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Summary
Author Notes
Michael Dibdin is the author of thirteen previous novels. A native of England, he now lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, the mystery writer Katherine Beck.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The wry 11th and final Insp. Aurelio Zen mystery (after 2006's Back to Bologna) will leave the series' many fans in renewed mourning for Gold Dagger-winner Dibdin (1947-2007). When the corpse of American attorney Peter Newman is discovered in Calabria after an apparent botched kidnapping, Zen finds himself probing the rumor that Newman was not only born in Italy but heir to a family of southern Italian landowners. The detective must sort out other possible motives for the crime, including the dead man's work for an eccentric Hollywood producer hoping to outdo Mel Gibson with a film based on the Book of Revelations. The writing occasionally soars ("There is a unique flavor of melancholy to remote railway stations during the long intervals between the arrival and departure of trains"), and Zen's apt observations of his country's foibles and the unromantic portrayal of Calabria help to balance the sometimes brutal plot. This quirky series will be missed. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
DONNA LEON has staked out Venice, Magdalen Nabb knows every narrow street in Florence, and Andrea Camilleri holds Sicily in the palm of his hand. But only Michael Dibdin, in the clever and exuberantly witty police procedurals he created for a dyspeptic cop named Aurelio Zen, tried to wrap his arms around the whole of Italy. Braving his way province by province - from the mountains of Alto Adige (in "Medusa") to the caves of Sardinia (in "Vendetta") - the British-born author produced crime stories that capture the idiosyncratic essence of each region while contributing to a dynamic study of the Italian national character in all its unruly glory. When he died last spring, Dibdin was well along in this ambitious deconstruction process, with END GAMES (Pantheon, $23.95), the last Zen novel, providing a key piece in the jigsaw design of the series. The story is set in the remote and rugged hill towns of Calabria, a southern region known to the French as "la Calabre sauvage" and one that Zen views with wary amusement - partly because he's filling in for a provincial chief of police who has shot himself in the foot while cleaning his pistol. But when an American lawyer working for a shady Hollywood film company is kidnapped and then killed, and when it later comes to light that the victim was actually a Calabrian, born into the oldest and richest family in the area, Zen begins to get a sense of a more cunning criminal mentality at work behind the transparently thuggish manner of the locals. Dibdin is outrageously funny, as always, in conveying Zen's snobby Venetian attitude toward his regional postings. Here, he heaps scorn on the tomato-based cuisine ("roba del sud," his mother would have dismissed it - "southern stuff"), the unrefined architecture (the offensive town church is declared "a modern monstrosity with Romanesque pretensions") and the rude local dialect ("incomprehensible" even to native Italians). More pointedly, Zen is "sick to death of this romantic mystique of the south" and "fed up with hearing how crime down here is ineradicable because it feeds off an unfathomable collective tradition of blood, honor and tragedy." Even as he allows Zen to rail against the xenophobic customs of this cruel and dangerous place, Dibdin registers respect for the games of survival adopted by the fatalistic populace as a way of life. And while satire invariably triumphs over sentiment when his colorful Calabrian lowlifes are joined in their criminal games by the ruthless Americans from the film company, Dibdin also gives his detective Zen-like moments of enlightenment into the soul of the region. "It depresses me," he tells a friend, responding to "the sense of a generalized and ineradicable sadness about the place." But in the end, he makes peace with this foreign land before he leaves for home. Michael Harvey, one of the originators and currently an executive producer of the addictive TV-documentary crime show "Cold case Files," applies his inside expertise shrewdly in his first novel, THE CHICAGO WAY (Knopf, $23.95). Working from a tight plot about an old rape case that heats up after the detective who tries to reopen it is murdered, Harvey writes his best when he gets up close to a subject, as he does in a shocker of a scene in a police warehouse stuffed with boxes of evidence from unsolved rape cases. The efficiency of his cinematic style also suits the brisk, animated shots of Chicago that give the story both grit and authenticity. But Harvey has only mixed success in adapting his up-to-date material to the vintage noir style he aims to emulate. His sleuth, a young private eye named Michael Kelly, initially has trouble finding his