Free And Then You Die by Michael Dibdin Page B

‘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: ‘þórunn Sigurðardòttir’, 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 ‘