Michael Dibdin - A long finish

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 line 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?’

‘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 facade 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.