Let the Games Begin (32 page)

With the crooked night-vision goggles, he studied what was left of the tip of his left leg. The stump, a mass of raw flesh and bits of bone, was leaking a dark-green liquid like a threadless tap. The real-estate magnate stretched out one hand,
grabbed a table cloth from an overturned coffee table and wrapped the injury as best he could. Then he grabbed a bottle of Amaro Averna liqueur and necked a quarter of it.

‘You arseholes. You think you've hurt me? You're wrong. Come on, surprise me, show me what you can do. Here I am.'

He gestured with his fingers for them to bring it on. He grabbed the machine gun and kept shooting around until there was nothing left to shoot. He was quiet for a moment, and then he noticed that his neck and shoulders were soaked in blood. He touched the back of his neck. Felt a piece of glass sticking out of his hair. He grabbed it with his thumb and index finger and tried to extract it, but it slipped his grasp. Gulping for air, he tried again, and as soon as he moved it a pink flash blinded his left eye.

He decided to leave it there and collapsed against the rest of the ice sculpture of an angel. Then, with the little strength that he had left, he necked the rest of the liqueur, tasting the bittersweet flavour of the Averna mixed with the salty flavour of his blood. ‘You haven't fucking hurt me . . . You haven't . . . A conspiracy of dickheads.' The head of the angel and the melted stubs of the wings were dripping a frozen rain that dribbled down his smooth skull and into the infrared goggles, down his chubby cheeks and onto the swollen stomach, the robe, and finally watered down the puddle of blood he was sinking in.

Death was cold. An ice octopus had wrapped its frozen tentacles around his spinal column.

He thought of his mother again. He would have liked to have told her that her little chiappariello loved her, and that he'd been a good boy. But he had no air left in his lungs. Luckily, he'd hidden her away in the bunker.

Fucking hell
. . . , he said, ironing out a smile. It was nice
to go like this. Like a hero. Like a Greek hero in a battle. Like the great Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks.

He was sleepy and felt exhausted. How strange, his foot didn't hurt any more. His head wasn't throbbing any more either, it was lighter. He felt like he'd risen out of his body and was watching himself.

Right there, collapsed beneath a melting angel.

His head fell onto his chest. The bottle slipped between his legs. He looked at his hands. He opened them and closed them.

My hands. These are my hands
.

In the end, they had won.

They who
?

Salvatore Chiatti fell asleep with a question to carry into the hereafter.

 

63

Fabrizio Ciba regained consciousness like he was coming out of a bottomless well. With his eyes closed, he stayed curled up in a foetal position, swallowing and spitting air. He remembered the darkness and the bunch of fat bastards hanging from the trees.

They've kidnapped me
.

He kept still, without opening his eyes, until his heart began to slow down. He was aching from his toes to the tips of his hair. As soon as he moved, an unbearable pain streamed along his shoulders . . .

That's where it hit me
.

(
Don't think about it
.)

. . . and through his neck muscles, radiating out like an electric shock behind the ears and up to his temples. His tongue was so swollen that it struggled to stay inside his mouth.

They fell from the trees
.

(
Don't think about it
.)

Right, he shouldn't think about it. He just had to stay still and wait for the pain to pass.

I have to think about something pretty
.

All right, he was in Nairobi, lying on a bed. The linen curtains were moved by a warm wind. Beside him was Larita, naked, vaccinating Kenyan kids.

Where's Larita
?

(
Don't think about it
.)

Soon he would get up and he'd take a Nimesulide pill and squeeze himself a nice fresh grapefruit juice.

It's not working
.

He was lying on ground that was too hard and cold to allow him to fantastise.

He placed a hand on the ground. The floor was wet, and felt like it was made of pressed dirt.

Don't open your eyes
.

He'd have to open them sooner or later, and find out where the monster had taken him. At the moment it was better to wait. He felt too shit and he didn't want other ugly surprises. He preferred to stay there, behave, and imagine Africa.

But there was a strange smell of damp that made him feel nauseous. It reminded him of the odour in the cellar dug out of the tuff rock in his uncle's house in Pitigliano. And it was cold, just like there.

