Back to Bologna

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Paleotti, Aldrovandi, Sigonio, Colonna and Gentileschi,’ Delia replied. ‘Zappi and Giovio are leaning towards us, but could go either way, while Orsini will certainly vote for Ugo. They have the same publisher, apart from anything else. But that will just make it look better. The main thing is that whatever happens you’re bound to win. So relax, okay? There’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say! You’re not the one who’s going to have to stand up in front of Christ knows how many million viewers and actually do it.’

  Flavia made a show of passing her mop over the false-tile vinyl floor, but in reality she was listening carefully. Her spoken Italian was not perfect as yet, although by no means as primitive as her reply to the crow had suggested, but she understood the language very well indeed. When you are a young woman, poor, powerless and alone in a strange land, you learn fast.

  The woman called Delia gave a snort of what sounded like exasperation.

  ‘Listen, Romano, everything’s going to be all right. Trust me. You’ll do fine, you’ll look fabulous, and above all you’ll clear your name of this ridiculous slur once and for all. If you’re nervous, just double your normal dose of beta blockers.’

  She paused and looked at him significantly.

  ‘But nothing else, all right? No coke, no speed, and none of whatever those pills are that you’ve been popping. Not until the event’s over. Understand? After that you can do what you like.’

  The man nodded grudgingly. Delia indicated a large video screen hanging at an angle above the set.

  ‘The list of ingredients will be displayed there. Glance at it briefly but with apparent interest. Remember, it’s supposed to be the first time you’ve ever seen it. Scrutinise it with a nonchalant, relaxed expression, as if your mind is running through all the possibilities offered before making a spontaneous decision. Then turn decisively away, go to the stove and get the pasta water going before starting in on the sauce. Do everything with panache and naturalezza. Maybe sing a bit. But not too much, okay?’

  She pointed to the kitchen counter.

  ‘The ingredients will be laid out here. Just pick out the ones we’ve been through with Righi and leave the rest alone. No last-minute improvisation, please. I’ll arrange for a litre bottle of Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta oil to be placed here. Naturally a celebrity such as you wouldn’t dream of using an inferior product, plus it’ll give our label some nice exposure.’

  She looked around.

  ‘What else? Knives here, next to the cutting board. Pans over here. When the dish is ready, press this buzzer. Someone will come and take the pasta bowl from you and carry it out behind the set and in through the back of the dining area, so that in theory the jurors don’t know which kitchen it came from. In fact your bowl has a distinctive orange patterning at the rim, subtly different from Ugo’s. Our people will be in no doubt about which one is which.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Something’s going to go wrong,’ the man replied in a dull voice. ‘I just know it.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Romano! Nothing will go wrong. Nothing can. I’ve covered all the angles. All you have to do is be here on time, with a clear head, and put together a simple bowl of pasta that even I could make blindfold. Besides, it doesn’t matter if it’s any good or not. Haven’t you understood yet? You’re bound to win! It’s all been arranged.’

  She glanced at her watch.

  ‘Right, let’s go back to the hotel. The press conference starts in half an hour.’

  When they had left, Flavia finished up her cleaning, then returned all the equipment to the storage room before leaving the concrete wasteland of the fiera complex and heading for the bus stop. The video display indicated that a smog alert was in effect, all vehicles with uneven numbered plates being banned from the streets, and that her bus would arrive in six minutes. She took out her phone and dialled.

  ‘It’s me. I had to work overtime because of this chef’s duel they’re having tomorrow. Where are you? Oh. Well, I’m starving. La Carrozza in half an hour? Yes, I know you’re going through a bad patch, Rodolfo, but it will do you good to get out. Ah, here’s my bus. A presto, caro.’

  Flavia climbed aboard the bus with a smile on her lips that had nothing whatever to do with the silly intrigues on which she had been eavesdropping. I’m going to meet my prince, she thought.

