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he found that Seppi and his translator had already arrived. He hurried over to their table, disbelieving of what he saw. Gone was the neat spare man in chinos and blue work shirt he had met barely two years ago. In his place was a bloated figure, bald and pasty-faced, and very obviously ill.
    “My God, what happened to you? I had no idea –”
    “It’s nothing … I’ve just been a little ill,” Seppi said.
    “With what –” Zach began.
    But Seppi shrugged off his concern, turning to his translator. “You’ve met Caryn, yes?”
    “I haven’t actually but we’ve been corresponding.”
    Zach had paid no attention to the woman who sat at the table but now he turned his attention to her. Even if he hadn’t been feuding with her, he would have been put off by the scowl on her face and the deeply inset eyes, and thin lips that seemed to be set in a permanent expression of disapproval. He turned back to Seppi, and asked again after his health. With obvious reluctance Seppi told him about the pancreatic cancer that was discovered too late to respond effectively to treatment. Neither his translator nor he was willing to say anything more about his illness, and as the effete waiter brought them their cappuccinos the conversation moved to the fourth book. He could not concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, Seppi said, and it was therefore taking him longer than expected.
    “You shouldn’t bug him so much, he’s a dying man – you publishers are all alike,” the translator cut in unexpectedly. Seppi silenced her with a glance and said simply, “You’ll get the book by Christmas.” Seppi hadn’t touched his cappuccino and looked exhausted. Zach felt deeply sorry to be putting pressure on someone who was so obviously ill. The table fell silent until Seppi suddenly said, “Zach, tell me about your favourite meal.” This was unexpected; their conversations had never been about anything but professional matters. Seppi wasn’t an author he would count as a friend exactly, so he fumbled around for a reply. He remembered ameal at Nobu with an especially high-powered Egyptian publisher with expensive dining habits, and had begun talking about the exquisite unagi he’d eaten there when Seppi had interrupted, looking puzzled: “You’re Japanese?”
    “Umm, no, sorry – I don’t understand.”
    “I was just wondering what your favourite food was, from your growing years, your childhood?”
    “Ah …”
    The thought rose in his mind of his grandmother in Kanyakumari making puttu, steamed and fragrant, that he would dissolve in coconut milk or meat stew; he hadn’t eaten it in three decades but the taste was rich and warm in his mouth.
    Before he could reply, Seppi had begun to speak again, almost to himself. “In Palermo,” he said, “the bay lies before the shore like a discus hand-painted by the gods, in blues so shimmering and mysterious the eye cannot quite comprehend them. It is so inviting that you have no option but to jump in, though you have to be careful where you swim, there is so much seaweed in the water. It held no terrors for us, though, my friend Luigi and I grew up swimming in that bay.
    “Hours and hours of just swimming, and diving and calling out to the beautiful girls in the tourist boats who would smile and wave out to us, two skinny ten-year-olds who were having so much fun. When we’d had enough we would head back to shore and go in search of street vendors serving our favourite food, babbaluci. For just a few lira we would get a big helping of snails marinated in olive oil, parsley, and garlic, fried in a pan that hadn’t been cleaned for a few centuries,giving everything a rich flavour. The vendor would tear off a sheet of the previous day’s
Giornale di Sicilia
, twist it into a funnel, and pour the smoking hot snack into it and hand it to us, and we would wander off to explore the evening’s delights crunching the fat, juicy, perfectly cooked snails between our