narrative groove and sounds a bit like Dick Powell doing a voice-over. He loosens up once the investigation into the cover-up of a serial rapist begins to get interesting; all the same, certain procedural devices just don't wash. In classic P.I. novels, the hero tricks the cops and leans on a reporter pal to pick up information. Here, the ex-cop Kelly is so friendly with the fuzz they issue him invitations to crime scenes and autopsies and work up DNA evidence for him in the forensic lab. Nice try, but I don't think so. Joe Sandilands, the Scotland Yard detective who served so honorably in Barbara Cleverly's historical mysteries set in India, reveals another aspect of his sensitive nature in TUG OF WAR (Carroll & Graf, $24.95). The year is 1926, and Sandilands has been dispatched to Reims, France, to determine the identity of a mute, shell-shocked World War I veteran whose sad condition (and sizable military pension) has attracted multiple claims. Listening to the heartbreaking war stories of the major applicants, including the widow of a Champagne vintner who disappeared on the battlefield of Chemin des Dames "in the middle of the corpse-strewn Marne," is enough to rattle the detective, who fought at Passchendaele. But despite her mastery at vivid scene-setting, Cleverly never loses sight of the historical puzzle that is central to her story. Simply put, it's a stunner. There's usually an element of the supernatural - or at least, the macabre - in Fred Vargas's insanely imaginative procedurals featuring Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Although Adamsberg is commissaire of the prestigious Serious Crime Squad in Paris, his messy personal life has a way of taking over his criminal investigations. This is precisely what happens in WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HAND (Penguin, paper, $14) when an eventful trip to Canada leads him to be hunted for murder on two continents. But one doesn't read for logic in this novel (which maintains its loopy quality in Sian Reynolds's translation from the French); one reads to be amazed by the fantastic twists in the bizarre plot about a long-dead serial killer who seems to be pursuing his quarry from the grave. One reads as well to be delighted by the literary grace notes. Even when the formal symbolism gets a bit thick, who can resist a detective who cracks a case by researching the etymology of a killer's name? Michael Dibdin Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels capture regional Italy - and the gloriously unruly national character.
Guardian Review
Crime fiction is driven by death, but the guaranteed survival of the detective counters the morbidity of the form. So it's unsettling beyond the usual effects of the genre to read a book by a writer who has recently died. The shadow of mortality and mourning that is a basic requirement of mysteries is doubled in the case of End Games , Michael Dibdin's 11th novel about the Italian cop Aurelio Zen, because the advance copies began to circulate just after the news of the writer's death on March 30, nine days after his 60th birthday. Whatever state Zen is in on the final page of End Games , he has no chance of surviving this book. The tying up of ends in the final chapter will not, for most readers, achieve the catharsis that is one of the reasons such stories have appeal. The author's sudden absence haunts us far past the last page. Officially, the title of the final Zen book alludes to a plot involving a film company shooting, in Italy, a movie based on the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. As the director explains in a television interview: in "our post-9/11 world, the Book of Revelation touches many exposed cultural nerves. We all know that if terrorists gain access to nuclear or biological weapons, it will quite literally mean the end of the world." Dibdin's end, though, has encouraged the book's name to be taken in a different way. Because of the finality of the title - and the fact that the story begins with the ominously prophetic words "The dead man" - there has been an assumption, reflected in some obituaries, that End Games was consciously a final work, for both Dibdin and Zen. The possibility of the detective's death has been strong since Blood Rain (1999), in which he seemed to have been dispatched by a Mafia car bomb in the final paragraph. Although there were four more books, this hint of the hero's expendability gave Dibdin's creation a sense of fragility that few series characters attain. Paradoxically, though, End Games is not obviously an acknowledged finale, though there is, for the reader particularly alert to clues, a rather circuitous inclusion of the word "tomb" in a climactic, and otherwise optimistic, paragraph, as well as an odd, brutal reference to a medical condition that seems to have no functional purpose within the book. Otherwise, it is energetically and meticulously written, and the longest novel in the Zen series. There is, perhaps, one