A long finish

Later — when word of what had happened got about and, in variously garbled versions, was for a time the common property of the entire nation — a television crew set up a satellite dish in a clearing on the hillside at the back of the Faigano property, paying what in local terms amounted to a small fortune for the temporary rights to a few square metres of land so poor, so barren, so utterly useless, that it had virtually ceased to exist on anyone’s mental map of the vicinity. People scratched their heads and murmured, ‘They paid that? For il Bric Liserdin? ’, seemingly as shocked by this anomaly as they had been by the thing itself.

That was how it was always referred to: ‘the thing’, as though it had nothing more to do with them than the metal bowl which the outsiders from Milan trucked in and mounted for a fat fee on the steep, scrub-covered hillside where rocks perpetually shouldered their way to the surface like moles, infesting the ground on which Gianni and Maurizio’s ancestors had expended such futile labour, its only produce the stones used for terracing the slopes on the other side of the hill, the vineyards with the good exposure.

But the exposure that the television people wanted, contrary to every natural law, was apparently right there in that arid wasteland, with line of sight towards some heavenly body, invisible to the naked eye, which they claimed hung in space like the frescoed angels in the local church, motionless above the moving earth, gathering up all the villagers’ chat, blather and evasions and then beaming it down again so that they could watch themselves later, being interviewed live at the scene of the tragedy.

He himself couldn’t be interviewed, of course, even later. The man they would have paid far more than they gave the Faigano brothers, in return for being able to ask exactly what he had seen and how it had felt, had to watch the whole charade and bite his tongue and pretend that he was just like everyone else, knowing no more than what he heard in the street and saw on television. The frustration bit keenly, like a bad case of indigestion, subverting every pleasure and adding its intimate edge to every other woe and worry. Had his state of mind been known to anyone else, it might have gone some way to explaining — perhaps even preventing — the subsequent events, which, while not in the same class as la cosa itself, nevertheless prolonged the unprecedented notoriety which the community was to enjoy.

But all that came later. At the time, he was aware of nothing but the smear of reluctant light to the east, the fat clods of clay underfoot, the mist oozing up from the river valley, the eager breathing of the dog keeping obediently to heel. He was intensely aware of all this, and of everything else in his immediate vicinity, as he walked up the hillside between the rows of vines, a large bouquet of white flowers clutched in one hand, hunching over to keep below the level of the russet and golden foliage sprouting from ancient stumps kept low by intensive pruning. With all the money they were making, the Vincenzo family had been able to replace the traditional canes supporting the training wires with concrete posts stacked neatly across the hillside like the rows of crosses in the military cemetery just outside the village.

His route had been chosen with care. The vines covered him on two sides only, but they were the vital ones. To his right lay the road which ran along the ridge towards Alba. Only one vehicle had passed since he had slipped into the field through a carefully concealed hatch cut in the protecting fence, and it had gone on its way without slackening speed. A more acute danger lay in the other direction, where on a neighbouring hillside about a mile distant stood the Vincenzo residence and its associated outbuildings. If the owner had been up and about at that hour, watching the mist drifting through his vines like the smoke from a cigar, he might well have spotted something moving out there, and gone inside for his binoculars and his gun. Even at his advanced age, Aldo Vincenzo’s eyesight was as legendary as his suspicion and intransigence. But the intruder was fairly sure that on that particular morning there would be no one about, for he had chosen not only his route but also his moment with care.

The price he paid for the cover afforded to either side by the ranks of vines was almost total exposure in the other two directions, but here he felt even more confident of passing unobserved. At his back the ground sloped away to a railway cutting whose further edge was so much lower that nothing was visible in that direction except for the faint outline of the village of Palazzuole rising from the mist on its distant hilltop. Ahead of him, at the crest of the hill, was a small, densely wooded hanger which had been left wild, a scrubby north-facing patch too unpropitious for even Aldo to try to cultivate. The road from Alba to Acqui ran through it on a continuous banked curve so steep and tight that drivers still had to slow down, change gear and address themselves seriously to the steering wheel. Back in 1944, the underpowered, overladen, unwieldy trucks had virtually been brought to a standstill by the incline, even before the lead driver noticed the tree lying across the road…

It was while they were waiting that Angelin had found the truffle. The two of them had been stationed on that side of the road, while the others were concealed in the continuation of the wood further up the hill, which had then belonged to the Cravioli family. Now it, too, was part of Aldo’s empire, together with the unbroken sweep of vines on the hillside beyond the road to the right.

The plan had been simple. When the crew of the Republican convoy, which had hurriedly left Alba after its seizure by the partisans, got out to clear the fallen birch from the road, the men on the upper slope would rake the scene from end to end with a mounted machine-gun captured from a German unit a few weeks earlier. He and Angelin were to pick off any fascisti who tried to take refuge in the woods on that side.

Meanwhile they had nothing to do but wait. People nowadays had no idea how much waiting there had been. They thought that war was all gunfire and explosions, sirens and screams, but he remembered it as long periods of tedium punctuated, like a summer night by lightning, by moments of intense excitement such as he had never imagined possible until then. He had been fifteen at the time, and immortal. Death was something that happened to other people. It no more occurred to him that he might be killed than that he might get pregnant.

As it turned out, he was right. Everything went according to plan, except that Angelin caught a stray bullet which emptied what little brains he’d ever had all over the mulch and moss of the underwood. But although no one came right out and said so, Angelin was expendable, and in every other respect the ambush was a textbook success. Mussolini’s die-hards were cut down in seconds — all but one youngster who threw down his gun, pleading incoherently for his life, and had to be dispatched at short range.

But during that interminable period of waiting, all he had been aware of was the pallid light reaching down through the trees and the welling silence, fat and palpable as a spring, broken only by the rasp of his companion’s digging. Using a small, short-bladed knife, Angelin was painstakingly excavating the hillside in front of the oak tree behind which they were concealed. Eventually the scraping noise got on his nerves.

‘What are you doing?’ he whispered irritably.

Angelin smiled in a vacuous, almost mocking way.

‘I smell something.’

He’d responded with a muttered blasphemy. It wasn’t just the noise that was getting on his nerves, it was the whole situation. Everyone knew Angelin was the next best thing to the village idiot, so being relegated to keep him company on the other side of the road from the real action looked like a judgement. He could imagine what the others had said, back at the planning meeting to which he hadn’t been invited. ‘Let’s stick the kid with Angelin. He can’t do any harm over there.’ They’d never forgotten the time he’d opened fire out of sheer excitement before the order had been given, and nearly compromised the whole operation. In the end no harm had been done, but one of the older men had made a crude joke about premature ejaculation, and ever since then they’d kept him at arm’s length when it came to gun-play. His courage was not in dispute, but they didn’t trust his judgement.

Angelin had kept digging away, scratching and sniffing, until he had opened up a gash about a foot wide in the soft earth at the foot of one of the trees. Finally he unearthed a filthy lump of something that might have been bone or chalk, shaved a corner off and presented it impaled on the tip of his knife.

‘White diamond!’ he whispered, as pathetically eager for praise as a truffle hound for the stale crust of bread with which it would be fobbed off after doing the same work.

It was then that they heard the sound of the convoy in the distance, engines revving as they climbed over the col leading up from the valley of the Tanaro. Later, of course, there’d been no time to explain. There were the trucks to turn around, and cartons of documents and records from the Questura in Alba to unload and reload, together with whatever arms and ammunition they could strip off the escort. They’d left Angelin’s body where it was. There was clearly nothing to be done for him. Nor was there any way of identifying the bullet which had passed through the back of his skull and buried itself somewhere in the mulch. They all knew that bullets could ricochet in all kinds of crazy ways. Above all, they knew that the sound of gunfire must have been heard over a wide area, and that an enemy detachment would be coming to investigate very soon.

He did not return to the site of the ambush until the following year. By then the war was over and its victims had started to take on the marmoreal, exemplary status of martyrs and mythic heroes. At the bend in the road where Angelin died — but on the other side, as though he’d been part of the main action — a plinth had been erected, bearing his name, a date and the words: ‘Here he fell for Italy beneath the lead of a barbaric enemy’. A faded wreath in the national colours garlanded the stone tablet. Angelin’s ex-comrade had read the inscription without the slightest flicker of expression. Then, making sure no one was watching, he climbed down into the woods below and commenced his excavations.

For several years it continued like this. Some seasons he got a heavy yield, others little or nothing. Truffles were like that: capricious, female and unpredictable. It was part of their considerable mystique. Lacking the late Angelin’s nose for their pungent scent — no doubt nature’s compensation for his deficiencies in other respects — he used a tabui, one of the carefully bred and trained mongrels which have the ability to home in on any example of tuber magnatum Pico within a ten-metre radius.

The lode which Angelin had discovered on this unregarded strip of wasteland at the edge of the Vincenzo property was not his only hunting ground, but returns during the early years had still been modest. He kept a few of the smaller tubers for his own use, and sold the rest either to middle-men in the informal market held every morning in the back streets of Alba, or directly to a variety of restaurants and local connoisseurs. Considering that the outlay consisted only of his time, which was of no value, the returns were reasonable. Along with some casual labour, part-time haulage and odd jobs in the handyman line, it added up to a modest living.

Then, imperceptibly at first, things started to change. One of the first signs — and the most serious, from his point of view — was the barbed wire fence which Aldo Vincenzo had erected around his property. The local wines were beginning to acquire a reputation, and with it a price, exceeding anything previously heard of, and the grapes which produced them became correspondingly precious. There was even talk of Aldo Vincenzo emulating the example of some other local producers by sending his son, Manlio, to study something called ‘viticulture’, which struck most of the community as an absurdity akin to enrolling the boy at university to teach him the facts of life.

At about the same time as wines of the Langhe started acquiring their international reputation, coincidentally creating difficulties of access to his secret hoard of white truffles, the market for the latter took off in an even more dramatic and indeed literal sense. Since truffles lose their savour after a few days, most of the harvest had previously been consumed locally, with just a small quantity being exported by rail to hotels and restaurants in other regions of Italy, as well as a handful in Austria, France and Switzerland. Then came the era of air cargo. ‘White diamond!’ Angelin had said, but that proverbial metaphor was soon out of date. Ounce for ounce, la trifola made uncut diamond look cheap. International buyers vied with one another to obtain the precious tubers and ship them off to eager consumers in London, New York and Tokyo.

It was a world market, but the supply was strictly local. Some unexplored Russian hillside or Cambodian valley might perhaps hide similar riches, but white truffles could not be cultivated, and for now the only source of any importance was a small area of southern Piedmont centred on the town of Alba. Prices went through the roof, and the trifolai became even more reticent about the exact location of their favoured sites. Angelin’s discovery thus became of still greater value. No one ever suspected that this slice of forgotten copse at the margins of the Vincenzo territory might be a mine for the white diamonds so much in demand. Like the hillside which the Faigano brothers later leased to the media for a small fortune, it had fallen off the map.

But if anyone saw him digging there, or noticed that the barbed-wire fence designed to protect the vines had been cut, all this would rapidly change. That was why he had not come during the hours of darkness, the traditional season of the ‘phantoms of the night’, as truffle hunters were known. At night he would have had to bring a torch, which might easily have been seen. People around here were naturally curious. Everything happened according to a time-honoured order and sense. Any exception was a potentially interesting anomaly to be noted and passed on to others. Hence the indirect route which he had chosen to approach the spot, the care he took not to be seen, and above all his timing.

The evening before had seen the Festa della Vendemmia, celebrated annually at Palazzuole on the first Saturday in October. The date of the vintage itself varied from year to year and from vineyard to vineyard, depending on the weather and the degree of risk which any given grower was prepared to accept in return for the possibility of riper fruit. But the date of the village festa was invariable, as were the excesses and rituals associated with it. On the Saturday everyone ate and drank and danced and drank and flirted and drank and reminisced and drank, and then grew maudlin and nostalgic and lyrical. The entire community stayed up until well after midnight, slept in late the next morning and then reluctantly hauled themselves out of bed, clutching their hangovers like cerebral cysts, and staggered to church to attend the service invoking divine blessing on the event on which virtually all of their livelihoods depended in one way or another.

So as he picked his way up the muddy alley between the two rows of vines, he knew that the chances of anyone being up and about, never mind vigilant and suspicious, in the misty half-light before sunrise on that particular Sunday morning were as close to zero as made no difference. And while he had put in an appearance at the celebrations the day before — not to do so would inevitably attract comment — he had made a few glasses of wine go a lot further than it had appeared, and had woken fresh and alert at five o’clock that morning, ready for his annual, but very private, ceremony.

He thought of this as ‘laying flowers on Angelin’s tomb’, even though the supposed victim of a barbaric enemy was not, of course, buried at the spot where he had been killed. The flowers were real, though: a touchingly artless bouquet of white chrysanthemums he had bought the day before in full view of several witnesses. He had told them that the flowers were for his mother, but with an awkward shrug which both ended the conversation and would be remembered in the event of his being caught and asked the reason for his presence on the Vincenzo land that morning. ‘I just wanted to honour my fallen comrade,’ he would say, his voice breaking with long-denied emotion. ‘People called him simple, but to me he was a friend…’

No one would dare question him further after that, he reckoned. His evident sincerity would speak for itself, for the oddest thing of all was that by now he had come to believe this version of events himself. And so as he made his way up the vineyard that autumn morning, he was simultaneously two quite different people on two very different quests: a wary and unscrupulous truffle poacher, and an elderly veteran of the Resistance honouring a dead brother-in-arms.

