A Long Finish - 6

by Michael Dibdin

  At a loss, and feeling vaguely ashamed of himself, he went over to the back door of the property and made a big show of knocking and calling out Beppe’s name. There was no reply, but the door opened a crack, as if under its own volition. Lamberto stared at it an instant. Then, ignoring Anna’s frantic entreaties, he stepped over the threshold, shutting the dog outside.

  ‘Beppe! Beppe? It’s Lamberto!’

  He already knew that there would be no answer. The silence had that coherent quality, like settled soil, which houses only have when they are empty. Lamberto stepped cautiously into the large kitchen, with its board floor and bare walls where islands of brickwork showed through the crumbling plaster. The air was cold, the room empty. Moving into the hall, Lamberto continued his search, occasionally calling Beppe’s name aloud, less loudly now. Outside he could hear Anna’s persistent keening, as though she were answering him, but within the house the solid, complacent silence was unbroken. There was clearly no one there.

  Lamberto returned to the kitchen and looked around, reluctant to admit failure. On the table stood a dirty dish with some sauce dried to a crust, an empty wine glass and a chunk of bread. The fire-place was cold, the ashes holding no ember. Lamberto picked up the bread and squeezed it. Yesterday’s. So Beppe had eaten, presumably before going out, but had not been back since. Except that his dog was there, and his car.

  Then he noticed another item on the table. He picked it up and inspected it. At first sight it resembled a general-purpose knife such as might be used for slicing salami or cheese, except that the blade and handle were stained with a dark tawny substance resembling dried blood. Before he could begin to think what this might signify, his attention was diverted by the sound of a key being inserted into the front door.

  Lamberto started to put the knife back on the table, then thought better of it. The silence had suddenly turned malign, no longer placid and compact but tense and still, loaded like a gun. Gripping the knife tightly, Lamberto stepped to his right and concealed himself as best he could beside a huge credenza where unused heirloom bowls and plates gathered dust. Steel-rimmed heels clacked steadily down the hall. Lamberto couldn’t think of anyone who wore boots like that, certainly not Beppe. Lamberto grasped the knife still more tightly, feeling simultaneously ridiculous and terrified.

  At the doorway to the kitchen, the heels paused. There was a long moment of silence, broken only by one of Anna’s despondent yowls. Then the intruder moved forward into the room, revealing himself as a portly man in black uniform and hard cap trimmed with red braid and a gilt badge showing a flaming torch. Catching sight of Lamberto, he started slightly.

  ‘Signor Latini.’

  ‘Buon giorno, maresciallo,’ Lamberto replied automatically.

  The two men looked at each other for a moment. Then the Carabinieri official nodded towards the window.

  ‘Looks like it’s clearing up, finally.’

  ‘I came to see Beppe,’ Lamberto blurted out. ‘His car’s outside, and his dog, Anna. But he’s not here.’

  Enrico Pascal nodded slowly.

  ‘No, he’s not here.’

  Lamberto Latini finally became aware of what he was holding.

  ‘I found this on the table,’ he said, displaying the knife. ‘It’s got blood on it.’

  Again Pascal nodded, as though this was the most ordinary thing in the world.

  ‘Why don’t you put it back where it was? he suggested.

  Latini did so.

  ‘I thought something might have happened to Beppe,’ he mumbled haltingly. ‘And when I heard someone coming in … How did you open the front door?’

  ‘With a key.’

  ‘A key? Where did you get it?’

  The Carabiniere did not reply at once.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, Signor Latini?’ he said at length. ‘No, in that chair, please, away from the table.’

  Latini did so.

  ‘You were asking where I got the key. I got it from Beppe. And how did you get in?’

  Lamberto gestured behind him.

  ‘The back door. It was open.’

  ‘Open, or just unlocked?’

  ‘It wasn’t fastened. It must stick slightly. It opened when I knocked.’

  The maresciallo raised his eyebrows.

  ‘So you took advantage to come inside the house. Why?’

