Blood Rain - 7

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen had long ago decided not to concern himself too much about those aspects of life which he could not control, and he certainly could not hope to control or influence his fate in this situation. Gilberto had come up with a solution to his problems, Zen had accepted it, and now it was out of his hands. He was still very tired after his night on the ferry and all that had preceded and followed it, so he lay down on the sofa, covered in some garish acrylic material. He closed his eyes, thought about Stephanie and wondered where she was now, and so fell asleep.

  He awoke, sensing that there was someone in the room. It was the gangly youth, standing over him where he lay on the sofa. Half asleep as he was, Zen knew what was going to happen next, and indeed the head-jerk was duly performed. Zen staggered groggily to his feet and followed the kid out of the apartment and down to the street. He glanced at his watch. It was half-past nine.

  They got into the car and drove out of the city along narrow, gently winding roads. There was little other traffic, and what there was proceeded, like them, at a moderate pace, giving way to other drivers where necessary and never using the horn or flashing headlamps. The light was fading fast, but Zen could just make out a crooked grid of dry-stone walling all around, enclosing small fields with the occasional isolated house.

  The drive lasted another hour, broken by regular stops when the youth got out and scanned the road behind them, and then made a cellphone call in his incomprehensible dialect. So he could talk, thought Zen, lying back in his seat and smoking cigarette after cigarette. He had always had a good innate sense of direction, and by reference to his internal compass, the glow in the west and the rising moon, he soon worked out that they were taking an extremely circuitous route to their destination.

  In the end, though, they arrived, bouncing off the tarred road on to a dirt track which they followed for another kilometre or so, before pulling into a large field with a metal barn of recent construction at one end. In front of it stood the tiny single-engined plane, and beside it a short, stocky man with a moustache, wearing a pair of blue overalls and an old-fashioned flying cap with flaps over the ears.

  Without waiting for another head-jerk, Zen got out of the car. The man in overalls walked over to him.

  ‘Signor Zen!’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you. I apologize for the delay, but we needed to wait for dark and also make sure that you were unaccompanied.’

  Zen held out his hand, then retracted it, noticing no equivalent gesture from the other man.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

  The man smiled roguishly.

  ‘I will be your pilot tonight, as they say on the commercial airlines. If you care to step up here, I’ll start the engine and we’ll be off.’

  That had been almost an hour ago. Since then there had been nothing except the racket of the engine and the occasional lights of a ship passing so close beneath them that Zen felt sure they must rip off their wings against its masts. But the flight passed without incident, until the pilot spoke over the radio microphone he wore under his flying helmet and produced a spectacular display below: plumes of reddish light spaced equally to form two converging lines in the darkness.

  The plane immediately started manoeuvring, turning this way and that until it was centred on the strip of dark between the beacons. It dipped dramatically, causing Zen’s stomach to rise and his panic to return, and then floated down as effortlessly as a feather past a group of cars and a panel van and touched down lightly on a smooth surface. Well before they reached the last flare, the plane had stopped, circled around and begun to taxi back towards the waiting vehicles.

  ‘But that’s not your real problem,’ the pilot said once the clamour of the engine had died down again.

  ‘What?’ demanded Zen, stunned by this non sequitur.

  ‘The propeller falling off, or me getting a heart attack,’ the pilot replied. ‘Your real problem was arriving safely. And I’m afraid we have.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The pilot grinned.

  ‘I’ll be straight with you, Signor Zen, since you’ve been straight with me. Well, not quite straight. For instance, you didn’t tell us that you’re a policeman.’

  Zen felt the adrenalin rush like walking into a wall.

  ‘I didn’t think it was relevant,’ he mumbled.

  ‘It isn’t. It doesn’t matter at all, because in a few hours from now you won’t be in a position to tell anyone anything. When I asked our Sicilian friends if it would be possible to move the delivery date because I had been asked to transport a certain Aurelio Zen, they got very excited indeed. It seems that some friends of theirs are anxious to meet you to discuss the recent death of a friend of theirs. Name of Spada. My friends here were of course only too happy to be able to do their friends a favour.’

  The plane drew to a halt beside the cars and the van. Figures emerged from the darkness. The door was opened and Zen told roughly to descend. He stepped down on to a surface which felt like tarmac. On each side, the lines of flares stretched away into the darkness of the night, illuminating the scene in garish hues. The van had backed up to the rear door of the plane, which was open. A team of about five men were lifting out large, plastic-wrapped packages and stowing them away in the back of the van.

  That was all that Zen had time to see before he was hustled over to one of the waiting cars. A man of about thirty with shiny ribbons of thick black hair and a notable nose got out of the driver’s seat and approached Zen and his handler.

  ‘Search him, Nello,’ he said to the latter.

  Hands patted him down.

  ‘No gun,’ Nello reported.

  ‘Give me your mobile,’ the other man told Zen.

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  The man stared at Zen in total disbelief.

  ‘Well, actually I do,’ Zen went on, realizing that he was cutting a poor figure. ‘But I left it at home. I never use it, to be honest. The last thing I want is people being able to get in touch with me day or night, wherever I may be. I’m suppose I’m old-fashioned.’

