A Long Finish - 6

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘It was delicious.’

  ‘But it’s not just a matter of gastronomic pleasure! I made sure they doubled the usual ration of truffles to increase the therapeutic effect. Some people here will tell you there’s nothing but death that they can’t cure.’

  He turned left into the carriage entrance of an ancient three-storey palazzo, its sober façade relieved by ornate wrought-iron balconies and an elaborate plaster cornice. After a brief colloquy with the porter, they were admitted to Doctor Lucchese’s apartment on the first floor. The room into which they were ushered gave no hint that medical consultations might take place there. Lined with books, maps and prints, comfortably furnished with leather armchairs, antique tables and writing desks, it looked more like a scholar’s sanctum than a doctor’s consulting room.

  Nor did the physician’s appearance inspire confidence. Gaunt, with a shock of long grey hair streaked with silver, wearing a silk dressing-gown and smoking a cigar, he replaced the battered book he had been reading on a table and greeted his guests with a vaguely reluctant, world-weary urbanity which did not seem to augur well for his medical skills.

  ‘Michele Gazzano,’ he said to Zen, indicating the book, once introductions had been made. ‘From Alba, eighteenth century. I’ve just been leafing through his chapter on blood feuds in Sardinia. He spent fifteen years there as a judge. We Piedmontese ruled the place then, of course. If we can believe what he says, very little has changed in two hundred years. Should we find that depressing or encouraging?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘Both, perhaps.’

  Lucchese eyed him keenly.

  ‘You know Sardinia?’

  ‘Not as well as your author, no doubt. But we – the Italians, that is – still do rule the place. A few years ago I was sent there to investigate the Burolo murder. You may remember it.’

  Doctor Lucchese shook his head.

  ‘I find it hard to take anything that’s happened since I was born very seriously,’ he said. ‘Anyway, what can I do for you?’

  With an energy which suggested that he had been fretting on the sidelines, Tullio Legna intervened with an account of the various misfortunes which had befallen Dottor Zen since his arrival.

  ‘He caught the cold in Rome,’ he concluded, ‘and as soon as I got some trifola into his system, it acknowledged defeat and decamped. But now we have this new problem.’

  Lucchese removed the plaster and inspected the injury.

  ‘Almost identical to the blow that felled Aldo Vincenzo,’ he murmured. ‘Were you also attacked?’

  ‘No, I did it myself.’

  Once again, the doctor turned his disconcertingly undeceived gaze on Zen.

  ‘I see. Well, we’d better patch you up. Come with me, please.’

  The room into which Zen was ushered was a bleak tiled chamber at the rear of the premises. Apparently a converted bathroom, it was small, chilly and none too clean. Lucchese rummaged round in various cupboards, quizzing himself aloud as to whether various necessary supplies existed, or would be usable if they did.

  Matters improved once Lucchese got to work. First he injected a local anaesthetic, so painlessly that Zen didn’t even realize what had happened until the doctor started to scrub out the wound. Then came the stitches, six in all. Zen felt nothing but an odd sensation that an extra muscle had been inserted into his face and was now twitching experimentally.

  ‘How did this happen?’ asked Lucchese casually.

  Zen ill-advisedly shook his head, and immediately winced.

  ‘I don’t know. I remember tossing and turning in bed, dreaming vividly. The next thing I knew, I felt a sharp blow to my forehead. I didn’t know where I was or how I got there. When I turned on the light, I found myself in the bathroom, covered in blood.’

  Lucchese tugged at the final stitch.

  ‘What did you mean about the Vincenzo business?’ asked Zen. ‘I thought he was stabbed to death.’

  ‘That happened subsequently. The first blow was to the temple, with something edged but not sharp. Probably a spade of some kind, since there were also traces of dirt.’

  He gave a final wrench and snipped the thread.

  ‘There you are! Bathe it periodically with a pad of gauze soaked in dilute hydrogen peroxide, then come back in a few days and I’ll remove the stitches.’

