And Then You Die

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Right away, dottore! The usual?’

  ‘The usual.’

  Ernesto took one of the filled rolls from the glass cabinet, set it on a plate, then added two more thick slices from the roast and set it down in front of Zen along with a small carafe of white wine and a knife and fork.

  ‘I carved it extra fatty,’ he said with a conspiratorial wink. ‘You’re looking a bit peaky, dottore. We’ll have to feed you up.’

  Zen cut a chunk of the pale, perfumed meat and started to chew. Apart from wine, Ernesto only served one thing: porchetta, choice young piglets from farmers personally known to him, stuffed with fennel and herbs, slowly roasted to moist perfection on a spit and served cold with chewy fresh bread. The crackling was a crisp layer of rich delights, the fat a creamy, unctuous decadence, the flesh tender and aromatic. Even the generic Castelli Romani wine, which couldn’t have been given away free as a household cleanser in Venice, tasted blandly acceptable to Zen today.

  As he turned his attention to the roll, having satisfied his immediate craving for flavourful protein, he began to wonder what lay ahead in his imminent interview at the Ministry just down the street. The name Brugnoli meant nothing to him, but this in itself was not surprising. Zen had been out of commission and away from his desk for almost a year, and in Italian politics a year is a very long time. Indeed, he had heard rumours that in his absence there had been yet another general election. But while the players might have changed, the game was likely to remain fairly predictable. The Craxis and Andreottis might be either dead or in retirement, just like their erstwhile enemies, the hard men of the Red Brigades, but to this day no one knew for sure how Aldo Moro had been kidnapped with such breathtaking ease and efficiency, nor why he had been killed. It was like Argentina after the collapse of the military dictatorship. The old regime had been swept away, but a general amnesty and a still more general collective amnesia were in effect.

  The implications for Zen’s career were not positive. From what the Foreign Ministry official had told him in coded euphemisms on the phone, the case against Nello and Giulio Rizzo, if it ever came to court, could be resolved without Zen’s testimony. That removed any further threat to his life from Mafia hit men, but it also removed any interest that the Italian authorities might have had in him. The early retirement which had been hinted at back when he was still convalescing now beckoned. There would be polite speeches, perhaps even a few perks in the way of his pensionable grade and so on, but basically he would be out. At the very best, they might kick him upstairs to a position as Questore at some sleepy provincial police headquarters where he would shuffle files, oversee routine administrative work and generally watch the clock until he was eased out altogether.

  But what he needed was work, and more urgently than ever before. He had never felt particularly zealous or committed to his job until now, when it was in danger of being taken away from him along with his mother, his adopted daughter and a whole way of life he had casually taken for granted, as though it would always be there. Now it looked like it very well might not be, he asked himself in a sort of panic what he was to do. He would have enough money to live on comfortably, but how was he going to get through the day? What would he do at nine o’clock and noon and six in the evening, and why? What would be the point of it all?

  He wiped his mouth on the paper napkin, paid the modest bill, assured Ernesto of his satisfaction and continued custom in the future, and continued down the street to the café at the next corner, where he downed an espresso and smoked a cigarette which tasted as acrid as the one traditionally offered to the condemned man.

  The guard at the gate of the Interior Ministry building did not recognize Zen, but after some discussion allowed him to proceed as far as the security checkpoint at the main entrance. The plain-clothed functionary who presided here was a big man with squidgy features, clumsy gestures and the embittered air of someone painfully coming to terms with the fact that his boyhood dream of some day becoming a small-time pimp in Centocelle had probably passed him by.

  He demanded to see identification. Zen explained that he had been working undercover and was not carrying any. The failed pimp retorted that no one got in without identification, in a tone suggesting that the very fact that Zen had been unaware of this already made him a potential suspect.

  ‘I have an appointment with someone named Brugnoli,’ said Zen. ‘Does the name ring a bell?’

  ‘We don’t disclose the identity of Ministry personnel.’

  ‘Well, can you call him and let him know I’m here?’

  The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘The phone’s at the main desk.’

  Zen started forward, and was immediately restrained by an outstretched hand.

  ‘I can’t let you in without valid identification.’

  The official’s tone of voice indicated clearly that there was no point in trying to reason with him. Zen turned away, walked down the steps into the courtyard of the building and dialled a number on his mobile phone. A voice he didn’t recognize answered.

  ‘Sì.’

  ‘C’è De Angelis?’

  ‘Un momentino.’

  The voice receded, calling out, ‘Giorgio! For you.’ After a further pause, Giorgio De Angelis came on the line.

  ‘Well?’ he said bad-temperedly.

  ‘Ciao, Giorgio. Sono Aurelio.’

  There was a pause, then a deafening cry.

  ‘Aurelio! How are you? Where are you?’

  ‘Standing outside the front door to the building. I don’t have my ID and the security guard won’t let me in. Can you persuade him of the error of his ways?’

  ‘I’ll be right down.’

  Zen was smoking another cigarette when De Angelis appeared outside the doorway and bounded down to embrace his friend.

  ‘How wonderful to see you looking so well!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘It’s good to be back. I don’t know how long for, though.’