other subtle indication of a writer knowingly book-ending his career or, at least, one sequence of novels. In the last paragraph of Ratking , the 1988 story that introduced Aurelio Zen, the detective, walking home, notes that "the sky was clear and littered with stars". Almost 20 years on, as he enters the final pages of what we now know to be his last case, Zen looks to the heavens and regrets that light pollution has largely obliterated this natural illumination: "[Within] his lifetime that celestial array had been erased like a medieval fresco gaudily overpainted in a more enlightened era." Another possible suggestion of a writer turning to what the Roman Catholic church calls "last things" is that the Italian cop seems more conspicuously interested in religion than before, even more than when, in Cabal (1992), he was actually investigating a mystery within the Vatican. In End Games , he worries about his "sin list", quotes the Latin mass at one witness, then warns her that, if she fails to co-operate, "even the blessed sacraments may not suffice to ensure the salvation of your soul". At another point, Dibdin seems to have got a detail of Catholic theology - the Holy Trinity - wrong, but it turns out that the character, an old lady raised devoutly, has adopted a deliberate and revealing heresy. Underlining this ecclesiastical patterning, the book's recurrent metaphor for Zen is spiritual. His face is first compared to "the frescoed image of some minor saint who was being martyred". When he enters the interrogation room, a witness notes him as "a handsome man with the appearance of a certain kind of priest . . . suggesting a basic bent towards such kindness and indulgence as he might be able to reconcile with the strict rules of his calling". During a second interview, the same witness directly asks whether Zen's mother wanted him "to be a priest rather than a policeman". His spoken reply is that he had "no vocation", but Dibdin then gives him a silent thought that anyone who has followed the character through 11 books is tempted to chisel in the memory as an epitaph: "But I do have a vocation . . . it's this stupid, meaningless, utterly compromised job that I try to do as well as I can." Zen's near-contempt for his profession is one of Dibdin's most significant contributions to modern British crime fiction. He took Italy as his location because he had come to love the country and speak the language while teaching at the university of Perugia. But the decision to set the series outside the UK was perhaps also an acceptance that his home readership would not, at least 20 years ago, accept him being quite so consistently maudlin about the British force. PD James's Dalgleish, Ruth Rendell's Wexford, Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Colin Dexter's Morse all have moments of doubt and self- laceration during investigations, and it has sometimes seemed that resignation might end the career of Ian Rankin's Rebus before retirement does. But, from the very beginning of Ratking , when he seems at risk of being sacked after botching a politically sensitive investigation, Zen encourages the reader to think he has chosen the wrong job. Some of this comes from geographical accuracy: an Italian cop has to deal with a legacy of corruption and dizzily rotating political administrations. Zen's morality is one of the most absorbing areas of the portraits. Modern fictional cops are maverick almost by default - Rebus and Dalziel delight in ignoring new Home Office guidelines - but Dibdin's detective frequently resorts to illegality: planting or ignoring evidence, suborning witnesses, even, in And Then You Die (2002), committing an act that, if discovered, would merit a life sentence. Yet, when Zen breaks the law, it is because it seems to be the only way of enforcing the law within the Italian system. That the cop is to some extent on the run from what he has previously done, a burden left to the villains in most other crime fiction, significantly shapes his personality. In the later books - especially the penultimate Back to Bologna (2005) - Zen is suffering from disabling depression, an aspect of his personality that even the loosest acquaintance of Dibdin suspected to be autobiographical. But to have described Dibdin's fiction in the previous section as "British", though technically correct, feels uneasy. As a writer who was born in Wolverhampton and educated in Belfast but died in his final adopted home city of Seattle, Dibdin was always hard to pin on a map. So, in retrospect, it's not surprising that he should have become one of the few novelists who set the majority of their books outside the country of their birth. There are almost 3,000 Italian pages in the Zen sequence, and only two of Dibdin's other seven novels - The Tryst (1989) and Dirty Tricks (1991) - are set in contemporary England. After becoming a "resident alien" in the US to be with the writer KK Beck, his third wife, he soon wrote two novels in a contemporary