And Then You Die Read online

  ‘What did he look like, this man?’ Zen asked Gemma.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Like anyone else that age.’

  ‘What age?’

  ‘About thirty, I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t remember anything else about him?’

  ‘I only saw him for an instant. After that I was covered in scalding coffee and had other things to think about.’

  She reflected for a moment.

  ‘He had something written on his shirt,’ she said at last.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Some slogan in English. What does it matter?’

  Franco’s wife brought their coffees. Zen smiled.

  ‘It doesn’t, as long as you’re all right. It’s just odd, that’s all. Nothing unusual ever happens here, and this is the second case today.’

  ‘What’s the first?’

  ‘That man who’s taken my place.’

  Gemma nodded.

  ‘You should have called Franco, had him moved.’

  ‘I didn’t want to make a scene. What’s the point? The Brunellis never come during the week anyway, so I just took their spot.’

  Gemma finished her coffee.

  ‘Well, I’ll be going,’ she said.

  Zen stood up as she did.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to have dinner tonight,’ he found himself saying.

  She regarded him intensely.

  ‘Dinner? But why?’

  He gestured embarrassedly.

  ‘Why not?’

  This seemed to give her pause.

  ‘Why not?’ she repeated at length.

  ‘Good. About eight at Augusto’s. Do you know it?’

  ‘Of course, everyone knows it. Have you made a booking?’

  Zen shook his head.

  ‘Then we’ll never get in,’ Gemma said decisively. ‘They’re booked up weeks in advance.’

  ‘I can get us a table. Trust me.’

  Gemma looked at him again in that odd, intense way of hers.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll trust you.’

  She gave him a vague smile and walked off down the pathway at the side of the building leading to the car park. Zen headed back to the beach.

  He noticed the police at once. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all young and looking very sporty in the starched sky-blue shorts and summer shirts of the municipal police. They were stretched out evenly across the beach from the tideline to the land end, walking slowly and checking everything and everyone in their range.

  By the time Zen got back to his place, the female officer had just reached Franco’s boardwalk. Zen went over to her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said with a pleasant smile backed up by a hint of the steely sheen of power. ‘I’m in the police myself, down in Rome. Criminalpol. Is anything wrong?’

  The woman gave him the merest glance and shook her head.

  ‘Routine patrol,’ she said. ‘But we had some reports of someone passing as an itinerant trader, a vucumprà. Did you see anyone like that?’

  ‘How do you mean, “passing”?’

  ‘When he raised his sleeve, his skin was white from the elbow. And he didn’t look African. That’s what we were told, anyway.’

  ‘I can’t imagine any outsider wanting to cut a piece of that market,’ Zen remarked.

  ‘No, but he might have had other things in mind. People trust the Moroccans. Well, most of them are Sudanese actually, but the point is that they police themselves very effectively. They make a sale or they don’t, but no one gets ripped off. Same with the Chinese masseurs and fortune tellers. But there have been several robberies reported on the beach recently, people’s handbags and cameras disappearing while they’re away from their place, and if some white person has made himself up to look like the immigrants, he might get away with it. There are plenty of Albanians and gypsies about, and they can be very imaginative. Normally they do houses, sometimes while the owners are asleep, but this might be a new angle.’

  She looked at her two companions, who had drawn ahead, and nodded goodbye to Zen. He picked up his scattered belongings and started pensively back. That was the third anomaly this afternoon, he thought. First the stranger taking his place, then the young man who had stared at him and then rammed into Gemma, and now somebody impersonating one of the African traders. Anywhere else, this would have been a very average day’s haul of minor mysteries, but in the placid, predictable world of the beach it was a potential front-page news story. Perhaps there’s a pattern, thought Zen, smiling sourly at his wishful thinking.

  This enforced vacation was driving him slightly crazy, he realized. What he needed was to get back to work, but there was no prospect of that. The powers that be had their plans for him, and it had been made gently clear to him that these included an early and well-deserved retirement. ‘We’ll have to bend the rules,’ one of the official visitants to his hospital bed had told him. ‘But it’s the least you deserve after all you’ve been through.’

