And then you die

ISLANDA

It was when the light stopped dazzling him that Aurelio Zen realized that something odd had happened. He had ill-advisedly chosen a seat on the port side of the plane, so that the sun shone directly in on him, its low-inclined rays empowered with the brittle brilliance of February and the stultifying heat of August.

To make matters worse, it was all his own fault The place he had originally been assigned was on the cool, shady, norm-facing side of the plane, but this had not been apparent immediately after take-off, while the fat businessman in the next seat doing important things to a laptop computer had been. Spying an empty row of seats opposite, Zen had moved over, at which point the businessman promptly took possession of his original place and dumped all his voluminous gear in the place where he had been sitting, Theoretically, Zen supposed, he could call a cabin attendant and insist on being reseated in his rightful place, but it didn't seem worth the trouble. Along with everyone else, he had pulled down his blind when the cabin lights were turned off after lunch, but the insistent glow was still enough to bleach all substance from the ghostly figures cavorting about on the video screen in front of him.

Now, though, that intrusive radiance had disappeared. He raised the blind a fraction. No, the sun was no longer there. For a moment he wondered if it might have set, but the ocean vastness miles below still glittered in its reflected light. The sun must still be in the heavens, only it was now apparently aft of the plane. In which case they must be flying north. And even Zen's elementary knowledge of global geography included the information that America was not north of Europe.

He had spent the two weeks since his precipitate departure from Versilia on the small island of Gorgona, thirty-five kilometres off the Tuscan coast, which was mainly occupied by a prison camp for non-violent juvenile offenders. Following his flight in a military helicopter from Pisa, Zen had been accommodated in a spare wing of the spacious quarters reserved for the director of the camp. The latter turned out to be a tall, perpetually stooping man with a whispery voice, diffident to the point of defensiveness, who – according to some camp lore which Zen later picked up from one of the warders – had been the principal of a college in Bari until certain rumours about the sexual activities of the staff and pupils came to the attention of the authorities. 'So he got a job with the Grazia e Giustizia, and they sent him here,' the man commented with a wry grin. 'It keeps him off the street corner back on the mainland, and he certainly can't corrupt these thugs. They'll corrupt him, if anything. One of them offered me a blow job the other day for a cigarette end I was about to throw in the toilet. "What would you do for a whole pack?" I asked him. The little bastard looked me in the eye and said, "No disrespect, capo, but I'm not sure you could handle that level of service all by yourself. Better invite a couple of your pals along.'"

Zen ate his meals in the canteen, which served excellent food based on the products of the farm where the prisoners worked during the day. He had introduced himself to the staff as an academic ornithologist pursuing research into the behaviour of various rare local breeds of gulls. As he had hoped, the possibilities for conversational tedium opened up by this supposed professional interest ensured that no one ever addressed him. The rest of his time he spent exploring the maze of paths criss-crossing the island, which thanks to its 130-year vocation as a penal colony, remained completely unspoilt. The eastern slopes of the rugged interior were covered in pine forests like those which had once lined the coast, dimly visible through the haze to the east. Elsewhere, the prickly evergreen scrub of the macchia stretched as far as the eye could see, while occasional surviving groves of imported olives, holm oaks and sweet chestnuts provided shade. The air was utterly limpid, and as subtly perfumed as honey.

His idyll was disturbed only by thoughts of Gemma, and above all by the fact that he had been forced to leave so hurriedly, and was unable to contact her to explain why. All phone calls and correspondence had been strictly banned, so as far as Gemma was concerned Zen – or rather Pier Giorgio Butani – had simply vanished from Versilia overnight, without so much as a word of farewell. Even though he told himself repeatedly that the affair could never have amounted to anything, it remained a brutal, ugly and unsatisfying conclusion which left a very bitter taste behind.

He was entering his third week of seclusion when he received a message passed on by the director, instructing him to be packed and ready to leave at nine the following morning. Promptly at five minutes to that hour, a twin-rotor military helicopter identical to the one which had brought Zen to the island touched down in the parade ground where the inmates of the prison camp had to assemble each morning for their roll call and work assignments. He trudged across the concrete towards it, lugging the bags which had been shipped over on the ferry from Livorno shortly after his arrival. The sun was bright and clear in the cloudless sky, the air sweet and fresh, and until the helicopter's arrival the silence had been absolute. Zen felt as if he were being exiled from a paradise to which he could never return.

A matter of minutes later they were back at Pisa, at the military end of the airport, away from the commercial terminal. Here Zen was led to a small fixed-wing jet aircraft with no markings. His baggage was placed in the hold while he climbed a set of fold-down steps to the interior. This consisted of a single cabin with comfortable chairs facing a low central table. Seated in one of these was the young diplomat who had visited Zen during his convalescence.

He immediately stood up, shook hands with Zen and showed him into a seat, then produced a flask of excellent coffee and two cups. A moment later the stepladder was folded up, the door closed and the engines started.

'Forgive the rudimentary cabin service,' Zen's companion said as the aircraft started to taxi. 'On the other hand, the accommodation is superior to what you're likely to have for the rest of your journey, and at least you won't have to listen to the usual sermon about what to do in the unlikely event of a landing on water. I wonder if anyone's life has ever been saved by one of those cheap life-jackets they stuff away under the seats. It seems to me that all those safety announcements do is spread an irrational fear of flying, actually one of the safest forms of transport. Imagine if every time you got into a bus or train or taxi you had to listen to a lot of euphemistic waffle about what to do if the thing crashed! No one would ever leave home.'

The aircraft veered jerkily to the right, the engines roared, and before Zen knew it they were off the ground. He watched the coastline turning into a map for several minutes, then turned back to his companion, who was filling their cups of coffee. When he looked up at Zen, his professional mask was firmly back in place.

'I trust your stay on Gorgona was tolerable?' he said.

'Very pleasant, thank you.'

'It seemed the best short-term solution, given the events in Versilia.'

He looked at Zen with a serious expression.

'You're a very lucky man. The Mafia have now tried twice to kill you, and failed both times. Very few people can say that.'

'Is it certain that I was the intended target?'

The young diplomat gestured dismissively.

'Dottore, there has never been a recorded case of a murder on the beach in that area. A few knifings late at night down at the Viareggio end, and the odd settling of accounts between drug gangs, but otherwise nothing. Then a corporate lawyer with no known enemies, seated in the place which you had occupied for several weeks, is shot through the heart at point-blank range with a silenced pistol in broad daylight by a killer who nevertheless completely evades attention, even though the bagno was packed at the time.'

Zen nodded.

'I suppose you're right.'

'Of course we are. Which is why we've decided to move you yet again, this time to the United States.'

Catching Zen's look of alarm, he held up a soothing hand.

'The trial's not due to start for some time, but the safest option in the meantime seemed to be to get you out of the country and into the hands of the federal authorities. They have a lot of experience in protecting witnesses, and America is a very large country. To make matters even more secure, we are flying you not to New York, where the trial will take place, but to the west coast. There you'll be met by Italian-speaking agents of the FBI who will meet you airside, bypass all the immigration and customs procedures, and escort you to a safe house in a location which hasn't been disclosed even to us. It will be impossible for the Mafia to find you there.'

Zen looked out of the window again. The aircraft was passing over the Apennine chain. They were sending him away. He suddenly felt very small and helpless and desolate.

'Our immediate destination is Malpensa’ the diplomat continued. 'There you will transfer to the regular Alitalia flight to Los Angeles. You will be boarded separately from the other passengers, and without passing through passport control and all the other nonsense, and seated in the business-class cabin. I take it that you packed your bags yourself, that they have not been out of your possession at any time since then, and that they do not contain any explosive or inflammable substances.'