  ‘For someone who doesn’t take any interest in recent news, you seem to know a lot about the Vincenzo case,’ Zen observed ironically, as he replaced his jacket.

  ‘The doctor who examined the corpse is a fellow member of the Chess Club of Alba. No one’s actually played chess there for over a century, of course, but we still show up once a week to smoke and chat, the handful of us who are left. Every so often we make a token effort to elect some new members, but whenever someone is proposed, one of us always seems to feel that he wouldn’t quite fit in.’

  Lucchese placed the instruments he had used in the sink and peeled off his rubber gloves.

  ‘How much do I owe you?’ asked Zen.

  ‘I’m not finished yet. Suturing that cut is something that any competent intern could do. Healing your spirit will be more difficult.’

  Zen glanced at him sharply.

  ‘I’ll settle for the first, thank you. How much?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I insist!’

  Lucchese turned to him and smiled wanly.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t force me to accept your money, even if doing so might make you feel better about evading the real issue.’

  ‘I’m not evading anything!’

  ‘There’s no need to shout, dottore. I am simply pointing out that the reason you required medical attention this morning is almost certainly because you experienced an episode of somnambulism, vulgarly termed sleepwalking.’

  Zen gestured irritably.

  ‘That’s ridiculous! I’ve never done anything like that.’

  ‘You will yet do many things you’ve never done before, the last being to die,’ Lucchese replied. ‘On the basis of what you’ve told me, I can see no other explanation. But I quite understand your reluctance to accept it. Somnabulism is a profoundly disturbing phenomenon, bridging as it does two worlds which sanity and civilization require us to keep separate. As a policeman, you might like to regard it as a form of dreaming which leaves footprints in the soil – or, in your case, bloodstains in the sink. It is invariably the result of some profound psychic trauma, this being the injury which I loosely termed spiritual. Whenever you wish to discuss it with me, I am at your disposal.’

  He opened the door for Zen.

  ‘And then, and only then, will I present my bill.’

  Back in the living quarters of the house, Tullio Legna was deep in conversation with a young woman whom Zen assumed must be Lucchese’s daughter. The two policemen took their leave and walked down the echoing exterior steps to the courtyard.

  ‘So what’s this “new development” you mentioned on the phone?’ demanded Zen gruffly. He was still disconcerted by his exchange with Lucchese, as though the doctor had scored a point over him in some way.

  Tullio Legna smiled broadly.

  ‘Well, dottore, despite this little mishap, it seems that you’re in luck!’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Come and have a coffee and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  Legna led the way down the street to the Piazza del Duomo, where the Saturday morning market was in full swing. The two men skirted the crowded, bustling lanes of stalls and entered a venerable café in a narrow side street on the west side of the cathedral.

  Zen stood sipping a coffee and listening with half an ear to some tale about a local truffle hunter named Beppe Gallizio who had been found shot dead in a copse near Palazzuole. The stitches in his forehead were beginning to ache as the anaesthetic faded, but what most bothered him was the doctor’s words: ‘Healing your spirit will be more difficult.’ The man was clearly a charlatan, some sort of amateur psychoanalyst or
New Age guru. He would go elsewhere to have the stitches removed.

  ‘… holding a knife stained with blood,’ Tullio Legna was saying. ‘He claimed to have found it on the table, but of course there’s no proof of that. On the basis of the preliminary tests the Carabinieri have done, there seems every possibility that it is the weapon which was used to stab and mutilate Aldo Vincenzo. You appreciate what that means, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ murmured Zen vaguely.

  ‘Manlio Vincenzo will be released.’

  ‘He will?’

  ‘Of course! This Gallizio either committed suicide or he was murdered. If it was suicide, the knife must have been in his possession all along, in which case the presumption is that he killed Aldo. If, on the other hand, it turns out that Gallizio was murdered, then his killer – who was also Vincenzo’s – must have planted the knife at his house to throw suspicion for the original crime on a dead man.’

  Zen frowned.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ he said.

  Tullio Legna laughed.