  ‘But what are you doing here? I thought you were off for a working holiday in the States.’

  Zen immediately took a certain distance.

  ‘You’re not supposed to know that,’ he said. ‘No one is.’

  De Angelis shrugged.

  ‘It’s just something someone said. You know how it is. I had no idea whether it was true or not.’

  ‘But you passed it on to a few other people anyway.’

  ‘Only a couple. What happened to your hand?’

  ‘I had an accident with a knife.’

  ‘Are you free for lunch?’

  ‘I’ve already eaten. Plus I have an appointment with someone called Brugnoli, whoever he may be.’

  De Angelis rolled his eyes.

  ‘Ah, our new “facilitator”.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  At the security checkpoint, De Angelis showed his badge and obtained a temporary pass for Zen on his own recognizance.

  ‘Top floor, naturally,’ he said. ‘If you feel like talking afterwards, I’ll be at the Opera.’

  He inclined his head steeply backwards, seemingly inspecting the mock cupola above their heads as though for signs of earthquake damage.

  ‘I mean really talking,’ he added.

  Brugnoli’s office was the second on the left of the ‘good’ side of the top floor, the one with the view of the Quirinale. There was no sign on the door or beside it, but Zen had been assured by some young men hunched over computer screens in another room he had entered at random that this was the right place. There had been no identifying sign on their door, either.

  The reception area inside the unmarked door was unlike anything Zen had ever seen at the Viminale. There was a leather sofa and matching armchairs, a low table covered in magazines and art books, a number of large potted plants with fleshy outsized leaves, a printed sign thanking Zen for not smoking, and a large video screen showing current stock prices on various international markets. In the
opposite corner, next to an imposing internal door, a faux blonde in a pink lambswool twinset was picking fussily at a computer. The walls were painted a genteel pastel shade of peach and the Persian rug underneath the low table looked too threadbare and faded to be anything but a genuine antique. Gentle classical music made itself felt at a barely subliminal level, while recessed halogen lamps diffused a clear, restrained light on a space that had either nothing or everything to hide. It looked less like the antechamber to the lair of a high-ranking ministry official than the premises of a dentist whose bill would prove to be even more painful than the treatment.

  Zen introduced himself to the receptionist. She touched her computer screen in three places, like a priest blessing a communicant. A moment later, the inner door opened and a short, energetic man with receding hair and a jovial smile emerged.

  ‘Dottor Zen! What a pleasure! You’ve had a smooth trip, I hope? The way back always seems shorter and sweeter than the way out, I find.’

  He caught Zen staring slack-jawed at his open-necked shirt, stonewashed jeans and black running shoes.

  ‘Dress-down Friday,’ he explained. ‘One of my little innovations around here. It has encountered a certain amount of resistance from some of the older team members, I’m afraid, but of course I don’t insist. That’s my whole philosophy of the workplace environment. “Personal choice, personal empowerment, personal responsibility.” All that counts is results. Come in, come in!’

  Zen followed Brugnoli through the doorway, feeling like a superannuated bank clerk in his fifteen-year-old suit, a shirt that felt as though it consisted mostly of starch, and shoes of the now extinct variety that could be and indeed had been resoled.

  The room they entered was completely different from the reception area outside, but just as much of a surprise. It was about the same size and height as the entire upper floor of the Rutelli family’s villa in Versilia, but looked as though it had been redecorated by Snæbjörn Guðmundsson. The floor was tiled, the walls studiously bare and neutral. A minimalist desk in some synthetic black material supported a flat-screen computer terminal and nothing else. No telephone, no drawers, no paperwork. There were no filing cabinets in evidence either, nor any of the usual bookshelves groaning under a weight of identically bound legal tomes. No portrait of the current occupant of the Quirinale Palace visible though the floor-length windows, no crucifixes or flags, no framed documents in cursive script certifying that Dottor Brugnoli had been the recipient of this or that honour or award. In fact the only other objects on view in the huge space were a terracotta bust of a man’s head, mounted on an exiguous metal stand which seemed to be performing a balancing act like a juggler on a high wire, and a framed Fascist-era poster showing two men in uniform chatting in the street while a sinister eavesdropper lurked in the shadows. ‘Be Vigilant!’ warned the caption in mock three-dimensional characters. ‘Walls Have Ears.’

  So this was what it had come to, thought Zen glumly. The received but always unspoken wisdom of his professional generation had now been recycled as public postmodern irony. It was definitely time for him to quit.

  Meanwhile his host had retreated to the far corner of the room, where he was walking up and down talking intensely to himself. By now familiar with this epidemic which had recently started to afflict large numbers of the population, Zen turned politely away, pretending not to notice. That seemed to be the form. You’d be walking along the street, and this well-dressed and apparently successful man would come at you, head up and briefcase in hand, talking to himself. Sometimes even arguing with himself in a loud and insistent voice. It was as if all the drunks and schizos had been given million-lire clothing allowances and a middle-management job. Except that just as in the old days, when they lay in piss-stained doorways mumbling obscenities or screaming abuse, no one took the slightest notice. ‘Pay no attention, he’s harmless,’ he recalled his mother telling him as a child in Venice about some veteran of the Great War whose mind had slipped its moorings. ‘Just don’t ever turn your back on them, that’s all. Don’t look them in the eye and never turn your back.’

