And Then You Die (17 page)

A car drew up outside. Zen took a last look around the
disturbingly
notional space which had been his home for so many years and then, failing once again to be moved, picked up his bags, closed and locked the door and walked downstairs.

Fortunately the driver of Taranto 64 proved to be one of the few night cabbies in Rome who didn’t want to share his life story, political views, family problems and forecast for next season’s football championship with his fare. He just shut up and drove. There was almost no traffic, and they arrived at their destination in fifteen minutes. Zen over-tipped the soothingly reticent driver, walked inside the station and bought a first-class single ticket to Florence.

The platforms were deserted. By day, Tiburtina was a busy suburban station serving commuters and shoppers, but at this hour of the night it functioned purely as a stopping place to switch crews on long-haul trains without going into the terminus and having to change locomotives as well. Zen wandered into the bar and bought a cappuccino which he nursed until the clangour of a bell and then an incomprehensible announcement over the loudspeaker system warned of the imminent arrival of his train.

It consisted mainly of sleeping cars, and most of the seating carriages were empty. Zen could easily have had a first-class compartment to himself, but for various reasons he chose instead to share one with two other men. One was almost caricaturally Sicilian, the other less easy to place. Both had evidently been
dozing
, and went back to stertorous sleep as soon as the train started again. After a while, Zen joined them.

When he woke, they were in the Arno valley and dawn was
just starting to break. No details were yet visible outside, but the rugged mass of the Apennines to the east showed black against the gradually lightening sky. It felt good to be out of Rome. He would never live there again if he could help it, he realized.

He disembarked in Florence at the transit station of Rifredi, and grabbed an espresso before the arrival of an early local train to the terminus at Santa Maria Novella. In the piazza outside, the blue buses that served the region were starting to gather. One of the drivers told him that there was a service to Versilia leaving at eight o’clock. That left about an hour to kill. He went across the street to the Lazzi office, bought a ticket and left his luggage behind the counter, then set off towards the Mercato Centrale.

Zen had used this huge covered public market – the largest in Europe, as the locals characteristically claimed – as an
early-morning
breakfast venue before, in the course of brief trips to or through the city on assignments he could no longer remember. It was a short and pleasant walk from the station through the twisty, narrow, empty streets, and like all markets it came to bustling life at an hour when the rest of the city was still brushing its teeth.

When Zen arrived, the stallholders were still putting the
finishing
touches to their displays of produce and their clients had not yet materialized, but the food stands were doing a brisk trade from the market workers who clustered around each one,
squabbling
good-naturedly among themselves, joking, gossiping,
miming
excessive emotions of every kind, and from time to time breaking off to nag the unflappable serving staff into getting a move on with their order. No dainty pastries and lukewarm milky coffee for these men. They had a hard morning’s work ahead, lugging around sides of meat and whole hams and cheeses, and were tucking into crusty rolls stuffed with boiled tripe or beef, washed down with tumblers of Chianti sloshed from plastic-wrapped flasks.

Zen fought his way to the front just as another lump of beef emerged from the steaming cauldron set over a gas ring. He pointed to it, then to the wine, handed over some money and edged back out of the throng to let someone else have a turn. Eventually he found a spot at an angle of the market building where he could park his glass of wine on the railing, and
proceeded 
to munch away. Reaching into his coat pocket for the bunch of tissues he had grabbed from the dispenser to wipe off his greasy lips, he felt a more substantial paper product. Extracting it, he read ‘þórunn Sigurðardòttir’, and felt so happy not to be in Iceland that he went straight back to the stand and ordered another roll and another glass of wine.

How ridiculous it all was! Everything that had happened to him in the last few weeks seemed like a dream which makes
perfect
sense until you wake up and realize just how gullible you’ve been. That business on the coast and in the plane, the voices in his head and all the rest of it … It all amounted to nothing more than a flurry of coincidental nonsense, swirls of mental mud thrown up by the physical and mental ordeal that he had been through. But now it was over.

He finished his second roll and the rest of the wine and checked his watch. Just ten minutes left to catch the bus back to the coast. Perfect. He wondered if Gemma would still be at the beach. Or had he dreamed her too? In a few hours he would find out.

Outside the covered market, the street traders were now
setting
up their stalls laden with clothing, leather goods, CDs, tapes and videos. Zen walked through them, thinking only of catching his bus, until his eye was caught by some items of clothing. They were T-shirts, hanging from a wire suspended at the end of one of the carts. The colours differed, but the words printed on them were all the same: ‘Life’s a beach’.