It was only after Zen had solemnly shaken his head that he realized that this had been intended as a joke.

'Have you any questions?' his companion enquired urbanely.

Zen thought for a moment.

'Yes’ he said. 'If I write a letter, will you post it for me?' The diplomat looked embarrassed. 'That would depend’ he replied. 'On what?'

'On whom you wished to write to and on what you intended to say.'

'In other words, you would have to read it.'

The young man gestured in a pained way.

'Somebody would’ he said. 'There's no point in trying to conceal that. There's a lot at stake in this operation in terms of national honour and prestige. I'm afraid it would be naive to pretend that any obvious precautions are going to be overlooked out of motives of delicacy.'

Zen nodded.

'Thank you for being candid. You could have lied. It doesn't matter, anyway. It was a stupid idea.'

When they arrived at Malpensa, Zen was transferred to an airport authority car and taken to a windowless lounge in a remote wing of the terminal. Here he had been left to cool his heels for over an hour, before being led back to the car and driven along a succession of vast concrete taxiways to a parked Alitalia 747 which was loading the in-flight food and beverage trolleys. Zen was loaded too, via a stepped ramp which was wheeled up to the aircraft's rear door. It all reminded him oddly of his experience on his return from Malta to Sicily, where he had been 'met at the airport – a strip of abandoned motorway – by members of the Ragusa Mafia for delivery to Don Gaspare Limina. Once again, he was just a package, to be shunted around and stowed away, just like the packages of drugs unloaded from the Malta flight Packages don't have feelings or opinions about the process this involves or their ultimate destination. Zen did, but they were equally irrelevant.

Some three hours later, twisting uncomfortably in his seat and worrying about the disappearance of the sun, these views had not changed. The prospect of finding himself in America filled him with terror. Like many Italians of his generation, he had never been abroad before, apart from day trips into Austria, Switzerland and recently Malta. He had never even owned a passport, and it seemed highly appropriate that the one he was now carrying should be in a false name. Il bel paese could offer the traveller every conceivable variety of landscape, climate, natural beauties and cultural treasures. Why waste a lot of time going to some foreign country where they used funny money, spoke some barbaric dialect, and couldn't be relied upon to make a decent cup of coffee, still less know how to cook pasta properly? It was-a stupid idea, however you looked at it. And if the foreign country in question was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, it became quite literally insane.

Zen's rule of thumb in these matters was very simple. In theory, at least, he was prepared to at least consider going to any country which had formed part of the Roman Empire. If it had also been part of the political or trading empire of the Venetian Republic, so much the better. Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, the Balkans, Austria, Bavaria, France, Iberia, North Africa – even England, at a pinch – he could contemplate as a hypothetical destination. Beyond those limits, he just didn't see the point. The Romans had been brutal bastards, but they were no fools. If they hadn't bothered to conquer Sweden or Poland; there was probably a good reason. And they certainly hadn't been to America. Maybe they didn't know it was there. Or perhaps they'd heard rumours, but just didn't care enough to investigate further. Either way, Zen was inclined to trust their judgement.

As if this wasn't enough to stoke his anxiety, there was the small matter of his testimony at the trial. The Ragusa thugs who had delivered Zen to Don Gaspare Limina had been given to understand that he would be killed, and so they had not bothered to conceal their faces. But thanks to the Catania clan's mercy, or rivalry, he had survived to find himself in the almost unprecedented position for a non-mafioso of being able to identify two prominent members of 'those pushy little squirts from Ragusa', as Limina had contemptuously referred to his upstart neighbours.

But life is a moving target, and never more so than for Mafia capi. Don Gaspare had been arrested in the course of a massive operation following the attempt on Zen's life, and was now serving a multiple life sentence in a particularly cold and primitive prison high in the mountains near Matera. Meanwhile Bernardo 'The Tractor' Provenzano, the last remaining Corleonesi chieftain, still unapprehended after almost forty years as a fugitive, had managed to impose his control on the relatively free market and regional competition which had started to evolve following the breakdown of the old hierarchies. Following a spate of violent deaths and a judicious selection of the classic unrefusable offers, the Ragusa clan had been brought under his control, but also under his protection. Whoever testified against Nello and Giulio Rizzo would be testifying against Cosa Nostra itself, and would be a marked man for the rest of his days.

For a while Zen toyed with the idea that maybe they weren't going to America after all, given that they seemed to be flying north, but a glance at the route map in the Alitalia magazine dispelled this illusion. It appeared that when aeroplanes went from place to place, they never did so directly, but took a long curving roundabout path by way of such outlandish localities as Baffin Island and Labrador. Perhaps it had something to do with the prevailing winds, as in the days of sailing ships. Or maybe it was a planned diversion designed to give everyone a chance to get some sleep. Overnight trains often went deliberately slowly so as not to arrive at some ungodly hour and decant the passengers half awake at a deserted station in a slumbering city.

He flipped through the magazine, pausing to skim an article about the city he was bound for. Apparently it had originally been settled by the Spanish, who named it El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles. There was a translation in Italian, 'The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels', and photographs of an old stone monastery gleaming white in the sunlight. Maybe Los Angeles wouldn't be so bad after all, he thought. It sounded like a pleasant, old-fashioned sort of place, and at least the people would all be Catholics. Although by no means a committed believer, Zen preferred to be surrounded by his own sort. Protestants were an enigma to him, all high ideals one minute and ruthless expediency the next. You knew where you were in a Catholic culture: up to your neck in lies, evasions, impenetrable mysteries, double-dealing, back-stabbing and underhand intrigues of every kind. With which comforting thought he lowered the blind again and dozed off.

The next thing he knew was being woken by the stewardess and asked to fasten his seatbelt for landing. Were they there already? Ten hours, the captain had said before take-off. Surely he hadn't been asleep that long? The cabin lights had been turned on and the other passengers looked restive, all except the businessman who had taken Zen's seat after he moved. He was sprawled back, his chair in full recline position, a blackout mask over his eyes and his mouth wide open as if snoring. The cabin attendant in the other aisle bent over him and said something and then, not getting any response, buckled up the man's safety belt.

The scene outside the window looked like nothing on earth, a rough first draft of creation fresh from the drawing board: deep ocean rollers going about their restless immemorial business, then breaking up in spectacular confusion on the ragged coastline, and beyond that an uneven wasteland torn to shreds by outcrops and crags of raw rock breaking the surface in random profusion. There were no buildings, no fields, no farms, no roads, no people. Nothing.

This was not how Zen had imagined America, but as the wheels touched down and they rolled to a roaring halt, he saw a row of large camouflaged military jets, each with the United States flag painted on the tail. They continued to taxi for some time, then drew to a halt. The sound of the engines died away and everyone stood up.

Zen manoeuvred his way politely through the throng towards the row of seats opposite, where his hand baggage was in the overhead locker. The man who had taken his seat was still lying there, mouth agape. He had had several rounds of cocktails and liqueurs before and after the lunch which Zen himself had refused after one glance, and was no doubt still sleeping them off.

Gradually the line of standing passengers started moving slowly forward, carrying Zen with it. The crew members at the door nodded, smiled, apologized, and assured everyone that the delay would be a brief one. It seemed to Zen that one of the male attendants, a slim young man with piercing eyes, gave him a particularly meaningful look, but that was neither here nor there. Everyone knew that i steward were all gay. Outside, the light seemed diminished, uncertain of itself. The air was harder than he was used to, almost fibrous in texture, and smelt strongly of seaweed. Zen wrapped his coat about him and stepped down the gangway to the waiting bus.