  ‘I just wanted to make sure that Beppe was all right.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be all right?’

  ‘We had an appointment to meet here at ten o’clock. He’s never let me down before.’

  ‘When did you make this appointment?’

  The Carabinieri official’s tone had become more peremptory. Lamberto Latini appeared to reflect.

  ‘Let’s see. Yesterday, it must have been. No, the day before. I phoned and suggested we get together for a chat, you know …’

  ‘It’s a long way to come for a chat, Signor Latini, particularly on a working day.’

  Lamberto started to say something, then checked his watch and got up.

  ‘That reminds me, I must be going.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible.’

  Lamberto Latini frowned.

  ‘I’ve got a business convention coming to lunch. They’ve booked the whole restaurant.’

  Enrico Pascal sighed heavily.

  ‘No one appreciates the importance of good food more than I, Signor Latini, and your establishment is without doubt one of the finest in the region – although the last time I ate there, it seemed to me that the lamb was a trifle oversalted. But certain matters must take precedence even over gastronomy. Murder is one of them.’

  Lamberto Latini gave an irritated frown.

  ‘Murder? What’s the Vincenzo affair got to do with it?’

  ‘Where were you at five o’clock this morning, Signor Latini?’

  The question seemed to rebound from Lamberto Latini’s face and strike various surfaces in the room before returning for a belated answer.

  ‘In bed, of course!’

  ‘At home?’

  ‘Where do you think I sleep?’

  ‘Alone?’

  Now Latini’s anger was naked.

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  The maresciallo appeared unperturbed.

  ‘I’m asking if you can name any witnesses to substantiate your claim to have been at home, asleep, at five o’clock this morning.’

  For the first time, Lamberto Latini’s expression was one of open hostility.

  ‘My wife is dead. You know that.’

  Enrico Pascal inclined his head.

  ‘And when you finally woke up, you got into your car and drove over twelve miles to have “a chat” with Beppe Gallizio. On a day when your entire restaurant has been reserved for an important business lunch.’

  ‘Ask Beppe! He’ll confirm what I say.’

  Enrico Pascal stared at him in silence for some time. Then he went to the table, bent over and inspected the knife which Lamberto had been holding. He did not touch it, but his pudgy, rather feminine fingers drummed out a brief tattoo on the table-top. With a dismissive sniff, Lamberto Latini got up.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this!’ he proclaimed, heading for the door.

  In one smooth gesture, the maresciallo undid the flap on the holster of his service pistol.

  ‘Don’t do anything rash, Signor Latini,’ he said equably. ‘You’re in quite enough trouble as it is.’

  Latini turned, gazing at him in apparent incredulity.

  ‘I can’t stand here playing games all day, Pascal! I’ve got a business to run.’

  ‘It’s going to have to manage without you.’

  Lamberto Latini squared up to his opponent.

  ‘Are you saying I’m under arrest?’

  ‘I am placing you in detention pending further investigation. If you hand over the keys to your car, I won’t bother about the handcuffs.’

  ‘You must be out of your mind! The night Aldo Vin
cenzo was killed I was …’

  ‘Who said anything about Vincenzo? We’ve already made an arrest in that case, and it’s all in the hands of the judges. My concern now is with Beppe Gallizio.’

  Latini sighed with theatrical emphasis and spread his hands in gestural surrender.

  ‘All right, I admit it! I came here today to buy some truffles from Beppe for this lunch, which thanks to you is now going to be ruined, along with my reputation. I know that it’s technically an illegal transaction, and you know that everyone around here does the same thing. I thought you cared enough about the good things of the Langhe to overlook a minor matter like this. Apparently I was wrong. Very well.’

  He drew a bunch of clinking metal from his pocket and tossed it on the table.

  ‘Here are my keys, maresciallo,’ he said in a tone of sarcastic deference. ‘If I promise not to make a run for it, will you please try not to shoot me?’

