Professor Ego, as he was known to students and fellow academics alike, had now reached his peroration. Characteristically, this combined witty and learned references to Eugenio Montale, the video game Final Fantasy X-2, Roman Jakobson, the Schrodinger’s cat paradox, St Thomas Aquinas, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, transcendental number theory and the Baghdad blogger. He then accepted the plaudits of his audience with an equally characteristic gesture indicating that while he understood, as they of course did, that none of this was of any real importance, they also understood that nothing else was either. Or as Ugo liked to put it, adapting Oscar Wilde, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us no longer pretend to be looking at the stars’.
Rodolfo filed out with the rest of the auditors, several of whom glanced at him with embarrassment, and then looked away. The news of his expulsion from Ugo’s course had clearly got around the other students involved. He was now taboo. If only they knew, he thought, fingering the pistol pocketed in the leather jacket. The previous evening Rodolfo had extracted and carefully examined the weapon he had discovered concealed behind the books in his room. It was a very high-quality piece of hardware, of Soviet origin judging by the red star on the grip, and to all appearances brand-new, but a faint odour of cordite in the barrel and the fact that there were only seven cartridges in the magazine, which was designed to hold eight, suggested that it had been fired at least once.
Rodolfo was no novice when it came to guns. On his arduous ascent through the lower echelons of the post-war construction business in Puglia, his father had been obliged to learn how to maintain and use a variety of firearms. He had passed this knowledge on to Rodolfo as a father-son bonding exercise, taking the boy out into the wilds from their country property for target practice. He had graduated from cans and bottles to vermin and birds, and in hopes of pleasing his father had developed into quite an accomplished shooter.
Well, today he was going to put those long-neglected skills to the test. He walked down the corridor and staircases with the rest of the student throng, amusing himself abstractly with the thought that at any moment he could kill seven of them. That wasn’t going to happen, of course. Apart from anything else, the random, motiveless crime was so last century, one of the great cliches of modernism both artistically and politically. Someone like Vincenzo, who hadn’t realised that the only stars he could see were the flashes in his head as a result of collapsing in the gutter, might still get a kick out of that sort of thing, but not Rodolfo. His acte was not going to be gratuite so much as in omaggio. His gestural rhetoric would be flawless, and then he would catch the first southbound train, turn up on the family doorstep at dawn, admit his academic disgrace and humiliation and beg his father to give him a real job.
After his weekly lecture, Rodolfo knew, Edgardo Ugo left the building by a side door leading to the bicycle shed reserved for the faculty. There the professor retrieved his machine and cycled the short distance to his town house to relax and prepare for lunch. Rodolfo therefore posted himself at the gate leading from this area to the main street. He himself didn’t have a bicycle, but he had noted in the past that, in keeping with the traditions of his city, Ugo proceeded on two wheels at a civilised, leisurely pace barely faster than a brisk jog. What with the inevitable traffic delays, Rodolfo had no doubts about his ability to keep up with his quarry for the kilometre or so separating the university from Ugo’s bijou residence in Via dell’Inferno. And there, he thought to himself, remembering Vincenzo’s taunting remark, I’ll give the smug bastard something to interpret.
21
Gasping in pain, he lurched to his feet, overturning the row of stools like so many dominoes, and ripped open his shirt. Beneath the violated fabric of his belly, mighty worms stirred. The flesh glowed incandescently red and yellow, casting into black outline the scalpel scar curved like a question mark about his navel. Then the overstrained sutures finally unclasped, releasing a scalding discharge of foul-smelling pus and blood that drenched the other diners, all of whom carried on eating and chatting as if nothing at all had happened, which in fact it hadn’t.
‘ Caffe, liquore? ’ enquired the waiter.
Zen shook his head peremptorily. There was a sudden burst of laughter and one of the people perched at the counter near by pointed to the huge flat-screen television displaying images of a bearded man dressed as a chef running wildly about in a kitchen on fire. The dangling TV was all of a piece with the high concept behind the eatery, in effect a very pricey snack bar with deliberately uncomfortable furniture, a selection of wines by the glass at by-the-bottle prices, and patrons who apparently relished colluding with the staff in creating a spuriously sophisticated atmosphere of mutual disdain. All this tucked away on a narrow cobbled street that went nowhere in particular, with a frontage that was diffident in the extreme. Not for the first time, Zen reflected that while prostitution might be the oldest trade in the world, the catering business ran it a close second, and that there were other similarities.
But none of this was of any importance compared with the fact that he was still alone. Well over an hour now, and no sign of Gemma. He had tried repeatedly calling her mobile, but either the battery had run out or it was switched off. After waiting thirty minutes, he had ordered the dish of the day-he couldn’t even remember now what it had been-and eaten it with a morose appetite. He checked her text message again. There it was, the name and address of this ghastly place, even the phone number. Impossible there could be any mistake. Anyway, she had the number of his mobile, which he had left turned on all this time. The only possible conclusion, therefore, was that she had deliberately stood him up. He hadn’t expected anything quite so crude from Gemma, even at her worst, but there it was.
He had already asked for his bill when the door opened and in she walked, wearing a stylish but rather stern outfit. Her face, by contrast, was flushed and open, and her manner bubbling with barely suppressed hilarity.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she cried, collapsing at the table and lighting a cigarette. ‘You’ll never guess what happened! Or did you see it?’
She burst into laughter, which turned to a long series of coughs, during which the supercilious waiter appeared.
‘Nothing, thanks,’ she said, waving him away.
‘You don’t want to eat?’ asked Zen.
‘I grabbed a panino at a bar near the exhibition grounds while I was waiting. There wasn’t a taxi to be had for ages, of course.’
She erupted with laughter again.
‘Did you see what happened?’
Zen stared at her, still half-suspecting a trap, but her defences were clearly down. The only problem was that he still had no idea what she was talking about.
‘See? Where?’
‘On TV.’
Gemma pointed to the screen, now showing the President of the Republic inspecting a guard of honour in the quaintly ornate capital of some eastern European state which had recently come in from the cold war.
‘Caffe, liquore?’ enquired the waiter, surfacing again with such animus that they both relented to the extent of ordering coffees.
‘You have no idea what I’m talking about, have you?’ said Gemma, laughing again. ‘You must be the only person in the country who doesn’t!’
She reached over and touched Zen’s wrist on the tabletop, only for a moment, but enough to set off another of the intestinal twinges which reminded him again of that scene from a science fiction film they had once rented on video, where one of the crew of a spaceship discovers in the most unpleasant way that an alien parasite is nesting in his innards.