It was then that he saw something moving among the vines up ahead, heavy with ripe clusters of the fat blood-red grapes which would produce the Barbaresco wine for which the region was famous. All might have been well, even then. He had always been good at moving silently and at speed, and could easily have slipped through the rows of vines to his left and then worked back the way he had come. But Anna had scented the extraneous presence. Restrained by the leash, she couldn’t bound forward and investigate and so, as dogs will, she began to bark. The figure concealed in amongst the vines straightened up and turned towards him.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

There was no reply.

‘Didn’t you see the signs on the fence? “No trespassing,” it says. Do you know what that means, or are you illiterate on top of everything else?’

The dog stood between them, looking from one to the other as though uncertain which side to take, which one to defend and which to attack. Then the man who had brought her took the initiative, walking forward at a slow, confident lope, his right hand gripping his sapet, the adze-shaped mattock used to unearth truffles.

That was how it began.

‘Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello. I am a purist, Dottor Zen. I also happen to be able to afford that classical austerity which is the ultimate luxury of those who can have anything they want. In wine, as in music, the three Bs suffice me.’

‘I see,’ said Aurelio Zen, who didn’t see anything except the bins of bottles stretching away into the gloomy reaches of the vast, cold, damp cellar, its vaulted roof encrusted with a white mesh of saltpetre.

‘Barolo is the Bach of wine,’ his host continued. ‘Strong, supremely structured, a little forbidding, but absolutely fundamental. Barbaresco is the Beethoven, taking those qualities and lifting them to heights of subjective passion and pain that have never been surpassed. And Brunello is its Brahms, the softer, fuller, romantic afterglow of so much strenuous excess.’

Aurelio Zen was spared the necessity of answering by an attack of coughing which rendered him speechless for almost a minute.

‘How long have you had that cough?’ the other man asked with a solicitude which was all too evidently feigned. ‘Come, let us go back upstairs.’

‘No, no. It’s only a touch of chestiness. A cough won’t kill me.’

Zen’s host looked at him sharply. To someone who did not instantly recognize him — no such person was known to exist — he might have appeared an unremarkable figure: trim and fit for his sixty-odd years, but distinguished mostly by the layers of expensive tailoring which clad him like a second skin, and by a face whose wrinkles and folds seemed an expression not of calendar age but of inheritance, as though it had been worn by countless other eminent and powerful members of the family before being bequeathed to the present owner.

‘Kill you?’ he exclaimed. ‘Of course not!’

With an abrupt laugh, he led the way further into the labyrinth of subterranean caverns. The only light was provided by the small torch he carried, which swung from right to left, picking out stacks of dark brown bottles covered in mildew and dust.

‘I am also a purist in my selection,’ he announced in the same didactic tone. ‘Conterno and Giacosa for Barolo, Gaja and Vincenzo for Barbaresco. And, until the recent unfortunate events, Biondi Santi for Brunello. Poco ma buono has always been my motto. I possess an excellent stock of every vintage worth having since 1961, probably the best collection in the country of the legendary ’58 and ’71, to say nothing of a few flights of fancy such as a Brunello from the year of my birth. Under these exceptional circumstances, vertical tastings acquire a classical rigour and significance.’

He turned and shone his torch into Zen’s face.

‘You are Venetian. You drink fruity, fresh vino sfuso from the Friuli intended to be consumed within the year. You think I am crazy.’

Another prolonged outburst of coughing was the only reply, ending in a loud sneeze. The other man took Zen by the arm.

‘Come, you’re unwell! We’ll go back.’

‘No, no, it’s nothing.’

Aurelio Zen made a visible effort to get a grip on himself.

‘You were saying that I don’t understand wine. That’s true, of course. But what I really don’t understand is the reason why I have been summoned here in the first place.’

His host smiled and raised one eyebrow.

‘But the two are the same!’

He turned and strode off down the paved alley between the bins. The darkness closing in about him, Zen had no choice but to follow.

The instruction to attend this meeting at the Rome residence of the world-famous film and opera director, whose artistic eminence was equalled only by the notoriety of the rumours surrounding his private life, had come in the form of an internal memorandum which appeared on his desk at the Ministry of the Interior a few days earlier. ‘With respect to a potential parallel enquiry which the Minister is considering regarding the Vincenzo case (see attached file), you are requested to present yourself at 10.30 hrs on Friday next at Palazzo Torrozzo, Via del Corso, for an informal background briefing by…’

The name which followed was of such resonance that Giorgio De Angelis, the one friend Zen still had in the Criminalpol department, whistled loudly, having read it over Zen’s shoulder.

‘Mamma mia! Can I come too? Do we get autographs? I could dine out on this for a year!’

‘Yes, but who’ll pay the bill?’ Zen had murmured, as though to himself.

And that was the question which posed itself now, but with renewed force. The celebrity in question clearly hadn’t invited Zen to his palazzo, scene of so many widely reported parties ‘demonstrating that the ancient tradition of the orgy is still not dead’, merely to show off his wine collection. There was a bottom line, and the chances were that behind it there would be a threat.

‘I can appreciate your point of view,’ his host’s voice boomed from the darkness ahead. ‘I myself grew up in the estuary of the Po, and we drank the local rotgut — heavily watered to make it palatable — as a sort of medicine to aid digestion and kill off undesirable germs. But perhaps there is some other way I can make you understand. Surely you must at some time have collected something. Postage stamps, butterflies, first editions, firearms, badges, matchboxes…’

‘What’s that got to do with wine?’

The famous director, known to his equally famous friends as Giulio, stopped and turned, admitting Zen back into the feeble nimbus of light.

‘The object of the collection is as unimportant as the quantities inserted in an algebraic formula. To the collector, all that matters is selection and completeness. It is an almost exclusively male obsession, an expression of our need to control the world. Women rarely collect anything except shoes and jewellery. And lovers, of course.’

Zen did not reply. His host pointed the torch up at the curved ceiling of stone slabs.

‘The nitre! It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are now below Via del Corso. Young men, my sons perhaps included, are racing up and down in their cars as they once did on their horses, yet not a murmur of that senseless frenzy reaches us here. The wine sleeps like the dead.’

‘I used to have a collection of railway tickets,’ Zen remarked.

Giulio flashed a smile.

‘I knew it!’

A dry rustling amongst the bottles to his left made Zen start.

‘Rats,’ said the famous director. ‘You were saying?’

‘My father…’

Zen hesitated, as though at a loss, then started again.

‘He worked for the railways, and he used to bring them back for me, little cardboard tickets with the name of the destination printed on them, the class and the fare paid. By the end I had one to all the stations as far as Verona, Rovigo, Udine and Trieste…’

He paused again, then clicked his fingers.

‘All except Bassano del Grappa! I remember someone making a joke about having to wait until I was older before trying grappa. I didn’t understand at the time. I was just annoyed at having that gap in my collection. It ached like a pulled tooth.’

‘Excellent! Perfect! Then no doubt you will understand how I felt when I heard about this dreadful business involving Aldo Vincenzo.’

Zen frowned, returning reluctantly to the present.

‘Vincenzo?’ he echoed.

The famous director shone his torch around the neighbouring bins, lifted a bottle and held it out to Zen. The faded label read:

BARBARESCO 1964. VINIFICATO ED IMBOTTIGLIATO DAL PRODUTTORE A. VINCENZO.

‘Aldo Vincenzo was one of the producers I selected more than thirty years ago as worthy of a place in the cellar I then decided to create,’ he declared solemnly, replacing the bottle on the stack with as much care as a baby in its cot. ‘And now he’s dead and his son is in prison, all on the eve of what promises to be one of the great vintages of the century! That’s the reason why you have been “summoned here”, as you put it.’

‘You want to complete your collection.’

‘Exactly!’

‘To continue your horizontal tastings.’

His host regarded Zen sharply, as if suspecting some irony.

‘They might be that,’ he remarked, ‘if one actually swallowed all the wines on offer. Such, of course, is not the way in which a vertical tasting is conducted. But in any case, if you imagine that I have any chance of personally enjoying this year’s vintage at its best, you credit me with the longevity of a Methuselah. The patriarch, not the bottle.’

Zen struggled mutely with some internal paroxysm, then sneezed loudly, spraying gobs of sputum over the adjacent wine bins. The famous director grasped him once again by the arm and led him back the way they had come.

‘Enough! We’ll continue this talk upstairs.’

‘I’m all right,’ Zen protested. ‘It’s just this cold I’ve felt coming on for…’

‘I’m not worried about you! But sneezing in a cellar risks half the bottles turning out corked. So they say, at any rate. As for the presence of a menstruating woman, forget it! The whole business of wine is full of that sort of lore. I both believe and disbelieve, but with an investment like this I can’t afford to take chances.’

Giulio closed and locked the massive door giving into the vaults and led the way up a long, winding staircase and through an archway leading to the ground floor of the palazzo. They passed through several suites of rooms to the book-lined study where he had received Zen on the latter’s arrival, and gestured him into the armchair which he had occupied earlier.

‘As I was saying, the idea that I’m collecting the Vincenzo wine of this year — assuming there is any — for my own benefit is, of course, absurd. If the vintage is even half as good as has been predicted, it will not be remotely approachable for ten years, and won’t reach its peak for another ten. By which time I will be, if not defunct, at least “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”, as Shakespeare says.’

‘Then why should you care?’ demanded Zen, lighting a cigarette, which induced another massive fit of coughing. The other man eyed him keenly.

‘Do you have children, dottore?’

‘No. That’s to say… Yes. One.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘A boy. Carlo.’

‘How old?’

There was a long pause.

‘He’s just a baby,’ Zen replied at length.

‘Congratulations! But they grow up rapidly. Hence my interest in this year’s Vincenzo wines. I have two sons, both in the most repulsive period of their teens. At present they regard my interest in wine as just another example of their father’s dotage. If they drink at all, it’s some obscure brand of imported beer, although Luca at least shows promising signs of becoming a collezionista about that, too, hunting down limited-release Trappist brews and the like.’

He set about the meticulous business of cutting and lighting a massive cigar.

‘I believe — I have to believe — that in time they will come to appreciate what I have bequeathed them, and perhaps even set about extending the cellar far into the next millennium as a heritage for their own children.’

A triumphant puff of blue smoke.

‘But that is to look too far into the future. For the moment, all that concerns me is this harvest! Unless we act now, the grapes will either be sold off to some competitor or crudely vinified into a parody of what a Vincenzo wine could and should be.’

Aurelio Zen tried hard to look suitably concerned at this dire prospect.

‘But what can I do about it?’ he asked. ‘If the son is already under arrest…’

‘I don’t believe for a moment that he did it,’ the famous director exclaimed impatiently.

Zen produced a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.

‘Nevertheless, I’ve been given to understand that the Carabinieri have concluded their investigation. They have pressed charges against Manlio Vincenzo and the case is now in the hands of the judiciary. I don’t see where I come in.’

His host exhaled a dense barrage of smoke.

‘Perhaps you should be more concerned about where you go out,’ he said.

Zen frowned.

‘Go out? You mean, from this house?’

For the first time, Giulio smiled with what appeared genuine amusement.

‘No, no! All appearances to the contrary, I am not planning to immure you in some lost recess of my cellars. Nevertheless, a not dissimilar fate might well await you.’

He eyed Zen keenly.

‘I refer to your next professional posting.’

‘That is a matter of departmental policy,’ Zen replied, drawing on his cigarette.

Another smile, a shade more meaningful.

‘Exactly. And in that regard I wish to draw your attention to various facts of which you are aware, and to another which is as yet privileged information. I shall be brief. Firstly, the current Minister is a man of the Left. Many of his friends and associates in the former Communist Party dedicated their lives to the struggle against organized crime. Some of them were killed as a result.’

His eyes met Zen’s, and slid away.

‘In addition, you have recently been reassigned to work for Criminalpol after your brilliant exploits in Naples where, as the whole country knows, you were instrumental in smashing the terrorist organization known as Strade Pulite.’

‘But that was…’

‘A major coup! Indeed. All this you know, dottore. What you do not know — what no one outside the Minister’s immediate circle knows — is that he is in the process of forming an elite pool of senior officers who are to be drafted to Sicily to spearhead the coming campaign against the organization which took the lives of his comrades.’

Giulio waved his hand negligently.

‘We’ve all heard this before, of course, every time some judge or police officer was gunned down or blown up. But that was in the days when the Mafia had its men here in Rome, in the highest circles of power. Everyone understood how the game worked. Any over-zealous official who looked like doing some worthwhile work was transferred or killed, the government put up a token show of force, the Mafia made a token show of backing off, and in a few months it was back to business as usual.’

He glanced at Zen, who stifled a cough.

‘But this time, so I am assured, it will be different. A fight to the finish, with no quarter offered. The Mafia’s links to Rome have all been cut, and the new government is eager to show that it can deliver on what its predecessors endlessly promised. As a result, a process of internal head-hunting has been going on for officers of proven experience, ability and — shall we say? — independence.’

He broke off to relight his cigar, holding the tip at a respectful distance from the flame.

‘Your dossier, Dottor Zen, revealed you to have been severely compromised in the eyes of the former regime. This fact, needless to say, put you at the top of the list under the new management. Add to this your evident astuteness and ability to get things done, and you became a natural candidate for the new squad.’

‘They’re sending me to Sicily?’ gasped Zen.

His host nodded.

‘Oh, yes. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about that. There’s promotion in it, of course, and a substantial pay rise, but you’re definitely going to have to go south. The only question is when and where.’