  Enrico Pascal watched this performance with a cool, slightly clouded gaze.

  ‘But what about Beppe?’ he murmured.

  ‘What do I care about Beppe? Let him look after himself!’

  The Carabinieri officer looked at Latini for a moment.

  ‘He can’t. He’s dead.’

  A long silence.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Shot. Down in a coppice by the stream. His whole face and half his head blasted away.’

  Lamberto Latini staggered as though he had been struck. He said nothing.

  ‘Then I come up to his house and find you here, armed and in hiding,’ Pascal went on. ‘You have no verifiable reason for being here, nor any alibi for the time of the incident. Under the circumstances, Signor Latini, you’ll understand that I have no choice but to take you into custody pending further investigations.’

  He awoke naked and covered in blood. A series of mirrors revealed the scene from every angle. In an intriguing trompe-l’œil touch, there was also real blood on the glass, blotching out large portions of the reflected gore. This came as no surprise. The stuff was everywhere: on the walls, the gleaming taps, the fluffy white towels. Some had even ended up in the toilet, staining the water pale pink. More to the point, it was all over him, trickling down his face, finding its way in irregular rivulets down his chest, belly and legs, and then dripping off to further complicate the pattern of crimson splotches, spatters and spots on the tiled floor.

  A classic murder scene, in short, just like the illustrative pictures of carnage in the training manual, except that this was in sharp, rich colour, not poorly exposed black and white. There was even the obligatory clue, to reinforce the message that the criminal always gives himself away. Looking behind him in the mirror, he saw a smudged hand-print on the wall next to the light switch. That’s how they’d get him, that and the traces of blood that would linger in the cracks and crevices, no matter how hard he tried to clean it up.

  But was he the criminal or the victim? He examined himself more closely in the mirrors surrounding the blood-drenched sink. There seemed to be a deep gash above his left eye, up near the hairline. That must have been where it had landed, the savagely hard blow which had come from nowhere and stunned him out of his dreams into this waking nightmare.

  He unclenched his hands, sticky with drying blood, turned on a tap and grabbed a towel, soaked it thoroughly and set about cleaning himself up. The wound on his forehead looked even worse once it was fully exposed, a clammy mouth oozing a frightening quantity of bright red vomit. The half-dried stains covering his body and the floor and walls seemed to take an amazing amount of time and energy to clean up, even superficially. Again and again he wrung out the towel, depositing a stream of rose-coloured water in the basin, then rinsed it out and started in again.

  When he couldn’t find any more visible blood, he flung the filthy towel in the bath and went into the next room. Apart from a diffuse glimmer behind the closed curtains, it was in darkness. The air was stuffy and musty, with an odd, pervasive odour similar to that of sweat, but subtly different. He found the switch and turned on the light. His forehead was starting to hurt badly, and when he dabbed at the wound with a tentative finger, it came away bright red. He fetched another towel from the bathroom, pressed it to his face and stretched out on the bed.

  A manilla envelope was propped against the lamp on the table beside him. It bore the words ‘Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen’ in black felt marker. The name seemed familiar. He wasn’t entirely convinced that it was his, but it was a working hypothesis. Which left the question of where he was. After some considerable reflection, which yielded nothing, he opened the drawer of the bedside table and rummaged around until he found a booklet with instructions for using the telephone. The cover was stamped with a stylized picture of a large building and gold letters reading ‘Alba Palace Hotel’.

