And Then You Die

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Well, he made his move, and it still didn’t take.’

  ‘Thanks to me.’

  ‘Yes, you were pretty good in there. So what did he tell you?’

  ‘Well, there was the bomb in Sicily, obviously. Are you really a detective? You don’t seem the type.’

  ‘That’s the key to my success, such as it is. What about the others, the people he mistook for me?’

  ‘Apparently he got chatting with one of those African traders who work the beach, and offered him a small fortune in exchange for borrowing his robes and stock of trinkets for the day. The man jumped at the chance, of course, and as an illegal immigrant he would never dream of going to the police after he learned what had happened. Then our friend blacked up with boot polish and hit the beach. The make-up wasn’t that convincing, he said, but then “no one looks at those vucumprà anyway”. When he got to Franco’s, there was a man lying face down asleep in the place you always used. He’d been watching you for days, apparently. So he walked over, as though trying to interest the man in a sale, shot him once through the heart with that silenced gun, and then tossed the man’s towel over his back to cover up the wound and shuffled away. No one took the slightest notice, he said.’

  She pushed her plate back.

  ‘I’ll tell you the rest later. We’d better get moving. I’m nervous suddenly, thinking of him lying in there.’

  Zen ate a final forkful of the pasta, then glanced at his watch.

  ‘What time does it get light now?’ he asked.

  Gemma shrugged.

  ‘About five? Five-thirty, maybe.’

  ‘Then we have plenty of time. Let’s aim to get to the boat around four. But if you’re feeling anxious, we could do some of the preliminary work. If you’re still sure you want to do this, that is.’

  He paused significantly. Gemma nodded. Zen made a little conciliatory gesture, as though the whole thing had been her idea in the first place.

  ‘Fine. Let me have a cigarette, then we’ll make a start.’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘Thank you for the meal. It was delicious.’

  ‘It would have been even better with the mullet.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Like they say, there are plenty of good fish in the sea.’

  Gemma stood up and started to clear the dishes.

  ‘Not at our age,’ she said.

  It was dark outside when they started. Zen closed the shutters on the dining-room windows, then bent over Lessi’s corpse and started removing the man’s clothes while Gemma fetched the sheets. In the event of the body itself being discovered, Zen wanted no identifying material of any kind to be turned up at the scene. He searched the garments, but found nothing except some money which he pocketed. Then he turned to the body.

  Lessi’s nine-millimetre pistol must have been loaded with the same fragmenting shells that he’d used to kill Massimo Rutelli, for there were no exit wounds in the skull. The only sign of injury, apart from the superficial wounds to Lessi’s scalp, was a trickle of blood from the mouth and the deep scratches inflicted by the rose thorns. It was seeing his victim naked that disturbed Zen most. He was normally unsqueamish about the dead, but Lessi’s nudity he found problematic. It somehow entitled him to the status of a helpless and vulnerable baby. He felt instinctively protective towards the man he had just killed, and wanted to get him covered up as soon as possible.

  Gemma returned with the sheets, and then gathered up the scattered roses to clear the floor.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to get rid of these for years,’ she said, spreading out the two layers of pale green cotton. ‘A wedding gift from one of Tommaso’s aunts.’

  She took Lessi’s ankles, Zen his shoulders, and together they shifted the body on to the sheeting. They then folded the flap at each end up over the feet and head, and rolled the corpse to one side to make a neat bundle which Zen secured with the lengths of rope that Gemma had been tied up with. She meanwhile fetched some plastic garbage bags into which they stuffed Lessi’s shoes, clothing, the wig and false moustache, along with the roses. The pistol and the Ministerial communication device Zen put in his pockets.

  ‘Will there be anyone at the marina at this hour?’

  ‘There’s always someone there, to guard the property and the boats.’

  ‘Call and tell them …’

  He broke off.

  ‘What if your husband is using the boat?’

  ‘He won’t be. He hardly ever uses it, and then only for trips around the bay to show off to his business friends. He gets seasick if there’s the slightest movement.’

  ‘All right. Call the marina and tell them that you’ll be arriving with a friend to take the boat out in the early hours of the morning. Say we’re off to Corsica and want to make an early start. Oh, and ask them to top up the fuel and water.’

  Gemma was heading into the living room when he had another thought.

  ‘Is there an anchor on the boat?’

  ‘Of course. Two, in fact.’

  He waved her away and paced the room, thinking over his provisional plan and failing to find any obvious flaw in it. But they would get only one chance.

  ‘That’s done,’ Gemma said, coming back. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now we wait a while, until everyone around here is sound asleep. When will that be?’

  ‘Most of them probably are already. Lucca is not really a nightlife town, apart from the kids who hang around Piazza Napoleone. This neighbourhood is very quiet.’

  ‘Where’s your car parked?’

  ‘Just down the street.’

  ‘Can you back it up to the door?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Zen emitted a long sigh.

  ‘Good. We’ll wait a while to make sure that everyone is settled down. The really tricky bit is going to be getting the body and the other stuff into the car. Once we’re under way, barring unforeseen circumstances, it should be fairly straightforward. But if someone sees us humping an oddly shaped bundle out of here in the middle of the night, they’ll remember it. And if a police patrol car happens to pass by, they’re going to check.’

