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? Macche? 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 canapes 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