  Alba, he thought. His memory, which seemed to be short on essential facts but chock-full of arcane trivia, promptly supplied the information that this was a form of the Latin word for ‘white’. As in ‘albino’, it added pedantically, before appending a list of other things which were associated with the word: towels, wine, truffles …

  Tartufi bianchi d’Alba! Now he was getting somewhere. That was the source of that sweet stench – stronger even than that of blood – which perfumed the whole room, the bed sheets, and indeed his skin itself. They’d been grated over a meal he’d eaten the day before: shavings of moist, fragrant tuber with the colour of fine marble, the texture of raw mushroom and a flavour which permeated every internal membrane of your body until it seemed to glow in the dark. And, beneath, an egg with a yolk as orange as the setting sun smothered in a savoury cheese fonduta …

  The faint smile which had appeared on his lips at this fugitive memory abruptly vanished as his earlier panic returned. What about the blood? What about the cut on his forehead? What on earth had happened? He remembered arriving at the station in the rain and lugging his suitcase to the hotel. All that was clearly documented and archived in his long-term memory. The record since then was more contentious, relying on the usual circumstantial evidence, unsupported inference and informers’ reports.

  He’d been ill, that was the gist of it: feverish, aching all over, tossing and turning in fitful sleep. There was the wrecked and sodden bed to prove it. Somewhere that meal had to be fitted in, and an amiable stranger in a suit who had watched him get drunk and eat garlic. This section was badly focused and confused, with lots of gaps, but nevertheless basically sound.

  But what had come afterwards? All he could recover was a mishmash of tortuous, anxiety-ridden dreams, like a film patched together from discards and out-takes trying to pass themselves off as a coherent narrative. The only scene he still remembered – a child standing before him, one hand out-stretched like a beggar – made no sense in retrospect, and yet he knew that at the time it had been imbued with an infinite power to hurt and rebuke.

  None of which began to explain how his head had been cut badly enough to drench himself and the entire bathroom in blood. One moment he had been lying in bed, perhaps still feverish, racked by vivid and disturbing dreams. Under the circumstances, that was to be expected. The next thing he knew, he was standing in the blood-stained bathroom with a searing gash on his brow. How had he got there? What had happened in between? There was a gap in the story, a hiatus which nothing could explain.

  He was aroused from these speculations by the telephone. It sounded cheery, normal and welcome.

  ‘Tullio Legna, dottore. Are you feeling any better?’

  ‘I’m, er … Yes, thank you.’

  For it was only then that he realized that, despite his brutal awakening and its associated mysteries, he was feeling better. His cold seemed to have disappeared as if by magic. His limbs no longer ached, his temperature felt normal, and he wasn’t shivering or sneezing.

  ‘Good,’ said the local police chief, ‘because there has been a new development.’

  ‘I know. It’s going to need stitches, I think.’

  The li
ne went silent.

  ‘Stitches?’ Tullio Legna repeated.

  ‘I’m sorry to burden you with my medical problems yet again, but can you recommend a doctor?’

  Another brief silence.

  ‘Saturday is always difficult. Let me make a few phone calls and get back to you. But what happened, dottore?’

  ‘I slipped in the shower.’

  Tullio Legna made sympathetic noises and rang off. Still pressing the towel to his face, Zen walked over to the window, drew back the curtains and gasped. The rain had moved on and the clouds had transformed themselves into a radiant mist through which dramatically slanted sunlight irradiated the piazza where booksellers were setting up their booths under the pine trees.

  Thirty minutes later he was out in it all, badly shaved and clumsily dressed, walking up the Via Maestra with Tullio Legna. The latter had not only set up an appointment with a certain Doctor Lucchese, whom he described to Zen as ‘one of the best in Italy, if one of the laziest’, but had also brought a selection of adhesive bandages, one of which currently adorned Zen’s forehead.

  ‘And your cold?’ the police chief asked, as they picked their way through the promenading throng of Saturday morning shoppers.

  ‘It’s quite extraordinary! The garlic and wine treatment usually works in a few days, but this is like a miracle. It’s as if I was never ill in the first place. Even after this stupid accident, I feel better than I have for ages!’

  ‘Bella, no?’ Legna replied, catching Zen’s eyes on a well-endowed woman walking towards them. ‘Yes, they have that effect too.’

  ‘What do?’ asked Zen, turning round to check out the back view.

  ‘Tuberi di Afrodite, as we call them here. I take it you enjoyed the lunch I had sent up yesterday?’