Free Back to Bologna by Michael Dibdin

Particularly women, and you know what they’re like when roused. You don’t want the latter-day
tricoteuses
on your case. Lo Chef comes across as a cuddly, lovable rogue with a charming light tenor voice who makes the daily grind of cooking seem fun and sexy. You, on the other hand, are an arrogant intellectual who writes pretentious tomes on incomprehensible subjects and secretly despises his fellow men despite a shallow veneer of trendy leftist solidarity.’
    ‘Maybe I should sue you, Scheda.’
    ‘I’m just telling you how it’s going to look if we contest this action. We might–
might
–win the judgement, but Rinaldi will win the PR battle and you’ll come out of it, at considerable cost, looking like a mean-spirited shit.’
    ‘But you said that he’s insisting on going to court. What can I do about it?’
    ‘Show up at the Bologna exhibition centre two days from now.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘This is still at the negotiation stage, but I’ve already roughed it out with his personal assistant, a very intelligent woman called Delia Anselmi. She’s totally in agreement and seems to have a lot of influence over Rinaldi. Between the two of us I think we can swing it. But first I need your agreement.’
    ‘To what?’
    ‘Taking part in a cookery contest with Rinaldi during the Enogastexpo food fair that’s on there now.’
    Edgardo Ugo laughed.
    ‘You must be mad. Or think I am.’
    ‘On the contrary, it’s a perfect arrangement for all concerned.’
    ‘But he’s bound to win!’
    ‘Of course he is. So you’re going to lose a cook-off with the leading celebrity chef in Italy. If you challenged Roger Federer to a game of tennis you’d lose too. How humiliating is that? There are plenty of other aspects of life where you’re an acknowledged world champion. All you need to do is show up, shake hands with Lo Chef on stage, maybe join him in a duet–can you sing?–and generally make it clear that the whole affair was just a ridiculous mistake that the media have blown up out of all proportion. In return, he will sign a document that I will prepare, renouncing any legal action whatsoever against you now or in the future. End of story.’
    Ugo was silent.
    ‘Plus,’ Scheda added, ‘and this is the beauty part, the whole show will be broadcast live and as part of the deal I’ll arrange for you to have a few minutes solo to camera. There will be multiple repeats later in the day and throughout the weekend. Overall projected viewer numbers are around twenty million.’
    ‘I’ll do it.’
    Ugo put down the phone. All this talk of food made him realise that he’d forgotten to have lunch. He walked downstairs to the gigantic kitchen and peered despondently into the fridge. There were the remains of the dinner to which he’d invited a group of friends and colleagues the previous weekend, all the dishes being prepared communally from Marinetti’s tract on Futurist cooking. As the generous quantity of leftovers indicated, the preparation had been more satisfying than the actual food, but it had all looked very striking and had been beautifully photographed for an article about the event in
La Cucina Italiana
–good publicity for everyone concerned.
    He selected a few of the chunks of mortadella and cheese sculpted into letters that had formed part of the dish ‘Edible Words’, from which all the guests were supposed to eat their own names, then walked through to the former housekeeper’s office. This is where he paid his bills, kept his domestic files, and checked his emails. There were very few of the latter today, only twenty-eight new messages. He skimmed through the titles, opening some and deleting others unread. An offer for Lithuanian rights to two of his books, a request from the BBC for him to contribute to a documentary on the cultural significance of professional sport, an invitation to give a series of vapid but very highly-paid lectures in Japan, plus a selection of the