Read A Long Finish - 6 for Free Online Page A

nothing of giving them a perfect excuse for a multitude of personal shortcomings or lapses.
    But to Zen illness was an enemy he had no idea how to placate or control, a barbarian horde which descended without warning and made life impossible until, just as suddenly, it went off to wreak havoc elsewhere. And as such invasions went, this particular one was not only in the Attila the Hun class, but could hardly have been worse timed.
    He had arrived in Alba the previous night after a six-and-half-hour journey from the capital. He had never visited the town before, indeed had barely ever set foot in Piedmont except for a few trips to Turin during his years at the Questura in Milan. Asti, the provincial capital where he had changed trains, meant nothing to him except the sparkling, fulsomely sweet wine one got offered at weddings when the host was too stingy or ignorant to come up with anything better.
    There had been nothing sparkling about Asti at nine o’clock the previous night, however, with a blustering and buffeting wind and sheets of rain which spattered on the platform like liquid hail. The user-friendly genius of the State Railways had ensured that the two-coach diesel unit which serviced the branch line to his final destination was waiting on a track as far as possible from the platform where the Rome-Turin express had arrived. Trembling and breathless, with aching limbs and a sinking heart, Zen grabbed his bags and ran the length of the dank, ill-lit underpass, terrified that the connection would leave before he could reach it.
    He needn’t have worried. Another fifteen minutes passed before the automotrice finally revved up its engines and nosed off along the single-line track across the Tanaro river and south to Alba. Zen soon fell into a shallow, confused, snuffly sleep, from which he was awakened by a member of the crew, who curtly informed him that they had reached the end of the line. His interrupted dream had been set back in Naples, his last posting, and as he gathered his belongings together and clambered out of the train he braced himself for the crowds, the noise, the vibrant chaos and confusion of that city …
    It did not take him long to realize his error. The rainswept streets were as deserted as the small station, the taxi rank empty, the shops and houses shuttered and dark. Fortunately it proved to be a relatively short walk to his hotel, where it took several minutes of continuous ringing on the bell to rouse the night porter, who seemed to have no idea who Zen was or what he was doing there, or even that the establishment over which he presided existed for the purpose of offering accommodation to travellers.
    But all this had been as nothing to the discovery, next morning, that getting out of bed and going to the bathroom presented a physical challenge roughly equivalent to walking across Antarctica. He was shivering, aching, sneezing, snivelling, coughing and moaning, and felt utterly exhausted and disoriented. Somehow he made it back to bed and lay down for a few minutes, during which, according to the clock, an hour and a half went by. When he finally surfaced, two hours after that, he crawled to the phone, rang for a waiter and arranged for delivery of the ingredients whose preparation he was now embarked upon.
    The remedy was an ancient tradition of the Zen family, a secret nostrum at once venerable and slightly shameful, given its reputed connection with an ancestor who had been Governor of the Venetian stronghold of Durazzo, now in Albania, and who had gone native in such a spectacular way that the Council of Ten had not only recalled him but had had him quietly strangled. For Zen its mystique derived from the fact that as a child he had not been allowed to take it. For his colds he was dosed with aspirin ground up in a spoonful of honey. Only adults got the full-strength, gloves-off, no-holds-barred treatment: a whole head of peeled garlic eaten raw with copious quantities of strong red