  Back in the kitchen, Gemma poured herself some more wine and lit a cigarette.

  ‘If anyone does notice, we’re loading up a very valuable rug that I’m giving my sister for her birthday,’ she said.

  ‘At this hour?’

  ‘Yes. She lives in Milan and we want to be back by evening.’

  Zen nodded sceptically.

  ‘It might work.’

  ‘Of course it will.’

  ‘Unless I’m wrong, and Lessi did have a back-up plan.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Those “friends in the business” he claimed to have. He might just have told one of them to send someone to this address if he hadn’t called a certain number by a certain time. Something like that. But there’s nothing we can do about that.’

  ‘He had friends all right,’ Gemma said. ‘That’s how he found out that you were going to America.’

  Zen gazed at her.

  ‘He did?’

  She nodded.

  ‘He also had some equipment, or code words, or access to some computers. I didn’t understand all the details, but his friends told him that you were going to the States, and also the number and date of the flight you were booked on. Apparently he told them that he just wanted to confront you and “gain closure”. In reality, he reckoned that was his last chance of getting even with you for what you’d done to his partner or whatever he was. Once you’d landed in America, you’d be whisked off into some secure accommodation pending the trial, and his contacts would be no use to him there. So everything depended on getting to you before that.’

  ‘And he booked himself on the same flight and attacked me in that street in Reykjavik. But supposing the plane hadn’t been diverted? What was he going to do then?’

  Gemma shook her head.

  ‘No, you don’t understand. He didn’t buy a ticket on
the plane. He travelled as one of the cabin attendants.’

  Zen laughed.

  ‘That’s impossible!’

  She looked at him gravely.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. And that’s what scares me most about this insane affair I suddenly find myself caught up in. It wasn’t impossible at all. For people like that, and he isn’t the only one by any means, nothing is impossible.’

  ‘But how could he get through security? They must know who’s going to be on any given flight. You can’t just show up and be allowed on.’

  ‘With the computer codes he had, he accessed the Alitalia database and got the details of the designated crew for the flight you were going to be on. Then he looked up the personal details, address and telephone numbers of male cabin attendants on the roster, discovered one who lived in Rome, and called him saying that a mutual friend had said they ought to get together. They went out to some gay club in the suburbs, then back home to the man’s apartment. He didn’t say what happened after that, except that he took the man’s uniform and ID and changed the photo to one of him. That got him through security at Malpensa.’

  ‘But surely the other members of the crew would have recognized that he wasn’t … whatever his name was.’

  ‘Enrico, I think. Yes, but once he was past security he didn’t pretend to be Enrico any more. He was now someone else, who stepped in at the last moment because Enrico was ill. He’d got the story about the job out of Enrico at the club the night before. Everyone likes talking about their work. He wasn’t assigned to the cabin you were in, but once the lights had been dimmed for the movie he made his way there and placed a glass of water on the tray table of the seat number you had been assigned. Everyone always drinks any water available on an aeroplane, he said.’

  ‘Except it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t water.’

  ‘Exactly. You’d switched seats, so the person who’d taken yours drank the water, which contained some high-tech poison they supplied to that undercover unit he was in. Apparently it simulates the effects of a heart attack. But he didn’t want to end up in the US, where he’d done some work assignments in the past and might be recognized by the agents who were expecting you, so he sabotaged half the toilets on the plane by bunging the pillows and blankets they hand out at night down them, and then drew the senior steward’s attention to the problem. That forced a diversion. He’d got this idea from some story Enrico told him, he said.’

  ‘Enrico sounds to have been good value for a couple of drinks and a blow job.’

  Gemma grimaced.

  ‘I think the experience cost him rather more than that. Lessi was obviously a psychotic. Human life meant nothing whatever to him. Anyway, when the plane landed in Iceland, he changed into the civilian clothes he had brought with him and slipped through immigration using a false passport he had “lost” before leaving the police.’

  ‘So it was he who attacked me in the street that night.’

  ‘Yes. He claimed it was a total coincidence. The earlier flights back to Europe were all fully booked, so he had to wait for a late-night one. He went into town and was wandering around when he happened to catch sight of you. He said that you were drunk.’

  ‘Iceland has that effect on you.’

  ‘Of making you drunk?’

  ‘Of making you need to get drunk.’

  ‘I see. Anyway, that didn’t work either, so he flew back here, assuming that you were safely out of his reach in America. Then one of his contacts got in touch and told him that your trip had been cancelled and that you were coming back to Italy. He knew your address in Rome, of course, and went to visit you there.’

  She walked over and closed the window.

  ‘Right, now I think it’s time that you told me all about yourself, Dottor Zen.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Everything. I think I deserve that, don’t you? Under the circumstances.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m just not sure where to begin.’

  ‘How about the beginning? What’s your first name, for a start?’

  ‘Aurelio.’

  She turned and beamed at him.

  ‘What a lovely name! Go on.’