American voice: Dark Spectre (1995) and Thanksgiving (2000). Fascinated by vocabulary, Dibdin was a magpie of language, and this became reflected in an accent that had already been complicated in childhood by the imposition of Northern Ireland on British black country. The language of End Games properly reflects Dibdin's eclectic lexicon. The basic storytelling tone is simple, but ominous English: "Mirella and Tom were walking up an inclined alley in the old town when the attack occurred." And, as always in his fiction, the narrative voice enjoys frequent English wordplay: the history of religious cinema is neatly summarised as running from "De Mille to Mel". There's also a risky reference to a computer's "Down's Syndrome software", which reflects the author's intermittent truculence about the polite sensitivities of English society. He once suggested on television that theatres staging Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals should be blown up. Inevitably, though, most of the dialogue in these books has to represent Italian conversation. The early Zens employed the usual compromise of anglophone writers operating overseas - English dialogue with an occasional flavouring of localisms: Questura , Signora . Gradually, Faber & Faber's printers were required to make more and more use of their italic font and, with End Games , the publisher might think about giving away a Berlitz guide as a tie- in. A key plot-point at the end of one chapter is delivered in untranslated Italian and, within the English dialogue, there is a subtle misunderstanding between a Calabrian and an outsider speaking Italian. The local explains: "An easy mistake for a foreigner. Our verbal forms are very complex." Aptly, this book's idiom also reflects the writer's other adopted country. Symbolically, one character has plans to open a trattoria in Calabria serving US food. And several chapters, which use the viewpoint of an American who has come to Italy as a movie producer scouting locations for the Revelation film, are written in American west coast rhythms: "By the time his modified 737 finally touched down at wherever the fuck it was, Jake felt pretty well bummed." So consistent is the ventriloquism that one of Jake's sentences makes sense only if the letter Z is read to rhyme with "bee", in the stateside way. An Anglo-Italian-American writer, Dibdin is represented in this final book by all three of his dialects. In that sense, the book could not be a more appropriate coda, because his work represents a sort of unification of modern detective fiction. In the three decades of Dibdin's publishing career, the traditional English crime novel has been refreshed by influence from Europe - especially the novels of Scandi navian writers such as Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum - and America: the dense, violent, sardonic fiction of James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Robert Parker, George Pelecanos and others. Many younger British writers were guided by these imported styles to make their books darker, funnier and more internationally aware, but only Dibdin went as far as to base his fiction in continental Europe and the US. But, revealingly, even within their chosen foreign country, the Zens were restless. Most fictional sleuths, in line with usual police practice, have a single patch: Edinburgh for Rebus, Oxford for Morse, Brighton for Peter James's Roy Grace. Dibdin's cop, though Venetian by birth, operated nationally rather than locally, seconded to a different Italian region in each book. This had the benefit of providing Dibdin with a new cuisine and dialect each time and giving the central character the permanent status, always useful in a narrative, of an outsider. It also gave considerable emotional force to the mystery in which Zen worked for the first time among the canals and basilicas of his birthplace: Dead Lagoon (1994). Fittingly, End Games brings him to one of Italy's limits: Calabria, in the toe of what schoolchildren are taught to call the "boot" of the nation's shape on a map. In this distant and institutionally suspicious terrain, an American business traveller has been kidnapped, a crime that, again, perhaps deliberately echoes the missing man set-up in Zen's first Ratking investigation. This last book feels like a summation of Dibdin's feelings about the country he adopted fictionally. The significance of Catholicism in this novel could be explained, apart from any escalating sense of mortality in the author, by a desire to capture every significant aspect of Italy in one storyline. The Fellini-esque movie director, Aldobrandini, who "won the silver at Venice back in the 1960s" and sails around the Adriatic on his yacht, drinking Singapore Slings while preparing to shoot a movie for his American backers, can be taken as a similar attempt at inclusivity. Culture, religion, politics: the novel is as thorough as a checklist for a visiting diplomat. And, throughout, the writer