Let the Games Begin. Niccolo Ammaniti

almost fell off his chair. It was the same Alice Tyler who had translated Roddy Elton, Irvin Parker, John Quinn and all the new breed of Scottish writers.

      She must know them all! She must have had dinner with Parker and then afterwards he fucked her in a London squat, amidst fag-ends stubbed out on the carpet, used needles and empty beer cans.

      A frightful suspicion. Has she read my books? He needed to know now, straight away, immediately. It was a physiological need. If she hasn't read my books and has never seen me on television, she might well think that I am just anybody, might mistake me for one of those mediocre writers who get by attending presentations and cultural events. All of this was unbearable for his ego. Any balanced relationship, where he was not the star, caused unpleasant side effects: dry mouth, headspins, nausea, diarrhoea. If he were to seduce her, he'd have to rely solely on his charm, on his biting wit, on his unpredictable intelligence and not on his novels. And it was a good thing he didn't even take into consideration the hypothesis that Alice Tyler had read his works and hated them.

      He came to the last point, the most prickly one: what would he talk about once the old gasbag finished his rambling speech? Over the past few weeks Ciba had tried to read the Indian's huge volume a handful of times, but after ten pages or so he had turned on the television and watched the athletics championships. He'd really made the effort, but it was such a deadly boring book that it had boiled his balls. He had called a friend of his . . . a fan of his, a writer from Catanzaro, one of those insipid, subservient beings who buzzed around him in an attempt, like cockroaches, to feed themselves on the crumbs of his friendship. This one, though, unlike the others, had a certain critical spirit, a certain, in some ways, bubbly creative ability. Someone whom he might, in an undefined future, get Martinelli to publish. But for now he assigned this friend from Catanzaro secondary tasks, such as writing articles for him for women's magazines, translating pieces from English into Italian, library research and, like now, reading the behemoth and composing a nice short critical summary that he could make his own in quarter of an hour.

      Trying not to be too obvious, Ciba slid the three pages jotted down by his friend out of his jacket.

      Fabrizio, in public, never read. He spoke freely, he let himself be inspired by the moment. He was famous for this talent, for the magical sense of spontaneity that he bestowed upon his listeners. His mind was a forge open twenty-four hours a day. There was no filter, there was no depot, and when he started in on one of his monologues he captivated everyone: from the fisherman from Mazara del Vallo to the ski instructor from Cortina d'Ampezzo.

      But that evening a bitter surprise was awaiting him. He read the first three lines of the summary and blanched. It spoke of a saga revolving around a family of musicians. All of them forced, thanks to an unfathomable destiny, to play the sitar for generations and generations.

      He grabbed the Indian's book. The title was The Conspiracy of the Virgins. So why was the summary about A Life in the World?

      A terrible realisation. The friend from Catanzaro had made a mistake! That dickhead had cocked it up and done the wrong book.

      He devoured the blurb in desperation. There was no mention at all of sitar players, but of a family of women on the Andaman Islands.

      And at that very moment, Tremagli terminated his monologue.

      5

      He was crushed that the Durendal which had cost him three hundred and fifty euro would end up above his father-in-law's fireplace. Saverio Moneta had bought the sword with the idea of slaying the caretaker of the Oriolo Cemetery, or in any case with the idea of using it as a sacrificial weapon for the blood rites of the sect.

      The traffic moved forward at a walking pace. A row of palm trees, burned by the winter, were covered in coloured lights that twinkled on the bonnets of the Mercedes and Jaguars sitting in dealerships’ forecourts.

      There must have really been an accident.

      Saverio turned on the radio and began searching for the traffic station. A part of his brain was working ceaselessly in search of another plan of action to propose to Murder and the others.

      And what if, for example, we murdered Father Tonino, the priest from Capranica?

      His mobile began ringing again. Please . . . Serena . . . Not again? But the screen displayed the words ‘PRIVATE NUMBER’. It had to be the old bastard hiding his number in an attempt to fuck him over.

      Egisto Mastrodomenico, Serena's father, was seventy-seven years old and yet he tapped away on the mobile phone and the computer keyboard like a sixteen-year-old boy. In his office on the top floor of the Furniture Store of the Thyrolean Master of the Axe, he had a whole battery of computers connected to video cameras, the likes of which would have made a Las Vegas casino-owner jealous. The productivity of the fifteen salesmen was monitored throughout the whole day, worse than being inside a reality TV show. And Saverio, who was the department manager of the Thyrolean furniture shop, had four cameras pointed on him alone.

      No, I can't bear having to talk to him this evening. He turned the volume of the car radio up, trying to silence the phone.

      Mantos hated his father-in-law with such intensity that he had got irritable bowel syndrome. Old Mastrodomenico used every opportunity to humiliate him, to make him feel like a poor wimp, a freeloader who held his job at the furniture store simply because he was married to the old man's daughter. He would insult him not just in front of his colleagues, but even in front of customers. Once, during a spring sale, he had called him a moron, shouting it into the overhead speaker system. Mantos's only consolation was knowing that sooner or later the bastard would snuff it. Then everything would change. Serena was an only child, which meant he would become the manager of the entire furniture shop. And yet a part of him had even started to wonder if the old man would ever die. He'd gone through it all. They'd removed his spleen. They'd ablated a sebaceous cyst from his ear and he nearly went deaf. He had an eye ravaged by cataracts. At the age of seventy-four years he had slammed his Mercedes at two hundred kilometres an hour against a tip-up truck waiting at the Agip petrol pump. He was in a coma for three weeks and he had come-to even more pissed off than before. Then they diagnosed him with intestinal cancer, but seeing as he was elderly the tumour was unable to spread. And if that didn't suffice, during the twins’ christening he had slipped on the steps in front of the church and broken his pelvic bone. Now he lived in a wheelchair and it was up to Saverio to take him to work in the morning and take him back home in the evening.

      The phone kept ringing and throbbing in the tray next to the gearstick.

      ‘Fuck you!’ he growled, but that bloody sense of guilt written in his chromosomes forced him to answer. ‘Papa?’

      ‘Mantos.’

      It wasn't the old man's voice. And there was no way that he knew about his Satanic identity.

      ‘Who's this?’

      ‘Kurtz Minetti.’

      Upon hearing the name of the high priest of the Children of the Apocalypse Saverio Moneta closed his eyes and reopened them. He squeezed the steering wheel with his left hand and with his right the mobile phone, but it slipped out of his hand like a wet bar of soap, ending up between his legs. He took his foot off the clutch to get to the phone and the engine began hiccuping and turned itself off.

      Behind him horns were honking while Saverio shouted at Kurtz: ‘Hang on . . . I'm driving. Hang on while I pull over.’

      A motorcyclist on a big three-wheeled scooter knocked on the passenger window: ‘You realise you're a fuckwit?’

      Saverio picked up the phone, started the engine again and managed to pull over.

      What did Kurtz Minetti want from him?

      6

      As soon as Tremagli concluded his speech, the audience began pulling themselves up in their seats where they had cuddled up, stretching their numb legs, patting each other on the back out of solidarity at having