A short drive brought them to a low line of concrete buildings, where they were unloaded into what looked to Zen like the dance hall of a 'youth club' to which the church was trying to attract the disaffected teenagers of some no-hope town in Calabria. The unsmiling uniformed blonde men and women who had accompanied them on the bus now escorted them inside, then closed and locked the doors and drove away in the bus.

One of the side effects of Zen's brush with death had turned out to be that his lifelong fear of flying had been dispelled. This may have been due to the greater fears to which he had been exposed, or simply a case of familiarity breeding contempt; aeroplanes had been the preferred means of transport of the authorities in whose hands he had been ever since the 'incident’. At all events, he had now come to realize that flying was not at all frightening, just massively boring. And the most boring parts were not the flight itself, but the bits before it started and after it stopped. Entering the United States was evidently not going to be an exception. There was no sign of any passport officers, no sign of the luggage, no purposeful activity at all. Everyone just stood around.

Five minutes later, a second busload of passengers returned from the plane to swell the waiting throng, and some time after that a third, bearing a final contingent of stragglers. Meanwhile a tanker truck had approached the aircraft, and men in orange jumpsuits were hooking up a coil of large plastic piping to its underbelly. Zen turned to a young man standing next to him who had just finished a long mobile-phone call in Italian.

'Looks like they're filling her up’ he remarked, as a token conversational opening.

The man looked him blankly.

'Emptying her out, you mean. Christ knows when we'll get to LA at this rate. My people are going ballistic'

He punched more buttons and turned away.

'At first I thought it was a joke!' said a voice to Zen's left. 'Only on Alitalia!'

The speaker was a woman of fifty-something whose crisply tailored coat merely emphasized the puffiness of her features.

'Imagine diverting an international flight for a thing like that in this day and age!' she went on, rubbing her pudgy fingers together. 'It’s just a joke, a bad joke!'

Having failed to get a reply, the man Zen had spoken to first snapped his phone shut.

'The flight had over seven hours to go, there are three hundred and seventy-something passengers and crew aboard, and all but one of the lavatories were out of action. Think about it, signora. The alternative would have been no joke at all.'

The woman wrinkled her nose in disgust.

'I prefer not to think about such things,' she declared haughtily. 'It's disgusting, just disgusting. Only on Alitalia!'

An ambulance had now pulled up to the steps leading to the front of the aircraft. Two paramedics got out, unloaded a stretcher from the rear doors, and carried it up into the plane. Zen was desperate for a cigarette, and the woman's mention of lavatories, whatever it might have been intended to mean, made him realize that he might be able to get away with smoking one there. Looking around, he spotted two doors marked with the universal symbols for men and women.

Ten minutes later, with two Nazionali-worth of nicotine coursing through his blood, he emerged a changed man, totally confident about whatever questions the US immigration officials were going to throw at him, despite the fact that his FBI escort apparently hadn't shown up to whisk him through these formalities as had been promised. The only problem was that the immigration people apparently hadn't shown up either. In fact there was no sign of any activity whatsoever. All the passengers were just standing around looking glum, and staring at the men working on the plane from the tanker. Zen tried asking one of the uniformed blondes what was going on, but he or she would only reply in English, which Zen couldn't understand.

They had been there over an hour, during which time Zen made three further trips to the lavatory, when he heard someone calling what sounded like 'Pier Giorgio Butani!'. The speaker was another of the uniformed clones, and Zen's first thought was that that he was going to get arrested for smoking in a non-designated area. Then he realized that what must have happened was that the FBI agents had finally arrived. He showed his passport to the man, who nodded and gestured to Zen to follow him.

He was led through the crowd of passengers, all of whom looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and envy for having been singled out for special exemption from this communal purgatory. Zen gave them a politely superior smile. They went through a door and along a corridor, then into an office where two people were seated. One was a very striking young woman with the natural pale blonde hair which seemed to be as common here as it was rare in Italy. Zen's escort handed her the passport and then left. The other person was a thin, balding man in his late thirties with the startled expression of one who has been unexpectedly woken from deep sleep. He was wearing a hideous brown acrylic suit, battered ankle-length boots, a pink button-down shirt and a patterned yellow tie. The woman wore a dark blue uniform and white blouse buttoned at the collar. She rose and handed Zen a card which read: 'Borunn Sigurdardottir', with a line of incomprehensible script and some phone numbers beneath.

The man also stood up, searching in his pockets.

‘I should also have a card somewhere,' he said in heavily accented Italian. 'Maybe in my wallet. No, I must have left them in my other jacket. Wait a minute!'

He finally produced a crumpled business card with a telephone number and someone's name written on it.

'Sorry, other side,' the man told Zen, who turned the card over. It was embossed in blue and gold with the words 'Gruppo Campari: Campari, Cinzano, Cynar, Asti Cinzano, Riccadonna. Snaebjorn Gudmundsson.'

'What’s Campari got to do with it?' asked Zen.

"That s just my private business card,' the man explained. 'I'm also the Italian consul here.'

He indicated the uniformed woman.

'Signora Sigurdardottir is a police officer. She wishes to ask you a few questions. I will translate. Please sit here.'

Zen took a chair facing the desk and the interview began. The form was invariable: the woman spoke in a language utterly alien to Zen, the man followed with a question in Italian, Zen answered, the man spoke to the woman in the language she had used, and she made notes on a pad open in front of her.

'Signor Butani, I have already spoken to members of the crew on this flight. I have been given to understand by them that you were boarded ahead of all the other passengers, and through a separate entrance, bypassing the normal controls.'

'Yes.'

'Why was this?'

‘I have recently spent several months in hospital, recuperating after a serious accident. The ground staff had been informed of this fact, and kindly arranged for me to be given priority boarding.'

'What kind of accident?' 'A car crash.'

'What injuries did you sustain?'

'Serious concussion, head injuries, compression injuries to chest including two fractured ribs and a collapsed lung, limb fractures requiring pinning, plus the usual assortment of relatively minor fractures, lacerations and contusions.'

'Yet you now appear to be fully mobile.'

'The accident occurred almost a year ago. I still suffer from limb stiffness and some psychological effects, particularly when forced to spend long hours in a small, crowded space such as an aircraft. Fortunately I had contacts at Alitalia who were able to ensure that I was not inconvenienced any more than was strictly necessary.'

The female officer made lengthy notes. She was stunningly beautiful, Zen thought abstractly, and would certainly have cut a wide swathe through the herds of ragazzi on any Italian street. But somehow her beauty remained purely theoretical. He didn't feel remotely interested or excited by her.

'Do you have your boarding pass, please?' Borunn Sigurdardottir asked.

Zen found it in his wallet and handed it over.

This identifies your seat number as 24A,' the woman said.

'Yes.'

'But I understand from the crew members I interviewed that you were in fact seated in 25F.'

'That's right. There was someone sitting in the next seat to mine, and he didn't really seem the sort of person I wanted to be beside for ten hours unless I had to. The plane wasn't full, and I spotted an empty seat on the other side of the cabin, so once we were airborne I moved over there.'

'And the passenger who had been sitting next to you then took your original seat, is that correct?'

'It is. May I ask why any of this is of the slightest significance?'

The uniformed woman spoke rapidly in her incomprehensible tongue. It didn't sound to Zen's ears much like English – it was probably some regional American dialect, he supposed – but he had no difficulty in understanding the tone of voice. This was confirmed when the consul translated.

