Cabal - 3

by Michael Dibdin

  The man stepped off the exercise bicycle and surveyed himself in the mirror. His lithe, slender body was covered with a pleasing sheen of sweat, creating highlights and chiaroscuro and emphasizing the contours of the evenly tanned flesh, hardened and sculpted by workouts such as the one he had just completed. So satisfied was he by what the mirror showed him that he lingered there a moment longer under the spell of that unattainable object of desire.

  ‘Without my clothes, I feel naked,’ he had once remarked to an interviewer, who had laughed uproariously at this witticism. It was in fact the literal truth. Even his own nudity was only tolerable when reflected back to him from the mirror. The idea of other people’s was quite repugnant to him. His secret fantasy was to become that glistening image, to break through the glass and merge with that substanceless child of light, for whom being and seeming were one and the same. As for the others, as imperfect as himself, and a good deal less fastidious in most cases, he did not particularly care to share a room with most of them, never mind anything more intimate. With a final, flirtatious glance at the mirror, he turned away and flounced off to the bathroom.

  Ten minutes later, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, he walked through to the adjoining pair of offices. The clock on the wall showed twenty to seven. The suite was located on the top floor of a block backing on to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, and commanded a striking view of the great glazed cupola, swelling up into the night sky like a luminous balloon. He had switched off all the lights, and this background glimmer, softened by the thickening fog, was the only source of illumination. Feeling a prickle of sweat break out on his stomach and back, he opened the window slightly. Coolness was the key to everything. The secret of his success lay in the ability to remain perfectly calm whatever happened, to manipulate events and perceptions so that people saw only what he wished them to see.

  He picked up a canvas bag lying on the desk and went into the workroom next door. The walls were covered with sketches and photographs, the floor littered with irregular off-cuts of the fine paper used for sizing garments. Only a tiny fraction of the light from the Galleria penetrated to this internal room, but he moved through it with total confidence, skirting the pin-studded mannequins and sidestepping the benches draped with silk and velvet, cashmere and wool, leather and tweed. As he passed each one, he let his fingers run over the material, and shivered sensuously.

  The one way in which he revealed himself to be his father’s son was his passion for materials: their look, their feel, their smell. Umberto used to bring samples home from the mills at Como and stroke the boy’s infant cheeks with them. The idea was to train Raimondo from the earliest possible age for his future role as heir to the family textile business. But the child had misunderstood, as children are prone to do. He thought his father was caressing him, expressing a love that so rarely manifested itself on other occasions.

  At the door leading to the hallway, he paused briefly and listened. All was quiet. He unlocked the door, went out and closed it behind him, pulling until the lock engaged with a precise click. He removed a pair of disposable rubber gloves from the bag and put them on, then took out the cold chisel and hammer. Working the chisel into the crack between the lock and the jamb, he struck it repeatedly until the lock shattered. Then he replaced the chisel and hammer in the bag, peeled off the rubber gloves with a shudder of disgust – they reminded him of condoms – and went back inside, leaving the door slightly ajar.

  As he passed one of the worktables, his fingers touched a garment which he could not for a moment identify. He paused to stroke it delicately, grazing the surface of the fabric like a lover exploring the contours of his partner’s body. A languid smile of recognition softened the normally rigid contours of his lips. Of course! It was the model for the new line of jeans which he was going to unleash on the world next year, a move calculated to reaffirm the atelier’s revolutionary reputation. Not that demand for the existing lines had in any way slackened. On the contrary, business was booming. But he knew that the time to abandon a successful formula was before it began to pall. That way, you retained the initiative. You weren’t running for cover, you were ‘making a statement’.

  In the present instance, this meant abandoning the complex, multi-layered pyrotechnics for which he’d become famous in favour of something plain and popular, something strong and simple, something ecological. Jeans were all these things, of course, but their appeal was fatally diminished by the fact that they were also durable, and cheap. The response of the leading designers had been to price them up, to sell the price rather than the garment.