  ‘Ah. Right. Well …’

  This was by far the hardest thing that Zen had had to do so far that evening. He hated talking about himself. At first, he planned to give Gemma a heavily edited version of the truth, but much to his amazement he found himself telling her everything, precisely as she had asked.

  She didn’t even have to ask follow-up questions in the end, although she prodded him fairly hard in the initial stages. But a point came when she got up and made a large pot of coffee, turning her back on him and generating the usual amount of noise, and he just went on talking anyway. He couldn’t stop!

  But finally he did.

  ‘Now it’s your turn,’ he told Gemma, who was sipping a mug of strong espresso opposite him at the table.

  ‘No, no. You’ll have to find out bit by bit.’

  ‘But I told you everything!’ he protested.

  ‘You had to.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you did. Otherwise I’d have called the police and told them everything.’

  He laughed.

  ‘It’s a bit late for that.’

  ‘No it isn’t. Even tomorrow wouldn’t be too late. Or the day after that. You have Lessi’s gun. You murdered him and then threatened me with the same if I didn’t agree to help you dispose of his body. I think they’d believe that. Particularly if some of Lessi’s friends are as vindictive as you suggest.’

  Zen felt dazed, shocked, stunned by the wine and jolted by the coffee.

  ‘You’re going to tell them that?’ he asked.

  Gemma laughed.

  ‘Of course not, silly. I’m just explaining the balance of power around here. You have to do what I say, but I don’t have to do what you say.’

  Zen thought about this for a moment, then smiled at her.

  ‘I’ll be delighted to do whatever you say.’

  Gemma stood up, came round the table and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

  ‘Good. Then let’s get going.’

  While Gemma went to fetch the car, taking the two rubbish bags and a couple of old coats with her, Zen dragged the bundled body of Roberto Lessi across the dining room and through to the hallway. He opened the front door to the apartment and peered out. The light had automatically extinguished itself and the entire building was silent. Then he heard a clicking sound on the steps and Gemma reappeared.

  ‘All set,’ she said.

  They lifted the bundle and carried it out on to the landing, leaving the door open to provide background lighting, then down the stairs. The car was parked right in front of the main door, the hatchback open. They heaved the body inside, next to the garbage bags, and spread the coats out over it. Then Gemma ran back upstairs and locked up, while Zen climbed into the passenger seat.

  A circuit of the back streets of Lucca, deserted at this time of night, brought them to one of the gates through the enormous walls, and out on to the broad avenue that circumvented the city. Five minutes after that, they had left Italy and were on the motorway.

  Years before, when he had finally accepted that his daddy would never come home again, Zen had used to calm himself to sleep by imagining that his bed was in a cabin of one of those international sleeping cars which his father had once showed him in the shunting yards near Santa Lucia station, all dark wood and velvet curtains and brass-shaded lamps and a bell to ring if you needed anything. The train was making its way through a landscape filled with dangers of every kind – battles and floods and towns ablaze – but inside everything was calm. The hideous scenes visible through the window, if you were bold enough to raise the blind a crack, merely emphasized your own seclusion and safety. Meanwhile, the wheels kept ticking along over the rail joints, clickety clack, clickety clack …

  Although Zen rarely drove if he could possibly help it, the neutral, extraterritorial dom
ain of the rete autostradale never failed to have a similar calming effect on him. For the modest price of the toll, you were admitted to a private club that stretched the length and breadth of the country, a club that displayed an aristocratic disdain for regional traditions or quirks of topography, and was just about the only institution in the country guaranteed to be open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Whether you were just outside Turin or two thousand metres up in the Abruzzi mountains, the same rules applied and the same facilities were available. The real world stopped at the toll gates, its limits clearly marked by the chain-link fencing. Viewed from within that boundary, the scene was at best picturesque and at worst uninspiring. In that farmhouse over there, its one wan light just showing through the storm-whipped windbreak, the father might be beating his wife and screwing his daughters, with two bodies buried in the cellar and a crazed aunt chained up in the attic. It didn’t matter, that was another world. Pretty soon there would be another all-night service station where you could get a hot snack and a cold drink, buy a newspaper or a cassette tape, make a phone call and catch up on the TV news.

  Gemma drove prudently, keeping well within the speed limit as they passed through the tunnels and across the long viaducts of the A11 through the southern foothills of the Apuan Alps, and then cruised down the long curved section reaching down to the coastal plain to join the main north – south motorway at Viareggio. Traffic was heavier here, mostly foreign truckers getting a head start on their long itinerary before the tourists started clogging the road later in the morning. They glided effortlessly past the big rigs, the green kilometre signs ticking off their progress. A pert crescent moon peeked archly out over the mountain chain to the east.

  ‘Someone knew,’ said Zen at last, breaking their long silence.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Or at least suspected,’ Zen continued, working out the thought which had suddenly come to him. ‘And not Brugnoli. He thinks he’s a player, but he’s not. On the contrary, they’re using him.’

  Gemma took her eyes off the road for an instant to glance at him.

  ‘When you’ve got a moment, would you mind telling me what on earth you’re talking about?’