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
