Michael Dibdin - A long finish

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 Vincenzo 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’?il 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…