  14

  Aurelio Zen’s mind was wandering, and he was happy to let it do so. The air was acrid and savagely cold, the night starkly bright. On a frozen, floodlit field far below, men in suits and dark overcoats stood in line, heads bowed respectfully, awaiting their turn to step up to the podium and deliver a speech concerning the various virtues of Lorenzo Curti, their personal sense of loss and their perspectives on the unspeakable tragedy that his untimely death represented to everyone foregathered there, to the wider footballing community united at this moment in grief and remembrance, to the city of Bologna and indeed the nation and the world in general.

  The surrounding environment consisted of concrete, steel and rows of blue plastic bucket seats which the spectators had lined with newspapers to protect their clothing from the residue of filth deposited there by the polluted void above. Apart from the amplified eulogies, the only sound was from the crowd of hardcore ultra fans at the far end of the stadium, who kept up a continuous low ululation, presumably a spontaneous expression of respect.

  ‘I’ll see you in the bar,’ Zen told Bruno Nanni, getting up and starting along the narrow row between the seats towards the nearest aisle.

  Atotal stranger whose foot Zen inadvertently stepped on looked up at him truculently.

  ‘Leaving already? You might show a little respect.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Zen replied, shaking his head. ‘I just can’t take any more. It’s like a death in the family. Do you understand?’

  The man’s expression changed to one of sympathy and he nodded.

  Zen made his way through the cavernous vaults and vomitories of the stadium until he finally emerged in the bleak piazzetta outside, its scruffy grass borders and failed shrubs and trees exposed beneath the powerful and pitiless lighting ranged high overhead on steel poles.

  On their arrival, Bruno had pointed out a bar in a neighbouring street as the unofficial clubhouse of the diehard Bologna supporters. At present the latter were still all inside the stadium, and the bar was almost empty. The most conspicuous figure was a bulky man wearing a double-breasted overcoat, a grey trilby and dark glasses. He was leaning casually against the rear wall, sipping a tumbler of whiskey and smoking an unfiltered American cigarette, and was fairly obviously a private detective. Apart from him, there were just three elderly men playing cards at the rear of the premises, and a woman of about their age who was sipping a glass of Fernet Branca and murmuring in a sustained monologue to a Pekinese dog that was a triumph of the taxidermist’s art.

  ‘…personally I want to be burnt when the time comes, even though it turns out you pay the same either way, well of course you don’t pay but…’

  The ceiling was festooned with banners and flags in the team’s red and blue colours, and the walls were covered in photographs of cup and league-winning squads dating back to well before World War Two. Zen ordered a coffee with a shot of grappa and took it over to a table.

  Almost half an hour passed before the crowd started drifting out of the stadium. The bar soon filled up with young males wearing baseball caps, floppy jackets, even floppier pants, and synthetic sports shoes constructed along the lines of a club sandwich. They adopted a wide-legged stance, taking up as much room as possible, and loitered there with indefinite but vaguely menacing intent, talking and staring and drinking and twitching.

  Feeling slightly overwhelmed, Zen stood up and found an elbow-level ledge against the mirror-clad pillar in the centre of the bar. The man dressed up as a private eye had now removed his shades and was gazing with intense concentration at a knot of partic
ularly obnoxious newcomers who had taken up position to Zen’s right. He kept bringing his right hand up to his face to inspect something in the palm, a mobile phone perhaps. The thought spurred Zen to check his own, which he had switched off in the stadium out of respect for the occasion. A text message appeared: coming bo tomorrow lunch? He hit the speed-dial buttons for the Lucca number, but there was no reply.

  One of the fans came lurching back from the bar, a tall glass of some yellow liqueur in his hand. He was wearing a woolly hat, a black leather jacket with the club crest on the back, torn jeans and sports shoes, and walked straight into the mirrored pillar, spilling most of his drink over Zen’s coat.

  ‘Cazzo!’ he spat out. ‘Fuck you doing here, vecchione? Buy me another drink, you…’

  But Zen had apparently been seized by a violent coughing attack, which caused him to lose his balance and lurch towards the younger man. A moment later the latter screamed and then collapsed on the tiled floor, just as Bruno appeared.