'Signora Sigurdardottir has indicated that she wishes you to confine yourself to answering her questions.'

Zen beamed ingratiatingly.

'Please assure la signora ispettrice of my willingness to cooperate to the full with her enquiry, whatever it may concern.'

Snaebjbrn Gudmundsson duly translated, or at least said something to the woman, who had been eyeing Zen sharply. She nodded, then asked another question.

'What is the purpose of your journey to the United States?'

'Business.'

'What kind of business?'

Here Zen paused for the first time, at a loss how to answer. On me one hand, this woman was an accredited member of an American law-enforcement body, and therefore entitled to the truth. On the other, she had accepted Zen's passport in his cover name at its face value, and therefore evidently wasn't of a sufficiently high status to have been briefed about the real purpose of his trip. As usual, the safest option seemed to be a lie. He justified the pause with a laugh.

'I was just wondering how best to describe it, but actually if s very similar to that of the consul here, except that I deal in much less well-known names. High-quality olive oils, cheeses, dried mushrooms, honeys and preserves from small organic producers. It's a low-volume, high mark-up business. If the restaurants and boutique stores want the best, they have to come to me, but equally I have to come over every so often to…'

Borunn Sigurdardottir held up her hand and Zen turned off the flow.

'Do you have any commercial competitors?' 'Virtually none. As I said, this is very much a niche market, and I've just about cornered it.' 'What about personal enemies?' 'None that I know of.'

The woman made more notes whose length seemed out of all proportion to Zen's replies. Then she raised her startling blue eyes to Snaebjorn Gudmundsson and spoke at some length.

The consul stood up and looked at Zen.

'Let's go,' he said.

'What about my passport?'

'She needs to keep it for now. I'll explain outside.'

Zen assumed that this meant outside in the corridor, or at best back in the packed lounge with the other waiting passengers, but to his surprise Gudmundsson led the way through a set of double doors into the fresh air.

And fresh it was, too! Tangy, salted gusts swept across the car park in front of them with such boisterous energy that they almost knocked the two men over. The consul pointed to the left and strode off towards a small red Fiat which he unlocked. Zen stowed his cabin bag in the boot and got in to the car.

'Now then, I think it's time I explained the situation,' Snaebjorn Gudmundsson said when they were sheltered from the wind.

'It’s time someone did,' Zen replied pointedly.

'Feel free to smoke,' Gudmundsson remarked. 'I can smell it on

your clothing. A very pleasant odour which brings back happy memories of my misspent youth. No thanks, I've given up myself, but I remain a child of the Sixties. E proibito proibire and all that. So please go ahead.'

Zen lit a cigarette and rolled down the window slightly, creating an instant gale inside the car. The consul closed Zen's window and opened his own, on the leeward side.

'As you know,' he said, 'your flight was diverted here due to technical causes of a routine nature. Normally it would just have been a question of a few hours' delay at most for the necessary maintenance work to take place. But at the point when the passengers were being disembarked to facilitate this work – unblocking toilets can be a very smelly business – one of them failed to respond to the directions of the cabin crew. A doctor was summoned and subsequently pronounced him dead.'

"The one who was sitting in my place,' said Zen.

'Exactly. A certain Angelo Porri. This has placed the authorities here in a very difficult position. They of course have no wish to delay anyone's journey any longer than is necessary, but in the unlikely event that the cause of death turns out not to have been natural, everyone who was on board the plane will naturally become an important witness if not a potential suspect.'

'Yes, I see.'

'The corpse has been taken to a hospital in the city, where it will shortly undergo a post-mortem. Once that is concluded, you and your fellow passengers will most likely be free to leave.'

'And in the meantime?'

'For the time being, the rest of the passengers will remain in the holding area. They will be told that the repairs are taking longer than had been anticipated.'

Zen braved the wind long enough to throw his butt out of the window.

'So I'm being singled out for special treatment. Why?'

Snaebjorn Gudmundsson started the engine.

'This afternoon I received two telephone calls relating to my position as Italian consul. This in itself was highly unusual. I have to say that the position is an honorary one which I fill partly because it gives me a certain cachet in business and government circles here that is useful to my job with the Gruppo Campari. Even that is largely a part-time activity. My real work is quite different.' 'And what’s that?' 'I'm an artist.'

They drove out of the car park on to a dual-carriageway road.

'The first call was from the police here at the airport’ Snaebjorn Gudmundsson went on. 'They explained that an Alitalia flight had been diverted…'

'That’s the second time you've used that word’ Zen pointed out. 'Diverted from where?'

'From its flight in mid-Atlantic, of course’

Zen laughed.

'So what is this, Atlantis?'

'This is Iceland’

'I don't see any ice.'

'No, Greenland's the icy one. Some people say the original settlers deliberately named them like that, so as to send potential invaders to the wrong address. At any rate, as I was saying, the first call I received was from the airport authorities. They simply asked me to be prepared to come out to Keflavik in case any of the Italian passengers required assistance or refused to reboard the plane. People sometimes react in odd ways to emergency landings, even if the reason is completely routine’

'Someone said the lavatories were blocked. How did that happen?'

'The mind boggles. But apparently they were, and you can imagine what the result would have been. Anyway, the really interesting call I got was the second one. That was from the Foreign Ministry in Rome, which just about knocked me over. From time to time someone from the embassy in Copenhagen pops up to check that I'm not fiddling my expenses, but as far as direct contact goes that's about it. And here was a senior official at the Ministry -I didn't catch his name, but you could tell by his manner that he wasn't a subordinate – phoning me in person to brief me about a certain Dottor Pier Giorgio Butani who was travelling to Los Angeles on the diverted plane.'

Zen looked stolidly out of the window at the landscape through which they were passing, an undifferentiated jumble of jagged rocks of every size and shape separated by patches of boggy moor.

'What did they tell you about me?' he asked at last.

'Just that you were a VIP and that I was to accord you every possible assistance and protection during your enforced stopover here. I am not quite sure what they meant by "protection", but since it now appears that the delay to your flight may not be as brief as was first thought, I have obtained permission from the police to spare you a return to that squalid waiting area and take you somewhere more comfortable, Borunn Sigurdardottir will call on my cellphone if the flight's cleared for departure, and I can have you back at the airport in twenty minutes.'

They were now entering the outskirts of a settlement whose planned sprawl was more orderly but no more attractive than that of the eroded lava fields through which they had just passed. It all looked quiet neat, functional and dull. These outer suburbs were succeeded by an older section, equally sterile and monotonous, but with buildings of stone and brick rather than concrete.

They went to a cafe on a pedestrianized street in what appeared to be the centre. Some people at the next table were eating slabs of pallid fish or meat smothered in an anonymous sauce, with boiled potatoes and a scattering of shrivelled vegetables. Zen thought longingly of the lasagne and the beef he had turned up his nose at on the plane, then ordered a cheese sandwich and a beer and tried to collect his thoughts. Despite his earlier volubility, Snaebjorn Gudmundsson now seemed quite prepared just to sip his coffee and not interrupt this process. Indeed, most of the other couples in the cafe" were sitting in a profound but seemingly unstressful silence which in Italy would have been the height of bad form.

