And Then You Die

by Michael Dibdin

  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 huldufolk 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 disinvoltura 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.<
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  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.

  ‘Lessi? Wait, I do remember someone by that name. Yes, that’s right. He was an officer with the carabinieri’s ROS division. He saved my life when I was on that assignment in Sicily.’

  The man laughed his flat, hard laugh again.

  ‘Very good, Dottor Zen, very good.’

  ‘You’re Lessi?’ gasped Zen, as though the thought had only just struck him. ‘You look different, somehow. Or maybe that Mafia bomb affected my memory. Anyway, I only saw you that once, and at night.’

  Lessi stared at him with eyes that told Zen how close he was to death. He looked about him distractedly, taking in every detail of the situation.

  ‘No, actually you saw me four times, if we’re only counting last year.’

  The man’s leisurely tone gave Zen a flicker of hope for the first time. If Lessi wanted to talk, to explain and to justify himself, then there might conceivably be time to do what was necessary.

  ‘That time out in the country near Etna was the last,’ the gunman went on. ‘Before that, there was the time we picked you up in the street outside your apartment, the time on the ferry to Malta, and then earlier that evening, when you gunned down my partner Alfredo Ferraro in cold blood.’

  ‘What do you mean, cold blood?’ Zen demanded instinctively. ‘He had just strangled one man and was about to shoot me.’

  Lessi smiled.

  ‘Ah, so you do remember Alfredo after all. I rather thought you did, to be honest Perhaps you remember the truth about that bomb, too. You must do.’

  Zen glanced at the statically frantic figure of Gemma, just to check that her position was exactly as he had recalled it.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘The Mafia tried to murder me on the way back from my meeting with Don Gaspare Limina. He promised me safe conduct, but that was a lie. They just wanted time to get clear and to do the job far away from anywhere connected with them.’

  Roberto Lessi shook his head in mock disappointment.

  ‘Sorry, dottore. You’re very convincing and I almost believe you, but in the end it’s too much of a stretch. Your brain worked very well indeed when we met in Sicily and on the ferry to Malta, and I think it’s working just fine now.’

  He was right, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to start the ballet. Zen took a couple of apparently casual steps to his left.

  ‘Of course it is!’ he protested vehemently. ‘That’s what happened. So what the hell are you doing breaking in here and threatening me and Signora Santini? You realize that this means the end of your career.’

  Lessi had also moved slightly to the left, instinctively compensating to keep the same distance and angle between him and his adversary.

  ‘My career has already ended, dottore. We screwed up, you see. Well, my ex-colleagues did.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Zen snapped irritably, fidgeting another step around the invisible circle.

  ‘You remember when the Corleone clan killed Judge Falcone and his wife?’ Lessi replied. ‘They almost screwed up too. They planted a ton of explosives in that culvert under the motorway into Palermo from the airport, then blew the charge a second or two too early, for fear that Falcone’s car would pass by before it detonated. They knew they only had one chance, and so they panicked. In the end Falcone was killed anyway, but only because he had insisted on driving when he was met at the airport So he and his wife were sitting in the front seats of their car and took the full force of the blast, even though they were still som
e distance from the culvert. The carabinieri in the lead escort car, including some of my closest friends, were all wiped out. As for the chauffeur, he was seated in the back, where Falcone and his wife would have been if the judge hadn’t had his little whim. So they were killed and he survived.’

  Lessi had stopped moving, intent on his story, but Zen kept going, restlessly tracing a figure of short steps one way and another, but always two to the left and one to the right.

  ‘Well, dottore, the reason you’re alive is just the reverse of that scenario. The men who set the bomb and were responsible for detonating it were stationed on the hillside above the bridge your car crossed. Just for the record, they had no idea that you were in it. They had been told that the passengers were some Mafia thugs who we were eliminating as a routine “dirty war” tactic designed to stir up trouble between the rival clans.’

  Zen kept moving, glancing down at his feet as though they hurt him. Like the professional he was, even while fixated on his tale, Lessi responded by keeping pace in the same clockwise direction, keeping Zen always opposite him and safely beyond striking range, about two metres distant.

  ‘When they found out the truth, they were horrified, or at least pretended to be,’ he went on. ‘I tried to pass it off as a mistake, but I was forced to resign anyway. That hurt, I can tell you. I’d been expecting a little more cooperation and understanding from men I’d been working with for all these years.’

  He coughed out another laugh.

  ‘Loyalty doesn’t mean a damn thing in this country any more.’

  Still continuing his ritualistic shuffle, Zen looked Lessi in the eye for the first time.

  ‘But they blew the bomb.’

  ‘They blew the bomb, just like our friends in the Mafia did with Falcone. Unfortunately in their case they blew it a couple of seconds too late. I watched the whole thing from the ridge on the other side of the river bed, counting down to give the signal by turning the motorbike’s headlights on. But your driver seemed to speed up suddenly, and by the time I flashed and the others responded, the car had crossed the bridge. And since you were sitting in the front, it was that poor dumb cop who came along to hold your hand who was killed, while you and the driver got off with a few scrapes and bruises.’