And Then You Die

by Michael Dibdin

  The man also stood up, searching in his pockets.

  ‘I should also have a card somewhere,’ he said in heavily accented Italian. ‘Maybe in my wallet. No, I must have left them in my other jacket. Wait a minute!’

  He finally produced a crumpled business card with a telephone number and someone’s name written on it.

  ‘Sorry, other side,’ the man told Zen, who turned the card over. It was embossed in blue and gold with the words ‘Gruppo Campari: Campari, Cinzano, Cynar, Asti Cinzano, Riccadonna. Snæbjörn Guðmundsson.’

  ‘What’s Campari got to do with it?’ asked Zen.

  ‘That’s just my private business card,’ the man explained. ‘I’m also the Italian consul here.’

  He indicated the uniformed woman.

  ‘Signora Sigurðardòttir is a police officer. She wishes to ask you a few questions. I will translate. Please sit here.’

  Zen took a chair facing the desk and the interview began. The form was invariable: the woman spoke in a language utterly alien to Zen, the man followed with a question in Italian, Zen answered, the man spoke to the woman in the language she had used, and she made notes on a pad open in front of her.

  ‘Signor Butani, I have already spoken to members of the crew on this flight. I have been given to understand by them that you were boarded ahead of all the other passengers, and through a separate entrance, bypassing the normal controls.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why was this?’

  ‘I have recently spent several months in hospital, recuperating after a serious accident. The ground staff had been informed of this fact, and kindly arranged for me to be given priority boarding.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  ‘A car crash.’

  ‘What injuries did you sustain?’

  ‘Serious concussion, head injuries, compression injuries to chest including two fractured ribs and a collapsed lung, limb fractures requiring pinning, plus the usual assortment of relatively minor fractures, lacerations and contusions.’

  ‘Yet you now appear to be fully mobile.’

  ‘The accident occurred almost a year ago. I still suffer from limb stiffness and some psychological effects, particularly when forced to spend long hours in a small, crowded space such as an aircraft. Fortunately I had contacts at Alitalia who were able to ensure that I was not inconvenienced any more than was strictly necessary.’

  The female officer made lengthy notes. She was stunningly beautiful, Zen thought abstractly, and would certainly have cut a wide swathe through the herds of ragazzi on any Italian street. But somehow her beauty remained purely theoretical. He didn’t feel remotely interested or excited by her.

  ‘Do you have your boarding pass, please?’ þórunn Sigurðardòttir asked.

  Zen found it in his wallet and handed it over.

  ‘This identifies your seat number as 24A,’ the woman said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I understand from the crew members I interviewed that you were in fact seated in 25F.’

  ‘That’s right. There was someone sitting in the next seat to mine, and he didn’t really seem the sort of person I wanted to be beside for ten hours unless I had to. The plane wasn’t full, and I spotted an empty seat on the other side of the cabin, so once we were airborne I moved over there.’

  ‘And the passenger who had been sitting next to you then took your original seat, is that correct?’

  ‘It is. May I ask why any of this is of the slightest significance?’

  The uniformed woman spoke rapidly in her incomprehensible tongue. It didn’t sound to Zen’s ears much like English – it was probably some regional American dialect, he supposed – but he had no difficulty in understanding the tone of voice. This was confirmed when the consul translated.

  ‘Signora Sigurðardòttir has indicated that she wishes you to confine yourself to answering her questions.’

  Zen beamed ingratiatingly.

  ‘Please assure la signora ispettrice of my willingness to cooperate to the full with her enquiry, whatever it may concern.’

  Snæbjörn Guðmundsson duly translated, or at least said something to the woman, who had been eyeing Zen sharply. She nodded, then asked another question.

  ‘What is the purpose of your journey to the United States?’

  ‘Business.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  Here Zen paused for the first time, at a loss how to answer. On the one hand, this woman was an accredited member of an American law-enforcement body, and therefore entitled to the truth. On the other, she had accepted Zen’s passport in his cover name at its face value, and therefore evidently wasn’t of a sufficiently high status to have been briefed about the real purpose of his trip. As usual, the safest option seemed to be a lie.

  He justified the pause with a laugh.

  ‘I was just wondering how best to describe it, but actually it’s very similar to that of the consul here, except that I deal in much less well-known names. High-quality olive oils, cheeses, dried mushrooms, honeys and preserves from small organic producers. It’s a low-volume, high mark-up business. If the restaurants and boutique stores want the best, they have to come to me, but equally I have to come over every so often to …’

  þórunn Sigurðardòttir held up her hand and Zen turned off the flow.

  ‘Do you have any commercial competitors?’

  ‘Virtually none. As I said, this is very much a niche market, and I’ve just about cornered it.’

  ‘What about personal enemies?’

  ‘None that I know of.’

  The woman made more notes whose length seemed out of all proportion to Zen’s replies. Then she raised her startling blue eyes to Snæbjörn Guðmundsson and spoke at some length.

  The consul stood up and looked at Zen.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘What about my passport?’

  ‘She needs to keep it for now. I’ll explain outside.’