For a moment Zen looked as though he was about to burst into tears, but all that emerged was another massive sneeze.

‘Salute!’ said his host. ‘Speaking of which, Sicily is notoriously insalubrious, particularly for newly arrived policemen who might well be drafted straight to the capital. If one were to arrive a little later, on the other hand, once the central command structure had been set up and all posts in Palermo filled, it might prove possible to secure an assignment in some relatively pleasant spot. Do you know Syracuse? An ancient Greek settlement in the least troubled portion of the island, possessing all the charm and beauty of Sicily without being tiresomely… well, Sicilian.’

Zen raised his eyes to meet those of his interlocutor.

‘What guarantees do I have?’

A look of pain, almost of shock, appeared on the famous director’s face.

‘You have the guarantee of my word, dottore.’

‘And your interest is?’

‘I thought I’d made that clear. I want Manlio Vincenzo released from prison in time to make the wine this year.’

‘Even if he murdered his father?’

A shrug.

‘If he turns out to be innocent, so much the better. But let’s assume that he did kill Aldo. It’s absurd to believe that Manlio Vincenzo poses a threat to any other member of the community. And in the meantime there’s a potentially great wine — maybe the great wine of the century — which demands the skill and attention only he can provide.’

He shrugged again, more expansively.

‘After that, I don’t really care what happens to him. In a year the estate will have had time to reorganize, to get another wine-maker or sell out to Gaja or Cerretto, either of whom would be only too glad to get their hands on the Vincenzo vineyards. But for now, Manlio’s my only resource. Just as I’m yours.’

Zen sat trying to catch his breath through the layers of phlegm which had percolated down into his lungs.

‘Why me?’ he demanded point-blank.

The famous director waved the hand holding his cigar, which left a convoluted wake of smoke hanging in the still air.

‘I made various enquiries, as a result of which someone mentioned your name and sketched in the details of your record. Most promising, I thought. You appear to be intelligent, devious and effective, compromised only by a regrettable tendency to insist on a conventional conception of morality at certain crucial moments — a weakness which, I regret to say, has hampered your career. In short, dottore, you need someone to save you from yourself.’

Zen said nothing.

‘In return for the services which I have outlined,’ his host continued seamlessly, ‘I offer myself in that capacity. I understand that at one time you enjoyed the favour of a certain notable associated with the political party based at Palazzo Sisti. His name, alas, no longer commands the respect it once did. Such are the perils of placing oneself under the protection of politicians, particularly in the present climate. They come and go, but business remains business. If you do the business for me, Dottor Zen, I’ll do the same for you. For your son, too, for that matter. What was his name again?’

‘Carlo.’

The famous director leant forward and fixed Zen with an intense gaze, as though framing one of his trademark camera angles.

‘Do we have a deal?’

Zen was briefly disabled by another internal convulsion.

‘On one condition,’ he said.

The man known to his friends as Giulio frowned. Conditions were not something he was used to negotiating with the class of hireling which Zen represented.

‘And what might that be?’ he asked with a silky hint of menace.

Aurelio Zen sniffed loudly and blew his nose again.

‘That when you next give a party here, I get an invitation.’

There was a moment’s silence, then the famous director roared with what sounded like genuine laughter.

‘Agreed!’

The meal over, the three men pushed back their chairs and returned to work. At first glance they appeared as interchangeable as pieces on a board. Gianni was slightly stockier than the others, Maurizio was significantly balder, while Minot, who was shorter and slighter than either of the two brothers, wore a foxy moustache above his cynical, down-turned lips. But their similarities were far more striking. They were all of an age, which might have been anywhere from fifty to eighty, worn down by constant labour and near-poverty, with proud, guarded expressions that revealed a common characteristic: the fierce determination never to be fooled again. Their clothes, too, were virtually identical: dark, durable knits and weaves, much patched and mended, each garment a manuscript in palimpsest of tales that would never be told.

They had eaten in silence, waited on by the only woman in the house, Maurizio’s teenage daughter Lisa. Back in the cellar, the long-maintained silence continued. It was not an empty silence, the void remaining once everything sayable has been said, nor yet the relaxed stillness which implies an intimacy or familiarity such that speech has become an irrelevance. This silence was tense with unspoken thoughts, facts and opinions not alluded to, a mutual reticence about things better left unsaid. It could be defused only by activity — filling mouths, or bottles.

The only light, from a single forty-watt bulb attached to a huge beam in the centre of the ceiling, died a lingering death in the lower reaches of the cellar, as though stifled by the darkness all around. The only sounds were repetitive and mechanical, muffled by the wooden casks mounted on wooden trestles which lined the walls. For lack of any other distractions, odour had it all its own way — an over-whelming profusion of smells fighting for prominence like plants in the jungle: yeast, mildew, alcohol, damp, fruit, corruption, fermentation. Their luxuriant variety created an olfactory arena whose dimensions apparently far exceeded those of the cellar itself, and this sense of concentration, of too much crammed into too little, gave an almost choking intensity to the musty reek which filled the lungs of the trio working silently in the gloom.

The division of labour had been established years before, and remained constant. Gianni Faigano, the elder of the two brothers, took the bottles from the rack of wooden pegs where they had been turned over to dry after being washed and sterilized. He filled each with a stream of red wine from a plastic tube inserted into one of the barrels, then passed the bottle to his brother, who positioned it under a metal lever loaded with a cork, which he rammed down into the opening. Maurizio then handed the bottle on to Minot, a neighbour who came by every year at this time to help out with this chore by applying the labels and capsules.

‘I hear Bruno’s got a new car,’ said Gianni.

The sound of his words died away so rapidly that a few seconds later it already seemed uncertain whether he had actually spoken, or if it had just been some natural noise arising from the work on hand, or of digestion, superficially mimicking speech. More than a dozen bottles passed from hand to hand, and were duly filled, corked and labelled. Crouched in their dusty sails among the shadows above, gigantic spiders surveyed the scene.

‘One of those off-road jobs,’ Maurizio remarked. ‘And bright red, into the bargain.’

Another six or eight bottles moved from the drying rack to the filling pipe and then the labelling bench before his brother replied. ‘It’s green.’

For a while everything continued as before. Then the spiders suddenly scuttled away to the furthest corner of their webs and crouched down, making themselves small and still. A bottle had broken, scattering jagged chunks of brown glass about the floor and releasing tongues of spilt wine to scout out the terrain.

‘I’ve had just about enough of this damned argument!’ said Minot.

There was a long silence. No one spoke or moved. Then Gianni Faigano filled another bottle, which Maurizio corked and handed to Minot, who pasted on a label. The arachnids above crawled back to their vantage points and took up their octagonal surveillance once more, while the bottles resumed their progress from one end of the cellar to the other.

‘You know what gets me most about it?’ demanded Maurizio. ‘Aldo Vincenzo’s turned into a national celebrity! There isn’t a man, woman or child from here to Calabria who hasn’t heard his name. He deserved to die like a dog — unknown, unburied and unmourned.’

‘It’s our fault for letting those television people talk us into setting up their equipment on our land,’ muttered his brother.

Minot stroked his moustache with a sly expression.

‘I hear you did quite nicely out of it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, if you’d refused, they’d have found someone else.’

‘I just wish whoever did it had simply killed the old bastard and left it at that,’ snapped Maurizio. ‘No one would have taken any interest then.’

They were down to the last few dozen bottles now, all destined for a couple of local restaurants and a select number of private individuals in Alba and Asti who ordered the Faigano brothers’ wine year in, year out, knowing it to be at least the equal of that made by growers fortunate enough to own land which fell within the officially classified area of Barbaresco, Denominazione di Origine Controllata. The property belonging to Maurizio and Gianni Faigano was only a stone’s throw away from that of the Vincenzo family, but unfortunately on the wrong side of the stream which marked the boundary of the DOC zone. Because of this, the resulting product could only be sold on the open market as generic Nebbiolo, which commanded a tenth of the price.

‘I ran into the maresciallo at market this morning,’ said Minot, setting another completed bottle in its crate. ‘You know what he told me? Apparently the police are opening their own investigation. Not only that, they’re sending some big shot up from Rome to lead it.’

The two brothers exchanged a brief glance, then returned to their work. This went without incident, except when the wine started overflowing and Gianni Faigano ripped off a fingernail grabbing for the spigot. Minot retrieved the severed sliver.

‘I’ll keep this for good luck,’ he joked, as though atoning for his earlier outburst.

Once the final bottles had made their way through the production line, the three men stood up stiffly.

‘Not like you to drop a bottle, Minot,’ said Gianni, sucking his injured finger. ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’

‘Why should I be?’

Gianni smiled.

‘I just wondered, since you mentioned this new investigation of la cosa…’

‘I’m not nervous, I’m angry!’ Minot snapped back. ‘As if there weren’t enough real problems facing the country, without sending some bastard up from Rome to make our lives a misery.’

‘Speaking of bastards…’ said Maurizio.

Minot whirled round on him.

‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

Maurizio held up his hands.

‘The canine kind,’ he explained, alluding to one of the dialect terms for a mongrel.

‘Well?’ demanded Minot. ‘What about them?’

Maurizio hesitated a moment.

‘The day Aldo died, I happened to be outside the house here, clearing my head with some fresh air and a raw egg.’

‘And?’

‘And I heard a dog barking over on the Vincenzo land.’

‘Why do you keep going on about Aldo Vincenzo? Let the son of a bitch rot in peace!’

‘By all means. Only if there’s going to be another investigation, we’d better get our story straight.’

‘My story is straight!’

‘Of course, Minot,’ said Gianni evenly. ‘We know that. But some people may be more awkwardly placed, you understand? The owner of that dog, for instance.’

Minot turned to face him.

‘You recognized it?’

Gianni looked at his brother.

‘Why don’t you two go on upstairs? I’ll clean up down here and join you in a minute.’

‘An excellent idea,’ said Maurizio. ‘Come on, Minot. After helping us out like this, the least you deserve is a glass of something. I don’t know what we’d do without you, I don’t really.’

The earlier silence had been replaced by a verbosity almost equally oppressive. But Minot allowed himself to be taken in hand and steered up to the large sitting room at one end of the brothers’ house, where he accepted a glass of the wine he had helped bottle several years earlier. Maurizio left the open bottle on the table and sat down, shaking his head sadly.

‘All this, coming so soon after Chiara’s death,’ he sighed.

Minot sniffed.

‘You mean there’s a connection?’

‘For some of us there is,’ Maurizio replied, with a sigh. ‘I suppose it’s stupid, after all this time, but Gianni was hit hard when she died. In his mind, she was immortal.’

Minot stared into his wine and said nothing.

‘And just when he’d started to get used to the idea,’ Maurizio Faigano continued, ‘this happened. Every time someone mentions la cosa, it’s as if Chiara’s tomb has been descrated.’

Minot reached out and grasped Maurizio’s arm sympathetically.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.’

Maurizio nodded sadly. After a while, Minot let go of his arm and took another gulp of wine.

‘What was that about hearing some dog in Aldo’s vines the night it happened?’

Maurizio looked at him.

‘Oh, nothing, I suppose. I couldn’t see anything, what with the mist, but I thought I recognized the dog’s bark. You know how distinctive they are.’

The door opened and in came Gianni, a large smile on his rumpled, slept-in face.

‘Well, that’s all taken care of,’ he said. ‘How’s the wine, Minot?’

‘ Discreto,’ was the guarded reply. ‘Maybe I should have kept more for myself.’

He glanced at Gianni, who waved negligently.

‘I expect we can let you have a few bottles, in return for all the help you’ve given us. Eh, Maurizio?’

‘Minot was asking about the dog.’

‘Ah, yes! Maybe it was just a runaway. Who knows?’

‘Not with those fences that Aldo put in,’ said Minot.

Gianni poured himself a glass of wine.

‘Perhaps someone found a way through them. Or made one. All I know is that Maurizio heard this bastardin barking down there. Which is odd in itself. No one’s ever found any truffles on Vincenzo land, as far as I know.’

There was a silence.

‘So whose dog was it?’ asked Minot.

He knew, as they did, that the hound would have been instantly identifiable. All men of their age in the Langhe either kept a truffle dog themselves or knew someone who did. Their noises and utterances were as familiar as those of neighbouring children.

‘I thought it was Anna,’ said Maurizio.

‘Beppe’s dog?’

‘I might have been wrong.’

They drank in silence for a while.

‘There are two ways we can handle this snooper from Rome,’ said Gianni. ‘Either we come up with a suitable suspect to hand him on a plate, or we just clam up.’

‘There already is a suspect,’ Minot pointed out.

‘But if they’re starting from scratch again, that means they don’t believe that he did it.’

‘And neither do I,’ said Maurizio. ‘What son would do something like that to his father? And still less a milksop like Manlio Vincenzo.’

‘They can be the worst if you push them too far,’ observed his brother. ‘They take it and take it for years, and then one day they crack. And God knows Aldo pushed Manlio. Remember what he said to him that evening at the festa, calling him a faggot and a queer in a voice you could hear all over the hall?’

Maurizio shrugged.

‘It doesn’t matter what we think. The important thing is to work out what to tell this cop from Rome.’

‘Or what not to tell him,’ Minot put in.

‘Or both,’ said Gianni. ‘Like in the war. Remember our motto? “Tell them anything, so long as you tell them nothing.” That’s what we’ve got to do now.’

Minot knocked back his wine.

‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’

‘Oh, really?’ asked Maurizio with a sarcastic edge. ‘Have you got a valid licence to gather truffles? And what about receipts for all your transactions, showing that sales tax was duly paid? All of which income you will, of course, have declared on your…’

‘What the hell’s that got to do with it? There’s a lot of stuff I could tell the cops about you two, for that matter.’

Gianni Faigano nodded earnestly.

‘That’s the whole point. We’re all in this together, like during the war.’

‘Except during the war you knew which side everyone was on. And we knew what we were fighting for.’

‘For our country, right? For our beliefs. Well, now we’re fighting for our community.’

Maurizio sighed.

‘A community in which someone stabbed an old man to death and cut off his cock and balls.’

Unexpectedly, Minot laughed, a tearing peal of hilarity with a slightly intoxicated edge.

‘That son of a bitch! If he’d known how he would end up…’

Gianni nodded.

‘But the fact remains that whoever did it is living right here amongst us.’

‘Right here in the village,’ Maurizio chipped in, ‘where I’ve yet to hear a single person speak a sincere word of regret for the victim.’

‘It’s us against them,’ said Gianni. ‘What’s done is done. It’s time to get on with our lives.’

Minot gave a series of earnest nods.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s just like the war.’

Gianni smiled.

‘It’s like the war all over again. And we know who the enemy is.’

With trembling fingers, Aurelio Zen unwrapped the medicinal potion from its layers of packaging, each as thin and transparent as tissue paper. A tight rain beat against the windows, while the hard wind behind it exploited every crack and weakness in the hotel’s ageing structure, seeping through the shutters and curtains to manifest itself as an intangible but ubiquitous presence in the room. The ancient cast-iron concertina of the radiator gurgled and spluttered and hissed, impotent against such virulently intrusive malevolence.

The phone again rang several times, just as it had earlier, breaking off with the same stifled cheep. Ignoring it, Zen worked patiently to free another clove of garlic from its enclosing membranes with the blade of his pocket-knife. The bulb had yielded eleven cloves in all. A few of the insiders were too small to bother with, but the outer monsters more than made up for these runts. Flakes of the frail integument lay all over the table, stirring sluggishly in the pervasive draught like some nightmare dandruff problem.

His task completed, Zen gathered the peelings into a heap, which he tipped into the waste-basket along with the vaguely pubic stalk. Outside, car horns blared and voices were raised in momentary anger. The sudden appearance of cold winds and relentless rain after so many weeks of glorious late-summer weather was trying enough in itself. But there was a more substantial reason why the tempers of the local citizenry should be frayed, for at least half the town was economically dependent, directly or indirectly, on the wine harvest. Until recently all the indications had been that this would be an exceptional vintage in terms of both quality and quantity. But the Nebbiolo grape from which all the best local wines were made sopped up water like blotting-paper, and the resulting product was thin, pale and insubstantial. Another week like this and the whole crop would be downgraded to one of the marginal years such as ’92 or ’94. A few more and it would be a total write-off, fit only for bulking up and marketing in litre flasks of generic red like the one which stood at Aurelio Zen’s elbow.

For Zen, this would not have represented any great tragedy. As the famous director and connoisseur responsible for his posting to Alba had pointed out, wine came in just two forms as far as Zen was concerned: sincero or sofisticato. The latter category, in its strictest interpretation, comprised anything not made by a family member or close personal friend with his own hands from grapes grown by him, and most certainly included anything in a bottle with a printed label on sale in shops and supermarkets. The former term of approbation was extended to any wines sold by the glass or jug in a few carefully vetted bars and restaurants, the understanding being that the proprietor had obtained them from producers known and trusted by him, and that they had not been messed about with.

But despite his inability to sympathize with the problems which were aggravating the good people of Alba, Zen had his own reasons for feeling wretched. The slight malady he had felt coming on in Rome had transformed itself into a full-blown, all-stops-out misery for which the word ‘cold’ seemed completely inadequate. As someone who almost never got ill, Zen found this especially hard to deal with. He knew plenty of people who, without being hypochondriacs precisely, nevertheless always seemed to be suffering to some degree or other from one of a range of minor ailments. They were used to it, indeed appeared almost to welcome it. Above all, they were good at it. Practice had made perfect. They were accomplished patients, well-versed in the skills of home remedies and medical treatment alike. They accepted illness as an old if rather tiresome friend whose visits were nevertheless preferable to solitude, to say 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 wine.

Despite the acknowledged and indeed almost miraculous benefits of this potion, there had been plenty of adverse comments about it from those forced to associate with the patient afterwards. As one uncle had put it succinctly, ‘The symptoms of the cure are worse than those of the illness.’ But to Zen’s mind this merely confirmed its efficacity, on a par with such harsh and primitive remedies as bleach poured over an open wound, or the ministrations of the local self-taught dentist, with his rack of terrifying implements whose application you didn’t want to even think about. Pain could only be cured by pain. Bad power required good power to defeat it, and power of any sort was bound to hurt.

The cloves of garlic, once stripped and chewed, certainly hurt at first, their crunchy fibrous substance disclosing an astonishing saturated strength of oily, burning intensity which coated every surface in the mouth and throat and then, under the benign influence of the wine, turned into a mild but persistent tingling warmth promising to drive out every foreign body and intruder in short order. He had drunk most of the litre of red wine and was biting into the last but one of the fat ivory cloves when there came a knock at the door.

‘Well?’ he mumbled through a mouthful of half-chewed garlic. Probably the cleaner wanting to make up the room. The service was never there when you needed it, but whenever you wanted a bit of peace and quiet…

The door opened cautiously to reveal a plump, dapper, well-dressed man of about Zen’s age carrying a large manilla envelope. He took in the scene and coughed in an embarrassed way.

‘Ah! Excuse the intrusion, dottore. I’ll come back later, when you’re more…’

Zen took another leisurely swig of wine.

‘Are you the manager?’ he demanded. ‘About time, too. I’ve complained twice about the heating, and that lump of scrap metal over there is still about as warm as yesterday’s bath.’

His visitor surveyed the dishevelled, unshaven figure huddled in his dressing-gown on the rumpled bed, gulping wine and chewing raw garlic.

‘I think there must be some mistake,’ he said.

‘I certainly hope so!’ Zen retorted. ‘The principles of central heating have been known in this country ever since Julius Caesar was wetting his knickers, yet your establishment is apparently incapable of…’

The newcomer closed the door. He strode to the phone, set his envelope down on the table and dialled.

‘Front desk? Room 314, Vice-Questore Tullio Legna of the Commissariato di Polizia speaking. I have come to pay my respects to a very important visitor from Rome who is staying here as your guest. I understand that he has complained about the inadequate heating in his room, but without effect. I suggest that you rectify this situation without further delay, lest I find it necessary to close the entire hotel pending a full investigation, a process likely to take some considerable time.’

He hung up and turned back to Zen.

‘Please accept my apologies, dottore. We don’t get many visitors out of season. They must have been trying to cut costs by turning the boilers off.’

Zen unrolled a strip of toilet paper from the spare roll he had removed from the bathroom and blew his nose loudly.

‘I feel dreadful,’ he said, rising painfully from his bed, one hand extended. Realizing belatedly that he was still holding the soggy tissue, he looked about vaguely for the waste-basket.

‘You’re ill,’ Tullio Legna observed.

‘No, no. I mean, yes, I suppose I am. But that’s not… Dreadful about receiving you like this, I mean. What must you think?’

‘I think you have a bad cold.’

Zen waved at the open wine bottle and the remaining clove of garlic.

‘An old family cure. I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

He gestured Legna towards the lone chair in the room and collapsed soggily on the bed, pulling the dressing-gown about his legs.

‘I tried phoning, but there was no reply,’ the local police chief replied, sitting down. ‘Since I happened to be passing, I thought I’d just drop by in person.’

Zen coughed, sniffed and lit a cigarette.

‘And found what looks like a flop for homeless alcoholic derelicts,’ he said, pushing the remaining clove of garlic about the bedside table like an extracted wisdom tooth awaiting the proverbial fairy. ‘But it does work. At least, so I’ve been told.’

‘The curative powers of garlic are, of course, well-attested,’ Tullio Legna remarked sententiously. ‘But here in Alba, at this time of the year, I think we may be able to do better. Will you allow me to order you lunch? Not from the kitchens here, God forbid. There’s a good place a couple of streets away. I’ll have them send it up to the room. What are you drinking?’

Zen passed him the bottle. His visitor inspected the label, sniffed the contents, and handed it back.

‘No,’ he said decidedly.

‘Not good?’ queried Zen.

‘Not even bad.’

Tullio Legna wiped his hands together as if to remove a contaminating stain.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘In an hour, shall we say? The sooner we start, the sooner you’ll be back on your feet. Which brings me to my reason for coming, apart, of course, from the pleasure of making your acquaintance.’

He pursed his lips and gazed thoughtfully at Zen, who felt the full force of his disadvantage for the first time.

‘When it was announced that a Criminalpol officer was being transferred here to open an investigation into the Vincenzo case, the news naturally excited much comment,’ Legna continued in a studiously neutral voice. ‘This case had been in the hands of my Carabinieri colleagues — we had had no hand in it — and they had made an arrest. There has therefore been a considerable amount of speculation as to why the Ministry should suddenly have decided to take a hand, and at such a high level.’

‘Naturally,’ Zen replied in an equally bland tone.

Tullio Legna smiled sympathetically.

‘I don’t want to burden you with questions when you’re unwell, dottore. But it would considerably facilitate my position if you would, however briefly, clarify yours.’

Semi-recumbent, half-drunk, stinking of garlic and feeling like death partially defrosted, thought Zen.

‘My position?’ he repeated.

‘Your interest, let’s say.’

‘In the Vincenzo case?’

‘Exactly.’

Zen put out his cigarette in the dregs of wine remaining in his glass.

‘I have no interest in it.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s a question of someone else’s interest.’

‘And what is that?’

‘To ensure that the Vincenzo wine gets made.’

Legna looked probingly at Zen for a moment, then smiled ironically.

‘And who on earth is this well-connected intenditore?’

Zen lit another Nazionale. When it became evident that he was not going to reply, Tullio Legna nodded gravely.

‘Ah, like that, is it? Excuse my indiscretion, dottore. We’re just simple country people here in the Langhe. I’m not accustomed to the Roman way of doing things.’

Zen gestured feebly.

‘It’s I who should apologize. You’ve been very kind, and I’m not trying to play games. I can assure you that the identity of the person who was instrumental in having me sent here is of absolutely no relevance to the case or to my assignment.’

‘Which is to get Manlio Vincenzo out of gaol,’ Legna remarked expressionlessly.

Zen shrugged.

‘I understand that this year’s wine promises to be exceptional.’

The Alba police chief got up and crossed over to the window. He opened the curtains, then wound up the external metal shutters. A bleak, pallid light reluctantly made its presence felt in the room. From the bed, Zen could see nothing but a section of rain-drenched plaster on the building opposite.

‘Not if this keeps up,’ Legna commented. ‘Until a few days ago, it looked like being one of the best years of the decade, possibly even the best since 1990. So the growers decided to delay picking and try to squeeze a little more flavour into the grapes. Now they’re out there clearing leaves and thinning clusters and praying that the rain lets up in time to save the harvest.’

He turned back to face Zen.

‘Well, I won’t tire you any more, dottore. You’ll need to be fully recovered if you’re to have any hope of getting Signor Manlio released in time to oversee the vintage. In my humble opinion, it’s a very tall order indeed.’

‘You think he’s guilty, then?’

A silent glance passed between the two men. Tullio Legna walked back to the bed.

‘The real problem is that there are no other suspects. Short of someone else coming forward and confessing, I can’t see any way of bringing it off.’

He paused, as though about to take his leave, then continued in a quieter tone.

‘And even if you did, it might not make any difference.’

Zen stared up at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘Meaning what?’

Legna eyed him acutely.

‘This is a small, tightly-knit community, dottore. Aldo Vincenzo may not have been the most popular member of it, to put it mildly, but to die like that! It’s the sort of atrocity which people remember from the war years, but which they never thought they’d witness again. Feelings are running very high.’

He placed the envelope he had been carrying on the bedside table.

‘All the information we have on the case is in there, together with a map of the district. But, as you no doubt know, Manlio and his father had a public row at the village festa on the evening in question. They were seen leaving the family house together later that night, and as far as we know Aldo never returned. If Manlio walks free without clear proof of his innocence, I’m afraid it may only be a matter of time before he… meets with an accident, shall we say?’

The two men confronted each other in silence for a moment.

‘And now I’ll go and order your lunch,’ Tullio Legna exclaimed in a loud, hearty voice. ‘Eat it all up, and try to get as much rest as you can. You’re going to need it.’

When the dog first appeared, snuffling and scratching at his door, Bruno Scorrone had a moment of weakness. Between thirty and forty million lire were staring him in the face, not to mention pawing at his knee, whining confusedly and surveying his hallway as though sighting invisible beings.

Somewhere safely far away — north of Asti, for instance, up in the Monferrato — Bruno could easily have disposed of a trained tabui like this for cash with no questions asked. But he had quite enough legal worries already, and knew exactly how much the hound meant to its owner. This made it all the more remarkable that she should be running around loose, her leash trailing behind her, at the mercy of less scrupulous and responsible citizens than Bruno, of whom there was no shortage in the locality. In the end he loaded the reluctant, hysterical Anna into his car and drove the two miles along back roads to Beppe Gallizio’s house. The rain had finally stopped, at least for now. The air was cool and slightly hazy, yielding a diffident, diffused light.

