I am a writer, for fuck's sake . . . I have to write my novel. My novel
. . .

He touched his arm. He had difficulty bending it.

If I've dislocated my shoulder, I'll never be able to write again
.

It was too much for Fabrizio Ciba. A rage as bitter as vinegar started to bubble in his stomach and rise towards his oesophagus. The more he thought about what had happened to him, the angrier he got. He was so full of rage that he risked exploding like a football. He began to sway his head up and down like a pigeon pecking at grain, and then, gritting his teeth, he started muttering to himself and gesturing with his hands. ‘Fuck off! I'm going to fuck them all over. One by one. I'll line them up and I'll fuck them one by one.' His nostrils flared in fury. ‘To begin with, I'll fuck over that joker Chiatti . . . I'll write the article and I'll ruin him. That big ball of shit has ended his days of recieving kindness. Who does he think he's dealing with?'

He turned suddenly towards Larita in search of support. ‘Can you explain what the fuck those fox hunters were doing . . .?' But he fell quiet, seeing her stock-still, paralysed next to the dead animal.

He felt like he was watching the last scene from
King Kong
.When the girl stays by the side of the big ape fallen from the skyscraper.

Larita really was tiny next to the elephant. In death, the pachyderm looked even bigger than when it was alive. Its trunk stretched out like a snake amongst the stones of the creek. Its feet drew up against its stomach; a broken tusk. The open eye
reflected the light of the street lamp. Blood trickled from its mouth and dissolved in the water.

Larita suddenly, as if freed from a magic spell, opened her mouth, trying to breath in deeply, but something stopped her. So she slowly reached her hand and placed it on the elephant's wrinkly forehead. Then, as if the strings that kept her standing had been cut, she slumped down and curled against its rump and began to cry, shaken by sobs.

Fabrizio put a hand over his mouth. How could he have forgotten about Larita? She was the only precious thing amongst all this crap. She was the angel who would save him. She and him were different. She and him had nothing to do with that party. And he had to take care of this beautiful creature and carry her to safety.

He ran to her and hugged her tight, feeling her small body jolted by sobs. She was so small. So helpless.

Larita, her eyes soaked in tears, her face on fire, swallowing air, tried to talk to him: ‘Po . . . po . . . poor thing . . .'

Who's she talking about
?

‘It's not . . . it's not fair . . . He had done no . . . thing wrong.' And she was gripped by sobs again.

About the elephant, you idiot
.

He hugged her head and laid it on his shoulder. ‘Don't cry. Please . . . Don't cry,' he whispered in her ear as he stroked her hair. But she wouldn't stop. As soon as the rhythm slowed, she'd start over again.

Fabrizio tried to say something. A gabble of senseless sentences. ‘No . . . It didn't suffer much . . . It broke its back, it didn't feel anything . . . It has been freed . . . A life spent in chains.'

Nothing, she kept on crying, like she was battery-powered. In despair, unable to find a way to calm her, he grabbed her
by the back of the neck, brushed her hair from off her face and, with a naturalness that he had never felt before in his life, he parted his lips and kissed her.

 

51

Zombie made it to the electrical plant; he was tired, but still determined.

Halogen spotlights created a bubble of light around the building, which shone in the dark like an underwater sea station. The plant was surrounded by three-metre-high metal fencing. To get inside, you had to pass through a gate with a yellow sign. It had a skull painted on it and warned: ‘HIGH VOLTAGE. DANGER. KEEP OUT.' In the yard around the little brick building two rows of big metal transformers were lined up and hummed like bee hives. Heaps of wires were wrapped around some ceramic electrodes and then stuck into the ground.

Zombie, in his brief career as an apprentice electrician, had at most dealt with the electrical plant of Villa Giorgini in Capranica, a nine-kilowatt, three-phase system for domestic use, with a safety switch and electricity meter.

Now he was faced with a real, proper miniature power station. He remembered having read something about them in the correspondence course he'd done with Scuola Radio Elettra. There were thermal power stations, hydropower and nuclear power stations. It couldn't be hydropower because there weren't any rivers or dams around. He ruled out nuclear power. So it was probably thermal and, anyway, who gives a fuck, all he had to do was sabotage it.

Luckily there weren't any guards at the power station. The gate was secured with a padlock and chain.

Zombie placed the silver poultry shears on one of the links and squeezed. The steel wouldn't give. He ground his teeth and squeezed harder. His faced turned purple from the effort. Slowly the ring began to bend. He increased the pressure and in one blow the chain and the poultry shears broke apart. He was left holding the two handles of the tool. He threw them away and walked inside.

The little metal door was obviously locked. He kicked at it with the sole of his shoe and it flew open onto a small room full of electronic panels. Ammeters, switches, cursors, lit-up LEDs, levers. Zombie studied the instrumentation, looking perplexed. It was like being in the cockpit of an airplane. He tried to press some buttons, lower a couple of levers, but nothing significant happened. Fiddling with stuff he might succeed in turning it off, but it could always be turned back on again. He needed to destroy it and leave the park in the dark.

Inside a glass cabinet he saw an axe with a red handle. He broke the glass and grabbed a hold of the tool. He noticed that in the middle of all of that equipment a big metal plaque was bolted to a wall. Three cables, as thick as mooring lines for a ferry, wound inside a huge steel switch. In the middle was a lever and a lock to stop anyone from lifting the switch. That was the heart of the power station.

He had to cut one of those cables and . . .

What sort of voltage would it have
?

He had no idea. But it was enough to toast him.