I'm underground. There were at least five of them in that tree. They've kidnapped me. It was a ploy just to kidnap me
.

A group of obese terrorists had swung down from the trees and kidnapped him.

Slowly at first, then more and more quickly, his brain began to elaborate this mad idea, to knead it and let it rise
like a piece of dough for making pizza. And he would bet his bottom dollar that the kidnapping had been coordinated by that son of a bitch Sasà Chiatti, a real mafioso who colluded with the powerful. The party, the safaris, were all a smoke screen to hide a global plan to get rid of a troublesome intellectual who pointed his finger at the moral downfall of society.

It's obvious, they want to make me pay for it
.

Throughout his whole career he had exposed himself, uncaring of the consequences, against the hidden powers. He considered it to be the civil duty of a writer. He had written a fiery article against the Finnish woodcutting lobbies that scythed down thousand-year-old forests. Those big beasts that had kidnapped him could very well be an extremist phalanx of Finns.

Another time he had openly declared in the
Corriere della Sera
that Chinese cuisine was crap. And everyone knows that the Chinese are a mafia, and they don't let anyone who has the courage to attack them publicly go unpunished.

Of course, those colossuses were a little too beefy to be Chinese . . .

What about if they'd united with Finnish woodcutters
?

Salman Rushdie and the Islamic fatwa came to mind.

And now they'll execute me
.

Well, if that's how it went, at least it would be a death that guaranteed him being remembered as a martyr for the truth.

Like Giordano Bruno
.

He was so caught up with unwinding himself from the tangle in his mind that the writer didn't realise he wasn't alone until he heard a voice.

‘Ciba? Can you hear me? Are you still alive?'

It was a low voice, almost a whisper. It came from behind
him. A voice that had an annoying inability to pronounce its r's properly. A voice that annoyed the shit out of him.

Fabrizio opened his eyes and swore.

It was that shithead Matteo Saporelli.

 

64

The day he had been called to organise the catering for the party, the unpredictable Bulgarian chef Zóltan Patrovic had set his eyes on an oil painting by Giorgio Morandi in Chiatti's studio that represented a pair of flagons on a table.

That work by the Bolognaise painter would add prestige to the Emilia-Romagna room in his restaurant Le Regioni.

His place, situated in Via Casilina on the corner of Via Torre Gaia, had been at the top of the European restaurant guides for years. It was designed by the Japanese architect Hiro Itoki, in 1990, like a miniature Italy. Looking at it from up above, the long building had the same shape and proportions as the Italian peninsula, including the major islands. It was split into twenty rooms, which corresponded in shape and culinary specialities to the regions of Italy. The tables took the names of the capital cities.

Morandi's painting would have been perfect hanging above the cellar-fridge where he kept the Lambrusco.

The Bulgarian had decided that, after the party, he would get Salvatore Chiatti to give it to him as a gift. And if, as he imagined, the real-estate mogul resisted, he would convince him to donate it to him by pushing a little confusion into Chiatti's mind.

Now that the party had fallen to pieces, the guests were lost in the park and he had seen the lifeless body of the entrepreneur
lying in a pool of blood, there was no reason for him not to pay himself for the work he'd done by taking the piece of art.

In the darkness, a candle in hand, he set off as silently as a black cat up the big staircase that led to the first floor of the Villa, which had been abandoned by the waiting staff and the other employees.

The steps were littered with pieces of furniture, clothes, dishes, broken statues.

The fatsos had sent the residence to rack and ruin. The chef didn't care who they were and what they wanted. He respected them. They had appreciated his cooking. He had seen them fling themselves at the buffet with a primeval enthusiasm and violence. He had recognised the ancestral ecstasy of hunger in their eyes.

For quite some time he had been returning home from his restaurant tired and frustrated. He couldn't bear the way people used their fork to investigate what was on the plate, how they interrupted their chitchat with mouthfuls, how they organised work lunches containing useless antipasti. To retain his sanity, he was forced to watch documentaries about hunger in the Third World.

