Ugo tried to say something, but the man had turned away and was loudly phoning for an ambulance. It was then that Ugo saw a woman leaning groggily against the nearest parked car. There was blood on her face and she was breathing rapidly.
‘Immediately!’ the policeman named Zen yelled. ‘It’s a matter of the highest urgency. My wife has been run over.’
‘I’m not your damned wife!’ the woman retorted.
The man folded up his mobile and strode over to Ugo, who had by now regained his feet. He looked absolutely beside himself with fury, or worry, or both.
‘I can’t effect an arrest now,’ the policeman told him, ‘as I need to accompany the victim to hospital. But if she turns out to be seriously injured, God forbid, then I shall take further steps. Give me your details.’
Ugo got out his wallet and handed Zen his identity card, along with another giving his home address and title, position and contact numbers at the university. That might get him a little respect, he thought, picking up his bike as a siren made itself heard in the distance.
‘Excuse me!’
He turned. The woman he had struck was looking at him.
‘Aren’t you Edgardo Ugo?’
He nodded. She smiled and her bloodied face lit up.
‘I’ve always wanted to meet you,’ she went on. ‘I was at your cook-off with Lo Chef this morning. I thought you were wonderful!’
For possibly the first time in his life, Edgardo Ugo found himself at a complete loss for words.
‘I’m so sorry that this happened,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t apologise enough.’
The woman laughed lightly.
‘Not at all, it was all my fault.’ She jerked a thumb at Zen, who was anxiously scanning the far end of the street for the ambulance. ‘We just had a row and I couldn’t get away from the restaurant quickly enough. I dashed out without even looking to see what was coming. There was no way you could have done anything about it.’
‘Here it comes!’ called Zen.
‘And don’t pay any attention to him,’ Gemma confided to Ugo. ‘All that stuff about arresting you? That’s just bluff and bluster.’
Then the ambulance was there, the paramedics stepping out. Ugo mounted the Bianchi and tried to cycle discreetly away, but the collision had dislodged the drive chain. He didn’t want to get his fingers filthy, or to linger, so he set off on foot, pushing the bike.
At the corner of the street, beneath the arch marking the entrance to the former ghetto, he turned to look back. Apparently the ambulance crew didn’t consider the woman’s condition serious enough to put her on a stretcher and were getting her seated in the back of the ambulance. The incident had drawn quite a crowd, including one young man wearing a black leather jacket decorated with the crest of the local football club. He also noticed that the policeman who had threatened him did not in fact get into the ambulance, as he had said he would, but watched it depart, then turned and started walking in Ugo’s direction.
Ugo turned the corner with a shrug. If the cop wanted to find him, he had the address anyway. Meanwhile he marvelled at the day’s extraordinary events. To knock someone down in the street and then have her tell you how wonderful you were! Incredible. He just hoped that she wasn’t concussed. Anyway, that was enough excitement. A hot shower and a change of clothes, then off to a leisurely late lunch with Professor Erik Lonnrot. He leant the bicycle against the house wall, between the front door and the marble copy of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 ready-made Fountain. He found his key and turned sideways to force it into the sticky lock.
And then something else happened.
23
Romano Rinaldi paced restlessly and at random through the many rooms of his hotel suite, a continual gyration with no purpose except to relieve the intolerable pressure in his skull. He knew, beyond the slightest doubt, that he was going to die at any moment. What was it called? An aneurysm, a stroke, a cerebral haemorrhage. Basically your brain blew up.
He walked through to the main bedroom, then over to the insulated glass doors giving on to the balcony over the street. The temptation to gasp down some fresh air was almost overwhelming, but he couldn’t risk showing himself, not with the ranks of paparazzi lined up like a firing squad detail below, fingers hovering over the shutter release for the front cover ‘HIS SHAME’ shot. Instead it was through into the spare bedroom and then down the internal hall to the lounge that stretched the entire width of the building. Despite his best efforts, he could hardly avoid catching sight of himself in the vast mirror that dominated the end wall.
I’m fucked, he thought, staring at his sagging features, totally and utterly fucked. And it’s all my own fault. It was mine to leave alone, but I agreed to take it on. After that it was mine to screw up, and I did just that, in front of an audience of millions. The TV news channels would show the highlights again and again and again, until the whole country had witnessed his utter humiliation. He would be laughed at in the street and people would snigger when he was introduced to them. As for his career as Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta, forget it. He would be carrying his shame about with him for the rest of his life, like those dogs you saw with a plastic bag of their own shit hanging from their collars.
He clutched his head and stared in the mirror. That prominent vein on his temple was surely even more engorged than it had been five minutes ago. Get Delia to call an ambulance. There had been good hospitals in Bologna ever since the Middle Ages. Back then they let blood to relieve the pressure. Leeches. That obscene object he’d been offered in a bento box when he visited Tokyo last year, some sort of raw snail out of its shell. An elegantly lacquered casket with a skinned penis inside. Well, after this he wouldn’t be invited to any more international culinary conferences, that was for sure.
On leaving the fiera complex-fortunately his production company had laid on a car in the VIP section of the parking lot, so he hadn’t had to face the mob outside the main entrance-Rinaldi had gone straight back to his hotel, entering through the kitchens, where his sudden appearance had generated a good deal of mirth and sight gags involving fire extinguishers among the lagered-up, sweated-out peons. Then up the emergency stairs to his suite, where he had double-locked and chained the door, taken the phone off the hook and switched off his mobile before snorting his entire remaining stash of cocaine. Unfortunately there hadn’t been that much left, and by now the effects had worn off. He switched the mobile on again, ignoring the backlog of messages, and dialled Delia.
‘Bring me two bottles of vodka and a bucket of ice,’ he said, cutting off the speech into which she immediately launched. ‘Personally. Now.’
Five minutes later there was a timid tap at the door. Rinaldi peeked through the spy-hole and verified that it was indeed Delia, and that she was alone, before dismantling his barricade and letting her in.
‘Put it down there,’ he said, pointing to the floor of the entrance hall.
But Delia kept going straight into the lounge, where she deposited the two bottles and the silver bucket on a glass-topped table.
‘Get out of here!’ Rinaldi shouted, coming after her. ‘I need to be alone.’
‘We have to talk, Romano.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
Delia sank into a sofa the size of an average family car.
‘ Carissimo, I’ve been trying to call you for hours!’
Rinaldi dropped four large ice cubes into a tall tumbler, filled it to the brink with vodka, and drank deeply.
‘Why didn’t you answer my messages?’ Delia went on in an irritating, deep-down-inside-I’m-just-a little-girl whine. ‘How can I help you if you won’t even speak to me?’
‘Nobody can help me. And I can’t help your career along any more, so don’t pretend to be personally interested. It’s over. Me, you, the series, the company, everything.’
‘That’s absurd, Romano! You can’t just chuck the whole thing away because of a silly accident.’
He gulped some more vodka and almost choked as he burst into incredulous laughter.