He would die, and so he would complete his mission. Even if, to be honest, he didn't give a fuck about the mission, the Devil, Mantos, that Satanist crap.

He felt as sad as a dead duck, but he had the strange sensation that an audience was observing him as he completed his final gestures. He was the cursed hero of his own, tragic, film.

There was a note pad on the bench. He ripped off a page and, without thinking too much about it, he wrote down a couple of lines. He folded it and wrote on the front: ‘For Silvietta'.

 

52

Mantos, naked, was standing on a rock, studying the moon and its craters. The wind caressed his skin.

Arms stretched out. Legs slightly bent. The Durendal in his hands, pointed in front of him. He inhaled and exhaled, freeing himself of useless thoughts. Serena melted away, the old arsehole melted away, Silvietta and Murder melted away, and Mantos concentrated on the miracle of coordination his body held. With every movement he became more aware of the energy running through the fibres of his muscles, of the deadly power held within the Durendal.

He felt the pain of separating himself from his earthly life rising up. He greeted it and bid it welcome. He lowered the Durendal, brought the hilt up against his stomach and raised his left leg. He isolated every tendon, every muscle, enjoying the feelings it gave him. The cold grabbed him by the scrotum.

Mantos was finally at ease. He was able to hear everything. The swishing of the wind in the trees, the guttural grunting of the warthogs in the swamp, the cries from the bat colony from Siam hanging on the pine branches, the traffic on the Olimpica, the tellies in lounge rooms, the sick world.

Then something made him startle. His windpipe closed and a shiver went up his spine. The feeling that someone, hidden in the darkness, was spying on him.

It wasn't an animal. But it wasn't human either. What was it?

He stretched out the sword and began turning around. He couldn't see anyone. The leader of the Wilde Beasts of Abaddon jumped down from the rock and, keeping the weapon ready, took the torch from his backpack and turned it on. The ray of light shone on the laurel bushes, on the blackberry bushes, on the tree trunks, on a rusty bin.

Nobody was there. Maybe his senses had made a mistake. Yet the feeling that someone was observing him remained. Eyes full of hate.

Mantos quickly slipped on his trousers, shoes and the black tunic. He then pulled on the backpack and ran off.

 

53

Zombie brushed the corner of his mouth with his middle finger – there, where Silvietta had kissed him. He stuck the letter in the panel, spat in his hands, grabbed the axe and, with his legs parted, positioned himself in front of the cable.

The moment had come to show everyone the courage he had kept hidden inside.

‘Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither.'

He lifted the handle and, with all the strength and desperation he had in his thin body, he cut the cable.

Twenty thousand volts of electricity were rushing through that copper wire, about ten times as much as is used for the electric chair. The flow of electrons travelled down the blade and the handle of the axe, which, even though it was made of wood, was burnt to ashes in a second.

The hands and the arms of the adept followed the same destiny. The rest of his body caught fire in a spectacular blaze.

The human torch began to knock around and bounce against
the walls of the small room. Then he stopped, threw his arms wide like a fallen angel that wants to fly, and slumped to the ground, burning away until what remained of Edo Sambreddero, aka Zombie, was nothing more than a charred log.

The turbines of the power station stopped. The buzzing was silenced. The lights of the park and the villa went off. Even the computers that controlled the waterfalls, the flow of water into the lakes, the sheds for the animals and everything else, were turned off.

A generator went into action. It turned on the emergency lighting in the house and activated the pneumatic pumps of the solid-steel gate at the entrances, which closed, leaving Villa Ada in the dark and cut off from the rest of the city.

Arrival at the Bivouac and Dinner

54

Fabrizio Ciba and Larita were kissing next to the elephant's corpse when the streetlights on the path went out. The writer opened his eyes and found himself immersed in complete darkness. ‘The lights! The lights have gone out!'

‘Oh my God.' Larita hugged Fabrizio in fear. ‘Now what? What do we do?'

The writer took a while to understand the nature of the problem. The passionate kiss had stunned him. The rage had dissipated and a strange feeling of well-being made him feel weak all over. Now that, finally, he had found love, everything else seemed irrelevant. His sole desire was to wash her, care for her, tend her wounds and make love to her. The elephant ride through the woods, the fall, the certainty of death and the surprise at being alive, that mix of fear, anger and death, had turned him on big-time.

‘And now what do we do?' She squeezed up to him.

Fabrizio felt Larita's heart beating strongly behind her tits. ‘I don't know . . . But hey . . . Can't we just stay here? What do we care?' He had forgotten that ancient pleasure of feeling the consistency of a pair of silicone-free tits.

‘Are you crazy?'

‘Why? We wait for dawn. We could hide in the thickets and behave like primitives without rules . . .' If that hadn't been real life, but one of his own novels, the main character would have taken Larita now and, without too much chit-chat, he would have undressed her and then he would have had her on
the elephant's carcass, with the blood, the sperm and the tears running together as in an ancestral orgy. Yes, in his new novel he'd include a nice little sex scene like this. In Sardegna, somewhere near Oristano.

Larita interrupted his thoughts. ‘The park is full of man-eating animals. The tiger . . . the lions . . .'

He had completely forgotten about the wild beasts. He squeezed her hand. ‘Yes, you're right, we've got to get moving. But I can't see a thing. Let's hope they repair the problem quickly.'

‘We have to keep to the path.'

‘Which way is the house? To the right or to the left?'

‘To the left, I think. I hope . . .'

‘All right. We'll walk along the path. It's just a few metres away.'