He stopped and fingered one of the garments. Noticing Zen’s interest, the vendor came over and named a variety of prices in rapidly declining order. Zen shook his head, but the man unhooked one of the shirts and turned it over to display the alleged quality of the cloth and manufacture. On the back of the shirt, in exactly the same lettering, was printed ‘And then you die’.

Zen waved the salesman aside and hurried on his way, turning the foreign phrase over in his mind.
La vita
è
una
spiaggia
e poi si
muore
. It made no sense. Perhaps it was some idiomatic
expression
he didn’t understand. There were so many things about English speakers he didn’t understand, like Ellen, his one-time American girlfriend asking him, ‘Why are all the things I like
either fattening or bad for me? ‘He’d shrugged and replied, ‘Because you like the wrong things.’

It had seemed self-evident to him, hardly worth saying, but Ellen had reacted as though he’d slapped her. ‘I can’t help what I like!’ she’d wailed. He’d sensed then that Americans liked to like things that were bad for them. It added a frisson of sin to their indulgence, and a self-righteous glow to abstinence.

‘Life’s a beach and then you die.’ Absurd. Another piece of dream jetsam with no significance. People would buy clothes with any nonsense on them as long as it was in English. For all they knew, they could be walking round sporting a shirt or
jacket
which said ‘I’m a Complete Idiot.’ It didn’t matter. English was chic.

He emerged into the piazza in front of Santa Maria Novella, retrieved his baggage from the Lazzi office and climbed aboard the bus just as the driver started the engine in a cloud of diesel fumes.

The warm evening light washed down, its heat glowing back up off the worn flagstones where four boys were playing football. Couples and clusters of locals stood about gossiping in a drowsy harmony punctuated by the brief appearance of bicyclists
transiting
in a leisurely manner from one portal of the small oval piazza to another. In the midst of it all, at an outlying table of a café,
protected
from the sun’s rays by a blue
ombrellone
, Aurelio Zen sat clad in a new cream linen suit and his Panama hat, lingering over the dregs of a coffee and smiling inanely at the sheer blissful
pleasure
of it all.

For the first time in his life, he felt himself to be a complete
gentleman
of leisure. He had spent the intervening ten days at the beach, sunning himself, relaxing, and lunching or dining with Gemma either at a variety of local restaurants – including one in a village perched on a crag at the end of a hair-raising mountain road up which she had driven without complaint or comment – or at the villa where he had reinstalled himself. Nothing had ‘
happened
’ between them, but there seemed every reason to suppose that something was about to, and it was their very sense of the inevitability of this that had precluded any hasty moves on either side. Nevertheless, the day before Gemma had definitely made a move of some kind by inviting Zen to dinner.

‘I should invite you,’ he had replied.

‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the invitation is to my house.’

At these words, the ancient core of Zen’s cerebrum, the only part he had ever really trusted, told him that something
significant
was going to happen this evening. Hence the new – and, truth be told, ruinously expensive – linen suit, hence the tingle of pleasurable anticipation transforming the mundane scenes in the piazza of this sleepy provincial town into signs and symbols of powers still in effect from when the place had been a Roman
amphitheatre. Unspeakable things must have happened in the space where those
ragazzi
were kicking their ball around,
seemingly
recklessly and with complete abandon, yet always ensuring that it did not cause any bother or inconvenience to any of the other players in the arena. That was part of the game, one of the rules.

Something was going to happen, of that he was sure, but he had no clear idea what, still less any sense that he could control the event in any decisive way. On his reappearance at the beach, Gemma had initially seemed a bit cool and distant. Zen had explained his abrupt absence as being due to ‘business’, to which she had responded by a curt nod, as if to say ‘If you have your secrets, so have I.’

Nevertheless, he could not help grudgingly admitting to
himself
that the prognostications were good. He hadn’t heard a word from the Ministry over his misuse of the high-tech
communication
device they had given him, sending out an all-points urgent alarm over some burglar breaking into his apartment in Rome. He had, however, heard from Gilberto Nieddu, who had taken Zen’s advice, made the necessary penitential pilgrimage to Sardinia, and convinced Rosa to return home with him and the children. Her terms, according to Gilberto, had been surprisingly mild: ‘Very well, but next time – if there is a next time – I won’t just leave you, I’ll leave you for dead.’ Zen had enthusiastically seconded Nieddu’s opinion that coming from Rosa this
amounted
to a declaration of total forgiveness and eternal love.