There was a lot of information to process. First of all, he was in a remote northern country of which he knew absolutely nothing, starting with its exact geographical location. Secondly, the man who had taken his seat on the plane was now dead of causes as yet unknown. The parallels with the fate of Massimo Rutelli were disturbingly obvious, although fortunately not as yet to the Icelandic police. Thirdly, it was unclear when or even whether he would be free to resume his journey, and what action if any his sponsors at the Foreign Ministry might take about this. But what was finally most disturbing was that there was absolutely nothing that he could personally do to affect the outcome. Such powerlessness induced both frustration and anxiety. Zen had always found that happiness came from throwing himself into some, activity, even if it turned out later to have been futile. Work was relaxing, whereas this enforced, problematic and conditional idleness threatened to wreck his nerves in no time at all.

He had just reached this dispiriting conclusion when a series of loud electronic beeps sounded out the opening strains of the Italian national anthem. The other patrons of the cafe" turned with expressions of icy disapproval towards Snaebjorn Gudmundsson, who plucked out his cellphone and bolted for the door. An elderly man at the next table with a head like a block of wood squared off with an axe, prolific silver-black hair, the regulation-issue laser-blue eyes, monster teeth and no neck at all looked at Zen and said something incomprehensible but evidently uncomplimentary. Zen instinctively spread his palms wide, tossed his head back, shrugged, and replied 'Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh!', thus indicating that while he entirely agreed with the other man's deprecation of the indiscriminate use of mobile phones in public places, he was not his brother's keeper, still less Snaebjorn Gudmundsson's, and couldn't be held responsible for the tatter's thoughtlessness. The Icelander regarded this pantomime with growing alarm, then pointedly turned his back.

Zen followed suit, looking out of the plate-glass window to the street, where Gudmundsson was talking animatedly into the phone under the scrutiny of some swarthy vagrant standing barely a metre away and staring intently up at him. Finally the consul concluded his conversation and returned inside.

'Bad news, I'm afraid,' he said, sitting down at their table again. 'The results of the post-mortem were inconclusive. They want to consult the senior pathologist at the university, but he's away at a conference and won't return until tomorrow.'

'You mean we all have to stay here until then?'

'Not all. The police have decided that if a crime has taken place, the passengers seated outside the cabin in which the victim was seated can be ruled out. They and the crew are being allowed to leave tonight. The others, including you, must remain until a final verdict has been reached on the cause of death.'

Zen sighed disgustedly.

'But you have your orders from the Farnesina!' he protested. 'To expedite my departure in any way you can.'

'Unfortunately that exceeds my powers. All I can do is to offer you a comfortable bed and hospitality at my house until this matter is sorted out. I suggest we go there now, unless you'd like to return with me to the airport to collect your bags. They have been unloaded from the hold and are in storage.'

Zen thought for a moment.

'Did you tell the police that I would be staying with you?' he demanded.

'Yes. They naturally wanted to be assured of your whereabouts.'

'Who was that street person who was listening in to your conversation?' 'Who do you mean?'

'Some low-life standing there right beside you, listening to every word you said. You must have seen him.'

'I didn't. I was probably paying too much attention to what the police were telling me. But what about him?'

Zen shrugged.

'Nothing, probably. He just disturbed me somehow. I don't want everyone in town knowing where I'm going to be sleeping this evening.'

Snaebjorn Gudmundsson stared at him.

'You have reason to believe that you're in danger?' he asked.

Zen realized that he'd stumbled.

'A man in my position inevitably makes a lot of enemies,' he replied blandly. 'But never mind, I'm probably imagining the whole thing. I'm afraid this unexpected visit here has rather shaken me.'

'Of course, of course! So then, will you come with me, or go straight to my house?'

'Neither. I'd like to go out and walk around a bit, then meet you at your house later. I need some exercise, and some time to think.'

Gudmundsson looked doubtful for a moment, then nodded resignedly. 'Very well.' He got out his wallet.

'I'd better give you some money.'

'I can change some.'

'Not at this time of night.'

Zen glanced at the window again.

'What time is it?' he asked.

'A quarter to nine.'

'But when does it get dark?'

'It doesn't. The sun just dips briefly below the horizon around midnight and then comes up again about two in the morning. In between, there's a couple of hours of dusk, but no darkness. In the winter, of course, if s the other way round.'

He wrote something on the back of the receipt returned by the waitress, and handed it to Zen along with a couple of banknotes.

'That's my address and phone number,' he said. 'Just hand it to a taxi driver when you've had enough, or call me if you want company.'

Outside in the street, they separated. Zen drifted off, wondering at the invariable grey light. Summer days here in the north evidently didn't have the classic three-act structure that he'd grown up with. They just maundered on like some experimental film in which the whole point is that nothing ever happens. It was then that Aurelio Zen decided to do something he had not done for a very long time indeed, so long that the person who had done it seemed almost as much of a stranger as the genetically modified strangers thronging by in the street He decided to get quite deliberately and totally drunk.

He took out the banknotes which the consul had given him. They came to fifty thousand kronur, whatever that might amount to. He went into the first bar he came to and ordered a vodka. This was not something he normally drank, but it was one of those useful international products, like taxis, which were available everywhere and always called die same thing in every language. The vodka was served ice cold in a small shot glass. Zen downed three of them in short order, then headed out to the streets in search of more bars.

He found them quite easily. Indeed, after a while they began to find him. They were all more or less the same; dingy, poky, smelly little burrows with bad lighting and deafening music. But after a while he started to feel quite at home, despite the fact that the other clients were all half a metre taller than him and at least twenty years younger, with the studiously bored air of modern youth everywhere. On the streets he had noticed more of the short, dark, unkempt people like the one he had seen eavesdropping on Snaebjorn Gudmundsson's phone conversation, but they didn't seem to come into the bars. Couldn't afford the prices, probably. They looked a bit like the East European refugees and migrants flooding into Italy from Albania and Romania, another race entirely, wearing clothes from another era.

That was outside, though, where Zen no longer had any desire to go. He'd found a cosy nook at the back of a subterranean den where a few youngsters were half-heartedly dancing, and a lissom blonde refilled his shot glass as soon as he emptied it.

Later on the action on the dance floor hotted up considerably, until Zen seemed to be the only person in the place not flinging himself about to the battering rhythms of the sound system. Several of the girls were now dancing topless, their breasts jiggling about in a touching, natural, slightly comical way. Their partners too had stripped down to the absolute minimum. The air was heavy with the smell of sweat and testosterone.

Later still, the place was half empty, the lissom blonde ignored him, and the lights came brutally to life. Zen consulted his watch, but it was still on Italian time. Anyway, they were evidently closing. He got to his feet and shuffled over to the door. The streets were even more packed than the bar had been earlier. No one was dancing, but a couple of drunken scuffles broke out and were quickly subdued. The little, dark, shabbily dressed people were much in evidence too, looking on at the proceedings with that sly, half-mocking expression they all had.

Zen's first priority was to find a taxi and get himself driven to the consul's house, but that was not so simple. The streets where he was were all pedestrianized, and his enquiries were either ignored or elicited a broad gesture and a string of verbiage he couldn't understand. In the end he set off walking along the main street, confident that sooner or later he would find a taxi rank.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a car in a side street with an illuminated sign on top. Someone was getting out of it. Zen started to run, but he was still some way away when the taxi revved up and drove quickly away. The person who had got out of it entered a nearby block of flats and closed the door. Disheartened, Zen turned back towards the main street. He was still some twenty metres away from it when the figure came rushing at him out of an alley to his right, a knife in its hand.

Zen's drunkenness saved him initially. He was so startled that he fell over backwards, landing heavily on his buttocks as the assailant swerved past. It was one of the little dark men he had been seeing all evening. He turned now, the knife held out, and walked back to where Zen was lying sprawled on the paving stones. The blade of the knife gleamed in the light from the nearest street lamp, but the man's face was in shadow.

