Authors: Michael Dibdin
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 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 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.