When he reached the house, on the outskirts of the village, there was no sign of Beppe. His car was there, but the front door was locked and Bruno Scorrone’s increasingly irritated thumping produced no response. Anna was behaving oddly, too. She circled the yard continually, sniffing and searching, running back to Bruno, planting her nose on his shoes and pawing the ground, then scuttling off to one side, where a path led down the hill. Bruno’s only interest in dogs was to scare off intruders and undercover tax agents, and in terms of their cash value as sniffers-out of truffles. He had no time to play whatever childish game the bitch was proposing. Fetching a length of rope from the barn, he tied one end to the leash dangling from her collar and the other to a spike protruding from the wall of the house, and then drove away.

Several hours passed. There is no way of knowing what this interval might mean to a dog, let alone one desperate to communicate urgent and terrible news. One of our days? One of our years? At all events, by the time Lamberto Latini showed up, Anna had worn her neck to a bloody mess in her frantic efforts to escape. Appalled at her condition, he freed the dog, which immediately displayed the same behaviour as she had with Bruno Scorrone, sprinting to and fro between Latini and the path winding down the hill between Beppe’s vegetable garden and a neighbour’s ploughed field.

Like the previous visitor, Lamberto rapped impatiently at the door, then tried the handle. He glanced at his watch. Just past ten. That was the time that they had agreed. By eleven at the latest he’d need to be at work back at his restaurant, which had been booked for lunch by a convention party from Asti who were being taken out for a ‘Traditional Langhe Country Meal’. But where the hell was Beppe? If he didn’t come through, Lamberto was in deep trouble. The cut-price dealings in truffles which took place in the back streets of Alba would be over by now, and if he had to pay the official price, including commission and tax, he’d hardly break even on the day.

Lamberto stood looking around in growing annoyance. Beppe had never let him down before. It was an excellent arrangement for both of them: truffles for cash, with no extra cut for middlemen or the fisco. Since Anna was there, he must have returned from his nocturnal hunting and gathering. Also there was the dented, mud-spattered old Fiat 500 which Beppe had cannily refused to trade in for something more comfortable and ostentatious, even though the sum Lamberto had paid him for a particularly fine specimen a couple of months ago would alone have paid for a new car. Whatever Beppe did with his money, it was nothing that might attract attention.

The dog was still mewling and worrying Lamberto’s shoes, making little forays towards the path leading down the hillside, then returning with a series of high-pitched whines. This increased the mystery of Beppe’s absence. Even if he’d been called away unexpectedly, or suddenly been taken ill, he would never have left his invaluable truffle hound tied up outside the house like one of her poor cousins, the half-starved watchdogs of the region.

Unlike Bruno Scorrone, Lamberto Latini liked dogs, to the extent — regarded locally as eccentric, if not perverse — of keeping a spaniel purely as a pet. So when he followed the increasingly distraught Anna round the side of the house, it was purely as a reflex action born of habit. But once they reached the back of the house and the bitch scampered off down the path, encouraged by this first glimmer of comprehension in the dim yet dominant species she had to deal with, Lamberto did not follow. He had no clear idea how to resolve the problem of Beppe’s dereliction, but taking his dog for walkies was certainly not it.

At a loss, and feeling vaguely ashamed of himself, he went over to the back door of the property and made a big show of knocking and calling out Beppe’s name. There was no reply, but the door opened a crack, as if under its own volition. Lamberto stared at it an instant. Then, ignoring Anna’s frantic entreaties, he stepped over the threshold, shutting the dog outside.

‘Beppe! Beppe? It’s Lamberto!’

He already knew that there would be no answer. The silence had that coherent quality, like settled soil, which houses only have when they are empty. Lamberto stepped cautiously into the large kitchen, with its board floor and bare walls where islands of brickwork showed through the crumbling plaster. The air was cold, the room empty. Moving into the hall, Lamberto continued his search, occasionally calling Beppe’s name aloud, less loudly now. Outside he could hear Anna’s persistent keening, as though she were answering him, but within the house the solid, complacent silence was unbroken. There was clearly no one there.

Lamberto returned to the kitchen and looked around, reluctant to admit failure. On the table stood a dirty dish with some sauce dried to a crust, an empty wine glass and a chunk of bread. The fire-place was cold, the ashes holding no ember. Lamberto picked up the bread and squeezed it. Yesterday’s. So Beppe had eaten, presumably before going out, but had not been back since. Except that his dog was there, and his car.

Then he noticed another item on the table. He picked it up and inspected it. At first sight it resembled a general-purpose knife such as might be used for slicing salami or cheese, except that the blade and handle were stained with a dark tawny substance resembling dried blood. Before he could begin to think what this might signify, his attention was diverted by the sound of a key being inserted into the front door.

Lamberto started to put the knife back on the table, then thought better of it. The silence had suddenly turned malign, no longer placid and compact but tense and still, loaded like a gun. Gripping the knife tightly, Lamberto stepped to his right and concealed himself as best he could beside a huge credenza where unused heirloom bowls and plates gathered dust. Steel-rimmed heels clacked steadily down the hall. Lamberto couldn’t think of anyone who wore boots like that, certainly not Beppe. Lamberto grasped the knife still more tightly, feeling simultaneously ridiculous and terrified.

At the doorway to the kitchen, the heels paused. There was a long moment of silence, broken only by one of Anna’s despondent yowls. Then the intruder moved forward into the room, revealing himself as a portly man in black uniform and hard cap trimmed with red braid and a gilt badge showing a flaming torch. Catching sight of Lamberto, he started slightly.

‘Signor Latini.’

‘ Buon giorno, maresciallo,’ Lamberto replied automatically.

The two men looked at each other for a moment. Then the Carabinieri official nodded towards the window.

‘Looks like it’s clearing up, finally.’

‘I came to see Beppe,’ Lamberto blurted out. ‘His car’s outside, and his dog, Anna. But he’s not here.’

Enrico Pascal nodded slowly.

‘No, he’s not here.’

Lamberto Latini finally became aware of what he was holding.

‘I found this on the table,’ he said, displaying the knife. ‘It’s got blood on it.’

Again Pascal nodded, as though this was the most ordinary thing in the world.

‘Why don’t you put it back where it was? he suggested.

Latini did so.

‘I thought something might have happened to Beppe,’ he mumbled haltingly. ‘And when I heard someone coming in… How did you open the front door?’

‘With a key.’

‘A key? Where did you get it?’

The Carabiniere did not reply at once.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Signor Latini?’ he said at length. ‘No, in that chair, please, away from the table.’

Latini did so.

‘You were asking where I got the key. I got it from Beppe. And how did you get in?’

Lamberto gestured behind him.

‘The back door. It was open.’

‘Open, or just unlocked?’

‘It wasn’t fastened. It must stick slightly. It opened when I knocked.’

The maresciallo raised his eyebrows.

‘So you took advantage to come inside the house. Why?’

‘I just wanted to make sure that Beppe was all right.’

‘Why shouldn’t he be all right?’

‘We had an appointment to meet here at ten o’clock. He’s never let me down before.’

‘When did you make this appointment?’

The Carabinieri official’s tone had become more peremptory. Lamberto Latini appeared to reflect.

‘Let’s see. Yesterday, it must have been. No, the day before. I phoned and suggested we get together for a chat, you know…’

‘It’s a long way to come for a chat, Signor Latini, particularly on a working day.’

Lamberto started to say something, then checked his watch and got up.

‘That reminds me, I must be going.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible.’

Lamberto Latini frowned.

‘I’ve got a business convention coming to lunch. They’ve booked the whole restaurant.’

Enrico Pascal sighed heavily.

‘No one appreciates the importance of good food more than I, Signor Latini, and your establishment is without doubt one of the finest in the region — although the last time I ate there, it seemed to me that the lamb was a trifle oversalted. But certain matters must take precedence even over gastronomy. Murder is one of them.’

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…

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.

‘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 cafe 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 cafe 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 elite 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.

Zen stared at it with a deepening frown. Where had he seen that name before? The answer came to him almost immediately. It had been in the report that he had just been thinking of, the one on the Vincenzo case which Tullio Legna had delivered the day before, together with a map of the area and Zen’s truffle-laden cure. The Faigano brothers, or one of them, had been among the witnesses who had testified to the loud and public row which Manlio Vincenzo had had with his father at the village festa the night before Aldo was killed. This had apparently originated in a series of sarcastic gibes by Aldo on the subject of his son’s supposed homosexual inclinations, and had ended with Aldo disclosing in a loud voice that he had read a letter from Manlio’s lover, a young man named Andrea. It had been at this point that Manlio had stormed out of the gathering, not to be seen again until after the discovery of his father’s body.

The Faiganos’ improvised stall was tended by a teenage girl perched on a stool reading a pop music magazine. She looked up with a bored expression as Zen approached.

‘Good morning, signorina.’

She flashed him a dazzling smile which revealed the embryonic beauty that would soon remake her pasty adolescence.

‘Is it possible to speak to either of the brothers?’ asked Zen. ‘It’s a business matter.’

The girl pointed in an over-emphatic manner almost certainly copied unconsciously from one of her teachers.

‘They’re in the bar over there. The one across from the town hall.’

Zen thanked her and threaded his way through the crowds to the corner of the Via Vittorio Emanuele, which Tullio Legna had referred to as Via Maestra. In a similarly confusing touch, the cathedral square was officially billed as Piazza Risorgimento. The original designations would have been officially changed during the era of reunification — Zen could imagine the ceremony, complete with brass bands playing selections from Verdi — in a fit of patriotic fervour and keeping-up-with-the-rest-of-the-country, but now the ancient names were showing through the scrofulous paint of those discredited ideals.

The bar which the girl had pointed out to Zen was crowded with elderly men whose worn, wary faces and heavy-duty clothing contrasted sharply with those of the townspeople. The air was thick with rumbling dialect and cigarette smoke. Zen told the barman he was looking for someone called Faigano. The latter in turn consulted a group of men standing at the counter, one of whom nodded mutely towards a trio playing cards at a table in the corner. Zen made his way through the throng.

‘Signor Faigano?’

Two of the men looked up simultaneously.

‘Yes?’ one of them replied warily.

Zen took a card out of his wallet and placed it on the table. It was one of those he had had printed during his stay in Naples, identifying him as one Alfonso Zembla.

‘Excuse me for interrupting, but I wonder if you could spare a few minutes. I’m a reporter for the Mattino, the most important paper in Naples, and I’m working on a story about the Vincenzo case. I’ve got the basic facts, of course, but I need some colour and comment to round it out…’

The man sitting immediately beneath Zen picked up the card.

‘Naples, eh?’ he said.

‘You know it?’ asked Zen.

The man laughed shortly.

‘The furthest south I’ve ever been was Genoa, and that was back in the war…’

The third man at the table, who had not responded to Zen’s initial greeting, started to whistle a short, melodious refrain. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up.

‘Time I was off,’ he announced to no one in particular.

‘All right, Minot,’ said the other man, who had not spoken yet.

He, too, stood up, stretching lazily.

‘I’d better go back and give Lisa a hand with the stall,’ he said through a forced yawn.

‘Take care, Maurizio,’ said the first man.

‘You too.’

‘May I?’ asked Zen, sitting down in one of the chairs thus vacated.

The remaining man held out his hand.

‘Gianni Faigano. It’s an honour to meet you, Dottor Zembla, but to be perfectly honest I don’t know how much help I can give. I’m just a simple man, and I don’t read the papers. To tell you the truth, I can hardly read at all. My brother Maurizio, he’s the smart one. He does all the paperwork, but he doesn’t like to talk. So there you are! We make a good team.’

‘So can we,’ suggested Zen, with just the suspicion of a wink. ‘You do the talking and I’ll take care of the paperwork.’

Gianni Faigano shrugged.

‘Why me, dottore? Look at all the people in here, and out there at the market. Any of them could have told you what you want to know. Yet you chose me. Why?’

‘I’d heard the name.’

‘Where?’

Various possibilities presented themselves to Zen’s mind, and he decided instinctively to go for the riskiest. What had he to lose, after all?

‘Someone told me that it was you and your brother who did it.’

There was a long, intense silence.

‘Did what?’ demanded Gianni Faigano.

‘Killed Aldo Vincenzo.’

Faigano inclined his head and laughed with what seemed like genuine amusement.

‘Now who told you that, dottore?’

Zen frowned and pretended to consult his notebook.

‘Someone called… Wait a moment. Ah, here we are! Beppe Gallizio. So when I saw your stall in the market I asked the girl there — Lisa, is it? — where I could find you.’

Gianni Faigano turned his misty brown eyes on Zen.

‘I heard that Beppe met with an accident.’

‘That’s right. Which, of course, would make you even more of a suspect, if I were to tell the police what he said to me.’

Zen paused to light a cigarette.

‘But I’ve no intention of doing that. All I want to know is what happened the night Aldo Vincenzo was killed.’

A brief laugh from Faigano.

‘Eh, we’d all like to know that!’

‘What people think happened, then. What they’re saying about it. A bit of background for my story, and the more scandalous and colourful the better.’

Gianni Faigano glanced around, as though to check whether he could be overheard.

‘I’ve heard a couple of stories. I’m not saying there’s anything to them, mind you, but…’

‘Don’t worry, this is all off the record.’

The other man looked at him acutely.

‘But is it on… What do you call it?’

‘What?’

‘When the people who hired you pay for everything.’

‘On expenses? Of course.’

Gianni Faigano smiled slowly.

‘In that case, I think we should talk about it over lunch,’ he said.

