End Games - 11 (39 page)

Jake dreamt he was flying. At first it was awesome, the scenery scrolling away like on Google Earth, mountains and fields and rivers and roads and towns. Some flyover state. He longed to nuke something, but he couldn’t figure out which game it was, who the bad guys were or even the basic scenario. The only thing he knew for sure was that on an earlier level his character had spawned in the shining city upon a hill. That meant his game status was Exceptional and he had unlimited powers, which was way cool except he hadn’t a clue what to do with them.

Maybe it was these doubts that triggered off what happened next, one of those dream things where everything goes bad just because it does, no reason given. There was this coffin on the floor he was trying to push out of the open doorway of the plane, only it was super heavy and wouldn’t budge until suddenly the rollers kicked in and they both went flying, flipping over slowly down to the sea beneath and then into it, still tumbling. He ended up in a kind of desert with huge cracks in the ground and these giant spiders, except they were more like cockroaches, a gazillion of them coming at him, more and more all the time. It was a classic run ’n’ gun, first-person shooter death match with randomised portals, only the software was way over-specified for his game controller, a dumb brick on a string with two buttons and a D-pad dating back to the eight-bit Nintendo games of the 1980s. He was getting killed here! This wasn’t a game, it was a fucking cartoon. Loony Tunes Two. That’s all, folks.

‘Hate to wake you, but we’ve only got about an hour to run. Care for an eye-opener?’

Jake rolled over in bed and tried to focus on the babe who was shaking his shoulder. She totally wasn’t Madrona, but he got there in the end.

‘Sure.’

‘Coffee, tea or me?’

Huh? thought Jake, but then he caught the look on her face and realised she’d been doing that thing that was big with the kids these days and gave him a headache, where you say one thing but mean something way different, ironing or something.

‘I’ll take a Diet Rockstar and some RapSnacks YoungBloodz Southern Crunk BBQ.’

‘You want ice with that?’

He got out of bed and glanced out of the window. Mountains, fields, rivers, roads, towns, like on Google Earth. Some flyover state. He turned on ESPN and watched a bunch of ads. Black guys dunking big balls, white guys hurling oval balls, brown guys hitting white balls, all in sexy slow-mo. Ball games, celebrating designer sportswear and racial diversity. Cool. He sucked down his energy drink and tooled around the net a little till he found this site with a world map showing the area of darkness – kind of like a huge cock – over the places where it was night. Right now Madrona was in the light zone, but the edge of darkness was creeping towards her all the time. The image updated automatically every minute, so you could just sit there and watch the shadow line jerk forward a notch as the sun sank slowly in the west. You learn something every day, thought Jake. Like he’d never realised that the sun went round the earth, although it was kind of obvious once you thought about it.

Then Madrona rang.

‘Yo.’

‘Where are you, hon?’

‘Beats me. I get in in like an hour?’

‘Bummer. I got a bikini wax at four or I’d come meet you.’

‘Eeeh.’

‘Are you okay, hon?’

‘I had this weird dream? Kind of creeped me out.’

‘Really? You know Crystl?’

‘I totally know her.’

‘She’s just awesome with dreams. She talked me through a whole bunch of mine and showed how they like foretell the future and stuff.’

‘Plus the movie thing tanked.’

‘You’re saying
Apocalypse!
isn’t going to happen?’

‘Not any time soon.’

‘How come?’

‘That’s gaming.’

He barked a laugh.

‘Chill, babe. It’s not the end of the world. Life is good!’

There is a unique flavour of melancholy to remote railway stations during the long intervals between the arrival and departure of trains. And when the station is a modernistic monstrosity constructed a few decades ago on the scale befitting a provincial capital such as Cosenza, that flavour can become almost intolerably intense.

The platform stretched away like a desolate beach at the edge of the world. Opposite, a grandiose diagram of sidings was occupied by a few rusted wagons, surplus to requirements and awaiting the scrap man. The clock ticked off precise divisions of a time without meaning anywhere else in the world. Within the cavernous vestibule behind, three uniformed employees yelled insults at each other across the resonant space with the insolence of those secure in the knowledge that under the
statale
‘you pretend to work and we’ll pretend to pay you’ system, their jobs were not only guaranteed for life but left them enough free time to make some serious money in the black economy on the side.