  Zen assumed that this meant outside in the corridor, or at best back in the packed lounge with the other waiting passengers, but to his surprise Guðmundsson led the way through a set of double doors into the fresh air.

  And fresh it was, too! Tangy, salted gusts swept across the car park in front of them with such boisterous energy that they almost knocked the two men over. The consul pointed to the left and strode off towards a small red Fiat which he unlocked. Zen stowed his cabin bag in the boot and got in to the car.

  ‘Now then, I think it’s time I explained the situation,’ Snæbjörn Guðmundsson said when they were sheltered from the wind.

  ‘It’s time someone did,’ Zen replied pointedly.

  ‘Feel free to smoke,’ Guðmundsson remarked. ‘I can smell it on your clothing. A very pleasant odour which brings back happy memories of my misspent youth. No thanks, I’ve given up myself, but I remain a child of the Sixties. È proibito proibire and all that. So please go ahead.’

  Zen lit a cigarette and rolled down the window slightly, creating an instant gale inside the car. The consul closed Zen’s window and opened his own, on the leeward side.

  ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘your flight was diverted here due to technical causes of a routine nature. Normally it would just have been a question of a few hours’ delay at most for the necessary maintenance work to take place. But at the point when the passengers were being disembarked to facilitate this work – unblocking toilets can be a very smelly business – one of them failed to respond to the directions of the cabin crew. A doctor was summoned and subsequently pronounced him dead.’

  ‘The one who was sitting in my place,’ said Zen.

  ‘Exactly. A certain Angelo Porri. This has placed the authorities here in a very difficult position. They of course have no wish to delay anyone’s journey any longer than is necessary, but in the unlikely event that the cause of death turns out not to have been natural, everyone who was on board the plane will naturally become an important witness if not a potential suspect.’


  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘The corpse has been taken to a hospital in the city, where it will shortly undergo a post-mortem. Once that is concluded, you and your fellow passengers will most likely be free to leave.’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘For the time being, the rest of the passengers will remain in the holding area. They will be told that the repairs are taking longer than had been anticipated.’

  Zen braved the wind long enough to throw his butt out of the window.

  ‘So I’m being singled out for special treatment. Why?’

  Snæbjörn Guðmundsson started the engine.

  ‘This afternoon I received two telephone calls relating to my position as Italian consul. This in itself was highly unusual. I have to say that the position is an honorary one which I fill partly because it gives me a certain cachet in business and government circles here that is useful to my job with the Gruppo Campari. Even that is largely a part-time activity. My real work is quite different.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘I’m an artist.’

  They drove out of the car park on to a dual-carriageway road.

  ‘The first call was from the police here at the airport,’ Snæbjörn Guðmundsson went on. ‘They explained that an Alitalia flight had been diverted …’

  ‘That’s the second time you’ve used that word,’ Zen pointed out. ‘Diverted from where?’

  ‘From its flight in mid-Atlantic, of course.’

  Zen laughed.

  ‘So what is this, Atlantis?’

  ‘This is Iceland.’

  ‘I don’t see any ice.’

  ‘No, Greenland’s the icy one. Some people say the original settlers deliberately named them like that, so as to send potential invaders to the wrong address. At any rate, as I was saying, the first call I received was from the airport authorities. They simply asked me to be prepared to come out to Keflavik in case any of the Italian passengers required assistance or refused to reboard the plane. People sometimes react in odd ways to emergency landings, even if the reason is completely routine.’

  ‘Someone said the lavatories were blocked. How did that happen?’

  ‘The mind boggles. But apparently they were, and you can imagine what the result would have been. Anyway, the really interesting call I got was the second one. That was from the Foreign Ministry in Rome, which just about knocked me over. From time to time someone from the embassy in Copenhagen pops up to check that I’m not fiddling my expenses, but as far as direct contact goes that’s about it. And here was a senior official at the Ministry – I didn’t catch his name, but you could tell by his manner that he wasn’t a subordinate – phoning me in person to brief me about a certain Dottor Pier Giorgio Butani who was travelling to Los Angeles on the diverted plane.’

  Zen looked stolidly out of the window at the landscape through which they were passing, an undifferentiated jumble of jagged rocks of every size and shape separated by patches of boggy moor.

  ‘What did they tell you about me?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Just that you were a VIP and that I was to accord you every possible assistance and protection during your enforced stopover here. I am not quite sure what they meant by “protection”, but since it now appears that the delay to your flight may not be as brief as was first thought, I have obtained permission from the police to spare you a return to that squalid waiting area and take you somewhere more comfortable, bórunn Sigurðardòttir will call on my cellphone if the flight’s cleared for departure, and I can have you back at the airport in twenty minutes.’

  They were now entering the outskirts of a settlement whose planned sprawl was more orderly but no more attractive than that of the eroded lava fields through which they had just passed. It all looked quiet, neat, functional and dull. These outer suburbs were succeeded by an older section, equally sterile and monotonous, but with buildings of stone and brick rather than concrete.