The resulting meal was by no means the first time that Aurelio Zen had had occasion to dine out with men for whom the principal point of the exercise seemed to be to make themselves look good by giving the staff of the restaurant a hard time. Service, food, wine, the menu itself: nothing passed muster by their exacting standards. Other patrons — credulous, ignorant or weak — might be taken in, or too feeble to protest, but not them!

Dishes and bottles of wine would be sent back, or grudgingly accepted after a long critique of their multiple defects. The course of the meal would be interrupted by long negotiations with the waiter, the implication being that while the establishment was capable in principle of producing the genuine product, otherwise they would not have favoured it with their patronage, it equally obviously was not going to do so for just anyone, only for those who had aggressively demonstrated their credentials as true connoisseurs, not to be fobbed off with anything less.

So far from being the type to play games of this kind, Gianni Faigano had struck Zen as someone who would eat whatever was put in front of him and be grateful to have it. This erroneous impression was dispelled the moment they reached the restaurant his guest had suggested, in a side street just off the piazza where the weekly market was now winding down. Even before they were seated, Faigano had pointedly objected to the table they were offered. And once this was rectified, he proceeded to find fault with the selection of daily specials, and, most vociferously, with the truffle with which it was proposed to adorn their meal.

‘At least a week old,’ he declared, having taken a briefly dismissive sniff. ‘And it’s not even from the best area.’

A selection of other tubers was brought to the table, and one eventually met with Gianni’s grudging — sigh, grimace, shrug, not-much-but-what-can-you-expect-in-a-place-like-this? — gesture of heavily qualified approval.

Next it was the turn of the cellar.

‘Macche? Only a couple of bottles I’d drink, even on my deathbed, and they’re priced for the Swiss and German tourists. No, no, dottore! I may be your guest in one sense, but in another and more important one you’re mine. I can’t have you come all the way from Rome — I mean Naples — and be held to ransom like this. Wait here.’

He got up and stomped out of the restaurant. Zen sat glumly sipping mineral water and nibbling at a bread-stick, feeling fairly sure that Faigano had used this as an excuse to back out and that he would never see him again. But he was wrong. A few minutes later, his guest returned with an unlabelled bottle which he handed to the waiter and told him to open ‘with the greatest care’.

‘Our own,’ he explained to Zen. ‘Not one of the best years, but at least we’ll know what we’re drinking.’

Nor was that all. When the food began to arrive, Faigano proceeded to denigrate the quality of the insalata di carne cruda, finely minced raw veal seasoned with oil, lemon and garlic, then to complain that the risotto was overcooked and too dry, and finally to interrogate the waiter in considerable and sceptical detail about the provenance of the hare, which, stewed in wine and its own blood, formed the basis of the main course. Once these formalities had been disposed of, he glanced at Zen in a worldweary, man-to-man way and proceeded to eat his way through the whole five courses on offer while managing to suggest that he was doing so simply as a favour to the management, to avoid them losing face before a distinguished visitor from out of town.

In his spare time, he outlined his views on the Aldo Vincenzo case.

‘No one round here ever believed that Manlio did it. Quite apart from anything else, he doesn’t have the balls, if you’ll excuse the expression.’

‘But I was told that he and his father had a big row at the festa the night before Aldo died,’ Zen replied.

Gianni Faigano gestured dismissively.

‘They were always quarrelling about one thing or another. I don’t blame the boy. Aldo’s mistake was sending him abroad. He learned foreign ways and manners and got strange ideas in his head. When he left, he was a good, obedient son, but when he got back he had changed. Our little world here in the Langhe seemed provincial to him. Aldo tried to bring him back to heel, but the damage had been done.’

He finished the last of his risotto and looked round critically for the waiter.

‘That’s a nasty-looking cut you’ve got there, dottore,’ he remarked, still looking over his shoulder. ‘Quite fresh, too, by the look of it.’

‘I slipped in the shower.’

Now that the anaesthetic was wearing off, he could feel the stitches as a dull, persistent tugging in his forehead.

‘Probably a woman,’ said Gianni Faigano, signalling to the negligent minion.

Zen peered at him.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘They used to burn them for it, round here.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Zen replied, indignant yet oddly disturbed by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘I was completely alone. It was just an accident.’

Faigano smiled.

‘There are no such things as accidents, dottore. Everything that happens has its cause. And when a healthy man like you injures himself as badly as that, it’s almost certainly woman’s work. Someone’s put a hex on you, maybe even without knowing it herself. But there’s a way to break the spell.’

‘What’s that?’ Zen found himself asking, despite his better judgement.

Gianni Faigano leant forward, as though imparting some forbidden mystery.

‘Find another woman, one who really loves you. Then the other one won’t be able to harm you any more. Despite everything, good is more powerful than evil in the end.’

They were distracted from these abstruse speculations by the arrival of the lepre al civet, which Gianni Faigano proceeded to damn with praise so faint as to be practically imperceptible.

‘Let’s get back to the subject,’ Zen interrupted briskly. ‘You say that no one here believes that Manlio killed his father. So who do they think did it?’

‘That depends who you ask. Everyone’s got their own theory.’

And what’s yours?’

Gianni Faigano poured them both some more of the dark brick-red wine.

‘You like it?’ he asked, tapping his glass. The wrinkled skin of his finger contrasted oddly with the smooth, pink tip whose nail had apparently been torn away.

‘It’s excellent.’

‘We don’t mess around with our wine,’ Gianni Faigano said solemnly. ‘We don’t make any money off it either. Some people might say that there’s a connection.’

‘But plenty of people around here do make money from their wine,’ Zen pointed out. ‘Aldo Vincenzo, for one. Did he mess around with his wine?’

Faigano shook his head decisively.

‘No, no! The top producers don’t need to. They can make their wine the same way I make mine, using the traditional methods and not cutting any corners, and then charge whatever they want. But that end of the market is very small and very crowded. The rest of us have to try to make a living further down. Most of us manage to get by, but others do rather better. Very much better, in a few cases.’

‘And what has this got to do with the Vincenzo case?’

Once again, Gianni Faigano leant forward conspiratorially across the table.

‘The Carabinieri are questioning Lamberto Latini about the death of Beppe Gallizio,’ he whispered. ‘What they don’t know is that Latini wasn’t the only person at Beppe’s house that morning.’

Zen allowed his eyes to open wide.

‘Who was the other?’

Faigano returned to eating his meal with the air of someone who has now earned it.

‘A little while ago,’ he said conversationally, ‘Aldo Vincenzo was implicated in a case involving the export of wine which had been falsely labelled.’

‘There’s money to be made in that?’

Faigano shrugged.

‘Wine’s not heroin. But buying generic Nebbiolo at a few hundred lire a litre, and then selling it as Barbaresco Riserva Denominazione di Origine Controllata at fifty to a hundred thousand a bottle? I’d say there was money to be made.’

Zen paused to swallow a morsel of the succulent hare stew.

‘But why would Aldo Vincenzo risk his reputation by getting involved in something like that?’

‘Because he was greedy!’

For the first time, Faigano showed some sign of personal feeling. He leant still nearer to Zen, his voice a fervent undertone and his stubby, gnarled fingers stabbing the table to emphasize every point.

‘He was one of the richest men in the area, with most of the best land. But he always wanted more. More money, more land, more power, more of everything! And he didn’t care what he had to do to get it. He tried to get that son of his to rape my niece so that the Vincenzo family would get its hands on our property when Maurizio and I died! What do you say to that?’

Zen took another sip of wine.

‘I’d say that it made you a suspect in his death, Signor Faigano.’

Gianni laughed.

‘Ah, but if I’d really done it, I wouldn’t have told you that, would I?’

Zen said nothing.

‘Anyway, the authorities claim that Aldo and another local producer were involved in a scheme to sell several thousand cases of falsely labelled wine,’ Faigano went on. ‘Apparently they’d bought off the local authorities, but when the shipment of bogus Barolo was seized in Germany, there was nothing they could do.’

Zen took out his notebook.

‘Who was the other man?’

Gianni Faigano paused a moment.

‘It’s all on record anyway, so there’s no harm in telling you. His name is Bruno Scorrone, and he runs a winery near Palazzuole. He buys in grapes from local growers, on a lowest-price-per-kilo basis. Sometimes wine, too, when there’s a glut or someone needs some cash fast. I’ve heard some people say he trucks in wine from down south, too, and uses it for blending, but that may just be malicious gossip.’

He grinned at Zen.

‘There’s a lot of that around here.’

‘I still don’t see how Aldo Vincenzo comes into all this.’

Gianni Faigano sighed expressively.

‘To sell wine as Barbaresco, you have to be able to show provenance from land in a DOC zone. Scorrone doesn’t own any such land, but the Vincenzo family do.’

‘But surely they use it to make their own wine.’

‘Ah, but here’s the trick! With controlled zones, there’s a maximum permitted yield — so many grapes to so much ground. Understand?’

Zen nodded.

‘But the best grapes are always the fewest. The flavour is denser and more concentrated, and so is the wine. Only the top growers can afford to prune their vines that hard, to keep their yields down and reject any grapes that don’t come up to scratch. Men like Aldo Vincenzo, whose wines command the highest prices. That leaves a gap between what they actually produce and the permissible regulated limit, wine which was never actually made but which would have been entitled to call itself Barbaresco if it had. It was that ghost wine that Bruno Scorrone was selling abroad.’

Zen shook his head.

‘All right, let’s assume that Vincenzo and this Scorrone were involved in a contraband wine racket. Why should Scorrone have killed him?’

Faigano pushed away his plate.

‘You asked what people are saying, dottore. I’m telling you. They’re saying that Aldo Vincenzo was killed just a few weeks before he was due to present himself before a judge in Asti to explain why certificates of origin made out in his name had been attached to a consignment of the cheapest vino sfuso. They’re saying that it will be much easier now for Bruno Scorrone to argue that he bought the wine in good faith from a renowned grower of the region. How was he to know it was contraband? If Aldo Vincenzo said it was Barbaresco, that was good enough for him!’

He paused significantly and looked around once again.

‘They’re also saying that Scorrone was seen driving up to Beppe Gallizio’s house the morning he was killed.’

Zen finished his wine as the waiter removed their plates.

‘So you believe Scorrone did it?’

Gianni Faigano smiled strangely.

‘I don’t believe anything any more, dottore. For me, the world stopped making sense a long time ago. But people around here have long memories. It’s all we do have left, some of us. Who knows? Maybe someone had waited years and years before taking revenge for something Aldo thought forgotten, or had even forgotten himself?’

He straightened up as the waiter returned with the cheese tray.

‘But that needn’t concern you!’ Faigano remarked loudly in a jocular tone. ‘If you were a policeman, now, I wouldn’t envy you the task of trying to solve this case. But as it is, you’ve got your story and can go home to Naples without bothering your head about it any more. Right, dottore?’

‘Mombaruzzo, bubbio coazzolo. Sommariva fello fontanile?’

The voice was distant yet loud, reverberant and insistent, with a hectoring tone covering an under-current of desperate pleading. It was absolutely essential that he understand! A matter, quite literally, of life and death.

‘La morra cravanzana neviglie perletto bene vagienna. Serralunga doglani cossano il bric belbo moglia d’inverno!’

But try as he might, nothing made sense. And the fact that it so nearly did just made matters worse, as if he were at fault. Perhaps if he got closer to the speaker he would be able to hear more clearly and do whatever was expected of him. Stumbling forward in the darkness, he moved in the direction from which the voice seemed to be coming.

‘Barbaresco! Santa Maria Maddalena, trezzo tinella?’

In the end, it was his own cry of pain that woke him. This was real in a different way. And — agonizingly, but reassuringly — it was not intermittent or qualified but immediate and continuous, with future consequences built in. A foot was involved, as well as the shin immediately above. He seemed to be naked. The surface beneath his bare soles was as rough and yet yielding as sand, but hard edges lurked in the darkness all around. It was against one of these that he must have struck his left leg.

After an interminable period of exploratory gestures in the surrounding obscurity, he eventually located something that seemed familiar. Further tactile tests seemed to confirm that this was indeed the edge of the bed. Working on this hypothesis, he groped his way along it. Sure enough, he soon came to a table-leg. Not only this, but the lamp was where it should be, according to his folk-memories of the presumed locality. A brief fiddle with the nipple on the base produced light. Stripped of its dream-enhanced pretensions, the room looked absurdly small. No wonder he had come to grief, when his mental chart had been erroneous not in a few details but on a totally different scale, like the map of a city mistaken for that of a continent.

But why had he left the safe haven of his bed in the first place? There had been an urgent reason, he remembered, connected with that resonant voice whose words he could still fugitively hear. It had exhorted him to save someone while there was still time. A life had been in danger, and he was at once deeply implicated and the only person who could prevent the atrocity. Only he hadn’t been able to understand the language in which this terrible appeal had been delivered, and so he was guilty. A child had died because he had not been quick or capable enough to save him.

A clamorous noise made itself felt in the room. Another Aurelio Zen — one who lived in the world called real and, unlike his incompetent dream double, understood its signs and portents — picked up the phone and answered.

‘Good morning, Dottor Zen. Did I wake you? My apologies, as they say. But I happened to be awake already, so I thought that we might as well get started.’

The voice was metallic, neutered, robotic.

‘Who is this?’

‘Ah, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? But don’t worry, you don’t have to answer it right away. I’ll even give you a few clues, to get you started. Here’s the first. Via Strozzi, number twenty-four.’

Zen gripped the receiver with growing anger.

‘What the hell is this? Do you know what time it is?’

A tinny laugh.