Zen had also visited the hospital at Pietrasanta once again, this time to have the stitches on his knuckles removed. The doctors had taken the opportunity to examine his general progress one last time, and had pronounced him surprisingly well advanced on the way to total recovery. Better still, the last traces of the
huld
ufolk
had vanished along with the stitches. He had heard no more voices, had enjoyed dreamless sleep, and in general seemed fully integrated back into the common lot of humanity.

This of course included a general uncertainty, and a measure of anxiety, about the future. The fact of the matter was that he liked Gemma, to the extent that he had got to know her, and that he desired her as a woman. He had some reason to suppose that she felt something similar where he was concerned, but that was all.
He knew nothing about her in any depth, and almost everything she knew about him was either lies or a distortion of the truth. The most probable scenario therefore seemed to be that they would either end up in bed this evening, or some evening soon, or they wouldn’t, but in either case that would be as far as it went. Both of them came with lengthy and elaborate histories, and
neither
had shown much interest in investigating or explaining them, much to Zen’s relief. This made for a trouble-free
divertimento
in the short run, but suggested that the longer-term prospects were tenuous in the extreme. There was just not enough to hold them together, to give them a reason for not going their separate ways. Even with a marriage and children, not to mention decades of intimacy at an age when the personality is still malleable, Gilberto and Rosa had come within a breath of parting for ever. What lasting hope could there be for two strangers at mid-life, with nothing more in common than that they happened to be seated in opposite
ombrelloni
at Franco’s bathing establishment, and seemed to get along and be mildly attracted to one another?

He glanced at his watch and stood up with a sardonic grin at his own fatuousness in taking all this so seriously. A brand-new suit, a bad case of stage fright, and, yes, some roses would be a good idea, just to complete the caricature. One little bomb under the car he’d been travelling in and a couple of half-hearted attempts by some Mafia thug to silence him, and here he was convinced that a casual and probably purely conventional dinner invitation – Gemma’s way of paying him back for his hospitality to her – was the hour of destiny. But it would still be interesting to see her apartment. One could learn a lot from the things people had chosen to surround themselves with, especially if the choice had been made with a view to preventing you doing so.

A lengthy and lazily uncoordinated peal of bells from various churches and towers began to ring out seven o’clock as he walked the length of the piazza and out into the street beyond, which bent and narrowed at the point where it would have passed through the original Roman walls. The cramped space between the tall medieval buildings to either side was packed with tall, elegant Lucchesi on foot or on bikes who wove their way through the seemingly impenetrable mass of pedestrians with the same
disin
voltura
that the future soccer stars had displayed in the piazza.

A news-stand he passed was displaying copies of a satirical review whose headline read, ‘Medical Breakthrough Reveals Why Pisans Are Born – No Cure In Sight.’ Zen smiled
indulgently
and moved on. Unlike most other countries, at least Italy did not use neighbouring nations as its stereotype for crass stupidity. The universal butt of such low humour was the
carabinieri
, but every region had its own ritually despised city, whose
inhabitants
were depicted as cretinous scum who would believe
anything
and achieve nothing. In his native Veneto, the traditional target was Vicenza; here in Tuscany it was evidently Pisa, and such gags would have a particular appeal here in industrious, mercantile Lucca, so near to yet so far from the neighbouring
città
di mare
, with its untrustworthy crew of brigands and adventurers with a weather eye always out for one-off deals and a quick killing.

He found a flower shop and ordered a dozen red roses, then wondered if this might look a bit pointed. After a long discussion of the intricacies of the situation with the florist, who had the soft voice and perfect tact of all the townsfolk Zen had encountered, he emerged with a bouquet of yellow roses and turned left off the main street towards the address which Gemma had given him. I like this place, he thought as he strode along. I could be happy here. Despite being entirely landlocked, Lucca reminded him in some indefinable way of Venice. It was a question of its scale, its look and feel of placid security, and above all the politely reticent manners of its citizens, refined by centuries of trade and
commerce
.