  Such a solution was worthy of the shallow, conventional minds who ran the major fashion houses. Anyone could license a line of designer denims and sell them at a five hundred per cent mark-up – at least, anyone with a name like Armani or Valentino could. It had been left to him, the newcomer, to achieve a truly creative breakthrough. His fingertips caressed the soft brushed silk which he’d had tinted to resemble worn and faded denim. Naturally no one in their right minds would be prepared to pay Falco prices for real denim, which would last for years. These, on the other hand, although virtually indistinguishable from the real thing to the naked eye, would tolerate only the most limited wear before falling apart. People were going to kill for them.

  Back in his private sanctum, he sat down at his desk and held his watch up to the glimmer from the window. Five to seven. He opened the middle drawer of the desk and took out the pistol he had brought from home. The gun had belonged to his father, a service-issue revolver which he had retained illegally at the end of the war as a souvenir. As far as he knew, Umberto had never used the weapon in anger, not that it would have done him much good against the Red Brigades’ Kalashnikovs. But that would just make the authorities more sympathetic when his son acted a trifle hastily in a similar situation. Not that anyone was likely to think twice about the matter anyway. Break-ins and muggings were everyday events in the junkie-ridden centre of Milan. What was more natural than that he should keep his father’s old service pistol at the office where he often worked late and alone? Or indeed that he should use it when the need arose?

  ‘I was walking towards my desk, officer, when I heard a sound in the outer office. I’d just had a shower. I suppose that’s why I hadn’t heard the noise of the door being forced. I ran to the desk and got out the pistol I’ve kept there since the building was broken into last week …’ After that, it would depend on whether his visitor proved to have been armed, something which he could easily verify after shooting him dead. If he wasn’t, then it might be marginally more difficult, although accidents did notoriously happen in these circumstances. But this was unlikely. The overwhelming probability was that the intruder would have a gun too. He sounded like Zeppegno, a wannabee thug full of tough talk and cheap threats. To scum like that, a gun was like an American Express card. It said something about you. People treated you with respect and said, ‘That’ll do nicely, sir.’ You didn’t leave home without it. All he needed to do was put on the rubber gloves and fire a few rounds from the victim’s gun into the walls and furniture, then transfer the sheaths to the dead man’s hands, thus explaining the lack of fingerprints, and call the police. If he got anything more than a fine for possessing an unregistered firearm, there would be a universal outcry among the good burghers of Milan. What, an eminent designer could be threatened by some doped-up hoodlum in his own office without even being permitted to defend himself? What was the world coming to?

  He placed the gun on the desk within easy reach and lay back in his swivel chair, thinking about his father. His parents were not often in his thoughts. Indeed, people had called him cold and unnatural at the time of the tragedy, but it would be truer to say that he felt little or nothing, and refused – this was the scandal, of course – to pretend that he did. He had never tried to get anyone else to understand his views on the subject, which all came down to the fact that he did not consider Umberto and Chiara to be his parents at all, except i
n the most reductive genetic sense. Their children were Raimondo and his sister Ariana. He, Falco, owed them nothing.

  His cousin Ludovico Ruspanti had been an early inspiration. He had made everyone else in Raimondo’s circle seem wan and insipid. When Umberto and Chiara became martyrs of the class struggle, his father dying in a hail of machine-gun fire sprayed through the windscreen of their Mercedes, his mother succumbing to her injuries a few days later, he had remembered Ludovico’s deportment on the occasion of his own bereavements. He must have handled it badly, though. No one had criticized Ludovico’s play-acting, even though he had turned to wink broadly at his cousin after making some fulsome comments about his late brother, as though to say ‘We know better, don’t we?’ Raimondo, on the other hand, had made the mistake of being frank about his feelings, or lack of them, and for this he had never been forgiven.

  What no one could ever deny was that he had coped extremely well with orphanhood, while Ariana had been broken. She had worshipped her parents, particularly her mother, to whom she had always been close. Raimondo had made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of her child-like dependency, of that physical intimacy prolonged well into adolescence. He found it cloying and excessive, and he had been proved right. When the walls of her emotional hothouse were so brutally shattered by the terrorists’ bullets, Ariana had collapsed into something very close to madness.