‘Questions, questions! You’re a detective, I hear. Why don’t you do a little detecting?’

‘Why don’t you go and fuck yourself?’

He slammed the phone down and lay back on the bed. Then, rolling up and over like a wounded animal, he located the bedside clock, rang the front desk and demanded to know why they had put a call through at half-past five in the morning. The clerk, who sounded as though he had been asleep himself, protested that he had not transferred any calls to Dottor Zen’s room, and indeed that there had been no calls of any sort to anyone since he had come on duty late the previous evening.

On the floor beside the bed lay the map which Tullio Legna had included with the dossier on the Vincenzo case; Zen had been studying it when he fell asleep the night before in an attempt to get some grip on the layout of the area. It was the standard 1:50,000 sheet covering Alba and the surrounding countryside and villages. He picked it up and located Palazzuole. A railway line ran nearby, and there appeared to be an isolated station which served the town.

His eye drifted away, following the lines of hills and the course of rivers, until he was brought up short by the words Trezzo Tinella. He had heard that before, and recently, too. Then, with an almost superstitious shudder, he remembered the parting shot of the voice in his somnambulistic dream: ‘Barbaresco! Santa Maria Maddalena, trezzo tinella?’

For a moment it seemed as if he had stumbled unawares on some cosmic clue, a previously unsuspected secret passage between worlds believed to be separate. Then he noticed the word Barbaresco on the map. It was, he realized, not just the name of a wine but also of a village, not far from Palazzuole. He searched the sheet until he found Santa Maria Maddalena, Fontanile, Fello, Serralunga and Sommariva. No doubt the others were all there, too. He must have read the names unconsciously the night before and then combined them in his sleep to form those sentences which had hovered so disturbingly on the brink of some painful, urgent sense.

Meanwhile he had been sleepwalking again. On this occasion the experience had left no visible scars, but there was no telling where he might have ended up if he hadn’t stubbed his toe and barked his shin on the coffee table. What was happening to him? Was he to believe Doctor Lucchese’s theory of psychic disturbance or Gianni Faigano’s misogynous ramblings about a malevolent female influence? Or were they both right? And what about that phone call? ‘Via Strozzi, number twenty-four.’ The address, if that was what it was, meant nothing to him.

He took a shower to rinse away this mood of morbid introspection, then went over to his suitcase and dug out the battered, buff-coloured railway timetable he always carried with him. Alba looked the size of Rome on the 1:50,000 map, but it didn’t figure at all on the schematic map of the national railway network printed at the front of the timetable. Zen looked it up in the index, then consulted the schedule for the line wandering off into the hills to the east. The first train of the day left in just under fifteen minutes. On a whim, he decided to try to catch it. He had been spending too much time alone in his room, brooding about his own problems and state of mind. What he needed was to get to work.

Outside the hotel, there was still no hint of the coming dawn. The street was dark and silent, the sky implacably opaque. He walked rapidly back in the direction he had taken when he arrived, glancing at his watch as he passed beneath a street lamp. Somewhere behind him, another set of solitary footsteps resounded comfortingly on the flagstones.

Once he reached the station, it became obvious that there had been no need to hurry. A two-car diesel unit stood dark and silent at the platform, but the booking office was closed and no one was about. Zen lit a cigarette and paced the platform as the clock moved spastically from three minutes to six to three minutes past. As though on cue, a door slammed and two men emerged. One wore the grey-blue uniform of the State Railways, the other was in jeans and a tattered green ski-jacket. Zen walked up to them.

‘For Palazzuole?’ he enquired, indicating the train.

‘Stop at Palazzuole!’ the uniformed man called to his unkempt companion, who was heading for the driver’s compartment.

‘ Va bene.’

The engines roared into life amid a cloud of thick black smoke. There was only one other person on the platform, a young woman in a long coat and a hat who didn’t seem interested in this train. Zen boarded and took his seat, and after a brief delay the automotrice rumbled off into the darkness, crossing numerous sets of points. To all appearances, Zen was the only passenger.

He lay back on the hard plastic seat and turned to the blank screen of the window. It reflected his face back to him: old, tired, defeated, possibly even mad. ‘We had no idea! He always seemed perfectly normal.’ That’s what people said when someone cracked up, as though to reassure themselves that such conditions were invariably obvious and predictable, and so their own lack of symptoms meant that their future sanity was not in question.

Zen sat up and refocused his eyes on the seat opposite. For a moment, the glass had seemed to display two faces: his own, and — some distance behind and to one side — that of a boy about five years old. Only his face, of extraordinary beauty, was visible, the dark eyes fixed on Zen with a look of love and reproach.

‘Palazzuole!’

Zen swivelled round. The uniformed man was standing in the doorway at the end of the carriage.

‘Palazzuole,’ he repeated, as the brakes squealed beneath them.

Zen was about to say that he didn’t have a ticket, but the guard had already disappeared. The train jerked to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Zen walked hastily to the end of the carriage and stepped down. The train revved up and sidled away, leaving him in total darkness. Almost total, rather, for once his eyes had adjusted, he realized that he could just make out his surroundings by the faint suggestion of light which now tinted the sky, diffused down through a thick layer of mist. The station building was shuttered and obviously long disused. In faded black paint on the cracked and falling plaster he could just make out the letters PAL ZUO E and the information that he was currently 243 metres above mean sea level.

He walked past the station building into the gravel-covered area behind, and along a short driveway leading to a dirt road which crossed the tracks at a slight angle. Here he got out the map and his cigarette lighter, and determined that the village lay east of the railway station which nominally served it. He turned right on to the narrow road, towards the pallid glow which was slowly hollowing out the night.

There was just enough light to distinguish the crushed gravel and glossy puddles of the unpaved strada bianca from the ditches to either side. Zen lit a cigarette and walked on through the damp, clinging mist, up the slight incline of the road which crossed the river and the railway. As he climbed out of the valley, the visibility steadily improved. Now he could see that the fields had recently been ploughed and that the turned earth was silvery with dew. The exercise and the fresh air exhilarated him.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Somewhere else, a church bell began to toll monotonously, summoning the faithful to early mass. By now the light clearly had the upper hand over the mist and the darkness. Every surface glistened and gleamed with moisture, as though it had just been freshly created. As imperceptibly as the dawn itself, the incline of the road increased until he found himself ascending a steep hill which forced the road to twist and turn. Stopping to catch his breath, Zen noticed lights behind him and heard the low growl of a motor.

The vehicle — a red Fiat pick-up truck — neared rapidly, gobbling up the road it had taken Zen so long to traverse on foot. He stepped on to the verge to let it pass, but the truck pulled to a stop and a window was rolled down.

‘ Buon giorno,’ said the driver.

Zen returned the greeting.

‘Get in.’

The tone was peremptory. After a moment’s hesitation, Zen walked around the truck and climbed into the passenger seat, which he found himself sharing with a small black-and-white dog. The cab reeked of a powerful odour to which he would not have been able, a few days before, to put a name, but which he could still smell faintly on his own skin.

‘Going to the village?’ asked the driver, restarting the truck. Glancing at the dog, which was whining nervously, he snapped, ‘Quiet, Anna!’

‘I’m going to Palazzuole,’ said Zen.

‘Did your car break down?’

‘No, I came on the train.’

The driver laughed humourlessly.

‘Probably the first passenger they’ve had all year.’

Zen studied the man’s face as he negotiated the bends in the narrow, steep road. Apart from the thin, weedy moustache which covered his upper lip, it reminded him of pictures he had seen of that iron-age corpse they had dug out of a glacier somewhere up in the Alps. It also reminded him of something else, something more recent, but he couldn’t think what.

‘The station’s a long way from the village,’ he replied idly.

‘It isn’t that!’ the man exclaimed. ‘But people round here remember the way the railway used to treat us, back when everyone depended on it. I can still remember my mother running to catch a train to town — this was before the war, I can’t have been more than a few years old. She was a minute or two late, but people like us didn’t have clocks. The guard saw her coming, waving and calling out, but he held out his flag just the same and the train took off, leaving her standing there. Her grandfather died that night, before she’d had a chance to see him for the last time. People round here have long memories, and they don’t have much use for the train.’

They were approaching the village now, but all that was visible was the lower row of brick dwellings. Everything above had disappeared behind another thick layer of mist.

‘I smell truffles,’ said Zen.

His driver glanced at him sharply, and Zen suddenly knew where he had seen him before: in the bar near the market, talking to the Faigano brothers. One of them had called him Minot.

‘I got a few. They’re easy enough to find if you know where to look. Providing someone else doesn’t get there first, of course!’

He barked his short explosive laugh again, and slowed the truck as they entered the bank of mist which enveloped the higher levels of the village. The road had abruptly become paved, and the thuds and rumbling beneath them died away.

‘You have friends here?’ Zen’s driver asked softly.

‘I’m on business.’

‘What kind of business?’

Zen thought quickly. The man didn’t seem to have recognized him, and if he repeated the story about being a Neapolitan newspaper reporter in this context it would be all round the village in no time, and might shut a lot of mouths he would prefer to stay open.

‘Wine,’ he said.

The truck turned through the mist-enshrouded streets as cautiously as a ship in shallow water.

‘Wine, eh?’ the man called Minot remarked. ‘I thought you people travelled around in Mercedes.’

The engine noise fell away as they emerged on to a broad, level piazza in the upper reaches of the mist.

‘I lost my licence a couple of months ago,’ Zen replied. ‘Drunk driving, they called it, although I was perfectly all right really. Just one of those lunches with clients that go on a little too long.’

The driver drew up in front of an imposing arcaded building.

‘Well, I’ll leave you here,’ he said. ‘The Vincenzo house is about a kilometre outside town on the other side. That’s where you’re headed, I take it?’

Zen got out, and the dog reclaimed its space, curling up on the seat.

‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said.

The man named Minot gave him an ironically polite smile.

‘A pleasure, dottore. Welcome to Palazzuole!’

By the time Aurelio Zen finally reached the Vincenzo property, the sun had dispersed the last traces of mist and the air was fresh and warm.

He had spent the intervening period in a cafe on the main square of Palazzuole, having discovered that there was a bus which stopped there shortly after ten o’clock which would not only drop him off at the gates of the Vincenzo estate but pick him up there on its return and take him all the way back to Alba.

Meanwhile he drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, read the newspapers and congratulated himself on having done the right thing. He felt a completely different person from the dream-drunk neurotic who had surfaced that morning. In short, he felt himself again. It might be a far from perfect self, but he determined to hang on to it if at all possible.

Two papers were available at the bar in Palazzuole: the Turin national La Stampa, and a local news-sheet resoundingly entitled Il Corriere delle Langhe. Apart from a filler about a partial eclipse of the sun due the following day, the former paper revealed nothing of any interest except the latest feints and gestures in various political and judicial games which had been going on for months if not years and in which Zen had long ceased to take any interest. The latter, on the other hand, turned out to contain some real news.

‘Suspect in Gallizio Killing Released’ read the headline. The article below explained that Lamberto Latini, the restaurateur whom the Carabinieri had found at Beppe Gallizio’s house when they arrived, had proved to have an unbreakable alibi for the time at which the murder took place. This had been fixed with some precision as shortly after six o’clock in the morning, thanks to a triangulation involving the medical examiner’s report, the time shown on the victim’s pocket watch, which had been stopped by the shotgun blast that killed him, and the testimony of a neighbour who had heard a shot at about that time.

The witness had taken no particular notice of this event, assuming that it was someone out after game or vermin. People rose early in the country, and they all owned guns. But Lamberto Latini, it transpired, had not risen early that day. When Beppe Gallizio met his death in a grove of linden trees in the valley below Palazzuole, Latini had been asleep in the arms of Nina Mandola, wife of the local tobacconist. What made the situation more delicate, and explained the fact that it had only now been revealed, was that Signor Mandola was sleeping in the next bedroom at the time.

This state of affairs, it turned out, was a longstanding and stable one. Everyone in the village knew about it — Lamberto left his car parked right in front of the house when he came visiting — but it was a private matter and none of them had dreamt of mentioning it to the police. Nor had Lamberto Latini. The truth had only come out when Pinot Mandola himself had called Enrico Pascal, the local maresciallo dei Carabinieri, and told him that Latini could not possibly have committed the murder since he was sleeping with the caller’s wife at the hour in question.

If truth were told, Pascal was considerably more embarrassed than the complaisant husband himself at having to probe, as delicately as possible, the reasons for this unusual arrangement. Mandola himself was quite straightforward about it. As a result of a glandular illness, he had become impotent. Since he was unfortunately unable to provide for the sexual needs of his wife, his marital duty was clearly to find someone who could.

‘I immediately thought of Lamberto. He had long been a close friend to both of us, and I’d always had the idea that he admired Nina. And since his wife’s death, he had been running around all over the place having affairs and visiting whores and neglecting the restaurant. I felt it was time for him to settle down.’ With two such intimate witnesses, to say nothing of various villagers who came forward, now that the truth was in the public domain, to attest to having seen Latini’s Lancia in front of the Mandola house until after eight that morning, the Carabinieri had no choice but to release the restaurateur.

‘And so the mystery of Beppe Gallizio’s tragic death returns to haunt a community already traumatized by the horror which so recently afflicted the Vincenzo family,’ the article concluded. ‘Are the two connected in some way? “How can they be?” people are saying. But, in their hearts, they are thinking, “How can they not be?”’