  ‘It’ll take ages to work out what actually happened, but the beauty of it from your point of view is that it doesn’t matter. Your remit was to free Manlio Vincenzo, right? Well, he’s been in prison the whole time, and therefore can’t have had anything to do with Gallizio’s death and the incriminating knife. He’s off the hook, and so are you. The whole balance of the case has shifted. You’ve successfully fulfilled your assignment, and without even getting out of bed!’

  The police chief of Alba paid the bill and led the way outside. He turned to Zen and shook his hand vigorously.

  ‘In a perverse way, I’m sorry it’s worked out so smoothly, dottore. It would have been good to have had you here longer and been able to show you some of the wonderful things which the Langhe has to offer. But I’m sure that you’re eager to get back to your family and friends, and at least you had a chance to sample our famous white truffles, eh? It’s been a pleasure working with you. If there’s anything more I can do for you before you leave, don’t hesitate to contact me. Arriverderci!’

  With that Tullio Legna walked off and was soon lost in the constantly shuffled pack of market shoppers and traders. Zen stood looking after him with the distinct feeling of having been seen off the premises – very elegantly and very painlessly, but also very finally.

  He went back inside the café and ordered an amaro, a local variety of the sweet, sticky liqueur flavoured, in this case, with truffles. He knocked it back, lit a cigarette and reviewed the situation. According to the local police chief, who did not strike Zen as the type to lie about verifiable matters, the case he had been sent to solve had solved itself without him. There was therefore nothing to stop him from packing his bags and returning to Rome by the first available train. He might as well take a ticket all the way to Palermo, in fact, and save the bother of breaking his journey.

  That consideration aside, the prospect of going home just at the moment was far from inviting. His tour of duty in Naples had ended in professional triumph and private turmoil. The most disturbing aspect of the latter had been the discovery that Tania Biacis, with whom he had once had a transient, desultory affair, was pregnant – and that, according to her, he was the father.

  He had barely started coming to terms with this development when he was transferred back to the Ministry in Rome, where Tania was also employed, and reinstated in the ranks of the élite Criminalpol division as a just recompense for having supposedly smashed a murderous terrorist conspiracy single-handed. But when he cornered Tania in the corridor one day and tried to arrange a meeting to discuss the situation, her response had been brutal.

  ‘There’s nothing to discuss, Aurelio. It’s all taken care of.’

  He literally had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘I had an abortion,’ she explained icily. ‘Termination of pregnancy, yes?’

  ‘But you … I mean, it’s dead?’

  ‘He, actually. Yes, very dead indeed.’

  Her tone had an exaggerated brutality about it, a determined refusal to admit feeling directed as much at herself as at him.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ she went on, ‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure it was yours in the first place. But after seeing you again, carrying on in that high-handed, arrogant, selfish way, I knew that I couldn’t afford to take the risk. So I had it removed. End of story.’

  But it wasn’t, at least for Zen. His initial sense of shameful relief had quickly proved itself to be illusory – a deceptively fragile crust covering a quagmire in which he was now struggling, as it sometimes seemed, for his sanity, if not his life. Every instinct told him to put the episode behind him, to wipe it out of his consciousness as thoroughly as the foetus had apparently been expunged from its mother’s womb. But there seemed to be no surgical procedures prescribed for this particular intervention.

  To make matters worse, he had to see Tania every day at work. Not even Zen’s current celebrity gave him any leverage over the rigid employment hierarchies of the Ministry of the Interior. He could no more have had his ex-mistress transferred to another department than he could have had the building moved from the Viminale hill to the Aventine on the grounds that the air was more salubrious and the view superior.

  As though sensing his discomfiture, Tania appeared to go out of her way to discover or manufacture reasons for crossing his path. Zen had no idea how she herself felt about what had happened. His one attempt to find out had been repulsed with a heavy barrage of rhetoric about a woman’s right to choose, all of which he agreed with but which brought him no closer to understanding this particular instance of the general principle.

