And Then You Die: An Aurelio Zen Mystery by Michael Dibdin

Author:Michael Dibdin [Dibdin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780375421884
Amazon: 0375719253
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2002-05-21T05:00:00+00:00

LUCCA

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 café, 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.

‘I should invite you,’ he had replied.

‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the invitation is to my house.’

At these words, the ancient core of Zen’s cerebrum, the only part he had ever really trusted, told him that something significant was going to happen this evening. Hence the new – and, truth be told, ruinously expensive – linen suit, hence the tingle of pleasurable anticipation transforming the mundane scenes in the piazza of this sleepy provincial town into signs and symbols of powers still in effect from when the place had been a Roman amphitheatre. Unspeakable things must have happened in the space where those ragazzi were kicking their ball around, seemingly recklessly and with complete abandon, yet always ensuring that it did not cause any bother or inconvenience to any of the other players in the arena. That was part of the game, one of the rules.

Something was going to happen, of that he was sure, but he had no clear idea what, still less any sense that he could control the event in any decisive way. On his reappearance at the beach, Gemma had initially seemed a bit cool and distant. Zen had explained his abrupt absence as being due to ‘business’, to which she had responded by a curt nod, as if to say ‘If you have your secrets, so have I.’

Nevertheless, he could not help grudgingly admitting to himself that the prognostications were good. He hadn’t heard a word from the Ministry over his misuse of the high-tech communication device they had given him, sending out an all-points urgent alarm over some burglar breaking into his apartment in Rome.

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