  This fact had been hushed up by the services of exclusive and discreet private ‘nursing homes’ which existed for just this very purpose, and by the use of such euphemisms as ‘prostrated by grief’ and ‘emotionally overwrought’. The plain truth was that Ariana Falcone had gone crazy, as her brother had not scrupled to tell her to her face shortly after the funeral. Enough was enough! He had always resented the exaggerated fuss which had been made of Ariana, the way her every wish and whim was pandered to. This excessive display of temperament was just another blatant example of attention-seeking, and in extremely poor taste too, trading on their parents’ violent deaths for her own selfish ends, and trying – with a certain amount of success, moreover – to make him look cold and heartless by comparison. The sooner she faced up to the realities of the new situation the better. Their parents were dead and he was in charge. What Ariana needed was a series of short, sharp shocks to bring this home to her, and it was this which he had set out to provide.

  Although he had applied his treatment rigorously, Ariana stubbornly refused to respond. On the first anniversary of the killings, he had given her one last chance, ordering her to appear at a memorial service which was being held at their local church. Not only had she refused, but the only reason she deigned to give was that she wanted to play with her collection of dolls which were kept in the beautiful wooden toyhouse which her parents had given her for her eighth birthday. Her brother’s response had been swift and decisive. Tying her to a chair, he had doused the doll’s-house in paraffin and set fire to it before her eyes, with the dolls inside.

  But Ariana’s petulance seemingly knew no bounds. Far from accepting that it was time to stop these embarrassing and self-indulgent games, she had sunk into a condition verging on catatonia. Eventually Raimondo found a doctor who was prepared to prescribe an indefinite course of tranquillizers which kept Ariana more or less amenable, and their Aunt Carmela was brought in to act as minder. Raimondo moved out to a small modern flat near the university, where he had been re-enrolling for years without ever taking his exams. The huge palazzo which Umberto’s father had bought in the twenties was turned over to Carmela and Ariana. A new playhouse was obtained and stocked with dolls. It was not quite the same, but Ariana showed no sign of noticing the difference, or of remembering what had happened to the original. She spent her days happily sewing clothes for her dolls based on ideas culled from Carmela’s discarded magazines.

  What happened next was completely unpredictable. Appropriately enough, the whole thing had been intended as a joke. Paolo, one of Raimondo’s student acquaintances, had always dreamt of becoming a fashion designer, much against his parents’ wishes. It was he who told Raimondo about the competition being run by a leading fashion magazine to find the ‘designers of tomorrow’. He was submitting a portfolio of drawings and sketches, which he described to his friends at every opportunity. If he won, he explained, then his parents would be obliged to let him follow his genius instead of taking a job in a bank. Paolo went on at such length about it that Raimondo finally decided to play a trick on him. One evening when Ariana had gone to bed, he borrowed a dozen of her dolls, complete with the miniature costumes she had made for them, removed the heads to make them resemble dressmaker’s mannequins, and then photographed them carefully with a close-up lens. Next he took the prints to a commercial art studio and had them reproduced as fashion sketches, which he triumphantly showed to Paolo as his entry.

  If Paolo had taken the thing in the spirit in which it had been intended, Raimondo would have admitted the truth, had a good laugh, and that would have been that. To his amazement, however, Paolo reacted with a torrent of vituperative abuse. Raimondo’s designs were impractical nonsense, he claimed. No one could ever make such things, let alone wear them. In short, it would be an insult to submit them for the competition. Until that moment, Raimondo had not had the slightest intention of doing so, but Paolo had been so unpleasant that he sent the drawings in to spite him. When the results were announced three months later, he was awarded the first prize.