Like mine, thought Zen. Italy was indeed the
bel
paese
, inexplicably blessed, just as some people seemed to be. Everything went wrong all the time, but somehow it didn’t matter, while in other countries even if everything went perfectly, life was still a misery.

‘
Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con
un ritardo di circa trenta minuti
.’

No, he wouldn’t lose his job. The delay to the connecting train from Cosenza to the coastal main line almost certainly meant that he would lose the seat he had reserved on the Intercity express to Rome, and therefore any hope of getting home to Lucca that night, but his job was safe. True, the powers that be had ruled that ‘the tragic and disastrous outcome’ of last night’s events had been due to Zen’s ‘precipitate actions in a complex situation demanding the greatest sensitivity and local knowledge’. Suggestions had even been made that it might be in everyone’s best interest, including his own, if he were to be offered early retirement.

On the other hand, he hadn’t been termed ‘grossly incompetent’, which was just about the only way of winkling a government employee out of his comfy shell. If those railwaymen merely treated their customers with arrogant contempt, flaunted framed portraits of Che Guavara in their offices and fiddled the petty cash from time to time, no one could touch them. If they failed to align the points correctly or signalled one train into the path of another, that would be another matter. Zen hadn’t done that. Two men were dead, but this had been deemed not to be ‘as a direct result’ of his ‘regrettable initiative’. In short, he’d been a bit naughty but all would be forgiven. The Mummy State had merely scolded her son, not disowned him.

The night before, he had eventually crawled back to the track, where he was intercepted by the Digos agent on the MotoGuzzi, who had been called in by his colleagues. Zen had ridden behind him up to the crime scene. This was a level area which served as a trysting place for the young people of the locality, judging by the beer bottles, syringes and used condoms picked out by the headlights of the black Jeep. Nicola Mantega was groaning, trying to say something and occasionally vomiting blood. Near him, Giorgio lay still. His sister, handcuffed to the grille of the Jeep, was screaming hysterically.

Accounts of what had happened varied. Natale Arnone claimed that Giorgio had fired first, he had returned fire, and the others had then shot both Giorgio and then, in error, Mantega. The Digos men agreed that Giorgio had fired shots in their general direction, ‘classic supersonic incoming whine and then the plonk of the discharge catching up, but nowhere near us’, that Arnone had fired back, hitting Mantega, and when Giorgio ignored their orders to drop his gun they had killed him. The clearing was too small and overhung by the huge pines to bring in a medivac helicopter. An hour later, an army ambulance managed to negotiate the treacherous dirt track leading to the spot, by which time Nicola Mantega was dead.

‘
Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con
un ritardo di circa venti minuti
.’

Aurelio Zen gazed up at the ring of mountains that hemmed Cosenza in on every side. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the
autostrada
and high-speed rail link to the national network had been constructed, but the character of cities and of their inhabitants are formed over centuries, not decades. Cosenza still viewed itself, and was viewed by others, as a backwater notable mainly for the fact that Alaric had been buried here. And he had done well, thought Zen. Whatever its shortcomings, Cosenza was an excellent place to be buried in, which is effectively what had happened to him that morning when Gaetano Monaco appeared at the Questura, bursting with confidence, energy and wisdom and eager to assume his duties and responsibilities as police chief of the province, the first of which was to show Zen the door.

‘I’m sure you did your best, but we’re not in the lagoons of Venice here!’ Monaco proclaimed. ‘No indeed! Calabria – or rather the Calabrias, as I prefer to think of this unique region, so diverse yet so cohesive, at once an infinite enigma and an endless delight – is a very special part of the world,
veramente molto
particulare. Molto, molto, molto!
I sympathise with you, dear colleague. Your failure must pain you deeply, but I doubt whether any other outsider would have performed much better, if that is any consolation. The task you took on was simply beyond your powers. The fact is that only someone who had the good fortune to be born and to grow up here can ever hope to understand this extraordinary land and its even more extraordinary people, and know instinctively how to deal with them.’

