And Then You Die

by Michael Dibdin

  No, that wasn’t right. He’d been misled by the previous association with his mother’s funeral. The word had been bottles, not body. ‘They don’t put the bottles in the box, they wrap the box around the bottles.’ In some hospital, during one of the few lucid memories he had of that whole period. A young doctor was preparing to give him an injection of liquid drawn from one of a set of glass phials packed into a cardboard box on the trolley beside him. Zen had remarked, in an attempt at humour, that it must be hard work fitting all those tiny bottles into such a tight space. And the doctor had explained, adding that his brother worked in packaging and never tired of telling him that wraparound was the wave of the future.

  But why had that voice come back to him now? He had often noticed that if he found himself humming some tune, there was usually a connection between the words, or title, or general context and associations of the music, and something that had been preoccupying him without his conscious awareness of it. The same must be the case here, he thought, but what possible connection could there be? Bottles, boxes, packaging, wraparound … None of these had any evident relevance. Nor did threats to his life and the resulting injuries, not to mention doctors or hospitals. He was finished with all that.

  He moved his luggage into the bedroom where he used to sleep. Maria Grazia had stripped the bed before leaving. He didn’t feel up to remaking it, so he fetched a pillow and some blankets from the linen cupboard in the hall, blew out the candles in the living room and groped his way back to the bedroom. The air was filled with the unctuous smoke of the candles, which made him realize that there had been a previous and not dissimilar odour in the apartment which he only now identified as the sweet-and-sour fetor of his mother’s dying flesh. The thought made him close and lock the bedroom door behind him. A few minutes later he was lying fully clothed on his bed, wrapped up in his coat and the blankets. A few minutes after that he was asleep.

  He awoke a moment later, or so it seemed. It was an instant and complete awakening with no memory of dreams, no drowsiness, and no evident cause. The room was silent and dark, apart from a faint glimmer coming up through the shutters from the street below. He lay on his back, staring up at the lamp hanging like a predatory bat from the ceiling. He had always loathed that lamp, he realized. Then he thought: Now that mamma’s dead, I can get rid of it.

  A sound broke the silence. It was difficult to say what might have caused it, but the source seemed clear. He lay quite still, listening intently. Eventually there was another sound, equally generic and almost inaudible, but it too had been located just outside the room, behind the locked door leading to the rest of the apartment. But that was absurd. Clearly there was no one out there. How could there be?

  The silence then remained unbroken for so long that he almost convinced himself that he had imagined the earlier noises. Then he heard a distinct metallic scraping that he recognized instantly. Someone was turning the handle to his bedroom door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted, sitting up in bed.

  There was silence again, then a rapid series of ratchety clicks. Zen climbed out of bed as the door resounded under a tremendous blow.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he yelled again.

  Another blow, then another. The door was of seasoned oak, at least a hundred years old. It wouldn’t give, unless the intruder had an axe, but sooner or later the catch must.

  Zen groped in his coat pocket and found the device he had been given at the Ministry the previous afternoon. He clicked the button at the side to turn it on, then slid up the shield over the glowing red button and pressed it as another earthquake-like tremor hit the door.

  What happened then was the last thing he had expected: the sound of a phone ringing in the room next door. It was only a moment later that he remembered that the phone had been cut off. There was a brief whisper of speech, followed by a number of unidentifiable sounds, then silence.

  It was broken a few moments later by a distant siren that veered ever nearer and louder until it wound down from a strident shriek to a mild burble outside the building. Blue flashing lights added an intermittent brightness to the glimmer in the room, while a furious pounding and ringing sounded out in the stairwell and from the street. After a while it ceased, to be replaced by the sound of clattering boots on the stone steps and then in the room outside.

  ‘Polizia!’

  Zen felt a wave of overwhelming relief that made him realize just how scared he had been. He had heard that voice countless times before, and knew it well. It was the voice of a raw young patrol officer, himself scared even more, and knowing that his only hope of saving his reputation and possibly his life was to sound overwhelmingly masterful.

  Zen unlocked and opened the door, and was immediately pinned in the glaring beams from two flashlights aimed right at his face.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, holding up his empty hands. ‘I am Dottor Zen.’

  The two policemen in the room lowered their torches, creating a more even light.

  ‘What’s going on?’ barked one.

  ‘We received an all-points emergency call to assist you,’ said a slightly steadier voice.

  ‘Someone broke into my apartment.’

  ‘The door was open when we got here,’ replied the steadier voice immediately.

  ‘Probably a burglar,’ said the first patrolman.

