‘I was walking towards my desk, officer, when I heard a sound in the outer office. I’d just had a shower. I suppose that’s why I hadn’t heard the noise of the door being forced. I ran to the desk and got out the pistol I’ve kept there since the building was broken into last week…’ After that, it would depend on whether his visitor proved to have been armed, something which he could easily verify after shooting him dead. If he wasn’t, then it might be marginally more difficult, although accidents did notoriously happen in these circumstances. But this was unlikely. The overwhelming probability was that the intruder would have a gun too. He sounded like Zeppegno, a wannabee thug full of tough talk and cheap threats. To scum like that, a gun was like an American Express card. It said something about you. People treated you with respect and said, ‘That’ll do nicely, sir.’ You didn’t leave home without it. All he needed to do was put on the rubber gloves and fire a few rounds from the victim’s gun into the walls and furniture, then transfer the sheaths to the dead man’s hands, thus explaining the lack of fingerprints, and call the police. If he got anything more than a fine for possessing an unregistered firearm, there would be a universal outcry among the good burghers of Milan. What, an eminent designer could be threatened by some doped-up hoodlum in his own office without even being permitted to defend himself? What was the world coming to?
He placed the gun on the desk within easy reach and lay back in his swivel chair, thinking about his father. His parents were not often in his thoughts. Indeed, people had called him cold and unnatural at the time of the tragedy, but it would be truer to say that he felt little or nothing, and refused — this was the scandal, of course — to pretend that he did. He had never tried to get anyone else to understand his views on the subject, which all came down to the fact that he did not consider Umberto and Chiara to be his parents at all, except in the most reductive genetic sense. Their children were Raimondo and his sister Ariana. He, Falco, owed them nothing.
His cousin Ludovico Ruspanti had been an early inspiration. He had made everyone else in Raimondo’s circle seem wan and insipid. When Umberto and Chiara became martyrs of the class struggle, his father dying in a hail of machine-gun fire sprayed through the windscreen of their Mercedes, his mother succumbing to her injuries a few days later, he had remembered Ludovico’s deportment on the occasion of his own bereavements. He must have handled it badly, though. No one had criticized Ludovico’s play-acting, even though he had turned to wink broadly at his cousin after making some fulsome comments about his late brother, as though to say ‘We know better, don’t we?’ Raimondo, on the other hand, had made the mistake of being frank about his feelings, or lack of them, and for this he had never been forgiven.
What no one could ever deny was that he had coped extremely well with orphanhood, while Ariana had been broken. She had worshipped her parents, particularly her mother, to whom she had always been close. Raimondo had made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of her child-like dependency, of that physical intimacy prolonged well into adolescence. He found it cloying and excessive, and he had been proved right. When the walls of her emotional hothouse were so brutally shattered by the terrorists’ bullets, Ariana had collapsed into something very close to madness.
This fact had been hushed up by the services of exclusive and discreet private ‘nursing homes’ which existed for just this very purpose, and by the use of such euphemisms as ‘prostrated by grief’ and ‘emotionally overwrought’. The plain truth was that Ariana Falcone had gone crazy, as her brother had not scrupled to tell her to her face shortly after the funeral. Enough was enough! He had always resented the exaggerated fuss which had been made of Ariana, the way her every wish and whim was pandered to. This excessive display of temperament was just another blatant example of attention-seeking, and in extremely poor taste too, trading on their parents’ violent deaths for her own selfish ends, and trying — with a certain amount of success, moreover — to make him look cold and heartless by comparison. The sooner she faced up to the realities of the new situation the better. Their parents were dead and he was in charge. What Ariana needed was a series of short, sharp shocks to bring this home to her, and it was this which he had set out to provide.
Although he had applied his treatment rigorously, Ariana stubbornly refused to respond. On the first anniversary of the killings, he had given her one last chance, ordering her to appear at a memorial service which was being held at their local church. Not only had she refused, but the only reason she deigned to give was that she wanted to play with her collection of dolls which were kept in the beautiful wooden toyhouse which her parents had given her for her eighth birthday. Her brother’s response had been swift and decisive. Tying her to a chair, he had doused the doll’s-house in paraffin and set fire to it before her eyes, with the dolls inside.
But Ariana’s petulance seemingly knew no bounds. Far from accepting that it was time to stop these embarrassing and self-indulgent games, she had sunk into a condition verging on catatonia. Eventually Raimondo found a doctor who was prepared to prescribe an indefinite course of tranquillizers which kept Ariana more or less amenable, and their Aunt Carmela was brought in to act as minder. Raimondo moved out to a small modern flat near the university, where he had been re-enrolling for years without ever taking his exams. The huge palazzo which Umberto’s father had bought in the twenties was turned over to Carmela and Ariana. A new playhouse was obtained and stocked with dolls. It was not quite the same, but Ariana showed no sign of noticing the difference, or of remembering what had happened to the original. She spent her days happily sewing clothes for her dolls based on ideas culled from Carmela’s discarded magazines.
What happened next was completely unpredictable. Appropriately enough, the whole thing had been intended as a joke. Paolo, one of Raimondo’s student acquaintances, had always dreamt of becoming a fashion designer, much against his parents’ wishes. It was he who told Raimondo about the competition being run by a leading fashion magazine to find the ‘designers of tomorrow’. He was submitting a portfolio of drawings and sketches, which he described to his friends at every opportunity. If he won, he explained, then his parents would be obliged to let him follow his genius instead of taking a job in a bank. Paolo went on at such length about it that Raimondo finally decided to play a trick on him. One evening when Ariana had gone to bed, he borrowed a dozen of her dolls, complete with the miniature costumes she had made for them, removed the heads to make them resemble dressmaker’s mannequins, and then photographed them carefully with a close-up lens. Next he took the prints to a commercial art studio and had them reproduced as fashion sketches, which he triumphantly showed to Paolo as his entry.
If Paolo had taken the thing in the spirit in which it had been intended, Raimondo would have admitted the truth, had a good laugh, and that would have been that. To his amazement, however, Paolo reacted with a torrent of vituperative abuse. Raimondo’s designs were impractical nonsense, he claimed. No one could ever make such things, let alone wear them. In short, it would be an insult to submit them for the competition. Until that moment, Raimondo had not had the slightest intention of doing so, but Paolo had been so unpleasant that he sent the drawings in to spite him. When the results were announced three months later, he was awarded the first prize.