Twenty minutes later he was back in the spacious landscaping and clear air of his villa, set back from a secluded lane winding through the spine of hills above Monte Donato between the Reno and Savena rivers; a mere five kilometres from the city laid out beneath like a map, yet to all intents and purposes another world. For some reason the confrontation with Rodolfo Mattioli was still troubling him, though, so he decided to dismiss it by getting to work.

Two hours passed, and the dusk was curdling beyond the window, before Edgardo laid down his Mont Blanc 4810 Series Limited Edition fountain pen, as thick as a stumpy but fully erect cock, on the sheet of heavy, deckle-edged Fabriano paper, rich in linen and made by hand using methods essentially unchanged since the thirteenth century, then thoughtfully replaced the solid black sculpted cap over its rhodinised 18-carat gold glans. He had chosen these writing tools as appropriate to the task he had just completed, a piece of cheap journalistic fluff designed to promote the recently-released film-very loosely based on a misreading of the superficial plot level of his best-known novel-in some American celebrity gossip rag sold to semi-literate sadsacks at supermarket checkouts.

But as always, the choice had not been easy. Each of the rooms on the upper floor of the villa was a scriptorium, and each quite differently designed and equipped. It was a question of selecting the right one for the assignment in hand, and Edgardo always had at least five on the go at any given time. For an article due to be published in the prestigious learned journal Recherches Semiotiques, tentatively entitled ‘The Coherence of Incoherence’-a play on the celebrated treatise Tahafut al-Tahafut by the twelfth-century Muslim scholar known in the West as Averroes, whose Arab name Ibn Rushd opened up the possibility for the type of puns on the author of The Satanic Verses for which Ugo was justly celebrated-he was working at an IBM workstation linked by a fibre optic cable to the University of Bologna’s Unix mainframe.