make sure that you were unaccompanied.’
Zen held out his hand, then retracted it, noticing no equivalent gesture from the other man.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘No problem.’
The man smiled roguishly.
‘I will be your pilot tonight, as they say on the commercial airlines. If you care to step up here, I’ll start the engine and we’ll be off.’
That had been almost an hour ago. Since then there had been nothing except the racket of the engine and the occasional lights of a ship passing so close beneath them that Zen felt sure they must rip off their wings against its masts. But the flight passed without incident, until the pilot spoke over the radio microphone he wore under his flying helmet and produced a spectacular display below: plumes of reddish light spaced equally to form two converging lines in the darkness.
The plane immediately started manoeuvring, turning this way and that until it was centred on the strip of dark between the beacons. It dipped dramatically, causing Zen’s stomach to rise and his panic to return, and then floated down as effortlessly as a feather past a group of cars and a panel van and touched down lightly on a smooth surface. Well before they reached the last flare, the plane had stopped, circled around and begun to taxi back towards the waiting vehicles.
‘But that’s not your real problem,’ the pilot said once the clamour of the engine had died down again.
‘What?’ demanded Zen, stunned by this non sequitur.
‘The propeller falling off, or me getting a heart attack,’ the pilot replied. ‘Your real problem was arriving safely. And I’m afraid we have.’
‘What do you mean?’
The pilot grinned.
‘I’ll be straight with you, Signor Zen, since you’ve been straight with me. Well, not quite straight. For instance, you didn’t tell us that you’re a policeman.’
Zen felt the adrenalin rush like walking into a wall.
‘I didn’t think it was relevant,’ he mumbled.
‘It isn’t. It doesn’t matter at all, because in a few hours from now you won’t be in a position to tell anyone anything. When I asked our Sicilian friends if it would be possible to move the delivery date because I had been asked to transport a certain Aurelio Zen, they got very excited indeed. It seems that some friends of theirs are anxious to meet you to discuss the recent death of a friend of theirs. Name of Spada. My friends here were of course only too happy to be able to do their friends a favour.’
The plane drew to a halt beside the cars and the van. Figures emerged from the darkness. The door was opened and Zen told roughly to descend. He stepped down on to a surface which felt like tarmac. On each side, the lines of flares stretched away into the darkness of the night, illuminating the scene in garish hues. The van had backed up to the rear door of the plane, which was open. A team of about five men were lifting out large, plastic- wrapped packages and stowing them away in the back of the van.
That was all that Zen had time to see before he was hustled over to one of the waiting cars. A man of about thirty with shiny ribbons of thick black hair and a notable nose got out of the driver’s seat and approached Zen and his handler.
‘Search him, Nello,’ he said to the latter.
Hands patted him down.
‘No gun,’ Nello reported.
‘Give me your mobile,’ the other man told Zen.
‘I don’t have one.’
The man stared at Zen in total disbelief.
‘Well, actually I do,’ Zen went on, realizing that he was cutting a poor figure. ‘But I left it at home. I never use it, to be honest. The last thing I want is people being able to get in touch with me day or night, wherever I may be. I’m suppose I’m old-fashioned.’
Nello laughed.
‘You’re not just old-fashioned, Papa. You’re extinct!’
He grabbed Zen by the arm, pushed him into the back of the car and got in beside him. The other man got behind the wheel and gunned the engine. They drove off along the runway, which looked suspiciously like an autostrada, then turned right on to a steep dirt track down which they bumped and bounced. When they reached the bottom, Zen saw that the landing strip behind them was indeed a portion of a two-lane highway, elevated on concrete stilts and breaking off abruptly just beyond the earthen ramp which they had just descended.
‘What’s going on?’ he demanded in an indignant tone.
Nello laughed.
‘You’re a VIP, Papal You get met at the airport.’
The car turned left on to a minor paved road and accelerated away.
They drove in silence for almost two hours. Zen saw signs to Santa Croce, Ragusa, Modica, Noto, Avola, Siracusa, Augusta, Lentini… The fact that his captors hadn’t bothered to blindfold him almost certainly meant that he was going to be killed. Quite apart from anything else, he now knew the approximate location of the section of uncompleted motorway which the local clan used as a landing strip for its drug shipments. Yes, they were going to have to kill him, no question about that.
‘How do you light up the runway?’ he asked.
Rather to his surprise, the answer came at once.
‘Sets of distress flares hooked up to an electrical cable,’ Nello replied with a certain technological eagerness. ‘We rig it all in advance, powered by a car battery, then when the pilot calls in on the radio we switch on the current.’
‘Shut up, Nello,’ said the driver.
‘What did I…?’
‘Just shut up!’
A large commercial aircraft flew overhead, its powerful landing lights seemingly vacuuming up the clouds scattered low in the sky. Then Zen saw the signs for Catania, and had a surge of hope. In the city, there would be traffic lights and, even at this time of night, traffic jams. He might be able to make a run for it, get away from these Mafia thugs and throw himself on the mercy of the authorities whose protection he had so arrogantly spurned. They wouldn’t be too happy about his disappearance, of course, and still less about what had happened to Alfredo Ferraro. He would have to be patient, penitent and remorseful, like an adulterous husband, but in the end they’d have to take him back. After all, he was one of them.
Unfortunately for this pleasing scenario, the signs to Catania rapidly died out, to be succeeded by ones to Misterbianco, Paterno, and a host of other places which Zen had never heard of. The car was labouring like a boat in a broken sea, the road rearing up and spinning round. Apart from that, there was nothing but fleeting glimpses of the small towns through which they drove at speed, the two men now apparently more tense than before.
At length they reached another town, more or less identical in appearance to all the others. The driver drove through the back-streets to the main piazza and drew up next to a gravel-covered park dotted with trees. At the end, next to them, stood one of those imposing but uninspiring civic statues which dot the minor towns of Italy, commemorating some local celebrity who had the misfortune to be born there. This one was of a man in vaguely nineteenth-century garb, his right hand clutching a book to his chest and his left outstretched in greeting or appeal. Zen read the name on the plinth by the light of one of the few streetlamps which adorned the piazza. It meant nothing to him.
Meanwhile the driver had taken out his telefonino and was now speaking rapidly in dialect. If he and Nello were indeed ‘only too glad to be able to do their friends a favour’ by handing over Zen, they were doing a good job of concealing the fact. So far from being happy, they looked as though they were scared to death.
About a minute later a car appeared at the other end of the piazza and swooped down towards them. Nello nudged Zen.
‘Out,’ he said.
Zen opened his door and stood up. The air smelt fresh and cool. The other car screeched to a halt alongside the first, its engine still running. The driver got out and shook hands with Zen’s captor and they spoke quietly for a while. Then the other man stretched out his arms and exposed his palms like a saint displaying his stigmata. His