  They went to a café on a pedestrianized street in what appeared to be the centre. Some people at the next table were eating slabs of pallid fish or meat smothered in an anonymous sauce, with boiled potatoes and a scattering of shrivelled vegetables. Zen thought longingly of the lasagne and the beef he had turned up his nose at on the plane, then ordered a cheese sandwich and a beer and tried to collect his thoughts. Despite his earlier volubility, Snæbjörn Guðmundsson now seemed quite prepared just to sip his coffee and not interrupt this process. Indeed, most of the other couples in the café were sitting in a profound but seemingly unstressful silence which in Italy would have been the height of bad form.

  There was a lot of information to process. First of all, he was in a remote northern country of which he knew absolutely nothing, starting with its exact geographical location. Secondly, the man who had taken his seat on the plane was now dead of causes as yet unknown. The parallels with the fate of Massimo Rutelli were disturbingly obvious, although fortunately not as yet to the Icelandic police. Thirdly, it was unclear when or even whether he would be free to resume his journey, and what action if any his sponsors at the Foreign Ministry might take about this. But what was finally most disturbing was that there was absolutely nothing that he could personally do to affect the outcome. Such powerlessness induced both frustration and anxiety. Zen had always found that happiness came from throwing himself into some activity, even if it turned out later to have been futile. Work was relaxing, whereas this enforced, problematic and conditional idleness threatened to wreck his nerves in no time at all.

  He had just reached this dispiriting conclusion when a series of loud electronic beeps sounded out the opening strains of the Italian national anthem. The other patrons of the café turned with expressions of icy disapproval towards Snæbjörn Guðmundsson, who plucked out his cellphone and bolted for the door. An elderly man at the next table with a head like a block of wood squared off with an axe, prolific silver-black hair, the regulation-issue laser-blue eyes, monster teeth and no neck at all looked at Zen and said something incomprehensible but evidently uncomplimentary. Zen instinctively spread his palms wide, tossed his head back, shrugged, and replied ‘Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh!’, thus indicating that while he entirely agreed with the other man’s deprecation of the indiscriminate use of mobile phones in public places, he was not his brother’s keeper, still less Snæbjörn Guðmundsson’s, and couldn’t be held responsible for the latter’s thoughtlessness. The Icelander regarded this pantomime with growing alarm, then pointedly turned his back.

  Zen followed suit, looking out of the plate-glass window to the street, where Guðmundsson was talking animatedly into the phone under the scrutiny of some swarthy vagrant standing barely a metre away and staring intently up at him. Finally the consul concluded his conversation and returned inside.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said, sitting down at their table again. ‘The results of the post-mortem were inconclusive. They want to consult the senior pathologist at the university, but he’s away at a conference and won’t return until tomorrow.’

  ‘You mean we all have to stay here until then?’

  ‘Not all. The police have decided that if a crime has taken place, the passengers seated outside the cabin in which the victim was seated can be ruled out. They and the crew are being allowed to leave tonight. The others, including you, must remain until a final verdict has been reached on the cause of death.’

  Zen sighed disgustedly.

  ‘But you have your orders from the Farnesina!’ he protested. ‘To expedite my departure in any way you can.’

  ‘Unfortunately that exceeds my powers. All I can do is to offer you a comfortable bed and hospitality at my house until this matter is sorted out. I suggest we go there now, unless you’d like to return with me to the airport to collect your bags. They have been unloaded from the hold and are in storage.’

  Zen thought for a moment.

  ‘Did you tell the police that I would be staying with you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Y
es. They naturally wanted to be assured of your whereabouts.’

  ‘Who was that street person who was listening in to your conversation?’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘Some low-life standing there right beside you, listening to every word you said. You must have seen him.’

  ‘I didn’t. I was probably paying too much attention to what the police were telling me. But what about him?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘Nothing, probably. He just disturbed me somehow. I don’t want everyone in town knowing where I’m going to be sleeping this evening.’

  Snæbjörn Guðmundsson stared at him.

  ‘You have reason to believe that you’re in danger?’ he asked.

  Zen realized that he’d stumbled.

  ‘A man in my position inevitably makes a lot of enemies,’ he replied blandly. ‘But never mind, I’m probably imagining the whole thing. I’m afraid this unexpected visit here has rather shaken me.’

  ‘Of course, of course! So then, will you come with me, or go straight to my house?’

  ‘Neither. I’d like to go out and walk around a bit, then meet you at your house later. I need some exercise, and some time to think.’

  Guðmundsson looked doubtful for a moment, then nodded resignedly.

  ‘Very well.’

  He got out his wallet.

  ‘I’d better give you some money.’

  ‘I can change some.’

  ‘Not at this time of night.’

  Zen glanced at the window again.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  ‘A quarter to nine.’

  ‘But when does it get dark?’

  ‘It doesn’t. The sun just dips briefly below the horizon around midnight and then comes up again about two in the morning. In between, there’s a couple of hours of dusk, but no darkness. In the winter, of course, it’s the other way round.’

  He wrote something on the back of the receipt returned by the waitress, and handed it to Zen along with a couple of banknotes.

  ‘That’s my address and phone number,’ he said. ‘Just hand it to a taxi driver when you’ve had enough, or call me if you want company.’