  ‘He hit me!’ the man on the floor yelled, thrashing wildly about. ‘He kneed me in the fucking balls! Christ it hurts!’

  All conversation in the bar ceased, but no one intervened. The complainant struggled painfully to his feet and turned on Bruno.

  ‘You with him, Nanni?’ he demanded aggressively.

  Bruno nodded.

  ‘So who is the old bastard?’

  ‘A friend.’

  There was a moment then when various things might have happened, then three of the man’s companions came over and led him away.

  ‘Sorry about that, dottore,’ the patrolman remarked.

  ‘He knows you, Bruno?’

  Nanni shrugged.

  ‘I’m not part of his tight set, but we all more or less know each other. The ones who go to away matches, I mean.’

  ‘Does he know you’re a policeman?’

  ‘You think I’m crazy?’

  He leant forward.

  ‘Actually, he’s the one I wanted you to meet.’

  ‘The one who’s bragging that he killed Curti?’

  Bruno nodded.

  ‘So who is he?’

  ‘Name of Vincenzo Amadori. His father’s a lawyer and his mother works for the regional government. One of the better families in town, as they say here. But the kid likes to act the desperate emarginato with nothing to lose. Comes on like he’s one of the hardest cases at the stadium.’

  ‘And the others accept him?’

  Bruno shrugged.

  ‘They tolerate him. Of course, it helps that he’s got money. All the drinks tonight for that clique over there are on him, for example. He just hands the barman his credit card.’

  ‘But he’s not really liked?’

  ‘I didn’t notice anyone rushing to his aid just now.’

  He looked wonderingly at Zen.

  ‘Did you really knacker him?’

  But Zen chose not to hear.

  ‘Why is there nothing about any of this in the interim report on the Curti case?’ he demanded.

  Bruno dismissed the question with a wave.

  ‘No one knows except me. In any case, it’s just stadium gossip.’

  ‘Or malicious misinformation put about by some rival gang of supporters who resent this Vincenzo Amadori’s attitude and influence, and are trying to make trouble for him.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Bruno conceded. ‘But there is one potentially substantive detail. That pack always hires a coach to take them to the away fixtures, so that they can travel together and stoke up on booze and God knows what before being shaken down by the cops at the entrance to the ground. I was rostered for duty the night Curti was shot, so I couldn’t go to the game myself, but I’ve heard that Vincenzo travelled down to Ancona with the rest of them as usual, only when the coach left for the return trip he wasn’t on it.’

  Zen noticed the man in the trench coat and trilby heading for the door. He handed Bruno some money.

  ‘Get us both a drink. A hot toddy for me. And a damp cloth to clean this muck off my coat.’

  15

  ‘Nervoso? Macché? For me, the cooking is the life! I wait tomorrow like a promised spouse his moon of honey! Believe it, to be nervous, it is more the timorous adversary of me which is feeling himself in this mode! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

  The Dutch journalist nodded in a mystified way and started muttering to his neighbour. Romano Rinaldi looked around the company with that trademark beaming smile, showing his very white teeth above the beard and generally radiating relaxed bonhomie. He could only stand another five minutes, he thought, catching Delia’s eye meaningfully. She responded with a minimal vertical movement of her head, and Romano smiled even more largely and headed for the bathroom.

  Safely locked in a cubicle, he took out one of the origami sachets stashed in his wallet and inhaled the contents off the back of his hand. Just the one, he thought, relishing the immediate, overwhelming rush of clarity and assurance. Well, maybe one more, what the hell. The main thing was that the evening was a success. More than that, a triumph! Everything was sparkling: the plates, the glasses, the lights, the company, and above all he himself, the star! He hadn’t sampled the varied and delicious canapés the hotel had laid on, not having any appetite for anything but the crystalline powder–all right, one more line couldn’t hurt–but this too fitted in perfectly, an act of genius demonstrating to the assembled contingent of foreign food pornographers that Romano Rinaldi disdained the products of even the best kitchen in Bologna. Nothing was good enough for Lo Chef but his own cooking.