  He froze, frowning at some unrecovered thought. The gist of it was that he had ignored his mother’s advice. That there was someone into whose eyes he had looked, and on whom he had then turned his back. One of ‘them’. But that was as far as the insight went, and it made no sense.

  Brugnoli terminated his conversation with a curt, ‘It’ll have to wait, I’ve got someone with me’, then adjusted the microphone of his headset and turned back to Zen with a convivial smile.

  ‘Can’t offer you a chair, I’m afraid. I don’t go in for that sort of thing. You know, the low chair, the high chair, the big desk, the status symbols and hierarchical markers. If you need that sort of nonsense to proclaim and bolster your standing, then you haven’t got any. Besides, standing is more natural and more productive. Keeps oxygen flowing to the brain instead of the bum, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But of course I was forgetting your injuries! How thoughtless of me. Feel free to use the stool by the desk if you wish. It’s a revolutionary design. You sort of kneel down into it. Works wonders for the spine and circulation.’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘Completely?’

  ‘More or less. I still get the odd twinge, but the doctors say that will pass. Apart from that, I’m back to normal.’

  Brugnoli gave a pleased smile.

  ‘Excellent! In that case, dottore, I can give you some rather good news.’

  He stood poised, his face densely pensive, as though posing for a news photographer.

  ‘I have been thinking for some time,’ he said, ‘of setting up a rather special unit within Criminalpol, and I would like to take this opportunity of inviting you to become its founding member.’

  Zen said nothing. Brugnoli swung round with a dramatic, self-deprecating gesture.

  ‘No, “unit” isn’t the right word. You’ll have to forgive me, dottore. Even I sometimes fall into the old habits of speech. What I have in mind is enabling a team of experienced, dedicated individuals with a proven track record for intelligence, intuition and above all initiative. My own version of the famous “Three I’s”.’

  He smiled wryly for the hypothetical camera.

  ‘Personal initiative, like personal responsibility, is something which I fear has not traditionally been prioritized within this department. But believe me, that is about to change. In the new climate, with the new government, the new culture, the new society in the making, this Ministry is, in the last resort, simply a business organization like any other. We have goals to achieve, issues to address, targets to meet and, most important of all, a vision to implement. The fusty old managerial skills of the past cannot rise to these challenges. We have to start thinking outside the box! We need fresh blood, fresh ideas and a fresh approach.

  ‘Not all our present staff have proved to be responsive to this new outlook, I regret to say. To be perfectly frank, some have been downright hostile. I am therefore currently drawing up a plan for a phased retirement scheme designed to offer such individuals a non-negotiable golden handshake amounting to eighty per cent of the salary they would receive for their remaining years of service. I shall be putting it to the Minister shortly, but I’m happy to say that he has already indicated his agreement in principle. The union also seems favourably disposed, thanks to various peripheral clauses, so there’s every chance that within a year or so at the most we’ll be able to start cutting away a lot of the dead wood around here – and at a price considerably less than paying them to continue not doing their jobs!’

  Brugnoli abruptly dropped the public persona and turned round with a man-to-man expression, as if Zen were a privileged viewer who was being shown the sections of the televised interview that were ‘off the record’.

  ‘But we must be careful how we wield the axe. The last thing I want is to deprive this concern of the services of more mature operatives
who might well prove to be an invaluable asset as we confront the varying demands for our products and services in the future. Men like you, dottore.’

  He stared pointedly at Zen, who nodded.

  ‘What would be involved?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘A substantial pay rise, for a start! On a par with Questore level, although I’m glad to say that you won’t have that discredited title. One of my long-term goals is to restructure our entire organization, phasing out all those Fascist-era positions associated with authoritarianism, repression and control of territory, and replacing them with more flexible classifications that emphasize the wide-ranging public-service nature of our work. Crime issues today are no longer province-specific, they’re national and, increasingly, inter- and supranational. In order to be able to respond effectively, we need to operate on the same level. Needless to say, any attempt to make such changes runs up against entrenched opposition and petty vested interests at every turn, which is why I have decided to start with this relatively modest initiative within Criminalpol itself.’

  ‘But what would I actually do?’ Zen replied.

  ‘Very much what you have in the past, but without all the bother of coming into the office to deal with endless meetings, paperwork and routine drudgery. Your time and skills are too valuable to be wasted like that, dottore. The whole concept is completely outmoded, a relic left over from the early industrial era, when the factory could only function if all the workers showed up when the whistle blew. Now that we can communicate instantly and securely at any time and in any place, what on earth is the point of someone like you trudging in here every morning to sit at a desk taking phone calls and filing reports? I’m interested in results, not reports. Under the new system, you would save yourself two hours a day commuting all the way in here, not to mention freeing up valuable office space which could be used more productively and profitably. Do you see what I mean?’

  I’m starting to get the idea, thought Zen.

  ‘In your case, there will be absolutely no need for you to come to the Ministry at all, except perhaps for a weekly progress meeting with a select group of other senior personnel.’