come up with a satisfactory solution to this unforeseen social conundrum.
‘What are you doing here?’ Vincenzo demanded, advancing threateningly on Zen.
His intentions were clear enough, but his execution let him down. His voice was still modulating from the plangent whine he had employed with the housekeeper to his peer-speak stadium bark, and when he reached the chair where Zen was seated he stopped short, seemingly uncertain how to follow through. Zen ignored him.
‘That medicine of yours really did the trick,’ he said to Carlotta, getting to his feet. ‘I feel even better than when I arrived!’
Vincenzo swung round on the elderly donna.
‘What’s he doing here? What the fuck’s going on?’
‘You mind your tongue!’ Carlotta fired back. ‘Such language, and before a guest in your parents’ house!’
Zen glanced at his watch.
‘It’s beginning to look as though Signora Amadori must have been delayed, and I’ve got other business to attend to. The matter’s really of no urgency.’
‘Just a moment, you!’ Vincenzo shouted aggressively, although keeping his distance. Carlotta stood looking from one of them to the other, understandably out of her depth. Zen grinned at her roguishly.
‘In fact, it might be better if you don’t mention that I came at all,’ he confided in a low voice. ‘You know what lawyers are like. If Avvocato Amadori finds out that I fell on those slippery steps, he might lie awake at night worrying that I’m going to sue him.’
‘Hey, you can’t get out of it that easily…’ Vincenzo began.
‘As for you,’ Zen cried, deigning to regard him for the first time, ‘treat your mother with a little more respect!’
Vincenzo and Carlotta answered in chorus.
‘She’s not my mother!’
‘He’s not my son!’
Zen sighed, then shook his head in evident bafflement and walked out.
18
Gemma Santini reached the Bologna trade fair complex forty minutes before the event was due to begin, assuming that this would allow ample time to pick up her reserved ticket and get seated. She was wrong.
The area around the row of ticket booths was packed with people, some of whom gave every impression of having been there all night. Most were waiting their turn in a more or less orderly way for the strictly limited number of free passes being handed out to pack the hall, but a few had resorted to what Gemma privately called Neapolitan granny tactics, screaming their needs, demands and special circumstances at the attendant in the hope that they would be given what they wanted just to shut them up and get them out of there.
The moment she had learnt about the cook-off between her favourite TV personality and the awe-inspiring Edgardo Ugo which was to take place in the very city to which she was going anyway, her thoughts had turned to Luigi Piergentili. Although now a moral and physical wreck of the kind that dear Aurelio fondly imagined himself to be, in his former capacity as the dominant consigliere at the Monte dei Paschi bank Luigi had wielded a power in Tuscany and beyond second only to the equally fond imaginings of certain now-forgotten politicians. His own season of influence had been brought to an end-not entirely fortuitously, some held-by an unpleasant hit-and-run accident which had left the victim addicted, as he freely admitted, to a powerful morphine-based painkiller. Unfortunately, all of the many doctors he had consulted ultimately declined to continue prescribing this medication, citing normative pharmaceutical criteria, contra-indicative long-term health risks and, above all, a fear of losing their licences to practice medicine. It was at this point that Signor Piergentili had appealed to Gemma.
Luigi had been far too canny to make this appeal to her pity, or even her venality. Instead, with a shrewdness she had appreciated almost as much as the implicit delicatezza, he had murmured over tea at the Caffe di Simo that a very close friend of his, a professor at the University of Florence, had happened to mention to him that Gemma’s son Stefano was studying engineering there.
‘How is he doing?’ he added, with a serene Etruscan smile.
The answer was spectacularly bad, but the smile made it clear that Luigi’s friend had also mentioned that. Moments later, a mutually advantageous marriage of convenience had been arranged. Both parties had thus far remained faithful, but following Stefano’s graduation cum laude Gemma, while duly grateful for the intercession concerned, had become the creditor in the relationship. She had therefore felt no qualms about phoning Luigi the day before, and telling him to work his network of contacts and fix her up with a comp ticket for the culinary showdown between Lo Chef and Il Professore. He had called back at dawn, after ‘a blissfully dreamless night, thanks to you, my dear’, with the news that she need only present herself at ticket counter 7 of the fiera compound in Bologna the next morning, and all would be taken care of.
This turned out to be true enough, as far as it went. What Gemma had not taken into account was the sheer crush of humanity attracted by this unique event. She didn’t mind waiting, but like everyone else she was aware that since this event was being televised live, timing was of the essence. Once the broadcast began, the doors would be closed and locked, and even Luigi’s pull wouldn’t be able to get her in.
In the end, with a discreet elbow jab here, a piscine slither there, and a good deal of old-fashioned argy- bargy, she made it to the threshold of the hall with about a minute to spare, only for her mobile phone to go off. It was Aurelio, blathering away about something or other. She dealt with him very summarily and then processed into the arena with the other latecomers.
There must have been at least five hundred people present, Gemma estimated. Many of them wore identifying badges and name-tags on a cord round their necks, and busied themselves with tape-recorders, cameras and notebooks, but many were ordinary citizens who had queued up since dawn for a ticket to a contest that had been the talk of Italy ever since it had been announced. Her seat turned out to be a good one, about a third of the way up, with an excellent view of both kitchens and of the central dining area.
At ten o’clock precisely, the house lights went down and a man wearing shiny shoes, tight black trousers and a patterned silk shirt open to the navel, revealing a gold necklace nestling in his spectacular chest hair, stepped forward to the edge of the stage. With no particular surprise, other than the fact that he was so much smaller than she had imagined, Gemma recognised him as the presenter of a TV variety show broadcast on the same channel as Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta. He proceeded to welcome the audience effusively, and then introduced the event and the participants in his usual bombastically jokey manner. Gemma noted, however, that once he got down to business the text of what he was evidently reading off a screen beneath one of the on-stage cameras had been very carefully scripted indeed, and almost certainly with a team of lawyers representing each party in the room.
In brief, it stated that Professor Edgardo Ugo, the noted Bolognese academic and world-famous author, had inadvertently written something in his column for Il Prospetto which might conceivably have been construed by the inattentive or ill-intentioned as casting doubt on Romano Rinaldi’s culinary abilities. Such a thing had of course never remotely been Professor Ugo’s intention. His comment had been made purely from a humorous and-the next word seemed to cause the presenter some trouble-metonymic perspective, and he unconditionally rejected any literal interpretation that might be placed on it. Nevertheless, to settle the matter once and for all, and also celebrate the glories of Italian cooking and the prestigious Bologna food fair, the two men would now ‘meet as equal slaves over a hot stove [pause for laughter] before you all gathered here today and watching at home’ in order to put a definitive end to any unpleasantness that might mistakenly have been perceived to have arisen.
‘And now please welcome…’
The presenter gestured towards the kitchen area to the left of the stage as Edgardo Ugo walked in from the wings. The professor was wearing an English style tweed jacket, khaki cords, a rumpled dark-green shirt and a clashing lime-green tie, and looked as though he couldn’t care less about the whole event. Acclaim from the audience was respectful but subdued.
‘And in the opposite corner…’
Clad in his trademark white uniform and toque, Lo Chef made his appearance at a leisurely, relaxed pace, grinning confidently and waving to the crowd. The applause was tumultuous and so prolonged that after a considerable time the presenter was forced to appeal for silence.