  He walked back past the bar, nodding to Franco and getting a grudging raise of the chin in return, and out into the full glare of the sun. As always, he was surprised to see the line of craggy mountains dominating the skyline to the east, their gleaming white surfaces making them seem even higher than they were in the July heat, although their lustre was not, of course, snow but marble.

  He crunched across the gravel parking lot and crossed the lungomare which ran all the way from Carrara to Viareggio, almost thirty kilometres in all, connecting the various villages and fishing ports which had now turned into a continuous strip of coastal development, retaining only their names and some vestiges of their original centres. Few of the buildings were more than a hundred years old, and the vast majority less than half that. Until the beach craze set in after the war, these marshy lowlands had been home to only a few stately villas set amidst the ribbon of wild pines which had once fringed the sea all the way south to Rome.

  The main road was impressively broad, but the virtual absence of traffic gave it the same slightly unreal feel as the rest of the area. This was even more marked in the back streets beyond, which motorized vehicles entered strictly on sufferance, and at a crawl. The narrow lanes were filled with pedestrians and cyclists wandering about without so much as a cautious glance to check what was coming. Everything was clean, neat and safe, a privileged enclave where the normal chaos theory of Italian urban life was inverted. Zen had initially found it charming, just what he needed in his prolonged convalescence, but now it was starting to grate on him. There was no edge, no friction, no coefficient of resistance. There were moments when he had to curb the urge to start behaving badly, just to stir things up a little.

  But that would not have done, any more than it would have done not to visit the beach every day. The truth was that Zen much preferred to avoid the sun, if at all possible, and also hated sitting still doing nothing for hours on end. But his instructions were to blend in, and to come to Versilia and not go to the beach would have made him an exception to the prevailing rule and thereby an object of interest and comment. So he put in his four or five hours a day, like going to the office, and then walked sedately home, resisting the impulse to bump into people, utter insulting innuendoes and make sarcastic remarks. It was a strain, but he had his orders.

  Nor could he leave. His orders on this point too were clear. He was to remain exactly where he was until contacted. Besides, he had nowhere else to go. He had not returned to Rome since the death of his mother, and felt no desire to do so. To attempt another false return to Venice was even more out of the question. The mere thought of either alternative made him realize how cluttered with the past his life had become, how devoid of any viable future. This was still more depressing, and seemingly insoluble, so he tried to think of other things, or better still not to think at all. That was all he needed to do, he told himself for the umpteenth time, just stop thinking and enjoy this pleasant, calm, mindless existence that most peo
ple could only dream of. What was the matter with him? Why was nothing ever good enough?

  He dropped in to the small alimentari where he did his daily shopping. His invitation to Gemma had been only partly motivated by a wish to know her better. The fact was that ever since his arrival he had been living off whatever cooked dishes the place had on offer that day, or those he could forage and prepare for himself, a very limited cuisine consisting largely of packet soups, frozen entrées, sandwiches and takeaway pizza. To dine out alone would be another anomaly of the kind he was not permitted by the terms of his contract. Even shopping alone, as a middle-aged male, was anomalous, but he had to eat.

  He stocked up on coffee, milk, bread and a few eggs. The cashier looked at him in the same way that Franco did, as though she was confused by recognizing yet not being able to place him. That look, in another pair of eyes, could yet get him killed, he thought idly. The fact was that he didn’t really care. The Mafia might not have killed him physically, but something in him had died, something without which life didn’t really seem worth the effort. He just didn’t care about anything, that was the real and lasting effect of l’incidente, and one which looked as though it might well stay with him throughout his long, tedious, enforced retirement, a nagging ache that no amount of therapy, exercise or hobbies would ever be able to dispel.

