Michael Dibdin - And then you die

Fortunately the driver of Taranto 64 proved to be one of the few night cabbies in Rome who didn't want to share his life story, political views, family problems and forecast for next season's football championship with his fare. He just shut up and drove. There was almost no traffic, and they arrived at their destination in fifteen minutes. Zen over-tipped the soothingly reticent driver, walked inside the station and bought a first-class single ticket to Florence.

The platforms were deserted. By day, Tiburtina was a busy suburban station serving commuters and shoppers, but at this hour of the night it functioned purely as a stopping place to switch crews on long-haul trains without going into the terminus and having to change locomotives as well. Zen wandered into the bar and bought a cappuccino which he nursed until the clangour of a bell and then an incomprehensible announcement over the loudspeaker system warned of the imminent arrival of his train.

It consisted mainly of sleeping cars, and most of the seating carriages were empty. Zen could easily have had a first-class compartment to himself, but for various reasons he chose instead to share one with two other men. One was almost caricaturally Sicilian, the other less easy to place. Both had evidently been dozing, and went back to stertorous sleep as soon as the train started again. After a while, Zen joined them.

When he woke, they were in the Arno valley and dawn was just starting to break. No details were yet visible outside, but the rugged mass of the Apennines to the east showed black against the gradually lightening sky. It felt good to be out of Rome. He would never live there again if he could help it, he realized.

He disembarked in Florence at the transit station of Rifredi, and grabbed an espresso before the arrival of an early local train to the terminus at Santa Maria Novella. In the piazza outside, the blue buses that served the region were starting to gather. One of the drivers told him that there was a service to Versilia leaving at eight o'clock. That left about an hour to kill. He went across the street to the Lazzi office, bought a ticket and left his luggage behind the counter, then set off towards the Mercato Centrale.

Zen had used this huge covered public market – the largest in Europe, as the locals characteristically claimed – as an early-morning breakfast venue before, in the course of brief trips to or through the city on assignments he could no longer remember. It was a short and pleasant walk from the station through the twisty, narrow, empty streets, and like all markets it came to bustling life at an hour when the rest of the city was still brushing its teeth.

When Zen arrived, the stallholders were still putting the finishing touches to their displays of produce and their clients had not yet materialized, but the food stands were doing a brisk trade from the market workers who clustered around each one, squabbling good-naturedly among themselves, joking, gossiping, miming excessive emotions of every kind, and from time to time breaking off to nag the unflappable serving staff into getting a move on with their order. No dainty pastries and lukewarm milky coffee for these men. They had a hard morning's work ahead, lugging around sides of meat and whole hams and cheeses, and were tucking into crusty rolls stuffed with boiled tripe or beef, washed down with tumblers of Chianti sloshed from plastic-wrapped flasks.

Zen fought his way to the front just as another lump of beef emerged from the steaming cauldron set over a gas ring. He pointed to it, then to the wine, handed over some money and edged back out of the throng to let someone else have a turn. Eventually he found a spot at an angle of the market building where he could park his glass of wine on the railing, and proceeded to munch away. Reaching into his coat pocket for the bunch of tissues he had grabbed from the dispenser to wipe off his greasy lips, he felt a more substantial paper product. Extracting it, he read 'Borunn Sigurdardottir', and felt so happy not to be in Iceland that he went straight back to the stand and ordered another roll and another glass of wine.

How ridiculous it all was! Everything that had happened to him in the last few weeks seemed like a dream which makes perfect sense until you wake up and realize just how gullible you've been. That business on the coast and in the plane, the voices in his head and all the rest of it… It all amounted to nothing more than a flurry of coincidental nonsense, swirls of mental mud thrown up by the physical and mental ordeal that he had been through. But now it was over.

He finished his second roll and the rest of the wine and checked his watch. Just ten minutes left to catch the bus back to the coast. Perfect. He wondered if Gemma would still be at the beach. Or had he dreamed her too? In a few hours he would find out.

Outside the covered market, the street traders were now setting up their stalls laden with clothing, leather goods, CDs, tapes and videos. Zen walked through them, thinking only of catching his bus, until his eye was caught by some items of clothing. They were T-shirts, hanging from a wire suspended at the end of one of the carts. The colours differed, but the words printed on them were all the same: 'Life's a beach'.

He stopped and fingered one of the garments. Noticing Zen's interest, the vendor came over and named a variety of prices in rapidly declining order. Zen shook his head, but.the man unhooked one of the shirts and turned it over to display the alleged quality of the cloth and manufacture. On the back of the shirt, in exactly the same lettering, was printed 'And then you die'.

Zen waved the salesman aside and hurried on his way, turning the foreign phrase over in his mind. La vita e una spiaggia e poi si muore. It made no sense. Perhaps it was some idiomatic expression he didn't understand. There were so many things about English speakers he didn't understand, like Ellen, his one-time American girlfriend asking him, 'Why are all the things I like either fattening or bad for me?' He'd shrugged and replied, 'Because you like the wrong things.'

It had seemed self-evident to him, hardly worth saying, but Ellen had reacted as though he'd slapped her. ‘I can't help what I like!' she'd wailed. He'd sensed then that Americans liked to like things that were bad for them. It added a frisson of sin to their indulgence, and a self-righteous glow to abstinence.

'Life's a beach and then you die.' Absurd. Another piece of dream jetsam with no significance. People would buy clothes with any nonsense on them as long as it was in English. For all they knew, they could be walking round sporting a shirt or jacket which said 'I'm a Complete Idiot.' It didn't matter. English was chic.

He emerged into the piazza in front of Santa Maria Novella, retrieved his baggage from the Lazzi office and climbed aboard the bus just as the driver started the engine in a cloud of diesel fumes.

The warm evening light washed down, its heat glowing back up off the worn flagstones where four boys were playing football. Couples and clusters of locals stood about gossiping in a drowsy harmony punctuated by the brief appearance of bicyclists transiting in a leisurely manner from one portal of the small oval piazza to another. In the midst of it all, at an outlying table of a cafe, protected from the sun's rays by a blue ombrellone, Aurelio Zen sat clad in a new cream linen suit and his Panama hat, lingering over the dregs of a coffee and smiling inanely at the sheer blissful pleasure of it all.

For the first time in his life, he felt himself to be a complete gentleman of leisure. He had spent the intervening ten days at the beach, sunning himself, relaxing, and lunching or dining with Gemma either at a variety of local restaurants – including one in a village perched on a crag at the end of a hair-raising mountain road up which she had driven without complaint or comment – or at the villa where he had reinstalled himself. Nothing had 'happened' between them, but there seemed every reason to suppose that something was about to, and it was their very sense of the inevitability of this that had precluded any hasty moves on either side. Nevertheless, the day before Gemma had definitely made a move of some kind by inviting Zen to dinner.