Yes, the unpredictable Bulgarian chef loved hunger and hated appetite. Appetite was the expression of a replete and satisfied world, on the verge of surrender. A people that tastes instead of eating, that nibbles instead of feeding themselves, that's already dead but doesn't know it. Hunger is a synonym for life. Without hunger the human being is only the pretence of himself, therefore becomes bored and begins to philosophise. And Zóltan Patrovic hated philosophy. Especially when applied to cuisine. He regretted the passing of war, hunger, poverty. Soon he would up sticks and move to Ethiopia.

The unpredictable Bulgarian chef was on the top floor. The
air was heavy with smoke, and wherever he pointed the dancing flame of the candle he could see destruction. He could hear murmurs and flashes of flames coming from the bedroom.

He didn't care what was going on in there, he had to go to the studio, but curiosity got the better of him. He put out the candle and moved closer to the door. A huge wall tapestry and the brocade curtains were on fire, and the flames lit up the room. On the four-poster bed lay Ecaterina Danielsson, completely naked. Her hair, like a red cloud, framed her angular face. Around the woman a dozen men were on their knees murmuring a strange chant and they stretched out their hands and brushed her tiny white breasts and plum-coloured nipples, the flat stomach with a goblet-shaped belly button, her pubis covered by a strip of carrot-coloured fur, and her long legs.

The model, her back arched like a cat, moved her head lazily, her eyes half-closed in an expression of ecstasy, her large, moist mouth wide open. She was gasping, placing her hands on the heads of the men bowed down around the bed like slaves worshipping a pagan goddess.

Zóltan moved along. He lit the candle again, followed the corridor and went into Chiatti's study. He lifted up the flame. His painting was still there. Nobody had touched it.

Something that resembled a smile appeared on the chef's face for an instant. ‘I don't want it, but I have to have it.' He took a step towards the painting, but then he heard sounds coming from the dark corner of the room. He flattened himself behind a bookcase.

More than sounds, they were disgusting cries.

Zóltan moved the candle slightly and saw, between two bookcases, in a corner, a man on his knees. He was all skin and bones. His little bald head, bent towards the floor, was hidden behind thin shoulder blades and Zóltan could see his
backbone, with the vertebrae protruding like a mountain range. His skin, as fine as tissue paper, was covered by a network of wrinkles and hung floppily from his arms, which were as frail as twigs. He was ripping something and stuffing it in his mouth, producing guttural sounds and gurgles.

Curious, the chef took a step forward. The parquet creaked underfoot.

The man on the ground turned around suddenly and ground the few rotten teeth he still had in his mouth. The small eyes shone like a lemur's. His shrivelled face was smeared with a dark, oily liquid. He pulled away, growling, his back against the wall. Between his legs he had the leftovers of a big tray of aubergine parmesan.

The chef smiled. ‘It's delicious, isn't it? I made it. It uses strained tomato sauce. And the aubergines have been fried in a light oil.' He moved closer to the painting.

The old man craned his neck, without losing sight of the chef.

‘Take your time eating. I'll just take this and leave,' the chef said in a low, reassuring tone of voice. But the old man grabbed the tray from the floor and, hissing like a cat, he threw himself at Zóltan. The chef stretched out his right hand and squeezed the spherical cap of the skull.

Aleksej Jusupov, famous marathon runner, stood still instantly. His eyes went blank and his arms fell to his sides. From the tray that he was holding on to in his hand, the rest of the parmesan dribbled to the ground.

How strange. Suddenly he was no longer afraid of that black man, and in fact he realised that he loved him. He reminded him of the old monk from his village. And the hand on his forehead radiated a wholesome warmth all down his arthritic
skeleton. It seemed to be absorbing a healing energy that surrounded his bones and softened joints stiffened over time with the dampness of life underground. He felt strong and fit, like when he was a young boy.

He hadn't thought back to that time in his life for years.

He used to run kilometres and kilometres along the frozen banks of Lake Baikal without ever getting tired. And his father, tempered in his overcoat, would check his times. To celebrate, if he had beaten his own record, they would go fishing on the long pier from where you could see the Barguzin Mountains covered in snow. In winter it was even more beautiful, and they would open a hole in the ice and drop their bait in. And if they were lucky, they would pull up one of those big brown carps. Vigorous animals, who fought proudly before giving in.