  Opposite the grocery, from a white lorry parked at the kerb, fresh vegetables, fruit and eggs were being sold to a bevy of housewives, all of whom were giving the vendor a hard time about his quality, selection and prices, a daily ritual necessary to everyone’s sense of dignity and self-esteem. The women knew that short of driving to one of the supermarkets on the highway inland, they were stuck with what Mario had on offer, in very much the same way that they were stuck with their husbands, children, relatives, homes and general lot in life. Their only perk was the right to bitch loudly and at length about the inequities of the situation, and in this they indulged freely. Mario, understanding that this was one of the costs of doing business, entered into me ensuing series of mini-dramas with gusto and vivacity, playing his part to the full.

  Zen drifted back across to the shady side of the street, taking in the scene at the greengrocer’s van, a cluster of young people on bicycles, a group of women cooing over a neighbour’s baby, a man leaning against a concrete telephone pole eating an ice cream and eyeing the passers-by. He was wearing a T-shirt with some sort of English slogan on it. Zen walked down two blocks to the end of the commercial area, then turned left into a street old enough to pre-date the rigid grid which had been imposed on later development, curving gently off past wrought-iron gates and spurts of greenery spilling over weathered walls. The villa which he had been assigned was about halfway along the curve, which ended at a crumbling gateway leading into one of the last remaining portions of the original pineta. There was virtually no traffic at all, and no sound to disturb the silence but the perpetual murmur of televisions and the occasional yapping of a small, neurotic dog kept by one of the neighbours.

  He reached his gate, and for some reason paused before unlocking it to glance over his shoulder. There was no one in sight. So they already know where you live, said a voice in his head. ‘Oh, shut up!’ Zen muttered audibly. Such professional paranoia was like the vanity of one of those women on the beach who couldn’t get used to the fact that the sexual stock she had been living off for the last thirty years had just tanked in the market. ‘We’re both yesterday’s men,’ he had told Don Gaspare Limina in Sicily, and he had been right. Why couldn’t he accept that he was no longer a player, and never would be again? In the event the Mafia had failed to kill him, thanks to a stroke of luck and their own incompetence, but he was as good as dead just the same.

  The gravel driveway inside the gate led to a stairway at the side of the house. At first-floor level this connected with a balcony running along the west face. Zen passed the shuttered windows and unlocked the door giving access to his domain. He took his groceries through to the kitchen immediately to the left of the front door and put them away neatly, then returned to the large salotto which took up most of the apartment and slumped down in an armchair, wincing slightly. The panoply of pain that he had lived with for so long had now lifted, but there were still a few malcontent twinges and jabs prepared to make his life a misery if he stretched too far in the wrong direction, or went to sleep in an unsuitable position, or generally overexerted himself in almost any way whatever. The doctors he went to consult once a week at the hospital in Pietrasanta had assured him that there was no permanent damage, and that any ‘perceived discomfort’ was purely superficial, temporary and nothing to worry about. He believed them, but these pains were less like the dramatic and evidently causal agony he had suffered in the months immediately following the explosion than the normal discomforts of age and decrepitude, telltale signs that the body was reaching the end of its useful life. This somehow made them even less bearable.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the delicious cool of the high-ceilinged room begin to massage his stress away. How many such rooms had he passed through on the long journey back to his present convalescence? He would never know. Of the first few weeks, his mind retained only jagged little splinters of memory, precise yet totally specific and uncontextualized. For the rest, he had to rely on what he’d been told. The driver had hauled him out of the burning car and radioed for help, and they’d both been rushed to hospital in Catania. After the immediate operation for a collapsed lung, Zen had been transferred by air to a military hospital on the island of Santo Stefano, off the Sardinian coast, where he had spent weeks in traction. Later he had been moved again, first to a sanatorium in the Adige valley, then to a private nursing home in the hills above Genoa.

