Michael Dibdin - And then you die

Zen lit a cigarette.

'What happened?'

'A friend of hers saw me and a member of my staff having dinner at a restaurant down at the beach in Lido di Ostia when I was supposedly in Turin, on business. Rosa had had her suspicions about me for years, but this was the first time she'd ever been able to prove anything. Her note gave me to understand that she was taking steps to ensure that it would also be the last.'

Zen nodded.

'So you've been doing this for years and finally got caught.' Nieddu refilled his glass.

'Want a drink? No? Good idea. Yes, I got caught, and you know why? Because I'd stopped trying so hard. That business in Lido di Ostia, I'd never have risked anything that stupid in the old days. If I said I was going to Turin, I'd go. What happened there was another matter. But I got lazy. Mobile phones haven't helped, either. Time was, you had to say where you'd be staying

and leave the number, but now you could be anywhere.' He took a large gulp of his drink. 'But that's not really it.' 'So what is?'

Nieddu lit a cigarette and lay down on the sofa.

'She got old, Aurelio. What else can I say? She got old.'

Zen did not reply. After a while, Nieddu leaned over and flicked the ash of his cigarette into his drink.

'You know that saying about generals? That they're always superbly prepared to fight the last war? It's not just generals, it's all of us.'

‘I don't understand.'

'Can you imagine if we were twenty again, or even thirty, how easy it would be for us to win at the kind of games people that age play? We'd be unbeatable, not least because we wouldn't care too much if we won, the way we did back then. We were under too much pressure, there was too much at stake. No wonder we fucked up.'

‘I still don't see what this has to do with you and Rosa.'

‘I thought I was one of those generals. I thought I had the situation all worked out. Basically, I thought I could get away with a certain amount of action on the side, providing I was discreet about it. But that wasn't the real point'

'So what was?'

'That it was still working for us in bed. Maybe she even did have some proof of what I was getting up to, I don't know, but as long as she was getting her share of attention it didn't bother her that much. But things were changing, like they always do. You don't notice it, any more than you notice the days growing shorter at this time of year. But they are, imperceptibly. The solstice is past and winter's on its way.'

Zen drowned his cigarette in the glass that Nieddu had previously used as an ashtray, then picked it up and carried it to the kitchen.

'Where did you take my drink?' Gilberto demanded. 'You don't heed another drink,' Zen responded from the hideous kitchen. 'What you need is some food.' 'I'm not hungry.'

"That's why you need some food. "Hunger comes from eating, thirst is quenched by drinking." But not if you're drinking whatever this is.' 'White rum.'

Zen reappeared in the doorway. 'You need to eat, Gilberto.'

'There's nothing here to eat Nothing you'd want to eat' 'Then we'll go out' ‘I can't.' 'Why?'

Nieddu rolled up off the sofa and confronted Zen blearily.

'They all know me in this neighbourhood. And they know what’s happened. The word's gone round. And if I show up, alone or with some male friend, the gossip and the sniggering is going to start. "Look, there's that Sardinian who cheated on his wife and got dumped." I can't take that, Aurelio. It used to be it was the women who suffered. "Her husband's run off with another woman." It was okay for the man, unless he was cornuto. But things have changed. I haven't been outside the building since it happened. I've been living on what was here, tinned stuff and pasta. I can't show my face in any of the restaurants round here.'

Zen smiled and took his arm.

'Fine, we'll go somewhere near my place. There are several good places – nothing fancy, good solid home cooking – and no one will know you from Adam. Come on!'

The cab Zen called, from the cooperative he always used, arrived almost too soon. He still had not decided where to go. In the end he asked for Piazza del Risorgimento. They could walk from there.

'She lost her looks,' said Nieddu as the lighted streets slipped past. 'Rosa?'

A single, stiff nod was the only response. 'That happens,' Zen replied.

'Yes, but it happens in different ways to different women. That’s what’s so cruel. If it was uniform, like…' He paused. 'Yes?' queried Zen.

'I don't know,' said Nieddu. 'Like something. There must be something if s like, right?'

'Probably’

This is going to be a long night, thought Zen. But he already felt better, just being outside that apartment with its air of acquiescent despair.

'One minute she looked thirty, the next she looked sixty’ Nieddu went on. 'No, that’s not quite right. There were a few years when she looked thirty most of the time, except in certain positions in a certain light when she suddenly looked sixty. After that, the balance tilted the other way. She looked sixty most of the time, except once in a while when she suddenly looked thirty again. That was the worst moment. Now she just looks sixty all the time.'

They had reached the embankment along the Tiber. Nieddu turned his eyes from the bright lights to the left and gazed out at the dark ditch on the other side.

'She had wonderful skin. Did you ever notice her skin, Aurelio? It was like a girl's, even when she was forty. And then it wasn't any more. It went all spongy and slack. It must have been dreadful for her, like wearing the finest silk all your life and then having to dress in cheap cotton. But it was tough on me, too. And so I stopped trying. With my affairs, I mean. It wasn't a conscious decision. I just didn't feel as guilty as I had before, so I didn't make as much effort’

He emitted a harsh laugh.

'I've even thought that maybe that’s what really pissed her off when she found out about me and Stefania. It wasn't just that I was fucking the help, it was that I couldn't even be bothered to cover it up properly. I'd got sloppy and unprofessional. That may have seemed like the last straw, the ultimate gesture of disrespect'

The taxi dropped them in Piazza del Risorgimento. This dingy clearing in the urban jungle, with its eclectic mixture of imposing umbertino facades, the manically raucous traffic through which quaintly retro trams made their stately way, the central island laid out with tall pines and shrubbery that had seen better days, the inevitable grandiose and birdshit-bespattered statue, and the imposing line of walls surrounding the Vatican City State, had always appealed to Zen for some reason he would have found difficult to explain, still less justify.

Steering Nieddu firmly away from various bars he seemed inclined to enter, Zen led him to a trattoria on a street just off Via Ottaviano. He himself went there seldom, precisely because he kept it as a resource for those times when he didn't want to be instantly recognized by the owner and subjected to the barrage of chat, gossip and nosy questions which were the inevitable lot of any regular. Zen ordered a bowl of vegetable soup and half a roast chicken with green salad. Giorgio said he'd have the same and a litre of red wine.

'Anyway, what about you, Aurelio?' he asked in painfully pro forma tone of voice. 'I heard the Mafia tried to kill you.'

'That was a long time ago.'

'So where have you been all this time?'

'In Iceland, just recently.'

The wine arrived. Gilberto poured himself a large glass and downed it in one go. 'Iceland, eh? What's it like? Icy, I suppose.' 'No, that's Greenland.' 'Logical.'

After that, the conversation rather flagged. Gilberto, in the throes of alcoholic anorexia, picked at his food with the tentative air of a stranger in a strangeland who has been invited to dine on unrecognizable local delicacies of whose nature and origin he is deeply suspicious. Zen ate his with a pleasure heightened by the fact that the soup had seen better days, the olive oil was of the industrial variety, the grated parmesan dried out, the chicken overcooked and too salty, and the salad leaves of the indestructible variety that resembled the rubber helmets that ladies at the Lido had used to wear during his childhood. It all reminded him very pleasantly of Maria Grazia's well-meaning culinary attempts, associated in his mind with the dull, cosy, slightly stifling family household from which he had spent a lifetime trying to escape, and which had now vanished, leaving only the empty shell for him to return to a little later in the evening.