aphorises about the country with a rueful authority more common in the native. One character is "in the most desperate situation in which any Italian can ever find himself. He was alone." Elsewhere, someone observes: "Italians always seemed to know where they were in space . . . Maybe that was why they were so good at art." In the final chapter, the authorial voice delivers a moving and truthful geopolitical precis: "Everything went wrong all the time, but somehow it didn't matter, while in other countries even if everything went perfectly, life was still a misery." Though he was familiar with the misery of life, Dibdin, in up moods, knew how to enjoy himself. Once commissioned to write a book about wine (he failed to complete it), he was a writer of appetite, his sentences lingering over lip-glistening descriptions of sex and food, although those tastes were indulged in different areas of his fiction. Culinary consumption is generally to be found in the Zen books. Within 20 pages of Ratking , Zen is eating lamb in a restaurant, despite already having had soup and spaghetti alla carbonara at home, and the banquet reaches a final course in End Games . There might be a case for this book being stamped with one of those new government traffic-light panels, warning of its calorific contents. Indicating the depth of his depression, Zen has for once lost his appetite in the early sections, nauseated by the obsession of Calabrian cooking with the tomato. The American characters, though, are tucking into "ribbons of home-made egg pasta overlaid with chunks of unctuous porcini . . . aged ewe's-milk cheese and slabs of Amedi dark chocolate." During the Sherlock Holmes moment in which he deciphers what actually happened in the kidnapping, the detective is treating himself to an alfresco picnic in the mountains, chewing "a sharp sheep's cheese, chunks of crusty wholewheat bread baked in a wood-fired oven". Beyond reflecting the author's own eager and curious palate, the reason for all these meals is that, in Italian culture, food reveals history and regional distinction. Also, Zen, as a depressive whose job unsettles him, eats as a distraction and a comfort. Interestingly, given the increasingly dominant comparisons between the policeman and a priest, sex seems to play little role in Zen's life. In End Games , for example, the only moment of tumescence occurs through food, when the dining policeman savours "the soft clitoral gristle of the clams". Zen's literary celibacy may have been partly a marketing decision. These books were increasingly targeted at the PD James and Ruth Rendell market, where readers are potentially decorous. Indeed, it is a curious fact that intercourse is more or less outlawed for the investigating figure in British detective fiction. Apart from Wexford, who is married, the other major detectives - Poirot, Marple, Dalgleish, Morse, Rebus, Zen - are all single through all or most of their mysteries. Divorced when the series begins, Zen is permitted occasional relationships and, by End Games , is married to Gemma, a witness in a previous case. But because each of his cases requires travel, he remains alone in his encounters with the reader, enforcing the generic convention that the bringer of justice is monk- like and undistracted. The intervening books outside the series were vacations from such publishing manners, and Dibdin certainly enjoyed them. The non-Zen novels are erotically inventive and explicit, making full use of the author's post- Chatterley freedom to map the erogenous zones. In The Tryst , a unsatisfyingly married psychiatrist becomes dangerously attracted to an adolescent patient. Dirty Tricks , a brutal comedy of bad behaviour, private and public, during the Thatcher era, begins with adulterous fellatio in the kitchen at a north Oxford dinner party and proceeds to sexual acts rarely described in mainstream fiction. Although Dibdin never formally employed a pseudonym, he seemed to do so psychologically, writing under two quite distinct identities. I have so far been fairly sparing with details of the action of End Games . This is partly, as in any discussion of a crime novel, for fear of spoiling the plot. But in Dibdin's case, there is also a sense, especially in the later Zen novels, that he slightly believed crime novels to be spoiled by the plot. End Games is typical of his late style in being a collage of seemingly unrelated scenes, played out in un-numbered, untitled chapters, the divisions signalled only by space at the base of a page. Readers will have to decide whether the three narrative strands - the kidnapping, the Revelation movie and a hunt for buried historical treasure - are ever satisfactorily connected, and whether this finally matters, given the intensity of the psychological and geographical detail Dibdin provides. The writer's increasing resistance to the twists and tension traditionally required by the genre may result from the fact that he came slightly reluctantly to the