His first reaction was one of incredulity. The joke had gone far enough — much too far, in fact. He must put a stop to it at once. But that wasn’t so easy, not with all Milan beating a path to the door. Paolo couldn’t have been more wrong, it seemed. The designs Raimondo had submitted were judged to be daring but accessible, refreshingly different, striking just the right balance between novelty and practicality. He was offered contracts, more or less on his own terms, with several of the city’s top fashion houses.
If Ariana had been in her right mind, he would have let her take the prize and the fame and fortune that went with it. As it was, this was out of the question. His sister was quite incapable of sustaining the ordeal of public exposure. Apart from Aunt Carmela and Raimondo himself, the only person she ever saw was her cousin Ludovico, on whom she seemed to have developed a schoolgirlish crush. She always brightened up before, during and after his visits, which had grown quite frequent. Apparently Ludo had some business interests in Milan, although it was never very clear what they were. When he was around, Ariana could almost pass for normal, but this was an illusion. Ariana lived in a self-contained world, talking to no one but her dolls. She had never watched television or read the papers since the day a report about some terrorist atrocity had caused a lengthy relapse. Her world had a lot to recommend it, from her point of view. It was warm, stable and quiet. There were no nasty surprises. Love might safely be invested, secure in the knowledge that no harm could befall.
For Raimondo to admit the truth would only have served to kill a goose whose eggs, it seemed, were of solid gold. But it wasn’t really a question of money. The Falcone family fortunes, although no longer quite what they had been when Umberto was running the business, were still in an altogether different league from those of their Roman cousins. No, it was the original element — that of the practical joke, the elaborate prank — which swayed him in the end. If fooling Paolo had seemed a worthwhile thing to do, the idea of fooling everybody was completely irresistible.
It took him a while to find his feet. The freelance contract didn’t work out in the end. When the house involved requested small changes in various details, he’d had to refuse, for the simple reason that he was unable to draw. His arrogance and intransigence attracted criticism at the time, but in the long run the episode merely strengthened his hand, increasing his reputation as a wayward, uncompromising genius who worked alone by night and then appeared with a sheaf of sketches and said, ‘Take it or leave it!’
When he launched his own ready-to-wear line the following March, it was only a modest success. The fashion world in Italy is dominated by a handful of big names whose control is exercised through exclusive contracts with textile producers, insider deals in which the fashion press allocate editorial space in direct proportion to the amount of advertising bought, and licensing arrangements for perfumes, watches, lighters, glasses, scarves and luggage which make such ‘conces-sion tycoons’ multi-millionaires without their having to lift a finger. What was being sold was an image created by the designers’ haute couture range, shown three times a year in Rome and abroad. Such garments, selling for tens of billions of lire, were out of reach to anyone but the super-rich, most of them in America and the Gulf oil states, but the image of luxury and exclusivity were available to anyone prepared to pay a modest sum for a ‘designer-labelled’ product which might in fact have been produced in a Korean sweat shop. The sweat didn’t stick, the chic did. That was the trick of it.
As sole owner of a large textile mill, Raimondo Falcone was in a unique position to break the cartel on raw materials. The problem lay in generating the desirable image. He clearly couldn’t go into couture. As the word implies, this means being able to cut, to go into a fitting room with the client, pick up a length of cloth and a pair of scissors and produce something which looks like it has grown there. This was clearly not a possibility for Raimondo, who couldn’t cut a slice of panettone without wrecking the entire cake. Then he had his inspiration, one day when he was being interviewed on television. His sudden emergence on to the fashion scene, as though from nowhere, was already the stuff of legend. People were naturally curious about him, his background, his working methods, his philosophy. While he was telling the interviewer a pack of lies — ‘I always thought of it as a hobby really, I used to scribble ideas on the back of an envelope and then lose it somewhere…’ — it occurred to him that what people really wanted from their clothes was the kind of miraculous transformation like the one which so fascinated them about him. They wanted to be able to put on a new personality like putting on a shirt. Fashion wasn’t just about attracting sexual partners or showing off your wealth. It was a search for metamorphosis, for transcendence. And who better to offer it than a man who appeared unfettered by the constraints within which ordinary mortals were forced to operate?
From that moment, he had never looked back. It took no more than an occasional grudging, condescending word of praise from him to keep Ariana busy. Censored extracts from fashion magazines, from which all reference to Falco designs had of course been removed, kept her fantasy world in touch with the colours, lines and fabrics which were currently in vogue. Once he had succeeded in convincing her that she needed big dolls to play with now, being a big girl herself, the trick-photography and out-of-house sketches could be dispensed with. From time to time he removed a selection of the garments she made and handed them over to his subordinates, a tight, highly-paid and very loyal team who relieved the maestro of the tiresome day-to-day business of putting his creations into production from the original models. All he had to do was tour the country, appearing at shops and on television, telling people that they were what they wore, and that in the late twentieth century it was ideologically gauche to suggest otherwise.
He sat upright suddenly, listening intently. Then he heard it again, a distant metallic sound somewhere far below. Once again, a smile bent his lips. He knew what it was: the discarded filing-cabinet shell which had been sitting on the landing of the first floor for as long as anyone could remember. When he arrived, having smashed off the padlock used to secure the emergency exit since the break-in, he had pulled the metal cabinet out from the wall so that it all but blocked the way upstairs. Its faint tintinnabulation was as good as a burglar alarm to him.
He picked up the pistol and walked with rapid, light steps into the workroom, where he knelt down behind one of the tables with a clear view of the door. The moment it opened, the intruder would be framed in a rectangle of light, peering into a dark, unfamiliar territory where the only recognizable targets were the mannequins. But he would be ready, his eyes perfectly adjusted to the fog-muted glimmer from the Galleria outside, the pistol steadied against the edge of the table and trained on its target. It would be like shooting rabbits leaving the burrow.
Then a miracle occurred. That, at least, is how he explained it to himself in that initial instant of wordless awe. After that it was pure sensation, pure experience. Later he realized that the whole thing could have taken no more than a few seconds, but while it lasted there was nothing else, only the noise and the light. The light was the kind you might see if they skinned your eyeballs, pickled them in acid and trained lasers on them. As for the noise…
When he was a boy, he had once been allowed up the campanile of the family church. After endless windings, the spiral staircase broadened into a chamber where the bells hung, great lumps of dull metal, seeming no more resonant than so many rocks. Yet when the clapper struck, they could be heard over half the city. He had wondered ever after what it would have sounded like if they’d started pealing while he was standing there. Now he knew. His whole body thrilled and jangled, every cell and fibre quivering in exquisite agony as the overtones and reverberations of that blow died away. Another such would kill him, he thought as he lay in a heap on the floor, clutching his head. But there wasn’t another. This puzzled him at first. Once the clapper was set swinging with that kind of violence, it was bound to come back to strike the other side, just when you were least expecting it.