  The press conference had been hastily arranged with a view to promoting a version of his show abroad. The domestic market was pretty well saturated now, but there was a potentially vast audience elsewhere, above all the US. Italian food was hot. With his usual casual mastery, Romano had learnt to speak perfect English in a few months, as he had just demonstrated. The assembled journalists had clearly been astonished, even disconcerted, by his fluency. Most people in Europe understood at least some English, and if they didn’t then they’d have to put up with subtitles or a voice-over. But the concept itself was solid, as he proceeded to explain in rapid Italian to the press corps when he floated back into the large private room that Delia had booked.

  ‘For we Italians, cooking is not a thing apart. It is not just a skill or a trade, it is life itself! This is impossible for foreigners to understand. You people just eat something, anything, to stay alive, gobbling down your filthy meals like a bunch of neolithic savages in a cave! For we Italians it is very different. When we create un piatto autentico, genuino e tipico, it isn’t just to satisfy our bodily hunger. No! We want to take inside ourselves all of Italy, her history, her culture, her language, her incomparable cities and landscapes. We want to imbibe the very heart and soul of this earthly paradise that is our native land! To you barbarians, food is a mere physical substance, so many calories and grams of fat, so much vitamin C and roughage. To us, this is a sacrilege! For we Italians, dining is like taking holy communion, tasting the very body and blood of our sacred culture that we consume in this daily domestic mass!’

  Surrendering as always to the instinctive grasp of the public pulse that never deserted him, Rinaldi launched into a free adaptation of Verdi’s ‘Va, pensiero’. Then he abruptly broke off in mid-phrase. His face darkened.

  ‘Mind you, it hasn’t always been easy for me. On the contrary! My enemies say I only do this for the money, the fame, the women, the fast cars, the jet-set lifestyle. And of course like every other talented and successful person in this country, I have many enemies. Only enemies, you might even say. They’re all out to get me! You stupid foreigners visit Italy and think, “Beautiful villas, magnificent countryside, wonderful art, cooking and culture, a truly civilised country, an earthly paradise”. You blind fools! You see only the pretty face and don’t have the wit to realise that this stinking nation is nothing but a bloated corpse whose apparent signs of life only prove that the maggots are already heaving within! P
aradise, my arse! Rather a Third World shithole inhabited by vicious, envious swine whose only thought is to try and drag me down to their own miserable level of insignificance!’

  He breathed deeply for several seconds, then smiled at everyone seated around the table to indicate the utter futility of any such attempt.

  ‘And now Professor Edgardo Ugo dares to suggest that I do not know how to cook! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! What does he know about Italian food and culture? He’s spent so long locked up with his musty books that he’s no better than you foreigners! Him, challenge me to prove myself? Don’t make me laugh! He lives in an ivory tower, like all academics. He cares nothing for the bel paese, but me, I love it with all my body and soul. That’s why I have dedicated my life to making the immortal masterpieces of our Italian cuisine accessible to the people, so that our long, proud and unbroken tradition may continue for many generations into the future!’

  He burst into totally sincere tears. Several of the journalists began to gather their things together and eye the door.

  ‘For him, it is all the head, not the heart!’ Lo Chef continued, drying his eyes openly, unashamed of his worthy emotion. ‘He is a thinker, but Romano Rinaldi is a lover! I COOK WITH MY COCK!!’

  Delia had long since given up any attempt at translating this speech, and was now bustling around speaking to the departing journalists. Sensing the prevailing mood, Rinaldi switched effortlessly into his perfect English.

  ‘Ugo dares quarrel me? Well! Soon he gets his want! This bastard say I know fuck nothing, but he is in error, my friends. Tomorrow I demonstrate once and for ever to you here, to my public, and to the entire world, that I know FUCK ALL!!!’

  In the lobby, Rinaldi pressed the flesh assiduously, with Delia keeping a cautious eye on the proceedings.

  ‘What I do now?’ he replied to an unasked question. ‘I walk! I inhale the air, I mingle with the people, I absorb the unique culture of Italy that lies all around, and I draw inspiration for the contest tomorrow. Buona notte a tutti!’