  In all that time, he had seen no one that he knew or could trust, except in the impersonal sense in which you trust a garage mechanic to repair your car. His body had had the best of attention, but it was only gradually that he had come to understand that the reason why the authorities were lavishing such care on him was because they needed him alive and presentable to testify at an upcoming trial in the United States. The most informative and forthcoming of his visitors had been a young man from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who had managed to intimate, without of course naming any names, that the Americans had succeeded in arresting a number of prominent mafiosi who had been on the Italian ‘most wanted’ list for years, including two members of the Ragusa clan whom Zen had identified from photographs in the course of a preliminary debriefing at the military base on Santo Stefano. This tended to reflect rather poorly on the Italian authorities, the young diplomat had continued, and it was unanimously felt at the highest levels that to send a hero of the unceasing domestic struggle against ‘the octopus’ to the USA, to testify in person that he had seen Nello and Giulio Rizzo unloading illegal drugs from the plane on which he himself had just arrived from Malta, would help redress the balance and generally help the home side cut a better international figura.

  Meanwhile, all he had to do was wait and make the most of the amenities of the accommodation that had been placed at his disposal. Which, he had to admit, were considerable. The property was apparently owned by two brothers named Rutelli, one based in Turin and the other in Rome, who divided it between them for vacation use. Zen had been allotted the upper storey, while the lower one had been empty until the day before, when he had heard noises indicating that someone had moved in. This someone was presumably the other brother, but Zen had been given no instructions to make contact with him, and had not done so.

  The floor he had was more than ample for his needs. There were two bedrooms, a pleasant bathroom, the small but adequate kitchen, and this great living area which breathed an air of calmer, more spacious times. Zen had always believed that every building came with its own aura, a sort of immaterial scent you picked up the moment you crossed the threshold. But unlike a scent, this couldn’t be sprayed on. It was unique and inalienable, and told the sensitive visitor much about the peo
ple who had lived in the space and the things that had happened there. Zen had been in beautiful houses he could hardly wait to get out of, so overwhelmingly oppressive was the sense of evil and despair which they radiated, and also in fetid inner-city tenements that felt as serene as a monastery cell. This room was visually pleasing, in a restrained, craftsmanlike way, but its real gift to him was the overwhelming sense of peace and contentment it radiated. He didn’t know who had lived there, but he would have testified under oath to their moral character and general probity.

  That was his last thought until he woke to find the room significantly darker and the clock showing twenty minutes past seven. It took him another moment to remember his dinner date with Gemma, for which he still had not made a booking. He had boastfully said that he could get them into Augusto’s, counting on using Girolamo Rutelli’s name to do the trick, but he hadn’t counted on leaving it this late.

  In the event this proved to be no problem. He had only just dialled the number of the restaurant when the phone was answered by an obsequious voice saying, ‘Augusto’s. Good evening, Dottor Rutelli.’

  Zen was speechless for a moment. Then he said, ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘We have Caller Identification installed, dottore. I explained it to you last time, don’t you remember? That way we can filter out the riff-raff and answer only the calls that matter. What can we do for you?’

  ‘I’d like a table for two this evening. About eight, if that’s possible.’

  ‘Ma certo, dottore. Come no? Alle otto. Benissimo. Al piacere di rivederla.’

  ‘I’ll be dining with a friend named Pier Giorgio Butani,’ Zen went on. ‘If I’m a little late, please look after him.’

  He took a shower and then carefully picked out some suitable clothing in the casually formal mode which was the evening norm in Versilia. Realizing that this was a tricky balance to bring off successfully, Zen had taken the bus to Viareggio shortly after his arrival and put himself in the hands of one of the men’s outfitters there. As always, his aim was to remain invisible. ‘Get lost in the crowd,’ the young man from the Farnesina had told him. ‘Keep your head down, melt into the background, don’t draw attention to yourself. We have decided against providing you with a resident bodyguard for that very reason, although there will be people keeping an eye on you. But Versilia’s full of tourists at this time of year, and as long as you’re reasonably cautious there’s no earthly reason why anyone should give you a second thought. Just remember who you’re supposed to be, and try to look the part.’ This last was a reference to one Pier Giorgio Butani, a distant cousin of Girolamo Rutelli. Butani really existed, just in case anyone checked, but he had moved with his parents to Argentina in the mid-Fifties, only rarely visited Italy and had never been to Versilia.