Tackling a man on the ground is a tricky business. You have to stoop to his level to get anything done, and if you do you lose your only advantage. Aurelio Zen was aware of this, having been in this situation before, but playing the other role. His attacker, oddly enough, was also aware of it. He made no further berserk moves, did not hurl himself on his prone victim, just stood there, sizing up the situation.

Zen was still drunk, but drunks can often focus very effectively on just one thing, which was all he had to do at present. So when the dark figure made its move, aiming a kick at Zen's ribs, he was ready. He flipped over, away from the blow, and was on his hands and knees before the other had regained his balance. The next assault was a straight lunge aimed at Zen's chest, which he parried at the cost of slit knuckles, then rose to his feet, using his assailant's impetus to throw him clear and to one side.

They were both standing now. Taking the initiative, Zen moved in and aimed a kick at the hand holding the knife, following up with the heel of his right hand slammed up into the man's jaw. He felt completely fearless, even when the swung blade returning stung him on the shoulder. Off balance but totally in control, he stripped the man's shin with the instep of his left foot, causing a satisfying shriek, then stepped back to consider his next move.

It was only then that he noticed the siren and the flashing lights at the far end of the street. A moment later a white Volvo with blue and red stripes and a yellow shield on the door pulled up. Disconcerted, Zen looked round for his attacker. He was nowhere to be seen. Two uniformed patrolmen got out of the car.

One of them spoke to Zen, who shrugged and replied in Italian, 'Sorry, I don't understand.' One policeman inspected Zen's hand, which was covered in blood. The other bent down and picked up a knife from the pavement. He got out his radio and made a call, then the two men led Zen over to their car.

The next hour and a half was spent in the emergency department of a hospital, where the injuries to Zen's hand and shoulder were cleaned and the former stitched. At a certain point he remembered the consul's card and the receipt with his address, which he handed to the hospital staff. When Snaebjorn Gudmundsson showed up in person, he initially seemed more agitated by Zen's lack of agitation than by what had actually happened. Zen just ignored him. He was feeling better than he had for months. He had no idea what had happened, still less why. That didn't matter. Something had, and he had dealt with it. He was in charge again, engaged with the real world, making and breaking. It felt good, and he wasn't going to let some weedy, neurotic diplomat tell him otherwise. In fact it was only with the greatest difficulty that Gudmundsson managed to convince Zen to come home with him and go to bed rather than take to the streets and see if there were any bars still open, but in the end he prevailed. They drove somewhere, Zen got out, they went inside, there was a bed, he lay down.

He awoke in a bright, hard light. His shoulder and hand ached abominably, but neither could begin to match his head. He was lying fully clothed on a narrow wooden bed in a musty room filled with cardboard boxes. He had no idea where he was, or any memory of how he got there. The world was a painful enigma whose solution, if there was one, eluded him utterly.

Some time later, Snaebjorn Gudmundsson appeared with a cup of tea in his hand.

'Feeling better?' he asked in an excessively loud and patronizingly cheery tone. 'Bathroom's to the left. I'll be next door when you're ready to talk.'

Twenty minutes later, Zen shambled into the room next door. It was a bleakly austere space stretching from one end of the small one-storey house to the other. The walls were white, the floor bare wooden boards, the furnishings hard and minimal. Since the front door was at one end, he must have crossed the room to get to the bed where he had woken up, but he had absolutely no memory of this.

'So how are you feeling?' Snaebjorn Gudmundsson demanded, putting down the book he had been reading.

'Like hell,' Zen replied succinctly.

'Yes, well, you seemed a bit the worse for wear last night, I have to say. Apart from your various injuries, I mean.' 'I drank a lot.'

'Expensive business here in Iceland.' 'I'll pay you back.'

'Oh, don't worry about that. You're evidently a VIP. I'll bill the embassy’

Zen collapsed in a chair made of wooden slats on a stainless steel frame. It was as uncomfortable as it looked. 'Did they find the person who attacked me?' he asked. Gudmundsson looked at him oddly.

'No, they didn't. You say he was dark, unkempt looking and short?'

'Shorter than me, and I'm shorter than most people here.'

"That's very unusual. Our genetic pool here in Iceland is remarkably homogenous. Or to put it another way, everyone's related to everyone else. We don't have a distinct class of shorter, dark-skinned people, like the Lapps in Finland.'

"They must be immigrants.'

'That s not really a problem here. We're an island, of course, which helps. The points of entry are strictly controlled and we're very particular about who we let in. Excessively so, some might say, especially if if s a matter of non-Northern European individuals. When the United States military applied to build Keflavik as a base during the war, the government agreed on condition mat no black servicemen be stationed there.'

Zen waved dismissively.

'Well, all I know is that I saw plenty of these people about last night. And this was before I got drunk. Like that one I told you I saw standing beside you outside the cafe yesterday, while you were talking on the phone. They looked different, they dressed different and they acted different. And one of them tried to kill me.'

An odd look came into Gudmundsson's eyes.

'You say they dressed differently. How?' Zen shrugged.

'I don't know. Like people who had just arrived from some remote village in the country. They were wearing coarse, homespun garments, badly cut and badly put together. They looked completely out of place, like the gypsies in Italy, but it didn't seem to bother them. On the contrary, they were staring at the other people in a really blatant way, with this sort of mocking, malicious smile.'

Snaebjorn Gudmundsson nodded slowly, considering all this. Then he stood up and beckoned.

'Come this way a moment’

He walked over to the front door and opened it on to the tiny patch of garden that divided the house from the street. The consul looked both ways, then turned to Zen.

'How many people are there in sight at the moment?'

Zen counted rapidly.

'Eleven,' he replied.

'Ah’ said Gudmundsson.

'Why?'

The consul ushered him back inside and closed the door.

'The reason why the police were on the scene so quickly last night was that all of downtown Reykjavik is monitored by a system of closed-circuit video cameras connected to viewing screens at the central police station, to deter and control violence among the roving packs of drunken youths who often go on revelling until five or six in the morning at this time of year. The patrol cars are parked strategically around the perimeter of the area, and can reach any trouble spot in seconds.'

Zen took out his cigarettes and looked questioningly at his host, who nodded.

'The street in which you claim to have been attacked…'

'What do you mean, "claim"? Look at my hand! Why do you think I needed all these stitches?'

'Let’s leave that for a moment. At all events, the street is not very well lit, and the nearest camera was quite a long way from where this happened. Nevertheless, one of the police officers on duty saw you fall over and then start lashing out with your feet and fists, and called in a patrol car. What he didn't see, and what re-examination of the video tape has failed to reveal, is any evidence of a second person.'

'Are you calling me a liar?' demanded Zen, really angry now.

'Not at all. I'm merely telling you what the police report stated.'

'You think my idea of a good time is to get so drunk I see people who aren't there and then slash my hand and shoulder with a knife I brought along for the purpose?'

'Are you drunk now?' asked the consul.

'No! Just horribly hung over.'

'Of course. Just a moment.'

He walked out to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a small glass filled with a brownish liquid. 'Drink this.'

'What is it?' Zen asked, sniffing the liquid. It smelt indescribably foul.

'Just drink it. Knock it back in one. You'll feel much better.'

Zen did as he was told. A sharp burning sensation in his mouth and throat was abruptly followed by the most intense onrush of nausea he had ever experienced. He knew without the slightest doubt that he was going to vomit massively there and then, all over the consul's hardwood floor. Then it passed, and was succeeded by a warm glow. The consul nodded.

