Free And Then You Die by Michael Dibdin

or Poland, there was probably a good reason. And they certainly hadn’t been to America. Maybe they didn’t know it was there. Or perhaps they’d heard rumours, but just didn’t care enough to investigatefurther. Either way, Zen was inclined to trust their judgement.
    As if this wasn’t enough to stoke his anxiety, there was the small matter of his testimony at the trial. The Ragusa thugs who had delivered Zen to Don Gaspare Limina had been given to understand that he would be killed, and so they had not bothered to conceal their faces. But thanks to the Catania clan’s mercy, or rivalry, he had survived to find himself in the almost unprecedented position for a non-mafioso of being able to identify two prominent members of ‘those pushy little squirts from Ragusa’, as Limina had contemptuously referred to his upstart neighbours.
    But life is a moving target, and never more so than for Mafia capi . Don Gaspare had been arrested in the course of a massive operation following the attempt on Zen’s life, and was now serving a multiple life sentence in a particularly cold and primitive prison high in the mountains near Matera. Meanwhile Bernardo ‘The Tractor’ Provenzano, the last remaining Corleonesi chieftain , still unapprehended after almost forty years as a fugitive, had managed to impose his control on the relatively free market and regional competition which had started to evolve following the breakdown of the old hierarchies. Following a spate of violent deaths and a judicious selection of the classic unrefusable offers, the Ragusa clan had been brought under his control, but also under his protection. Whoever testified against Nello and Giulio Rizzo would be testifying against Cosa Nostra itself, and would be a marked man for the rest of his days.
    For a while Zen toyed with the idea that maybe they weren’t going to America after all, given that they seemed to be flying north, but a glance at the route map in the Alitalia magazine dispelled this illusion. It appeared that when aeroplanes went from place to place, they never did so directly, but took a long curving roundabout path by way of such outlandish localities as Baffin Island and Labrador. Perhaps it had something to do with the prevailing winds, as in the days of sailing ships. Or maybe it was a planned diversion designed to give everyone a chance to get some sleep. Overnight trains often went deliberately slowly so as not to arrive at some ungodly hour and decant the passengers half awake at a deserted station in a slumbering city.
    He flipped through the magazine, pausing to skim an articleabout the city he was bound for. Apparently it had originally been settled by the Spanish, who named it El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles . There was a translation in Italian, ‘The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels’, and photographs of an old stone monastery gleaming white in the sunlight . Maybe Los Angeles wouldn’t be so bad after all, he thought. It sounded like a pleasant, old-fashioned sort of place, and at least the people would all be Catholics. Although by no means a committed believer, Zen preferred to be surrounded by his own sort. Protestants were an enigma to him, all high ideals one minute and ruthless expediency the next. You knew where you were in a Catholic culture: up to your neck in lies, evasions, impenetrable mysteries, double-dealing, back-stabbing and underhand intrigues of every kind. With which comforting thought he lowered the blind again and dozed off.
    The next thing he knew was being woken by the stewardess and asked to fasten his seatbelt for landing. Were they there already? Ten hours, the captain had said before take-off. Surely he hadn’t been asleep that long? The cabin lights had been turned on and the other passengers looked restive, all except the businessman who had taken Zen’s seat after he moved. He was sprawled back, his chair in full recline position, a blackout mask over his eyes and