  Nello laughed.

  ‘You’re not just old-fashioned, Papa. You’re extinct!’

  He grabbed Zen by the arm, pushed him into the back of the car and got in beside him. The other man got behind the wheel and gunned the engine. They drove off along the runway, which looked suspiciously like an autostrada, then turned right on to a steep dirt track down which they bumped and bounced. When they reached the bottom, Zen saw that the landing strip behind them was indeed a portion of a two-lane highway, elevated on concrete stilts and breaking off abruptly just beyond the earthen ramp which they had just descended.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded in an indignant tone.

  Nello laughed.

  ‘You’re a VIP, Papal You get met at the airport.’

  The car turned left on to a minor paved road and accelerated away.

  They drove in silence for almost two hours. Zen saw signs to Santa Croce, Ragusa, Módica, Noto, Avola, Siracusa, Augusta, Lentini… The fact that his captors hadn’t bothered to blindfold him almost certainly meant that he was going to be killed. Quite apart from anything else, he now knew the approximate location of the section of uncompleted motorway which the local clan used as a landing strip for its drug shipments. Yes, they were going to have to kill him, no question about that.

  ‘How do you light up the runway?’ he asked.

  Rather to his surprise, the answer came at once.

  ‘Sets of distress flares hooked up to an electrical cable,’ Nello replied with a certain technological eagerness. ‘We rig it all in advance, powered by a car battery, then when the pilot calls in on the radio we switch on the current.’

  ‘Shut up, Nello,’ said the driver.

  ‘What did I…?’

  ‘Just shut up!’

  A large commercial aircraft flew overhead, its powerful landing lights seemingly v
acuuming up the clouds scattered low in the sky. Then Zen saw the signs for Catania, and had a surge of hope. In the city, there would be traffic lights and, even at this time of night, traffic jams. He might be able to make a run for it, get away from these Mafia thugs and throw himself on the mercy of the authorities whose protection he had so arrogantly spurned. They wouldn’t be too happy about his disappearance, of course, and still less about what had happened to Alfredo Ferraro. He would have to be patient, penitent and remorseful, like an adulterous husband, but in the end they’d have to take him back. After all, he was one of them.

  Unfortunately for this pleasing scenario, the signs to Catania rapidly died out, to be succeeded by ones to Misterbianco, Paterno, and a host of other places which Zen had never heard of. The car was labouring like a boat in a broken sea, the road rearing up and spinning round. Apart from that, there was nothing but fleeting glimpses of the small towns through which they drove at speed, the two men now apparently more tense than before.

  At length they reached another town, more or less identical in appearance to all the others. The driver drove through the back-streets to the main piazza and drew up next to a gravel-covered park dotted with trees. At the end, next to them, stood one of those imposing but uninspiring civic statues which dot the minor towns of Italy, commemorating some local celebrity who had the misfortune to be born there. This one was of a man in vaguely nineteenth-century garb, his right hand clutching a book to his chest and his left outstretched in greeting or appeal. Zen read the name on the plinth by the light of one of the few streetlamps which adorned the piazza. It meant nothing to him.

  Meanwhile the driver had taken out his telefonino and was now speaking rapidly in dialect. If he and Nello were indeed ‘only too glad to be able to do their friends a favour’ by handing over Zen, they were doing a good job of concealing the fact. So far from being happy, they looked as though they were scared to death.

  About a minute later a car appeared at the other end of the piazza and swooped down towards them. Nello nudged Zen.

  ‘Out,’ he said.

  Zen opened his door and stood up. The air smelt fresh and cool. The other car screeched to a halt alongside the first, its engine still running. The driver got out and shook hands with Zen’s captor and they spoke quietly for a while. Then the other man stretched out his arms and exposed his palms like a saint displaying his stigmata. His chin was slightly raised and pushed forward, his lips turned down. The gesture, typically Sicilian, meant, ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  This sealed Zen’s fate. They couldn’t care less about him. They didn’t even glance in his direction. If they weren’t bothering to guard or even watch him, it was for the same reason that the ancient Romans did not build walls around their cities. It would have been redundant. They already controlled the whole place.

  The two men concluded their discussion with a handshake and Nello turned to Zen.

  ‘You’re to go with him,’ he said, indicating the newcomer.

  Zen nodded and started to walk over to the other car. Without a word, the driver opened the back door for him, as though this were a taxi which Zen had summoned. His nonchalant confidence confirmed Zen’s worst fears.

  Then, just as Zen was about to get into the car, his head lowered like an animal entering an abattoir stall, the planet suddenly went into labour. All four men shuddered where they stood, as though suffering sympathetic but lesser convulsions. There was a deep groaning which seemed to come from nowhere, the cobblestones beneath them trembled and the trees shook their branches in the windless air. Finally, just as these symptoms began to subside, the statue of the local celebrity turned towards them, its left arm apparently waving goodbye. Slowly, but with utter inevitability, it tumbled forward off its plinth and crashed to the ground.