'If s an infusion of hakarl, decomposed shark's meat pickled in raw alcohol In about five minutes you'll feel much better. But it was important to check whether you were still suffering the active effects of the drinks you had last night before evaluating the results of my little test.'

'What test?'

'When I asked how many people there were in the street.'

'I told you, there were eleven.'

Snaebjorn Gudmundsson regarded him solemnly.

'I only saw eight,' he said.

Zen laughed harshly, getting some of his own back at last.

'Maybe you need glasses!'

'There are no glasses made for this.'

'For what?'

Gudmundsson sighed.

'We call it fylgja. If s a special faculty. People who have it are called skyggn. All children are skyggn until they're about five, and many after that Almost all lose it when they reach puberty, but a few people retain the gift into adult life. It appears that you may be one of them, Dottor Zen. If so, you are only the second foreigner I've ever heard of with this faculty.'

'I have no idea what you're talking about'

The consul laughed.

'And when I tell you, you're going to think that I'm drunk. But try and accept that this is a well-attested phenomenon. What it means, of course, is another matter. If s like talking about religion. You may believe in God or you may not, but if s a perfectly respectable intellectual position to hold that God does not exist and that religion is simply a tissue of meretricious falsehoods designed to give people an illusory sense of purpose. What is not a respectable intellectual position is to hold that people do not have religious experiences. You follow me?'

'Whaf s all this got to do with whatever it is you said I had or was?'

'If s completely analogous. Some people believe in the existence of the huldufolk, others don't. Their existence is therefore debatable. What is not debatable is that there are people who claim to be able to see them.'

'See who, for God's sake?'

'The "hidden people". Traditionally, they have been regarded as a race of supernatural beings who live all around us, but in a parallel dimension which is only perceptible to those who are skyggn.'

'But you surely don't believe in this nonsense, do you?' Snaebjorn Gudmundsson shrugged.

‘I don't have fylgja, so if s all rather theoretical. I'm simply trying to come up with a rational explanation for what happened to you last night the people you saw in the street, and the one you say attacked you.'

'A rational explanation based on totally irrational premises. If the police camera didn't pick him up, if s because he was dark skinned and wearing dark clothing, that's all.'

The consul laughed.

'Iceland is an odd place, dottore. Geologically, if s the youngest landmass on the planet Think of it as the pizza country. If s about the same shape, and hot out of the oven. Up north they have geysers, volcanoes, lava flows. You can stand there and watch the terrible process of the earth being made, right in front of your eyes, while across the fjord the glaciers are calving icebergs. But enough of all this abstruse talk. How about some lunch?'

Zen shivered visibly.

‘I couldn't eat a thing.'

And he meant it. He was hungry, but not for anything you could get here. He needed food for his soul. He needed to go home, before he crossed to the other side of the shadow line Snaebjdrn Gudmundsson had described, and became one of the huldufolk himself, an invisible alien haunting the streets of this unreal city where it was always midday on the thirtieth of February.

'I think I'll go and lie dpwn for a bit,' he said. 'I didn't sleep well last night.'

Gudmundsson nodded.

'Of course. I'll let you know if there are any developments.' He was awakened by a light tapping at the door. It opened to reveal the consul. 'You have a visitor,' he said.

Zen rolled up off the bed. It was like being back in hospital, he thought. People came in and out of your room and told you what to do next. He had been living like this for almost a year now. When would he sleep in his own bed again? But where was that bed? Rome, he supposed, but the idea didn't carry complete conviction.

His visitor turned out to be Borunn Sigurdardottir, the policewoman who had interviewed him at the airport the day before. She nodded at him and made a short speech which Snaebjorn Gudmundsson translated.

'She brings good news. The chief pathologist has now confirmed the preliminary findings of the autopsy performed yesterday. His conclusion is that Signor Angelo Porri died of natural causes, a heart attack to be precise. The police therefore have no further interest in the matter, and you are free to go, with apologies for the unavoidable delay.'

Inspector Sigurdardottir handed over the passport in the name of Pier Giorgio Butani to Zen. Then she flashed Zen a brief smile, like a shaft of sunlight glancing off an ice field, and left.

'Well, that’s all very well' Zen said testily to Snaebjdrn Gudmundsson. ‘I can leave, but how? The only ticket I've got is on Alitalia. Do they fly to Iceland?'

'No.'

'Then what am I supposed to do, have them divert another plane to pick me up?'

‘I imagine that they will have made arrangements with another airline to fly you to America. We can check with the airport. But the first step is to inform the embassy in Copenhagen. I'll do that on the land line in my study.'

He returned a few minutes later.

'Well, that’s done. They're going to contact Rome. We're to await instructions.' A silence fell.

'Where did you learn Italian?' asked Zen.

'When I was a student in Florence, many years ago.'

'Studying what?'

'Art.'

'Oh yes, you said you were an artist.' 'Yes.'

Zen glanced around the stridently bare walls. 'So you sell all your work?' 'None of it.' 'None?'

'No. If s no good, you see.'

Zen smiled politely.

'I'm sure you're just being modest'

'Not at all. I may not be much of an artist, but I'm an excellent judge of art. I sometimes wish I weren't. It might make it possible to believe that my stuff had some value. But it doesn't. I know that'

'But you keep working?' 'Oh yes. What else would I do?' 'So where are your paintings?' Snaebjorn Gudmundsson stood up. 'Would you like to see them?'

Zen's heart sank. The last thing he wanted was a guided tour round some amateur dauber's studio. Fortunately the telephone rang next door.

'It’s Rome’ said the consul, reappearing in the doorway a moment later. Tor you.'

Gudmundsson's study, by contrast with the living area, was a jumble of papers and files. Zen seated himself at the desk and picked up the phone.

'Pronto.'

'Buona sera, dottore. This is not a secure line, so ifs important that we do not identify ourselves or be too specific about the matters under discussion.'

'I understand’

'We have spoken before, most recently on your connecting flight from Pisa to Milan.' 'Ah yes.'

'I understand that you have had a tiresome time recently, but that everything is now sorted out’

'That s right. What’s not clear is how I'm to continue my journey.'

'The answer is that you aren't.' 'I'm not?'

'No. There have been developments. In fact we have reason to suppose that they may have pre-dated your departure, but our American counterparts have only just seen fit to inform us.'

'I hope there's no lack of trust implied.'

'If so, it would be totally unjustified. There have been no breaches of security this end, I can assure you.'

'That s good to know. So if one of these attempts on my life finally succeeds, I can die secure in the knowledge that the leak was of non-Italian origin.'

'Please don't be facetious. Ifs also most inappropriate to mention such matters on this connection. In any case, there will be no more such episodes.'

'That's certain, is it?'

'Absolutely certain. As I said, there have been developments, as a result of which the event at which you were to participate in the United States has now been postponed and may well be cancelled altogether.'

Zen hardly dared to believe what he had heard.

'In short, one of the two principal protagonists has decided to co-operate with our side’ the Foreign Ministry man went on. 'As a result, your participation has been rendered superfluous. There is therefore no need for you to attend, and no risk that any further attempts will be made to prevent you from doing so.'

Zen laughed lightly.

'It was Nello, right?' he said.

'Please!'

'All right, but it was, wasn't it?' 'Well, yes. How did you know?'