crime shelves. (In this respect, he parallels Ian Rankin, whose first Rebus novel began as a scholarly variation on Jekyll and Hyde in which, in the first draft, Rebus died.) The first two Dibdin novels to be published were erudite exercises in historical pastiche: The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978) sent Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth on the trail of Jack the Ripper, while A Rich Full Death (1986) was a murder mystery set around the household in Florence of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Although critically praised, neither book achieved paperback publication or significant sales until the Zen books broke through; his readers may regret that Dibdin never returned to that strain of literary-historical fiction, except tangentially in the slight and somewhat bitter The Dying of the Light (1993), a parody of the classic English country house crime book, which has the feel of a lawyer's letter warning that critics and readers must never make the mistake of associating him with the genre of Agatha Christie. More than most mystery writers, Dibdin was angered by the extent to which prize committees and literary editors in Britain maintain a distinction between crime books and "literature". As a Booker prize judge in 1992, I tried to make a case for Dibdin's Cabal , but it was dismissed by a don on the panel as "a Vatican travelogue". End Games , though, completes a library that at least competes with the output of many writers who have been given cheques by literary committees. It would have been good to have more books, but this one serves as a culmination of what Michael Dibdin stood for, in writing and in life: place, language and the consolation that worldly pleasure can provide against darker intimations. To borrow from the ancient language of the nation in which his main fiction was set, and the religion of his troubled but finally decent detective: requiescat in pace Michael Dibdin's End Games is published by Faber on July 5. To order a copy for pounds 10 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-dibdinrevised.1 Underlining this ecclesiastical patterning, the book's recurrent metaphor for Zen is spiritual. His face is first compared to "the frescoed image of some minor saint who was being martyred". When he enters the interrogation room, a witness notes him as "a handsome man with the appearance of a certain kind of priest . . . suggesting a basic bent towards such kindness and indulgence as he might be able to reconcile with the strict rules of his calling". During a second interview, the same witness directly asks whether Zen's mother wanted him "to be a priest rather than a policeman". His spoken reply is that he had "no vocation", but [Michael Dibdin] then gives him a silent thought that anyone who has followed the character through 11 books is tempted to chisel in the memory as an epitaph: "But I do have a vocation . . . it's this stupid, meaningless, utterly compromised job that I try to do as well as I can." To have described Dibdin's fiction in the previous section as "British", though technically correct, feels uneasy. As a writer who was born in Wolverhampton and educated in Belfast but died in his final adopted home city of Seattle, Dibdin was always hard to pin on a map. So, in retrospect, it's not surprising that he should have become one of the few novelists who set the majority of their books outside the country of their birth. There are almost 3,000 Italian pages in the Zen sequence, and only two of Dibdin's other seven novels - The Tryst (1989) and Dirty Tricks (1991) - are set in contemporary England. After becoming a "resident alien" in the US to be with the writer KK Beck, his third wife, he soon wrote two novels in a contemporary American voice: Dark Spectre (1995) and Thanksgiving (2000). Fascinated by vocabulary, Dibdin was a magpie of language, and this became reflected in an accent that had already been complicated in childhood by the imposition of Northern Ireland on British black country. The language of End Games properly reflects Dibdin's eclectic lexicon. The basic storytelling tone is simple, but ominous English: "Mirella and Tom were walking up an inclined alley in the old town when the attack occurred." And, as always in his fiction, the narrative voice enjoys frequent English wordplay: the history of religious cinema is neatly summarised as running from "De Mille to Mel". There's also a risky reference to a computer's "Down's Syndrome software", which reflects the author's intermittent truculence about the polite sensitivities of English society. He once suggested on television that theatres staging Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals should be blown up. - Mark Lawson.