  His first reaction was one of incredulity. The joke had gone far enough – much too far, in fact. He must put a stop to it at once. But that wasn’t so easy, not with all Milan beating a path to the door. Paolo couldn’t have been more wrong, it seemed. The designs Raimondo had submitted were judged to be daring but accessible, refreshingly different, striking just the right balance between novelty and practicality. He was offered contracts, more or less on his own terms, with several of the city’s top fashion houses.

  If Ariana had been in her right mind, he would have let her take the prize and the fame and fortune that went with it. As it was, this was out of the question. His sister was quite incapable of sustaining the ordeal of public exposure. Apart from Aunt Carmela and Raimondo himself, the only person she ever saw was her cousin Ludovico, on whom she seemed to have developed a schoolgirlish crush. She always brightened up before, during and after his visits, which had grown quite frequent. Apparently Ludo had some business interests in Milan, although it was never very clear what they were. When he was around, Ariana could almost pass for normal, but this was an illusion. Ariana lived in a self-contained world, talking to no one but her dolls. She had never watched television or read the papers since the day a report about some terrorist atrocity had caused a lengthy relapse. Her world had a lot to recommend it, from her point of view. It was warm, stable and quiet. There were no nasty surprises. Love might safely be invested, secure in the knowledge that no harm could befall.

  For Raimondo to admit the truth would only have served to kill a goose whose eggs, it seemed, were of solid gold. But it wasn’t really a question of money. The Falcone family fortunes, although no longer quite what they had been when Umberto was running the business, were still in an altogether different league from those of their Roman cousins. No, it was the original element – that of the practical joke, the elaborate prank – which swayed him in the end. If fooling Paolo had seemed a worthwhile thing to do, the idea of fooling everybody was completely irresistible.

  It took him a while to find his feet. The freelance contract didn’t work out in the end. When the house involved requested small changes in various details, he’d had to refuse, for the simple reason that he was unable to draw. His arrogance and intransigence attracted criticism at the time, but in the long run the episode merely strengthened his hand, increasing his reputation as a wayward, uncompromising genius who worked alone by night and then appeared with a sheaf of sketches and said, ‘Take it or leave it!’

  When he launched his own ready-to-wear line the following March, i
t was only a modest success. The fashion world in Italy is dominated by a handful of big names whose control is exercised through exclusive contracts with textile producers, insider deals in which the fashion press allocate editorial space in direct proportion to the amount of advertising bought, and licensing arrangements for perfumes, watches, lighters, glasses, scarves and luggage which make such ‘conces-sion tycoons’ multi-millionaires without their having to lift a finger. What was being sold was an image created by the designers’ haute couture range, shown three times a year in Rome and abroad. Such garments, selling for tens of billions of lire, were out of reach to anyone but the super-rich, most of them in America and the Gulf oil states, but the image of luxury and exclusivity were available to anyone prepared to pay a modest sum for a ‘designer-labelled’ product which might in fact have been produced in a Korean sweat shop. The sweat didn’t stick, the chic did. That was the trick of it.

  As sole owner of a large textile mill, Raimondo Falcone was in a unique position to break the cartel on raw materials. The problem lay in generating the desirable image. He clearly couldn’t go into couture. As the word implies, this means being able to cut, to go into a fitting room with the client, pick up a length of cloth and a pair of scissors and produce something which looks like it has grown there. This was clearly not a possibility for Raimondo, who couldn’t cut a slice of panettone without wrecking the entire cake. Then he had his inspiration, one day when he was being interviewed on television. His sudden emergence on to the fashion scene, as though from nowhere, was already the stuff of legend. People were naturally curious about him, his background, his working methods, his philosophy. While he was telling the interviewer a pack of lies – ‘I always thought of it as a hobby really, I used to scribble ideas on the back of an envelope and then lose it somewhere …’ – it occurred to him that what people really wanted from their clothes was the kind of miraculous transformation like the one which so fascinated them about him. They wanted to be able to put on a new personality like putting on a shirt. Fashion wasn’t just about attracting sexual partners or showing off your wealth. It was a search for metamorphosis, for transcendence. And who better to offer it than a man who appeared unfettered by the constraints within which ordinary mortals were forced to operate?