Michael Dibdin - Blood rain

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, Modica, 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.’