  Panic-stricken, the four men started to run, each in a different direction. Where was not important: the essential was to get away. After a fifty-metre sprint, Zen found himself all alone in a darkened alley, facing a tall, elderly man wearing a dressing-gown and slippers, and carrying a walking-stick.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ the man said in heavily accented Italian. Not in dialect, in Italian.

  ‘Help me!’ said Zen. ‘Please help me.’

  The man inspected him.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Get me out of here.’

  ‘Out of where?’

  ‘Look, you’ve got to help! The Mafia is after me. They kidnapped me. I’m a police officer. I need to make a phone call, that’s all. The authorities will be here in no time with helicopters and armoured vehicles. They’ll have the whole place surrounded in less than an hour, but first I must make that call!’

  The man looked at Zen.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  Zen produced his police identification card, which the other man inspected by the flame of a lighter.

  ‘Please!’ said Zen as his wallet was handed back. ‘I just need to make one phone call and then a place to hide until my colleagues arrive.’

  ‘I think what you need is a drink,’ the other man replied.

  ‘So that’s where they landed you! Of course, of course. The project for that motorway has been in the pipeline for twenty years or more, and will doubtless stay there for another twenty. In theory, it’s supposed to run along the south coast, connecting Catania with Géla. At present it only exists on paper, but various people who own or have bought bits of land along the route will have been able to persuade the regional government to get a compulsory purchase order, buy them out, and then build that particular stretch to justify the purchase in the budget.’

  ‘But most of that land must surely be worthless?’

  Zen’s host picked up the packet of Nazionali which Zen had left on the table, having chain-smoked three immediately after arrival.

  ‘How much is this worth?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s about half a pack left… Two thousand lire?’

  ‘I’ll pay you four thousand.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘Why should you care? Let’s say I’m desperate for a cigarette. At any rate, if you agree, this pack is now worth twice what it was a moment ago. Now then, let’s suppose that you suddenly realize that you don’t have any more cigarettes, so you offer to buy one back from me. At four thousand for ten, it’s worth four hundred, but I want to make a profit on the deal, so I’ll charge six. That makes the remaining packet worth five thousand four hundred lire. We’ve almost tripled the value of these cigarettes in twenty seconds, without any money changing hands.’

  They were sitting in a small room on the first floor of a house which might have been anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years old. Facing them was an empty fireplace. At one end of the room, by the stairs leading up from the street, was a cubby-hole kitchen. At the other, a window open to the balmy night air, and another set of steps leading to the next floor. The other furnishings consisted of an oil painting showing a young man in military uniform, cases of books in four languages, and a stereo system from which emerged the mellifluent sounds of a wind ensemble. Zen took another sip of the whisky which he had been offered and tried to drag himself back to reality.

  ‘Listen, I really must make that phone call.’

  His host shook his head.

  ‘I used to have a telephone, but no one ever called me, and on the rare occasions when I wanted to place a call, the thing always seemed to be out of order.’

  Zen slammed his fist against his forehead. Why hadn’t he brought his mobile with him? You’re not just old-fashioned, Papa. You’re extinct.

  ‘Anyway, the point is that what applies to our hypothetical deal on your cigarettes also applies to land,’ the elderly gentleman went on. ‘Even more so, because they aren’t making any more land. So what there is is worth just as much as people will pay for it. And I imagine that the stretch where they built the section of motorway where you l
anded was sold at a very high price indeed. The buyer will have had friends in the regional government who informed him about the route of the proposed motorway. He buys the requisite fields, then resells them at twice the price to another friend, who then sells them back to him at twice that. Depending on how long they keep it up, they can then show legal bills of sale to the government agents, proving that that particular patch of parched scrub is now worth twenty or forty or a hundred times what the patch of parched scrub next to it is worth. And of course our friends’ friends in the regional government will ensure that, instead of rerouting the motorway, that price is paid.’

  The whole house quivered briefly, setting the ceiling lamp swaying gently to and fro, shifting the shadows about.

  ‘An aftershock,’ Zen’s host said calmly. ‘There may be more. But what we really worry about here is that this could be the prelude to an eruption. The last time, in 1992, the molten lava almost reached the village. And that was just a leak, a dribble. If Etna were to blow as it did in 1169, 1381 or 1669, or in 475 BC for that matter, everyone in this village would be dead within seconds.’

  ‘So why do you choose to live here?’ asked Zen. ‘You’re not Sicilian, I take it.’

  ‘No, I’m not Sicilian.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I will answer your questions in due course, if you wish,’ Zen’s host said at last. ‘But first we need to resolve your own problems.’

  ‘There must be a phone box in the village,’ suggested Zen. ‘Could you go down and make a call to a number I will give you and explain the situation?’

  The other man again shook his head.

  ‘The only public phone is in the bar, which will have closed by now. I could go to a neighbour’s house, but this would be so unusual that they would almost certainly listen in on the call. I am eighty years old, dottore. Very soon now I shall move house for the last time, so to speak, but I do not want to have to do so until then. If it becomes known that I gave you refuge and then called the authorities, life here would become impossible for me.’