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The dead man parked his car at the edge of the town, beside a crumbling wall marking the bounds of a rock--gashed wasteland of crippled oaks and dusty scrub whose ownership had been the subject of litigation for more than three decades, and which had gradually turned into an unofficial rubbish tip for the local population. The arrival of the gleaming, silver--grey Lancia was noted by several pairs of eyes, and soon known to everyone in the town, but despite the fact that the luxury saloon was left unguarded and unlocked, no attempt was made to interfere with it, because the driver was a dead man. The only ones to see him close to were three boys, aged between five and ten, who had been acting out a boar hunt in the dense shrubbery under the cliff face. The five--year--old, who was the prey, had just been captured and was about to be dispatched when a man appeared on the path just a few metres away. He was in his fifties or early sixties, of medium stature, with pale skin and a shock of hair that was profuse and solidly black. He wore a black suit of some cheap synthetic fabric, and a wide collar, almost clerical, but matte and black, encircled his neck. From it, beneath the throat, hung a large metal crucifix. The man's chest and feet were bare. He trudged silently up the steep path towards the old town, looking down at the ground in front of him, and showed no sign of having seen the trio of onlookers. As soon as he was out of sight the two younger boys were all for following him, scared but daring each other not to be. Sabatino, the eldest, put paid to that idea with a single jerk of the head. No one had confided in him about this event, but the community in which they all lived was a plangent sounding board when it came to news that might affect its members. Sabatino -hadn't heard the primary note that must have been struck somewhere, but he had un-consciously absorbed the secondary vibrations resonating in other parts of that complex instrument. "Danger!" they had whispered. "Lie low, keep away, know nothing." Discarding his role as the renowned and fearless hunter of wild boar for that of the responsible senior child, he rounded up his friend Francesco and the other boy and led them down a side path back to the safety of the town. The sole witness to what happened next was a figure surveying the scene through binoculars from a ridge about a kilometre away on the other side of the valley. The dead man followed the track until it rose above the last remaining trees and ceased to be a rough line of beaten earth and scruffy grass, to become a stony ramp hewn out of the cliff face and deeply rutted by the abrasive force of ancient iron--rimmed cartwheels. By now il morto was clearly suffering, but he struggled on, pausing frequently to gasp for breath before tackling another stretch of the scorched rock on which the soles of his feet left bloody imprints. Above his bare head, the sun hovered like a hawk in the cloudless sky. The isolated hill he was climbing was almost circular and had been eroded down to the underlying volcanic core and then quarried for building materials, so that in appearance it was almost flat, as though sheared off with a saw. When the dead man finally reached level ground, he collapsed and remained still for some time. The scene around him was one of utter desolation. The vestiges of a fortified gateway, whose blocks of stone had been too large and stubborn to remove, survived at the brink of the precipice where the crude thoroughfare had entered the former town, but looking towards the centre the only structures remaining above ground level were the ruins of houses, a small church, and opposite it an imposing fragment of walling framing an ornate doorway approached by five marble steps. All around lay heaps of rubble with weeds and small bushes growing out of them. The rounded paving stones of the main street were still clearly visible, however, and the dead man followed them, moaning with pain, until the cobbles opened out into a small piazza. He then proceeded to the church, bowing his head and crossing himself on the threshold. Ten minutes passed before he emerged. He stopped for a moment to stare up at the massive remnants of stone frontage which dominated the square, then crossed over to the set of steps leading up to the gaping doorway, knelt down and slowly crawled up the steps on his knees, one by one, until he reached the uppermost. A wild fig tree had established itself in the charred wasteland within the former dwelling, feeding on some hidden source of water far below. The dead man bent over it and kissed one of its leaves, then bowed down until his forehead touched the slightly elevated doorstep. The man watching from the ridge opposite put down his binoculars, lifted what looked like a bulky mobile phone off the dashboard of the Jeep Grand Cherokee beside him, extended the long recessed antenna and then pressed a button on the fascia. The resulting sound echoed about the walls of the valley for some time, but might easily have been mistaken for distant thunder. Excerpted from End Games by Michael Dibdin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
