thought I was when I went there yesterday. What really shook me was that she seems to think that Ruspanti is still alive.’
Falcone stood perfectly still, his hands clasped and his eyes raised to the ceiling, like a plaster statue of one of the lesser saints.
‘Of course, given the isolation in which she lives, there’s no reason why she should ever find out. Unless someone told her.’
There was no reaction apart from a fractional heightening of Falcone’s expression of transcendental sublimity.
‘I’m no psychologist,’ Zen admitted, ‘but I’d be prepared to bet that if Ariana was told that her beloved cousin Ludo was dead, and exactly how he died, then the consequences would be extremely grave.’
He waved casually around the workshop.
‘At the very least, the supply of new Falco designs would be likely to dry up for some considerable…’
Then the other man was on him, grabbing the pistol in his right hand. Zen tried to shake him off, but Falcone hung on like a terrier. In the end he had to crack him across the head with the other pistol before he would let go.
‘There’s no need for this,’ Zen told him. ‘All I want is a reasonable settlement. We can come to terms. I’m not greedy.’
But Falcone was beyond reach. Shaking his woozy head like a boxer, he came forward again. Zen cocked the replica revolver and pointed it at him.
‘Keep your distance!’
There was a deafening bang. This time both men looked stunned, but Zen recovered first. He wasn’t still groggy from the first time, for one thing. But the main point was that he had felt the revolver rear up in his hand, and realized what had happened. Falcone didn’t seem to have been hit, thank God, but his face was that of a man in hell.
‘It was a mistake!’ Zen assured him. ‘I got the pistols mixed up. I fired yours by mistake. Mine’s just a replica.’
But Falcone was gone, turning on his heel and sprinting through to the next room.
‘Come back!’ yelled Zen, chasing him. ‘You’re in no danger! All I want is money!’
When he reached the door of the office, it was empty. He searched the gymnasium and bathroom beyond, but there was no sign of Falcone. Only then did he notice the open window. The offices formed part of the south end of the Galleria’s main aisle, the lower floors having windows which opened directly on to it, beneath the glazed-barrel vault roof. This floor was at roof level, and it was only a short drop from the window to one of the iron girders which supported the large panes of glass. Catwalks ran the length of the main supporting struts, giving access to the roof for cleaning and maintenance. Along one of these, Raimondo Falcone was now running for his life.
‘ Merda!’ shouted Zen.
He was disgusted with his clumsiness, his unbelievable gaucheness, his limitless ineptitude. Couldn’t he do any thing right? What would Tania think of him, after all his proud boasts about things changing? Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. In sheer frustration he fired the pistol again and again, blasting away as though to punch new stars in the night sky.
The renewed firing made Falcone run even faster. He had reached the cupola now, and started to climb the metal ladder which led from the catwalk up the curving glass slope of the dome to the ventilation lantern at the top. Through the shifting panels of fog, Zen could just see Falcone moving rapidly across the panes of lighted glass like a nimble skater on a luminous mountain of ice. It thus seemed no great surprise when, in total silence and with no fuss whatsoever, he abruptly disappeared from view.
Down in the Galleria itself, Christmas was in the air. The shops, cafes and travel agencies were all doing a thriving business. Giving and receiving, eating and drinking, skiing and sunning and all the other rituals and observances of the festive season ensured that money was changing hands in a manner calculated to gladden the hearts of the traders. Any modern Christ who had attempted to intervene would himself have been expelled in short order by the security guards employed to keep this temple of commerce free of beggars, junkies, buskers, religious fanatics and other riff-raff.
Nevertheless, it was some such gesture of protest that sprang to most people’s minds when they heard the sound of breaking glass. The shop windows were a powerful symbol of the socio-economic barriers against which the poor were constantly being brought up short. They could gawk at the goodies as much as they liked, but they couldn’t get at them. Sometimes, especially around Christmas, the disparity between the way of life on display and the one they actually lived became too much to bear, and some crazed soul would pick up a hammer and have a go.
Even the screaming seemed at first to fit this scenario, until some people, more acute of hearing, realized that it was not coming from on-lookers in the immediate vicinity of the presumed outrage, but from somewhere else altogether — in fact from above. When they raised their eyes to the roof to see what it could be, the expression of amazement on their faces made their neighbours do the same, until in no time at all everyone in the Galleria was gazing upwards. It must have looked extraordinary, seen from above, this crowd of faces all tilted up like a crop of sunflowers.
Until then, the distribution of people in the aisles of the Galleria had been fairly even, but they now began to scatter and press back, forming clusters near the walls and rapidly evacuating the space at the centre of the building, where the arms of the House of Savoy were displayed in inlaid marble. The clearing thus formed might have been destined for an impromptu performance of some kind, a display of acrobatics or some similar feat of skill or daring. But the crowd’s attention was high above, where the vast, dark opacity of the cupola weighed down on the lighted space below. Now the shock was over, they were reassured to realize that the body plummeting to earth amid a debris of broken glass must be a spectacle of some kind got up to divert the shoppers, an optical illusion, a fake. Clearly no one could have fallen through the enclosure overhead, as solid and heavy as vaulted masonry. It was all a trick. A moment before impact the plunging body would pull up short, restrained by hidden wires, while the accompanying shoal of jagged icicles tinkled prettily to pieces on the marble floor before melting harmlessly away.
In the event, though, it turned out to be real.
