Michael Dibdin: And then you die

If Zen had been a bit more forthcoming about his own circumstances, this might have changed, but he had no such inclination. His cover story was paper-thin, and depended for its success on no one taking the trouble to check it at all carefully. Franco's role in life, Zen had already realized, apart from milking the summer trade for all its three months' life was worth, was to act as the catchment area, filter and conduit for any local gossip worth knowing. Radio Franco was always on the air, and if Zen had allowed himself to be quizzed about the vague and unsupported fictions he had been provided with, he would have been exposed for the fraud he was in no time at all. On the other hand, refusing to reply to Franco's seemingly casual questions would have been equally inadvisable. Zen's strategy had been to keep his distance, treating Franco not as the universal uncle he aspired to be but simply as the owner of the bagno, a paid service provider of no personal interest whatever.

He seated himself at one of the metal tables in the bar area, but did not order anything. After a few minutes, Gemma emerged from her changing room, wearing her street clothes. Their eyes met, and Zen beckoned her over.

'What happened?' he asked.

Gemma tossed her head.

'Oh, just a stupid accident. I was on my way back with the coffee, when this young idiot barged into me and knocked it all over me. It was quite painful, and it stained my suit of course. I've washed it out, but I hate wearing wet clothes so I'm going to go home.'

'Was he the one who ran off?'

'Who? Oh, yes. The funny thing is he was standing there staring at you.' 'At me?'

'Yes. You were sitting there with your eyes closed, and this kid was standing on the boardwalk staring at you, as if you were some kind of star or something. Then he suddenly whirled round and ran straight into me with the coffee’

The word seemed to jolt Zen's memory. He looked up at the bar and directed the owner to bring them two coffees. The owner scowled and yelled inside for his wife.

'What did he look like, this man?' Zen asked Gemma.

She shrugged.

'Like anyone else that age.'

'What age?'

'About thirty, I suppose.' 'You don't remember anything else about him?' 'I only saw him for an instant. After that I was covered in scalding coffee and had other things to think about.' She reflected for a moment.

'He had something written on his shirt’ she said at last. 'What?'

‘I don't remember. Some slogan in English. What does it matter?'

Franco's wife brought their coffees. Zen smiled.

'It doesn't, as long as you're all right. If s just odd, that’s all. Nothing unusual ever happens here, and this is the second case today’

'What’s the first?'

"That man who's taken my place’

Gemma nodded.

'You should have called Franco, had him moved’ 'I didn't want to make a scene. What's the point? The Brunellis never come during the week anyway, so I just took their spot’ Gemma finished her coffee. 'Well, I'll be going,' she said. Zen stood up as she did.

‘I don't suppose you'd like to have dinner tonight,' he found himself saying.

She regarded him intensely. 'Dinner? But why?' He gestured embarrassedly. 'Why not?'

This seemed to give her pause. 'Why not?' she repeated at length.

'Good. About eight at Augusto's. Do you know it?'

'Of course, everyone knows it. Have you made a booking?'

Zen shook his head.

'Then we'll never get in’ Gemma said decisively. 'They're booked up weeks in advance.' 'I can get us a table. Trust me.'

Gemma looked at him again in that odd, intense way of hers. 'Very well,' she said. 'I'll trust you.'

She gave him a vague smile and walked off down the pathway at the side of the building leading to the car park. Zen headed back to the beach.

He noticed the police at once. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all young and looking very sporty in the starched sky-blue shorts and summer shirts of the municipal police. They were stretched out evenly across the beach from the tideline to the land end, walking slowly and checking everything and everyone in their range.

By the time Zen got back to his place, the female officer had just reached Franco's boardwalk. Zen went over to her.

'Excuse me,' he said with a pleasant smile backed up by a hint of the steely sheen of power. 'I'm in the police myself, down in Rome. Criminalpol. Is anything wrong?'

The woman gave him the merest glance and shook her head.

'Routine patrol’ she said. 'But we had some reports of someone passing as an itinerant trader, a vucumpra. Did you see anyone like that?'

'How do you mean, "passing"?'

'When he raised his sleeve, his skin was white from the elbow. And he didn't look African. That s what we were told, anyway.'

'I can't imagine any outsider wanting to cut a piece of that market’ Zen remarked.

'No, but he might have had other things in mind. People trust the Moroccans. Well, most of them are Sudanese actually, but the point is that they police themselves very effectively. They make a sale or they don't, but no one gets ripped off. Same with the Chinese masseurs and fortune tellers. But there have been several robberies reported on the beach recently, people's handbags and cameras disappearing while they're away from their place, and if some white person has made himself up to look like the immigrants, he might get away with it There are plenty of Albanians and gypsies about and they can be very imaginative. Normally they do houses, sometimes while the owners are asleep, but this might be a new angle’

She looked at her two companions, who had drawn ahead, and nodded goodbye to Zen. He picked up his scattered belongings and started pensively back. That was the third anomaly this afternoon, he thought. First the stranger taking his place, then the young man who had stared at him and then rammed into Gemma, and now somebody impersonating one of the African traders. Anywhere else, this would have been a very average day's haul of minor mysteries, but in the placid, predictable world of the beach it was a potential front-page news story. Perhaps there's a pattern, thought Zen, smiling sourly at his wishful thinking.

This enforced vacation was driving him slightly crazy, he realized. What he needed was to get back to work, but there was no prospect of that. The powers that be had their plans for him, and it had been made gently clear to him that these included an early and well-deserved retirement. 'We'll have to bend the rules,' one of the official visitants to his hospital bed had told him. 'But if s the least you deserve after all you've been through’

He walked back past the bar, nodding to Franco and getting a grudging raise of the chin in return, and out into the full glare of the sun. As always, he was surprised to see the line of craggy mountains dominating the skyline to the east, their gleaming white surfaces making them seem even higher than they were in the July heat, although their lustre was not, of course, snow but marble.

He crunched across the gravel parking lot and crossed the lungomare which ran all the way from Carrara to Viareggio, almost thirty kilometres in all, connecting the various villages and fishing ports which had now turned into a continuous strip of coastal development, retaining only their names and some vestiges of their original centres. Few of the buildings were more than a hundred years old, and the vast majority less than half that. Until the beach craze set in after the war, these marshy lowlands had been home to only a few stately villas set amidst the ribbon of wild pines which had once fringed the sea all the way south to Rome.

The main road was impressively broad, but the virtual absence of traffic gave it the same slightly unreal feel as the rest of the area. This was even more marked in the back streets beyond, which motorized vehicles entered strictly on sufferance, and at a crawl. The narrow lanes were filled with pedestrians and cyclists wandering about without so much as a cautious glance to check what was coming. Everything was clean, neat and safe, a privileged enclave where the normal chaos theory of Italian urban life was inverted. Zen had initially found it charming, just what he needed in his prolonged convalescence, but now it was starting to grate on him. There was no edge, no friction, no coefficient of resistance. There were moments when he had to curb the urge to start behaving badly, just to stir things up a little.