'He talked to me in the car, while they were driving me to meet you know who. He explained how they lit the landing strip for the aircraft. The other man told him to shut up. I could tell he was a talker then. Any competent cop or magistrate could have got him to open up eventually. He was one of those people who just can't bear to be silent’

'Well, that’s what happened. And you'll be pleased to know that there's some evidence that the incident at Versilia may have been a contributing factor. In their view, it seems, that was their last hope of preventing your appearance at the event in America, and when it failed the outcome was preordained. So one of the protagonists, the one you mentioned, apparently decided to make a deal. His cooperation in return for a new identity and a new life over there’

'Any chance of that for me?'

'Better still, you can have your old one back. You're to return immediately for a complete briefing at your normal place of employment. Our embassy in Copenhagen will send full details to the consul shortly. I wish you a pleasant journey and a safe return home.'

When Zen reappeared in the living room, Snaebjorn Gudmundsson looked at him curiously.

"The embassy in Denmark is going to contact you about my travel arrangements,' Zen told him.

'Ah’

'Basically, I'm going back to Italy.' ‘I see.'

'Immediately’

The consul nodded his understanding of the rules of this game. He glanced at his watch. 'Well, that'll probably be the two-thirty to Copenhagen.'

Zen looked surprised.

'What time is it now?'

'Half past ten. Plenty of time.'

'It can't be only half past ten! It must be noon at least.'

'No, half past ten in the evening. The flight's in the early morning. We're so remote, you see. It takes three hours to get to Europe, and we're on British time, so that's another hour. If you want to get to a business meeting on time, you have to leave after midnight. But don't worry, I'll get you there in plenty of time.'

He looked at Zen and smiled.

'You asked to see my paintings. Come this way.'

Zen, who had completely forgotten this aspect of their conversation, followed the consul into his kitchen, then out into the back yard of the house, a concreted rectangle containing a large pile of black ash.

'There they are,' said Gudmundsson. 'The most recent ones, that is. The others are feeding the flowers in the beds at the front. What do you think?'

Zen gave a nervous smile.

'Are you some sort of performance artist?' he asked.

He had heard of people like that, who did things associated to his mind with circus performers and children's entertainers.

'Well, maybe I am,' Gudmundsson replied. 'I hadn't thought of it that way. This business has disrupted my normal schedule, of course, but on the whole I work hard, six hours a day at least. And at the time I'm always convinced that I've finally managed to produce something worthwhile. But then when it's finished I look at it and realize that I was wrong. If s just another botched job, one more piece of ugly nonsense. And God knows there's enough ugly nonsense in the world already. So I bring it out here and burn it.'

Zen gave what he hoped would be perceived as a judicious nod.

'If s like the Hippocratic Oath,' the consul went on with a face as straight as a priest. 'All would-be artists should be made to sign it. Rule number one, "Do No Harm". If I can't achieve something even vaguely resembling the sort of art I saw every day while I lived in Italy, the very least I can do is not clutter up the planet with any more trendy bric-a-brac. It seems that all I can manage is the clever, and who needs that? We're all clever these days. We're all so fucking clever. I'd rather make a nice bonfire and at least feel clean afterwards.'

He closed the door and led the way back inside.

'I'd better call the embassy in Copenhagen and find out about your flights.'

Zen went back to the storeroom where he had spent the night, and packed up his bags. When he reappeared next door, Gudmundsson was already there.

'Right They've booked you on the two-thirty to Copenhagen, as I thought, with an onward connection to Rome. You're to contact someone named Brugnoli on arrival. The tickets will be waiting at the SAS counter at Keflavik. If you're all set, we might as well go’

Zen lugged his bags back to the car and they set off. As soon as they were past the outskirts of the bleak, cheerless town, Zen felt his spirits rise. He still felt half drunk and totally disorientated, and had had no time to work out the implications of what had happened. But all that mattered was that he was leaving. He had never felt such a visceral urgency to get away from any place.

Suddenly the car drew in to the side of the highway.

'Do you see that rock over there?' asked the consul, pointing.

It was a massive outcropping of volcanic basalt, worn and weathered by the elements into myriad fantastic gullies and crevices.

'Thafs where they're supposed to live, in rocks like that one, hidden away in the crannies and crevasses. Allegedly they can be very vindictive if disturbed.'

Zen glanced at the consul, who restarted the car and drove on.

'The huldufolk, I mean,' he explained. 'There's a rock much like that on the property where my family's summer house is. My father was a member of parliament for the Alpyduflokkurinn, a very radical, left-wing party. He was also a close friend of Halldor Laxness, our Nobel Prize-winning writer, and generally prided himself on being a progressive, forward-looking individual. But when we had a new driveway put in to the summer house, he made the builders go all the way round that rock rather than blow it up, even though it added almost half a kilometre to the length of the drive, and of course to the cost "You surely don't believe in that superstitious nonsense?" I asked him mockingly. I've never forgotten his reply. "Of course not," he said. "But you can't be too careful.'"

They drove on for a while in silence. At last the structures of the airport appeared in the distance. Zen lit a cigarette and turned to Gudmundsson.

'You said that I was only the second case you're heard of where a foreigner had this…'

'Fylgja. Yes.'

'Who was the other?'

Gudmundsson laughed.

'Ifs a droll story. I told you that Keflavik was originally built as a military base during the Second World War. Well, one of the servicemen stationed there started showing symptoms of the condition, going on about people that no one else could see and so on. A lot of those rocks were torn up and blown apart to lay out the runways and base facilities, and so many of the "hidden people" must have been made homeless. At any rate, the medics who examined the man had never heard of the huldufolk, of course. They decided the guy was crazy and shipped him back to the States. This was just before the Normandy landings.'

Zen smiled.

'Lucky man!'

'Not really. The ship he was on got torpedoed by a U-boat off Newfoundland and went down with all hands.'

The parking lot at the airport was almost empty. Snaebjorn Gudmundsson pulled up right in front of the handsomely sterile terminal building.

'Now before we part,' he said, turning to Zen, 'I would suggest that you bear in mind what happened to that GI.'

Zen frowned.

'How do you mean?'

Gudmundsson sighed.

'I absolutely believe everything that you told me about what happened to you last night. I also give you my word that I shall not reveal it to anyone else. I strongly advise you to do the same. What may seem quite plausible here in Iceland will sound like arrant lunacy back in Italy. People will remember that car accident you had, and begin to wonder if the injuries you sustained were purely physical. Do you see what I mean?' Zen nodded.

'Yes, yes. Of course. I thought you meant something else.' 'What?'

'When you said I should bear in mind what happened to the American. I thought you meant that my seeming good luck might turn out to be a death sentence in disguise too.'

Snaebjorn Gudmundsson laughed.

'Of course not! Actually, he was very much the exception. Most people who are skyggn enjoy excellent health and live to an exceptionally old age.'

They both got out of the car. The consul fetched a trolley for Zen's bags. Once they were loaded, the two men stood there awkwardly.

'Thank you for your help,' said Zen. 'And good luck with the painting.' Snaebjdrn Gudmundsson grimaced.

'Just one authentic piece before I die, that’s all I ask. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant, still less whether anyone else notices or cares. Just one true thing, so that I can feel that my life hasn't been wholly wasted.'

They shook hands.

'It's been a pleasure to meet you, whoever you may be,' Snaebjorn Gudmundsson commented with an arch smile. 'I wish you a safe and pleasant onward journey. And please try and forget about what we've been discussing. It's really just a strictly local folk myth of no wider significance. It may or may not be true here, but it certainly isn't anywhere else. There are no hidden people where you're going!'