Zen had been tempted to retort that he at least hadn’t shot himself in the foot, but in the end he’d just walked out, leaving Monaco in triumphant possession of the field. True, the raids on the two houses in San Giovanni in Fiore had gone off without a hitch, and netted a wealth of evidence as well as five of Giorgio’s suspected accomplices. True, Zen had stayed up all night interrogating the latter, and had bluffed one of them into admitting that Peter Newman had indeed been seized in a normal kidnapping-for-cash operation, but that when Mantega passed on the information that the victim’s real name was Calopezzati, Giorgio had worked himself up into a fit of rage and sworn that he must die. Pietro Ottavio was denied food and water for three days, then told that he must do penance for his family’s sins by making an arduous and humiliating pilgrimage on foot to their former stronghold in Altomonte to pray for forgiveness, following which he would be free to go.

In different circumstances, all this might have been regarded as a significant achievement. As it was, Zen had been subjected to a dressing-down by the
prefetto
, the magistrate investigating the case and an assortment of high officials at the Ministry in Rome, besides having to dodge a pack of newspaper and television reporters all day. Even Giovanni Sforza assiduously evaded him as though he were the carrier of some fatal virus. In the end, there had been nothing to do but leave.

‘
Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con
un ritardo di circa dieci minuti
.’

A gust of wind stroked the platform with idle violence. Zen tried to visualise Lucca, and his life there with Gemma, but he couldn’t. Only this cradle-shaped tomb seemed real, all else an illusion.

‘
Buona sera, signore
.’

An old lady and a boy of about fifteen stood looking at him.

‘
Signora Maria, buona sera
.’

‘Allow me to present my grandson. We’re here to meet my sister. Go to the shop inside the station, Sabatino, and buy me a roll of mints. Here are five euros. You may spend the change on anything you like.’

The boy ran off.

‘Thank you,’ Maria said to Zen, once he was out of earshot.

Zen looked at her in astonishment.

‘For what?’

‘For killing that brute.’

‘But I –’

‘It needed to be done. Now we can all rest easy.’

‘
Signora
, I –’

‘You’re a real man, the kind they don’t make any more. Your wife is a lucky woman. May God bless and keep you always.’

‘Look, I think you –’

But Maria was no longer attending to him. Her face was averted and full of joyful expectation.

‘Ah, here comes the train!’ she said.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Maurizio and Mirella Barracco for their help and hospitality. Fiction is a demanding mistress, geography a hard taskmaster. As a result, I have been forced to appropriate the former Barracco baronial estates and hand them over to a dysfunctional clan who do not resemble the original owners of the property in any way whatsoever and are purely a product of my imagination.

Like Communism, the
latifondo
system has virtually vanished, but it determined the economic, social and political destiny of Calabria for an even longer period and left scars just as deep. My guide to this eroded enigma was Marta Petrusewicz, who was generous with her time and whose study
Latifundium
is a scholarly but highly readable account of the Barracco empire and a way of life that now seems as remote in time as the slave estates in pre-Civil War America, but in fact survived until the 1950s.

This book is dedicated to the
cumpagni
who meet at a hut in the hills near Cosenza for long evenings fuelled by food, wine, conversation and haunting songs where everyone joins in the chorus, even the English novelist who was once invited there, and then invited back. I owe them more than I can say. Ar’amici da Caseddra: Sabatino u Patruni, Giuvanni i Cacaprajeddra, Emanuele nonno Cariati, Ziju Micuzzu i Gangiulinu i Scarpaleggia, Damianu i Pacciarottu, Piatru Pittirussu, Brunu u Sonaturu, Pippo Ardrizzo e Saverio.

Author biography

Michael Dibdin was born in 1947, and attended schools in Scotland and Ireland and universities in England and Canada. He is the author of the internationally bestselling Aurelio Zen series, which includes
And Then You Die, Medusa
and
Back to Bologna
. He died in 2007.