‘I am see him there I think,’ she declared in a laborious chant.
‘Hey, it talks as well!’ Dragos remarked with a jocular leer. ‘Tell me you mix a mean martini, darling, and you’ve got yourself a date. Actually, all you need to do is sit down and cross your legs.’
He looked around hopefully, but chairs were among the many items of furniture the room lacked.
‘You go there to see him?’ Dragos continued. ‘Or is it the other kid?’
‘The other.’
Asharp nod.
‘Smart girl. Strictly between you, me and anyone who may be listening in behind these cardboard walls, our little Prince Vince is bad news.’
‘I already know these. But he is not a prince I think.’
The secret policeman’s attention had seemingly wandered again, this time to the electric hotplate that was the household’s only cooking facility. He walked over and sniffed the simmering sauce appreciatively.
‘Have you ever met any of his friends?’ he remarked in a tone of studied indifference.
‘Of this Vincenzo?’
‘The very same.’
Drago sucked at his cigarette.
‘He’s fallen into bad company, you see. His parents are very worried.’
‘My friend he is not bad company.’
‘Mattioli? No, he’s okay, for a student. But there’s this crew that Amadori hangs out with at football matches. They’re a different story.’
‘These I never see.’
‘Never, eh?’
Dragos picked up a spoon, dipped it into the pasta sauce and slurped down the contents, turning to Flavia with a patronising smirk that was abruptly wiped from his face. He dropped the spoon and clutched his throat, then doubled over and began bawling incoherently.
Flavia ran to the washbasin and filled the toothglass with water, but the sufferer had already grabbed a beaker of colourless fluid from a nearby shelf and downed it in one. The result was a series of piercing shrieks which blasted openings into that wing of the palace which the Princess had ordered to be abandoned and sealed up years before.
‘Merda di merda di merda di merda di merda di merda di…’
It was only after administering a lengthy course of plain yoghurt diluted with lemon juice that Flavia was able to get her visitor into a fit state to leave, which by then was all he showed any desire to do. Unfortunately the interruption left her no time to complete and then eat the late lunch she had been eagerly anticipating before going to work. She was particularly resentful about this since the sauce-despite the unprintable things the secret policeman had said about it-was a personal favourite which she could only prepare on very rare occasions when the necessary ingredient was to hand.
There were few enough things that Flavia missed about her native country, but the relish which formed the basis of this sauce was one. It consisted of sliced red and yellow goatshorn peppers, robustly hot and subtly sweet, steeped in oil with garlic and lemon zest and mysterious spices. The wonderfully intense flavour suffused your entire system for hours afterwards, warming and reinvigorating both flesh and spirit. It was a perfect pick-me-up for this vicious cold spell that had lasted for weeks, and Flavia had been overjoyed when six large and priceless jars emerged from the parcel she had received the day before from the woman who had been her closest friend during their long childhood years in the House of Joy.
But enough water to cook the pasta would take at least twenty minutes to come to the boil on the feeble electric ring, and in half an hour she was due at work. The managerial underling she had to deal with was an obnoxious little tyrant who had already made it abundantly clear that he regarded women like Flavia as expendable casual labour, and that the least infringement of her verbal terms of engagement would result in instant dismissal. So she mopped up as much of the delicious sauce as she could by dunking chunks of day-old bread into it, happily chomping it down. Why on earth the policeman had made such a fuss about the mouthful he’d tasted was utterly beyond her, although the remains of a glass of the homemade plum brandy that Viorica had also sent was probably not the ideal antidote.
Nevertheless, she felt that she had scored a point in some way. By the time he finally left, Dragos had been very tractable, indeed almost tearfully grateful for Flavia’s ministrations, and had insisted on leaving her his phone number with a line about her ‘being well rewarded’ for any information she passed on about Vincenzo Amadori. Flavia would of course never have dreamt of voluntarily telling the police anything about anyone, let alone a person associated, however insignificantly, with Rodolfo, but she definitely felt that she had won that particular encounter, and arrived at the bus stop in the freezing gloom with a light, lively smile on her lips.
10
The subject of Romano Rinaldi’s private life had generated a good deal of speculation, the more so in that next to nothing was known about it. For that matter, he himself barely knew anything definite about his true origins and-as he had explained to his publicist when Lo Chef’s growing fame made it necessary to hire one-what he did know, or suspected, was far too lurid to form a basis for the type of public persona he wished to create.
The publicist had listened to a rambling account of an informal and peripatetic childhood under the tutelage of a number of ‘aunts’, all of whom had originally formed part of the female entourage of a certain Italian pop idol of the 1960s whose star had now faded, but who was still alive and known to be extremely litigious. One by one these guardians had disappeared from the scene, until the last had brought the pubescent Romano with her when she joined a religious cult based in an abandoned complex of troglodytic dwellings out in the wilds somewhere east of Potenza.
At this point the publicist-a smugly jovial man with the air of a retired circus ringmaster-held up his hand.
‘Has anyone from that period ever tried to contact you?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Any family members still living?’
‘None that I know of.’
‘If someone shows up claiming to be related to you, do we have deniability?’
‘Why not? I can’t even prove anything myself.’
The publicist beamed and released a long, lingering sigh.
‘I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you,’ he said.
An alternative version of the star’s early years had duly been invented, featuring a poor but happy upbringing in working-class Rome, with a classic salt-of-the-earth mother who ruled her numerous brood with a rod of iron but saw them through the hard times, of which needless to say there were many, and above all served up the delicious, nourishing traditional meals that had first awakened the young Romano’s interest in cooking. For a time, an out- of-work actress had been hired to represent this redoubtable personage, but she had threatened to sell her story to a celebrity gossip mag and had had to be bought off and written out of the plot. After that the surrogate family had been kept strictly off-stage, ostensibly to protect the sanctity of Lo Chef’s private life, which was particularly precious to him following his mother’s tragic stroke.
Romano’s actual roots had however left their mark on him, not least in his conviction that the only thing worth achieving was the long-term certainty of short-term pleasure, and that any attempt to analyse or understand life was a complete waste of time. He was therefore unaware of the irony involved in the fact that once the money started rolling in to the point where he could invest in the construction of new apartment blocks, he himself had chosen to live exactly where he had grown up: illegally in a hole in the ground. The owners of properties such as his typically had a phantom abusivo dwelling constructed on the roof and classified for rating purposes as a storage facility; Romano had done something similar, but deep underground, and it was in this bunker that he was now planning the opening blitzkreig of his total war against Professor Edgardo Ugo.
To be honest, he was still furious with Delia, although a smidgin or two of the good stuff had phased his
