chin was slightly raised and pushed forward, his lips turned down. The gesture, typically Sicilian, meant, ‘I couldn’t care less.’
This sealed Zen’s fate. They couldn’t care less about him. They didn’t even glance in his direction. If they weren’t bothering to guard or even watch him, it was for the same reason that the ancient Romans did not build walls around their cities. It would have been redundant. They already controlled the whole place.
The two men concluded their discussion with a handshake and Nello turned to Zen.
‘You’re to go with him,’ he said, indicating the newcomer.
Zen nodded and started to walk over to the other car. Without a word, the driver opened the back door for him, as though this were a taxi which Zen had summoned. His nonchalant confidence confirmed Zen’s worst fears.
Then, just as Zen was about to get into the car, his head lowered like an animal entering an abattoir stall, the planet suddenly went into labour. All four men shuddered where they stood, as though suffering sympathetic but lesser convulsions. There was a deep groaning which seemed to come from nowhere, the cobblestones beneath them trembled and the trees shook their branches in the windless air. Finally, just as these symptoms began to subside, the statue of the local celebrity turned towards them, its left arm apparently waving goodbye. Slowly, but with utter inevitability, it tumbled forward off its plinth and crashed to the ground.
Panic-stricken, the four men started to run, each in a different direction. Where was not important: the essential was to get away. After a fifty-metre sprint, Zen found himself all alone in a darkened alley, facing a tall, elderly man wearing a dressing-gown and slippers, and carrying a walking-stick.
‘Is everything all right?’ the man said in heavily accented Italian. Not in dialect, in Italian.
‘Help me!’ said Zen. ‘Please help me.’
The man inspected him.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Get me out of here.’
‘Out of where?’
‘Look, you’ve got to help! The Mafia is after me. They kidnapped me. I’m a police officer. I need to make a phone call, that’s all. The authorities will be here in no time with helicopters and armoured vehicles. They’ll have the whole place surrounded in less than an hour, but first I must make that call!’
The man looked at Zen.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
Zen produced his police identification card, which the other man inspected by the flame of a lighter.
‘Please!’ said Zen as his wallet was handed back. ‘I just need to make one phone call and then a place to hide until my colleagues arrive.’
‘I think what you need is a drink,’ the other man replied.
‘So that’s where they landed you! Of course, of course. The project for that motorway has been in the pipeline for twenty years or more, and will doubtless stay there for another twenty. In theory, it’s supposed to run along the south coast, connecting Catania with Gela. At present it only exists on paper, but various people who own or have bought bits of land along the route will have been able to persuade the regional government to get a compulsory purchase order, buy them out, and then build that particular stretch to justify the purchase in the budget.’
‘But most of that land must surely be worthless?’
Zen’s host picked up the packet of Nazionali which Zen had left on the table, having chain-smoked three immediately after arrival.
‘How much is this worth?’ he asked.
‘There’s about half a pack left… Two thousand lire?’
‘I’ll pay you four thousand.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Why should you care? Let’s say I’m desperate for a cigarette. At any rate, if you agree, this pack is now worth twice what it was a moment ago. Now then, let’s suppose that you suddenly realize that you don’t have any more cigarettes, so you offer to buy one back from me. At four thousand for ten, it’s worth four hundred, but I want to make a profit on the deal, so I’ll charge six. That makes the remaining packet worth five thousand four hundred lire. We’ve almost tripled the value of these cigarettes in twenty seconds, without any money changing hands.’
They were sitting in a small room on the first floor of a house which might have been anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years old. Facing them was an empty fireplace. At one end of the room, by the stairs leading up from the street, was a cubby-hole kitchen. At the other, a window open to the balmy night air, and another set of steps leading to the next floor. The other furnishings consisted of an oil painting showing a young man in military uniform, cases of books in four languages, and a stereo system from which emerged the mellifluent sounds of a wind ensemble. Zen took another sip of the whisky which he had been offered and tried to drag himself back to reality.
‘Listen, I really must make that phone call.’
His host shook his head.
‘I used to have a telephone, but no one ever called me, and on the rare occasions when I wanted to place a call, the thing always seemed to be out of order.’
Zen slammed his fist against his forehead. Why hadn’t he brought his mobile with him? You’re not just old- fashioned, Papa. You’re extinct.
‘Anyway, the point is that what applies to our hypothetical deal on your cigarettes also applies to land,’ the elderly gentleman went on. ‘Even more so, because they aren’t making any more land. So what there is is worth just as much as people will pay for it. And I imagine that the stretch where they built the section of motorway where you landed was sold at a very high price indeed. The buyer will have had friends in the regional government who informed him about the route of the proposed motorway. He buys the requisite fields, then resells them at twice the price to another friend, who then sells them back to him at twice that. Depending on how long they keep it up, they can then show legal bills of sale to the government agents, proving that that particular patch of parched scrub is now worth twenty or forty or a hundred times what the patch of parched scrub next to it is worth. And of course our friends’ friends in the regional government will ensure that, instead of rerouting the motorway, that price is paid.’
The whole house quivered briefly, setting the ceiling lamp swaying gently to and fro, shifting the shadows about.
‘An aftershock,’ Zen’s host said calmly. ‘There may be more. But what we really worry about here is that this could be the prelude to an eruption. The last time, in 1992, the molten lava almost reached the village. And that was just a leak, a dribble. If Etna were to blow as it did in 1169, 1381 or 1669, or in 475 BC for that matter, everyone in this village would be dead within seconds.’
‘So why do you choose to live here?’ asked Zen. ‘You’re not Sicilian, I take it.’
‘No, I’m not Sicilian.’
There was a long silence.
‘I will answer your questions in due course, if you wish,’ Zen’s host said at last. ‘But first we need to resolve your own problems.’
‘There must be a phone box in the village,’ suggested Zen. ‘Could you go down and make a call to a number I will give you and explain the situation?’
The other man again shook his head.
‘The only public phone is in the bar, which will have closed by now. I could go to a neighbour’s house, but this would be so unusual that they would almost certainly listen in on the call. I am eighty years old, dottore. Very soon now I shall move house for the last time, so to speak, but I do not want to have to do so until then. If it becomes known that I gave you refuge and then called the authorities, life here would become impossible for me.’
‘Can you drive me somewhere else?’
‘I have no car.’
‘So what are we to do?’ demanded Zen in a tone of desperation.
‘First strategy, then tactics, as my commanding officer used to say. I need to know a little more about the situation. For example, you say this light aeroplane which flew you from Malta landed somewhere near a town