The moment he turned into Via del Fosso, he felt even more at home. The name – Ditch Street – was not attractive, but the thing itself was: a broad avenue of fine buildings to either side of a stone-embanked canal. The trickle of channelled water here was evidently fresh rather than tidal, the buildings more recent and everything on a smaller scale, but the concept was as familiar to Zen as his own face. This was a miniature version of the
neighbourhood
in Venice where he had grown up. The district must originally have been outside the Roman and medieval city, open fields later enfolded within the imposing line of red-brick baroque walls visible ahead of him. This is where the
middleclass
merchants of that time would have built their spacious and imposing mansions, leaving the clogged
centro
and its
anachronistic
palaces and slums to the decaying nobles and penniless plebs.

He found the house and mounted the step. Gemma had warned him that there were no names beside the buttons of the entry phone, but that hers was the second from the bottom. Almost as soon as Zen rang, the buzzer sounded and the front door unlatched. For a moment he was disconcerted by the lack of any preliminary query, but then realized that there had been no need of that. Gemma was expecting him and him alone.

As if to confirm this impression, the door to her apartment was slightly ajar. Zen knocked lightly and then entered, the bunch of roses concealed behind his back.

‘Gemma?’

There was no one in the hallway. She was probably in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches to their meal. Zen smiled, touched by this discreet message. He was being received as an old friend, a member of the family almost, one of the privileged few for whom
complimenti
would have been an insulting mark of coldness and distance. He walked down the hall and into the
living
room.

‘Gemma?’

But the person in the room was not Gemma. To the left of the door, just out of immediate eyeshot, stood a youngish man with blond hair and a thin moustache, wearing faded jeans and an open-necked shirt in a brilliant shade of orange.

‘
Buona sera, dottore
,’ he said.

My God, thought Zen, it’s what’s-his-name, Gemma’s jealous husband. He’d imagined him like this – young, lithe, athletic – but then reminded himself that whenever he read or heard about someone called by the same name as his boyhood friend in Venice, he always imagined them like that. For him, anyone called Tommaso would be always be gifted with eternal youth. In this case, however, he had been right.

‘Gemma’s in the dining room,’ the man went on. ‘Over there to your right. No, please, after you.’

Feeling utterly ridiculous with his pathetic bouquet of roses, Zen obediently walked over to the doorway, the man following.
Had Gemma told her husband that he was coming? Was this some sort of weird humiliation she had decided to inflict on him in return for his unexplained disappearance from the beach?

The moment he crossed the threshold to the next room, these thoughts vanished. Gemma was there all right. She was sitting in one of the dining chairs right opposite Zen, turned away from a small table elaborately laid for two. Twists of synthetic orange cord secured her arms and chest to the chair. Her mouth was
covered
by a wide strip of metallic silver tape and her eyes were wild.

Zen instinctively started towards her, only to be halted by a voice.

‘Don’t touch, please. You know the old saying. “Pretty to look at, delightful to hold, but if it gets broken consider it sold.”’

Zen swung round, letting the bouquet fall to the floor in front of Gemma. There was a different man behind him now, totally bald and clean-shaven. In one hand he held a blond wig and the wispy moustache, in the other an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer.

‘Against the wall please,
dottore
,’ he said, pointing with the gun. ‘You are familiar with the position, I take it.’

Zen splayed himself out against the wall, hands and feet
widely
spaced. He felt the pressure of the gun barrel in his back.

‘Don’t stain my suit,’ he stupidly said.

The man laughed.

‘Don’t worry. By the time I’ve finished with you, your suit will be the last thing on your mind.’

Hands frisked him quickly and professionally. That
professionalism
, and the sound of the laugh, finally made everything clear. The man’s next words, as he found and removed the
communication
device that Zen had been given at the Ministry,
merely
served as confirmation.

‘Ah, yes, your little squawkbox. Just as well I still have a few friends in the business. All right, turn around.’

The man tossed Zen’s belongings down on the floor beside the wig and moustache he had been wearing.

‘Still don’t recognize me?’ he asked teasingly.

Zen did, but the memory brought only despair. He said nothing.

‘Really? Does the name Alfredo Ferraro mean anything to you?’

Zen creased his brow and then shook his head.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘You’re afraid not. Well,
dottore
, you’re right to be afraid. But it’s a shame you don’t remember Alfredo. Some of us do. Some of us remember him very well, as well as what happened to him and who was responsible. Which of course is why I’m here.’

He held out the hand holding the pistol in a mock salutation.

‘Roberto Lessi.’

Zen forced his brow to furrow again.