Michael Dibdin: End games

Zen signalled the waiter. Obsession was an occupational hazard in Calabria, but obsessing about tomatoes was absurd. He paid over the agreed fee and responded with a brief nod to the waiter’s thanks, nicely pitched as always in the grey area between grudging respect and overt truculence. The moment he emerged from the air-conditioned dining room into the sullen, stacked heat of the street, he felt his pores gaping open like the mouth of the goldfish he had kept as a child. He lit a cigarette and surveyed the visible slice of sky, an incandescent azure enlivened by puffy, faintly bruised clouds trailing translucent spumes of virga. The door behind him opened and Nicodemo, the owner of the restaurant, appeared and also lit up.

‘You didn’t like your meal?’ he asked with a solicitous expression.

Zen chose his words carefully.

‘It was very authentic.’

Nicodemo beamed. He had already told Zen, at some length, that he was un immigrante. Having spent almost thirty years as a construction worker in a Canadian city called Tronno, he had now retired to his native Calabria and opened a restaurant dedicated to preserving and reviving the genuine cuisine of his youth.

‘My mother used to make that dish on very special occasions, starting at dawn,’ he confided to Zen in reverential tones. ‘The sauce takes hours to prepare, but the flavour of sheep from the bone and the fat is incomparable.’

‘There is certainly very little to which it can be compared. I just don’t have much appetite today.’

‘You’re not unwell, dottore?’

‘No, no. Overwork, I expect.’

Nicodemo nodded sagely. He wouldn’t of course dream of prying further — one didn’t interrogate the local police chief — but a sympathetic word never went amiss.

‘Ah, this terrible business.’

A silence fell, which the restaurateur perhaps broke to avoid the appearance of any possible indiscretion on his part.

‘And to think that he came here once to eat!’

‘Did he like the food?’ Zen replied, with a trace of sarcasm that was entirely lost on the other man.

‘But of course! He too was rediscovering his heritage, just like me when I first returned.’

Zen hurled his cigarette into the gutter.

‘I’m sorry, I thought you were referring to the American lawyer.’

‘I am! As soon as I saw the picture on television I recognised him.’

‘Signor Newman ate here?’

He sounded no more than politely interested.

‘Only once. It had come on to rain suddenly. He sheltered in the doorway for a while, then came inside when it didn’t stop. He asked my advice about what to order and after he’d eaten we got chatting. First in Italian, then in dialect. The rough stuff, from up in the Sila mountains. He hadn’t spoken that for years, but it gradually came back to him. Like discovering that you can still ride a bicycle, he said.’

Nicodemo shook his head.

‘He seemed delighted to be home again, just like me. And now this happens! Calabria can be harsh to her sons.’

He grasped Zen’s arm lightly. Zen did not care to be touched by strangers, but had come to recognise this as an accepted rhetorical gesture in the south and managed to control his instinct to recoil.

‘I really shouldn’t ask this, dottore, but do you think he’ll be all right?’

Zen freed his arm by making another of the rhetorical gestures used to punctuate lengthy discourses between men in the street, an activity as normal, frequent and essential to civic life in Cosenza as it had been in the Athenian agora.

‘In such matters, nothing is certain. But the victim’s son is due to arrive shortly, so with any luck we should be able to begin serious negotiations soon.’

Nicodemo nodded obsequiously and seized Zen’s hand.

‘Thank you, thank you! Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked, but even though we only met briefly, I liked the man. Besides, he is a fellow immigrant.’

Zen turned away.

‘You’re coming tomorrow?’ the restaurateur called after him. ‘I’m serving spaghetti with clams.’

Zen paused, struck by the innocent recipe like a familiar face sighted in a crowd. This was a dish he had grown up with, the soft clitoral gristle of the clams in their gaping porcelain shells, the hard, clean pasta soaked in the subtle juice, a nudge of garlic, a dab of oil, a splash of wine…

‘I’m going to the coast to buy the clams fresh off the boats first thing tomorrow,’ Nicodemo added encouragingly.

‘Will they be cooked in tomato sauce?’ queried Zen.

‘ Ma certo! Just like my mamma used to make.’

Zen inclined his head respectfully.

‘May she rest in peace.’

At the corner of the block, he stopped in a cafe to erase the lingering taste of tomatoes stewed in mutton grease by drinking two coffees and crunching down half a tub of Tic Tacs. He was just starting his second espresso when everything became strange. The light dimmed as in an eclipse of the sun, a wind entered through the open doorway, the pages of a newspaper lying abandoned on a table turned over one by one, as though by the hand of an invisible reader. Outside in the street, someone cried out jaggedly above the seething sound that had insinuated itself into the laden silence. A fusillade of ice pellets erupted upwards from the pavement and then the sky broke, dropping waves of sound that shook the ground and made the water in Zen’s glass ripple lightly. Next the initial fusillade of hail turned to a hard rain and within moments the sewers were gorged. The water backed up, deluging the street where people caught in the storm held up briefcases or newspapers to protect their heads and gazed across at the lights of the cafe on the other bank of the impassable torrent, while those safe inside cackled and jeered, savouring their sanctuary.

And then it was all over. The rain ceased, the flood subsided and the sun came out. By the time Zen had paid and left, the streets were already steaming themselves dry. The accumulated odours from the clogged drains combined with the water vapour to create a pale miasmal veil through which he made his way back up the hill to the Questura.

Nine and a half thousand kilometres away to the north-west, Jake Daniels awoke. Early light seeped through the hardwood venetians. Jake paused to check central processing performance and run a defrag, then rolled off the mattress and stood up. The barely audible breathing from the far side of the bed maintained its steady rhythm. He navigated the shallows of the bedroom and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him quietly. Madrona was great, but right now he needed his space.

He was fixing coffee and listening to the city’s fabled all-girl band, the Westward Ho’s, when his phone came to life. Inevitably, it was Martin. Martin was great too, except he didn’t do down-time.

‘Yo.’

‘We need to dialogue, Jake.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Pete Newman, that lawyer who’s been over in Europe providing logistical support on the movie angle? He’s missing.’

‘Missing what?’

‘No, he disappeared three days ago, presumed kidnapped. So we need to progress alternative strategies to minimise how this incident might impact our mission.’

‘Like when?’

‘Right away. There are significant granularity issues that need to be addressed and the solutions migrated to the rest of our people here and then cascaded down to the folks we’re teaming with at the location.’

‘Huh?’

‘Someone has to sweat the small stuff. I’m thinking I may need to go out there myself. You okay with lunch?’

‘Whatever.’

Jake poured himself a mug of coffee, cradled his BlackBerry in the other hand and headed on out to the deck. The sun was just starting to show above the hills behind. Out towards the lake, a thick layer of gunge had toned down the pricey vista of stacked conifers and sloppy water to the kind of generic blur you only notice if it isn’t there. Some dark agent in the guise of a crow hit the far end of the cedar planking in a clumsy clatter and then did the pimp roll over to a lump of wiener or marshmallow from last evening’s cookout. Jake lay back in a colonial rocker, breathed in the salty air and took stock. All in all, he was cool with this latest development. A totally necessary feature of any killer game was that whenever you thought you were home and free, really weird shit happened. And seeing who was the gamemaster on this particular adventure, the surprises were always going to be world-class. Which was okay. Jake had a few surprises in store himself.