Michael Dibdin - Cabal

‘You’re not Ludo!’

He whirled round. The voice had come from the other side of the gallery, but there seemed to be no one there. Then he noticed what looked at first like a full-length oil portrait of the woman he had seen on the train, her light blue eyes turned towards him, her head surrounded by a nimbus of fine flaxen hair. He squinted at her. The air seemed thick and syrupy, as though the fog outside were seeping into the house, distorting distances and blurring detail.

‘He couldn’t come,’ Zen ventured.

‘But he promised!’

He saw now that the supposed canvas was in fact a lighted doorway from which the woman was observing his advance, without any alarm but with an expression of intense disappointment which she made no effort to disguise.

‘I spoke to him just this afternoon, and he promised he would come!’

She was wearing a shapeless dress of heavy black material which accentuated the pallor of her skin. Her manner was unnervingly direct, and she held Zen’s gaze without any apparent embarrassment.

‘He promised!’ she repeated.

‘That’s quite right. But he’s not feeling very well.’

‘Is it his tummy?’ the woman asked serenely.

Zen blinked.

‘Yes. Yes, his tummy, yes. So he asked me to come instead.’

She moved towards him, her candid blue gaze locked to his face.

‘It was you,’ she said.

Had she recognized him from the train?

‘Me?’ he replied vaguely.

She nodded, certain now.

‘It wasn’t Ludo who rang. It was you.’

He smiled sheepishly.

‘Ludo couldn’t come himself, so he sent me.’

‘And who are you?’ she asked, like a princess in a fairy story addressing the odd little man who has materialized in her bedchamber.

Zen could smell her now. The odour was almost overpowering, a heady blend of bodily secretions that was far from unpleasant. Combined with the woman’s full figure and air of childish candour, it produced an overall effect which was extremely erotic. Zen began to understand the Prince’s attraction to his cousin in Milan.

‘Do you remember Ludo mentioning that he’d spoken to someone who worked for a magazine?’ he said.

The woman’s face creased into a scowl, as if recalling the events of the previous week was a mental feat equivalent to playing chess without a board. Then her frowns suddenly cleared and she beamed a smile of pure joy.

‘About my dolls!’

Zen smiled and nodded.

‘Exactly.’

‘It was you? You want to write about them?’

She bit her lower lip and wrung her thin hands in agitation.

‘Will there be photographs? I’ll need time to get them all looking their best. To tell you the truth, I thought Ludo was only joking.’

She smiled a little wistfully.

‘He has such a queer sense of humour sometimes.’

Zen explained that although they would of course want to take photographs at some later stage, this was just an introductory visit to get acquainted. But Ariana Falcone didn’t seem to be listening. She turned and led the way through the doorway as though lost in the intensity of her excitement.

‘Just think! In the magazines!’

By contrast with the cold, formal, antiquated expanses of the gallery, the room beyond — although about the size of a football pitch — was reassuringly normal in appearance. The architectural imperatives of the great house had been attenuated by the skilful use of paint and light, and the furnishings were comfortable, bright and contemporary. But to Zen’s dismay, the place was filled with a crowd numbering perhaps fifty or sixty people, standing and sitting in complete silence, singly or in groups.

Their presence struck Zen with panic. Ariana might have accepted his story at face value, but it was unlikely to bear scrutiny by this sophisticated host. Zen had never been so conscious of himself as the dowdy government functionary, encased in his anonymous suit, as when he ran the gauntlet of that fashionable throng, each flaunting an outfit so stylish and exotic that you hardly noticed the person wearing it. And in fact it was not until Ariana swung round with a grand gesture and announced, ‘Well, here they are!’, that Zen realized they were all mannequins.

‘Some of them are upstairs, being fitted,’ she went on. ‘Raimondo gave me a copy of Woman’s Wear Daily recently. I got lots of ideas from that. Which magazine do you work for, by the way?’

‘Er… Gente.’

‘Never heard of it.’

You must be the only person in Italy who hasn’t, thought Zen. She didn’t know what had happened to Ludovico Ruspanti, either. Was there a connection?

‘It’s about famous people,’ he explained. ‘Stars.’

‘All Raimondo brings me are fashion magazines. And I can’t go out, of course, because of my illness. Anyway, what do you think?’

She pointed around the room, watching anxiously for Zen’s reaction.

‘It’s magnificent,’ he replied simply.

He meant it! Whatever the implications of this peculiar ensemble, the scale of the conception and the quality of the execution were quite astonishing. Each of the ‘dolls’ — a full-size figure of articulated wood — was fitted out with a costume like nothing Zen had ever seen. Sometimes the fabrics and colours were boldly contrasted, sometimes artfully complementary. The construction often involved a witty miracle in which heavy velvets apparently descended from gossamer-fine voile, or tweed braces supported a skirt which might have been made of beaten egg whites. Even to someone as deeply ignorant of fashion as Zen was, it was clear that these garments were very special indeed.

‘Raimondo is your brother?’ he asked.

Ariana’s face, which had been beaming with pleasure at his compliment, crumpled up. She nodded mutely.

‘And what does he do?’ Zen inquired.

‘Do? He doesn’t do anything. Neither of us do anything.’

Zen laughed lightly and pointed to the dolls.

‘What about all this?’

She made a moue.

‘Oh, that’s play, not work.’

He walked about through the throng of figures inclined in a variety of life-like poses. One costume in particular caught his eyes, a clinging cardigan of stretch panne velvet textured to resemble suede and dyed in clashing patches of brilliant primary colours. He had seen it before, and not on a mannequin.

‘Do you really make them all yourself?’ he asked.

‘Of course! I used to have little dolls, but that was too fiddly, so Raimondo got me these.’

She pointed to a male figure on Zen’s right.

‘I made that outfit last year. It’s based on something I saw in a men’s fashion magazine Raimondo left lying around, a leather blouson and jeans. I thought that was a bit boring, so I let those panels into the suede to reveal a false lining made of blue shot silk, which looks like bleached denim. The slacks are in brushed silk, mimicking the suede.’

Zen looked at it admiringly.

‘It’s wonderful.’

Her pixie face collapsed into a scowl.

‘ He doesn’t think so.’

‘Your brother?’

She nodded.

‘I’m surprised he agreed to let you come, actually. I think he’s a bit ashamed of my dolls. When I told him what Ludo had said about the magazine when he phoned last week, Raimondo got terribly angry.’

Zen gazed at the stretch panne-velvet cardigan, his mind racing. Was it possible?

‘And where is he now?’ he asked.

‘Raimondo? Oh, he’s away in Africa, hunting lions.’

Zen nodded sagely.

‘That must be dangerous.’

‘That’s just what I said when he told me. And do you know what he replied? “Only for the lion!”’

He looked at her, and then at the mannequins. The contrast between their astonishing garments and the woman’s shapeless black apparel, imbued with the heady reek of the living body within, could not have been more marked.