Authors: Michael Dibdin
A dull thud and the sound of running footsteps told the rest of the tale. The narrator could still prove to be lethally unreliable, however, so Zen endured another minute or so of the hellish racket of the security alarm before he ventured out into the upper room. The torch used to illuminate the execution lay on the floor near the two bodies. Switching it on, Zen quickly ascertained that he was alone, and that both Spada and his killer were dead. Zen recognized the latter as one of the two ROS agents who, together with Baccio Sinico, had tried to take him into ‘protective custody’ earlier that evening. A quick search of his jacket turned up a wallet, which identified him as Alfredo Ferraro.
By now, the shrieks of the alarm system were intolerable. Looking around, Zen realized that it had been set off by the second shot that he had fired, which had apparently struck one of the display cases. Dipping his hand in amongst the priceless relics there, he selected an object at random and headed quickly back downstairs.
It was almost midnight when the surly staff of the ferry finally deigned to allow passengers to board. The blue and white hulk had been moored to the dock for over three hours by that time, at this latest stop on its leisurely and much-delayed passage from Naples to Tunis. Needless to say, no one had bothered to explain the reason for this further delay, still less to apologize. The employees of the Tirrenia ferry company had an attitude as charmless, peremptory and inflexible as tax inspectors or prison guards — or policemen, for that matter.
But why should they care? Their jobs were state-funded sinecures, hard to obtain but virtually impossible to lose. If the passengers had had any power and money, they would have gone by air. So if you were here, pacing up and down the dock at almost one in the morning at the mercy of a bunch of incompetent slackers like them, then you evidently had neither money nor power. In which case, who cared?
The passengers’ only consolation was that if they had to wait out in the open for hours on end, this was the perfect night for it; pleasantly cool, with an almost imperceptible onshore breeze scented with a subtle briny tang, an appetizer for the voyage to come. The scene would have been almost idyllic, in fact, if it hadn’t been for the banks of floodlights mounted on tall masts, mercilessly baring the concrete and steel austerities all around. And then, of course, there were the foreigners.
These last represented a majority of the thirty or so people waiting to board the ferry, but the noise they were creating made them seem even more numerous and obnoxious. They were all in their twenties, the sexes roughly evenly represented. The males were all wearing red T-shirts with the word ARSENAL printed in large white letters, while their mates were in various stages of undress, revealing large quantities of sunburned thigh, shoulder and midriff.
One of the men, who seemed to be in charge, to the extent that anyone was, sat at the bottom of the gangway perched on four cases of Peroni beer cans. From time to time he reached down and produced a fresh can from a partially dismantled fifth case lying open in front of him. The others all had beers in their hands, except for a separate group who were sharing a bottle of whisky, and one girl who had apparently passed out. From time to time, one of the men would start what sounded like a war chant, and pretty soon they all joined in, even the women. One of the whisky drinkers yelled at someone in the main pack, and Zen was surprised to catch what sounded like the words ‘Norman’ and ‘beer’.
So, the Normans have returned, he thought, lurking in the shadows created by a stack of metal cargo containers and trying not to look up the collapsed girl’s dress, which had ridden up over her hips in a fascinating manner. He remembered being taught at school how the people of Normandy, themselves originally invaders from Norway, had conquered Sicily in the Middle Ages and ruled the island for over a hundred years. He remembered it because, as with the increasingly few things he remembered these days, it came with a story.
The story, Zen now realized, was almost certainly apocryphal, but this knowledge did not diminish its mythic charm and power. One fine day, his teacher had told the class, a group of Norman soldiers on their way home from the crusades stopped off at a port in Sicily, quite possibly Catania. Being hard-drinking northerners, they consumed the local wine without regard to its high alcohol content, and soon got very merry indeed.
At this point a fleet of Moorish corsair ships appeared in the harbour, striking terror into the hearts of the inhabitants, who had been collectively raped, plundered, shipped into slavery and put to the fire and the sword for as long as anyone could remember. It was like the plague. It came and went. Some people survived, others succumbed. There was nothing to be done.