  There was no one he could discuss it with, either. He was no longer on speaking terms with his former friend, Gilberto Nieddu, after what Zen saw as the latter’s betrayal in the Naples case when Nieddu had been entrusted with the prototype of a video game, which he had promptly taken off to Russia and sold to the local mafia for a figure which he gloatingly declined to disclose.

  His only other resource in a matter as personal as this was his mother, and she seemed to have taken a turn not so much for the worse as towards the far distance, from which zone – like an assiduous but incompetent spy – she relayed incomprehensible or misleading messages, with the names all muddled up and the dates and times confused. Even the unfailing good sense of Maria Grazia, their Calabrian housekeeper, had been tried to the limit at times. To raise the question of dead babies and hypothetical sons with someone who had so recently made startling disclosures about Zen’s own paternity – all of which she now denied having ever uttered – would be merely asking for more and deeper trouble.

  But if Zen had good reasons for not wishing to return to Rome any sooner than he had to, the prospect of going back to the hotel room where he had been cooped up for the past thirty-six hours, to say nothing of an immediate transfer to a front-line posting in Sicily, held no appeal either. At a loss, he paid for his drink and went outside again.

  The sun had now broken through the dispersing mist and was shining wanly, its attenuated light almost as insubstantial as the shadows cast by the buildings at the end of the piazza. Zen made his way slowly through the crowd, only too conscious that he had no set goal or purpose. The shoppers, mostly middle-aged or elderly, all well-dressed and seemingly prosperous, were going about their business without any noise or fuss. Almost everyone he had encountered since his arrival had been like that: pleasant, patient, good-natured, polite. After his experiences in Naples this struck him as slightly sinister, as though it were all some elaborate charade. No one could be that nice all the time.

  Nor were they, as Zen had known ever since scanning the file on the Vincenzo case. He had obtained this, after the usual delay, from the Defence Ministry in Rome, and read it on the train trip north. Aldo Vincenzo had been killed with a ferocity which almost defied belief; hence the extensive media interest, although this had abated since Manlio’s arrest. But the report of a medical witness
– perhaps Lucchese’s friend – included among the documents which Tullio Legna had brought to the hotel the day before, was even more graphic:

  The body was lashed by the wrists and ankles to the wires supporting the laden vines, naked from the waist down. The shirt above was stained black with blood which had trickled down the thighs and legs in coagulating runnels, forming a pool between the legs which had already attracted the attention of a few early flies. The head was thrown back, the eyes wide as a startled horse. He had been stabbed again and again in the stomach and midriff below the breastbone: about forty times in all. The penis and scrotal sac had been hacked off and removed or concealed. No trace of these items has been found.

  So the niceness was a pose, a way of keeping strangers at a distance and seeing off inconvenient intruders from Rome. It had happened to him many times before, although usually at the hands of interested parties less suave than Tullio Legna. But the principle remained the same; the door was being closed in his face. Well, too bad, he thought. He wasn’t in a mood to be seen off, no matter how politely. He was, in fact, in a mood to make a complete arsehole of himself, to offend as many of these secretive, hypocritical bastards as he could, even though it got him nowhere at all from a professional point of view. This was not business but pleasure.

  The grid of the market was defined by the traders’ vans and lorries drawn up in rows, their tail-gates opening on to wooden stalls piled high with the goods offered for sale. These were mostly household durables: bedlinen, clothes, kitchen utensils and hardware items, with a few of the usual labour-saving, miracle appliances which salesmen were loudly and enthusiastically demonstrating to a clientele of crumpled, compact women of a certain age, who looked suitably sceptical about these claims but at the same time enthralled by the attention they were receiving.

  Near the main door of the cathedral was a separate section, with open-sided vans selling cheese and fresh and cured meats, and stalls offering jars of preserves and honey from the mountains, and, of course, baskets of truffles and wild mushrooms. One of these consisted of a red Fiat truck covered in a tent-like tarpaulin. A hand-painted sign in old-fashioned block lettering above the tail-gate read FRATELLI FAIGANO – VINI E PRODOTTI TIPICI.