  ‘There have been a number of attempts on my life recently,’ Zen replied in a studiously casual tone, as though this sort of thing was all in a day’s work for him.

  ‘The lights don’t work,’ said the steadier voice. ‘Maybe they cut the wiring.’

  ‘No, the fuse blew and I haven’t had time to mend it. Now could you just check that whoever it was isn’t still here, and perhaps try and find out how he got in?’

  One of the two torches started searching the apartment. The other headed out to the stairway.

  ‘No one,’ reported the first voice, returning to the room.

  He and Zen gazed at each other in the gloom hacked apart by his torch beam.

  There was a rush of boots on the steps and his partner reappeared.

  ‘The skylight at the very top of the stairs is wide open,’ he announced. ‘He must have been an agile little monkey, though. That window’s a good three metres off the ground.’

  ‘Well, thank you for your prompt response,’ Zen said conclusively. ‘Evidently on this occasion the whole thing was a false alarm. If you’ll just inform headquarters about that, I won’t keep you from your regular duties any longer.’

  He saw them to the front door of the apartment, then bent down and examined the door itself. There was no sign that any force had been used to open it. It was only when he straightened up again that he noticed Giuseppe, the janitor of the building. He was clad in pyjamas and a worn plaid dressing gown, and was lurking on the flight of stairs leading up to the landing.

  ‘Is everything all right, dottò?’ he asked.

  Zen took out the key to his apartment.

  ‘You didn’t give this to anyone while I was away, did you?’

  Giuseppe’s face assumed an expression of righteous indignation.

  ‘Absolutely not! It was locked up in the safe the whole time along with the duplicate sets.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘Very well. I just wondered.’

  ‘If you’d told me you were coming back, I’d have arranged for the electricity and gas to be on,’ Giuseppe added. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow, first thing.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I shan’t be living here any more.’

  Giuseppe took a few moments to digest this statement. So did Zen himself.

  ‘You’re moving?’ Giuseppe queried.

  ‘I’m leaving. A new work assignment. I shan’t be based in Rome any longer. I’ll contact the owners and tell them to cancel the lease as soon as possible. They should be able to find a new tenant quite quickly. Unless you have someone in mind, of course.’

  Giuseppe nodded in a dazed way. Clearly this, coming o
n top of the break-in and the appearance of the policemen, was just too much to deal with at this hour of the morning. He started to turn away, then paused.

  ‘Maybe that colleague of yours would like it.’

  ‘Which colleague?’

  ‘I don’t recall the name. It was a long time ago, right after that terrible bomb business. He came by to pick up some papers from work you’d left in the apartment. When he handed me back the key, he said what a nice place it was.’

  ‘You gave him the key?’

  ‘Of course. He showed me his identification card. It was just like yours, dottò. Well, different photo and name, of course, but the real thing. And he said he worked with you, so I let him in. I mean, I knew you were in hospital, so you couldn’t come yourself. That was all right, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. Good night, Giuseppe.’

  ‘Good night, dottò.’

  Zen went back inside, closing but not locking the door. What was the point?

  ‘Don’t look them in the eye, and never turn your back.’

  This time the voice was in the air, not in his head. He could feel its vibrations, although he knew there was no one there. Then another voice, this one internal, added, ‘They don’t put the bottles in the box, they wrap the box around the bottles.’

  He lit the knotted candles on the table and stood there in the gradually waxing light, staring at the chair in which his mother had always sat to watch banal television programmes which her addled mind had transmuted into richer, stranger material. Something was trying to tell him something, but what was it?

  For the first time, it occurred to him to look at his watch. It was a little after three in the morning. After a momentary hesitation, he went back into his bedroom and found the shelf on which he kept his Pozzorario railway timetable, the front cover festooned with anachronistic advertisements for various hotels con tutti i conforti a prezzi modici. Not for the first time, he wondered if anyone ever selected a hotel on the basis of these rather desperate-sounding appeals, and if so who. The timetable itself was a year out of date, but Zen knew that the schedules of the night trains were virtually invariable. After a few minutes’ search, he found an express from Reggio di Calabria to Milan that stopped at the station of Roma Tiburtina just after four o’clock. He repacked his bags, then called for a taxi. The dispatcher said that Taranto 64 would be there in about ten minutes.

  Zen spent the interval wandering about the apartment, apart from his mother’s room, which he did not enter, and wondering if there was anything he wanted to keep. Nothing, he concluded, with a surprising shiver of pleasure. He’d hire a company to haul everything away and dispose of it for whatever price they could get. He wasn’t even going to think about it. It could all go.

  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 Ze
n’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.

  LUCCA

  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.