Within minutes, the bells of the city’s churches started tolling out the bad news, and incidentally deafening the Normans, who grabbed a passing waiter and told him in no uncertain terms to turn off those fucking bells or else. The trembling native explained the reason for this tocsin, and advised his clients to flee immediately — ‘presumably after settling the bill’, the teacher interpolated with a sly wink at the class — since the Moors were about to rape and plunder, ship people into slavery, and generally put the city to the fire and the sword as usual.
The Normans looked at one another
and smiled
.
The teacher now broke off the story to give a brief lecture on physiognomical changes over the past centuries, their dietary causes, and why this meant you should eat your greens, just to show that this narrative digression had by no means extinguished his capacity for tedious pedantry. The Normans, he pointed out, would have been slightly less than the average height of Italians today, benefiting as the latter were from the ‘economic miracle’ of post-war reconstruction, but they would still have been a good head taller and proportionally broader than the Moorish marauders.
Imagine, he said, that you are one of the latter, out for a pleasant day’s looting and pillaging in an undefended town at the very toe of Italy. The inhabitants have all fled or are in hiding. The place is yours for the taking, you think. Then you round a corner to confront a horde of gigantic blond beings, completely drunk and utterly fearless, shrieking berserker battle cries and wielding their enormous swords and maces like children’s toys.
It wasn’t a question of courage, the teacher explained. The Arabs had never seen such creatures before. To them, they must have seemed like extraterrestrial aliens gifted with incomprehensible, superhuman powers. To try to fight against them would be mere folly. So they ran back to their boats, those who survived, and the local townspeople asked the Normans how much they would charge to stay around and provide this sort of service on future occasions. Not very much, was the answer. ‘But then,’ the teacher ended with a sly smile, ‘wine in Sicily is cheap.’
And now the Normans had returned, Zen reflected as the waiting passengers started to make their way up the gangplank, whose sullen Cerberus had finally consented, after a lengthy discussion on a two-way radio, to open to public access. The sleeping girl had been shaken into semi-consciousness and was helped along by a couple of the red-shirted men. Arsenal, thought Zen. He knew what the word meant, of course: the naval yard in his native city where the fleets of galleys which had built and maintained the Venetian empire had been constructed. But why were these drunken barbarians advertising it on their beefy chests? It was all a mystery. All he knew was that the Normans had returned, and that he was going to have to spend the next seven hours with them in the spartan public lounge of the ferry, since the cabins were apparently fully booked.
Apart from the latter-day Normans, the passengers consisted of a few dauntless young back-packers, and a selection of elderly Sicilian, Maltese and Tunisian persons, none of whom aroused any suspicion in Zen’s mind. Once on the ferry, he took up a position near the head of the gangplank, lest anyone else should board before they left. No one did. Ten minutes later, the mooring lines were cast off and they were steaming quietly off into the Ionian Sea, past the glowing lights of the refineries at Augusta and the twin headlands encircling the harbour of Syracuse, rumbling quietly south. Zen left his post and went down to the saloon. He was safe. He’d made it. They would never be able to find him here.
Down in the saloon, a major crisis had erupted, sparked by the Tirrenia line employee in charge, who was attempting to close the bar. This decision was being vigorously contested by the neo-Normans, one of whom, it turned out, spoke some Italian. But the barman was paying no attention to his protests and pleas. Closing time was closing time and that was that. The metal grille covering the bar came rattling down with the finality of a guillotine.
It was at this point that Zen intervened. He couldn’t care less about the foreigners, but he wanted a drink himself — thought he deserved one, in fact — and also wanted to throw his bureaucratic weight about a little in return for all the aggravation which he and everyone else had been treated to by the ferry company’s staff so far. Flashing his police identification card at the barman, he told him to reopen the bar immediately, lest his actions provoke a breach of the peace given the presence of a large number of evidently unhappy barbarians from the north, which might easily lead to actions of assault and affray likely to endanger the safety of the ferry, her crew and passengers.
The barman made the mistake of sneering at him.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re in international waters now. Back in Italy, you’re the law. Out here, what I say goes. And I say the bar closes.’
‘Where is this vessel registered?’ asked Zen.
The barman didn’t know. Zen took him by the arm and led him over to a framed certificate on the bulkhead, which showed that the motor-vessel
Omero
, built in 1956, was registered at Naples, Italy, with a stamp from the relevant authorities to prove it.
‘So?’ the barman responded.
‘So wherever we may be geographically, from a legal point of view we’re on Italian soil, and Italian laws therefore apply.’
Zen gave him an avuncular smile and an encouraging pat on the shoulder.
‘Think of this ship as a little island,’ he said in accents borrowed wholesale from the history teacher who had retailed the story about the Norman occupation of Sicily all those years ago. ‘An island temporarily mobile and detached from its home, but still subject to all the rules and regulations which apply in that state, of which I am an official representative. I therefore order you to reopen the bar
sine die
, on the aforementioned grounds of provoking a possibly injurious if not fatal breach of the peace.’
The barman gave a defeated snarl.
‘You sons of bitches really enjoy this, don’t you?’ he said, sliding the grille back up with a loud racket.
‘Damn right we do,’ Zen replied.
The Italian-speaking Norman materialized at Zen’s side.
‘Is it open again?’ he asked.
Zen nodded.
‘It’s open. And it’ll stay open until I give permission to close it.’
The foreigner yelled something to his companions, who immediately surged forward to the bar.
‘How did you do it?’ the Italo-Norman asked Zen.
‘How do you do this?’
‘Do what?’
‘Speak Italian.’
‘My grandmother was one of yous. I’m from Glasgow myself. In Scotland,’ he added, noting Zen’s troubled frown. ‘Came over in the twenties, never went back. But she brought me mam up to speak the lingo a bit, and she passed it on to me.’
‘And why do all your shirts have that word on them?’ asked Zen.
‘Arsenal? It’s a football club. We won a competition at this place where we all work, in Croydon, just outside London. Know where London is? Best sales team in the company. Free week’s holiday in Malta. Came over to Italy on a day trip, had one too many, missed the hydrofoil back. One of the lads is an Arsenal supporter. I’m a Celtic man myself, but he bought the shirts for all of us, so we sort of have to wear them. Would look a bit thankless else. Can I get you a drink?’
‘That’s very kind of you. A grappa, please.’
Zen stood there amid the swirling alien mass while the other man fought his way to the bar. He already felt very foreign, and very reassured.
They
— whoever they might be — certainly couldn’t get him here. In the centre of the saloon, the girl who had earlier been asleep on the quay was now dancing alone to some inaudible music. Her breasts, Zen noted with some interest, were even better than her legs.
The Glaswegian returned with Zen’s grappa and one for himself.
‘Never tried this stuff before,’ he said. ‘Not bad, and cheap too.’
‘Are you Norman?’ asked Zen.
‘No, Norman’s the one sitting on the beer supply. I’m Andy.’
‘Why is that girl dancing all alone?’
‘Stephanie? Well, you know how it is on trips like this. Couples form and couples fall apart. Hers fell apart.’
He looked sharply at Zen.
‘Do you want to meet her?’
Zen shrugged.
‘Why not?’
After that, one thing led to another with astonishing rapidity. Eventually they all ended up on the afterdeck of the ferry, under a clear sky and an almost full moon, surrounded by the benign vastness of the sea. Zen was getting on very nicely with Stephanie, who seemed both easy to please and also quite intrigued by this distinguished-looking foreign gent who kept trying out his incomprehensible English on her while peeking down her cleavage in a sexy but respectful way. Wit flowed like wine, and the wine — well, grappa, beer and whisky, actually — flowed like the softly enveloping air of the Mediterranean night.
The other noise, when it first became apparent, seemed at first just a slight annoyance, a minor case of interference which might disturb but could not obliterate the experience they were all sharing. But it persisted, and at last someone went to the stern rail to see what was going on.
‘It’s a boat,’ he reported. ‘Got writing on the side. C, A, R, A, B, I, N …’