Zen’s reading was interrupted by the barman, who alerted him to the arrival of the bus. Ten minutes later, it dropped him before a large pair of wrought-iron gates on an isolated stretch of road outside the village. A deeply rutted driveway of packed gravel curved down a gentle slope between matching sets of poplars as rigidly erect as uniformed guards. To either side, the land flowed away in gentle curves and hillocks, the contours defined as though on a map by serried rows of vines covered in burnt-ochre foliage.

As Zen strode along the drive, the house gradually came into view. It was set a little way down the hillside, so that the first thing visible was the roof. Roofs, rather: a quilt of russet tiles, each section covering a separate portion of the house, the rows all running slightly out of alignment with their neighbours. Stubby brick chimneys covered over with arched spires like miniature bell towers punctuated this mosaic.

It soon became evident that the house itself was as complex and various as its roofs, not so much a single entity as a conglomerate of buildings of various size, shape and antiquity, huddled together along three sides of a large courtyard with a covered well at its centre. Some of the walls were open, consisting only of rows of large arches; others had a few ranks of shuttered windows; still others were blank.

So far all had been silent, apart from the growl of a distant tractor, but when Zen approached the front door, a dog started to howl, alerted by some noise or scent. Judging by its appearance, this entrance had been disused for some time, so he followed the driveway around the outbuildings and into the courtyard. The dog’s yelps grew louder and more frantic. A blue farm-cart and a green Volvo estate stood side by side near the inner door, which was opened by a young man holding a shotgun in his right hand.

In his late twenties, he was impeccably dressed in a brown and russet check suit with an English look but an unmistakably Italian cut, a triangle of brown kerchief protruding from his breast pocket echoing the bronze-and-black banded silk tie. A dark mustard V-necked pullover and button-down collared shirt in the subtlest of light blues and a pair of highly polished Oxfords completed the ensemble. His straight black hair, slightly receding from the temples and worn relatively long at the back, was perfectly waved and formed. A pair of wide-rimmed spectacles gave character to a pleasant, open, boyish face.

‘Good morning,’ he said in a firm, cultivated tone.

Unpleasantly aware of the shotgun — which wasn’t exactly pointed at him, but wasn’t exactly not either — Aurelio Zen showed his police identification and introduced himself above the frantic barking of the still invisible dog. The young man nodded and set the gun down.

‘Shut up!’ he yelled loudly.

The dog abruptly fell silent.

‘I apologize for the intrusion,’ Zen remarked. ‘If I’d known there was anyone here, I would have phoned first.’

‘Well, someone’s been at work on your behalf,’ the man replied. ‘There have been two calls for you so far this morning.’

Zen looked at him in utter astonishment.

‘That’s impossible! No one knew I was coming here. I didn’t even know myself until a few hours ago.’

‘Neither did I, for that matter. I was released at seven o’clock this morning.’

‘Released?’

The man stared at him defiantly.

‘From prison. I am Manlio Vincenzo. What can I do for you, dottore? My recent experiences have not been such as to endear me to representatives of the law, but I am aware of my duties as a citizen, and still more of the precarious nature of my present position. I repeat, what can I do for you?’

Zen gave an almost embarrassed laugh.

‘I’m not sure, to be perfectly honest. I suppose I wanted to take a look at the scene of the crime. To see for myself, I mean, to get the feel of the…’ Manlio Vincenzo nodded.

‘I quite understand. What we in the wine business call the gout de terroir. Well, you’re in luck. Whatever else we may lack here in the Langhe, we have any amount of that. Let me get my boots on.’

He went back inside, taking the shotgun with him. Zen turned to face the sunlight streaming into the courtyard. Protected from the slight breeze, to say nothing of the noise of traffic on the road above, it felt incredibly warm and quiet, a haven of sanity in a harsh world. It cost Zen a distinct effort to remind himself that its late owner had walked out of here to an atrocious death, and that as yet no one knew why. When Manlio Vincenzo reappeared, clad in a pair of green rubber boots and a coat, he seemed to have been reading Zen’s thoughts.

‘My father would have gone this way the morning he died,’ he said, leading Zen around the far side of the house.

‘The night he died, you mean.’

Manlio shook his head.

‘No, dottore. He spent his last night in bed. My father snored very loudly. It was not the least of the many things which my poor mother had to put up with from him. I got up in the night to fetch a glass of water, and the whole upstairs of the house was vibrating from that unmistakable stertorous rasping. It was always particularly bad when he’d been drinking heavily.’

Zen frowned.

‘There was nothing about this in the reports I read.’

‘Of course not,’ Manlio snapped bitterly. ‘It’s only my unsupported evidence, and I was already under arrest. Why spoil a perfectly good case by dragging in the truth?’

‘What time was it when you heard him?’

‘About half-past three. I’ve been waking around then ever since I got back from abroad. Or rather I used to. In prison I slept like the dead, as they say.’

They had emerged into the open, with an extensive view of a series of hummock-like hills covered in vines, each surmounted by a clump of low, solid, brick buildings similar to the one behind them. In the washed-out blue sky, patches of cloud massed like foam on water.

‘Rosa, your housekeeper, told the Carabinieri that Aldo left the house after returning from the village festa, and that you followed him,’ Zen remarked.

‘Quite right. Rosa preferred to stay here and watch the shopping channel. It’s her one pleasure in life, although she never orders anything. Anyway, I left the festivities early, as you no doubt know, following a much-publicized quarrel with my father. When he got back, I tried to talk it through with him. He walked out and I followed. Rosa, who was clearly embarrassed by the whole scene, went off to bed. She was asleep when I returned.’

‘Why did your father go out at that time of night in the first place?’

‘There was a phone call shortly after he got home. It may have had something to do with that, but when I asked him where he was going, he just said he wanted to clear his head. He’d had quite a lot to drink at the festa. I told him that I’d come too, and he shouted that he’d had quite enough of me for one evening. But I tagged along anyway. I didn’t like the idea of him going to bed in that frame of mind. Besides, he’d got the whole thing wrong, and I wanted to talk the thing through.’

The lines of heavy-fruited vines stretched away before them across the curve of the hillside. Manlio Vincenzo turned off between two rows and started to walk downhill.

‘This is the way we came,’ he said. ‘My father a pace or two ahead, me following at his heels like a dog.’

‘How can you be sure it was this row of vines? It was pitch dark and you admit you were drunk…’

Vincenzo turned to him.

‘ Dottore, you could blindfold me and take me to any point on our property and I would know exactly where I was, to the nearest metre. Believe me, this was the way we came.’

They walked on in silence for some time.

‘What was the quarrel between you and your father about?’ asked Zen eventually.

‘There were two causes. The one which has fascinated the press and public, needless to say, is that he had opened and read a private letter addressed to me by a friend, had misunderstood the contents and then used them to abuse me in public. But that was relatively superficial. The real reason for his animus lay much deeper. I’m afraid it will seem quite incomprehensible, if not absurd, to an outsider.’

Zen shrugged.

‘Tell me anyway. That’s why I’m here.’

Manlio Vincenzo paused to inspect the clusters of grapes nestled amongst the leaves to one side.

‘It was about wine,’ he said.

Zen looked at him sharply, suspecting a joke. Clearly he was wrong, however.

‘Our family has owned this land for about a hundred years,’ Manlio went on, striding away again. ‘My great-grandfather grew rich in the cotton business, and bought himself a country estate outside the village his father had come from. He made wine for his own consumption, but that was all. When my father inherited the property after the war, those vines and the wine they produced had acquired a significant commercial value, and by the time I was born the market had taken another leap. I managed to persuade him that if we were to continue to compete effectively, we needed to keep track of the latest developments in the field. So when I finished university, he sent me abroad to study viticulture.’

‘Where abroad?’

‘Initially to Bordeaux, and then to the United States.’

Zen stared at him in amazement.

‘America? But all they drink is milk and Coca-Cola!’

Manlio Vincenzo smiled.

‘Exactly what my father said when I suggested the idea. But you’re both wrong. The University of California at Davis was at that time, and probably still is, one of the best places in the world to study wine production in all its aspects, with no preconceptions and nothing taken for granted. The Americans may have started late, but they’ve caught up quickly.’

‘This doesn’t explain why you and your father almost came to blows at the Festa della Vendemmia that night,’ Zen remarked pointedly.

‘I’m coming to that. My father sent me abroad to study because he wanted to emulate the other top growers in the area, people like Gaja, Di Gresy and Bruno Rocca. He resented their growing fame, not to mention the prices they could command, and wanted me to find out how we could match them. As for me, I wanted to travel, to meet new people and to see the world. At that point I didn’t even want to be a wine-maker particularly. My degree was in engineering. But I went along with his idea, because it was a way to get out of this place.’

‘And away from him?’ suggested Zen.

Vincenzo gestured loosely.

‘To an extent, yes. In return, I was prepared to do the courses and come back with some useful tips on oak and pruning and fermentation techniques. Instead, I came back as someone quite unrecognizable to him, with ideas he found profoundly disturbing.’

‘What sort of ideas?’

‘About grape varieties, for one thing. That, of course, had never entered my father’s head as a subject for discussion. Like everyone else around here, we grew only one grape, Nebbiolo. That was taken for granted, as though it had been ordained by God. All Aldo wanted me to learn was how to manage and vinify it more profitably. But after my experiences abroad, I had different ideas, which he…’

Manlio Vincenzo inspected Zen briefly through his owl-like glasses.

‘This is the spot where he told me to go and suck my boyfriend’s prick, to quote his expression. Just here in this slight hollow where the water collects. You can feel how spongy the earth is here compared with the well-drained section we’ve been walking over.’

Zen, who could feel nothing of the kind, nodded. Manlio Vincenzo stood still, looking into the distance.

‘Then he turned and walked off without another word. I started after him, but I realized it was useless. I made my way back to the house and went to sleep. I never saw him alive again.’

‘What time did you get up the next morning?’ asked Zen after a moment’s silence.

‘About seven.’

‘But you didn’t see your father?’

‘No, he was gone by then. The door to his room was open, but he wasn’t there. That didn’t surprise me. He was always an early riser, and at this time of year you could hardly drag him away from his vines. I think that’s really why he went out the night before, to tell you the truth, even though it was too dark to see anything. As the vintage approached, he would spend hours just tramping the fields, snipping back leaves and checking on the ripeness of the fruit. He was like a mother with a new-born baby.’

Moving quickly, he led the way up the other side of the gulley and over a ridge. The rows of vines were interrupted here by a narrow track to allow mechanical access. Manlio climbed rapidly up the hillside, leaving Zen some distance behind. At last he turned left into the ploughed alley between two rows of vines leading up to a scruffy patch of oak trees at the edge of the field. A lorry lumbered into view, revealing the road by which Zen had arrived.

Suddenly Manlio slowed to a hesitant, stealthy gait, as though stalking some timid creature. He pointed to a bare stretch where three vines had been brutally hacked off just above ground level. The soil showed signs of having been recently turned over.

‘That was where they found it,’ he said in a stonily neutral tone.

‘The corpse?’

A curt nod.

‘I had the vines cut right back, of course. There was no question of making wine from those grapes. Before that, the spot was well hidden both from the road and from the house. That’s why it took so long to find him. My father often used to go off for the day somewhere or other without letting anyone know. If I’d sounded the alarm and then it turned out he’d gone into town on some private business, I’d never have heard the end of it. Things were bad enough between us as it was. I didn’t call the police until the evening of the next day, and it wasn’t until the following morning that they brought in the dogs.’

‘By which time, according to the medical report, it was impossible to determine the time of death with any precision,’ Zen remarked in a deliberately casual tone.

Manlio smiled and nodded.

‘Yes, I know. The investigating magistrate made great play with that particular point. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I didn’t kill my father.’

‘Someone did,’ Zen said quietly.

‘Yes, someone did. And someone else knows who that someone is, and yet another person knows that that someone knows. That’s the way it is around here, dottore.’

He had spoken with such bitterness that Zen was amazed to hear him add, ‘Are you free for lunch, by any chance?’

‘Lunch?’ he echoed vaguely.

‘Well, let’s not exaggerate. Rosa has been staying with her daughter since I was arrested, so we’ll have to improvise. But the wine will be good.’

He glanced at Zen with an expression of solicitude.

‘That’s a nasty-looking cut you’ve got there, dottore. Quite fresh, too, by the look of it.’

After Minot had dropped Aurelio Zen in Palazzuole, he drove a few miles out of town to pay calls on some private clients and a restaurant owner with whom he sometimes did business. His pickings that night had not been good enough to warrant going into Alba and selling directly on the street.

His customers initially balked at the discovery that prices had risen by an average of ten per cent.

‘Beppe didn’t used to charge this much!’ they all said, in one form or other.

‘God rest him, Beppe’s dead,’ was the reply. ‘If you want to pay market prices, drive into town. If you want home delivery, this is the going rate.’

They paid, all but one, and Minot made his way home a hundred thousand lire nearer to being able to buy Anna from Beppe’s sons and heirs. They lived in the city, and not only were they uninterested in owning a truffle hound but they seemed blissfully ignorant of the animal’s real value. For the meantime Minot had kindly offered to take care of the bitch, and, needless to say, was putting her to good use, although he kept her in a shed outside the house because of the rats.

The rats had made their appearance some years earlier: a brief incursion here, a nocturnal raid there, some grain missing from the supply Minot fed his chickens, a few chewed sacks of seed, and lots of hard, black droppings. Minot had already tried setting Anna on them once, one night when Beppe had to go to Turin for his younger son’s wedding and had let Minot borrow her in accordance with their long-standing arrangement. But Anna had been bred to sniff out truffles, and showed no interest in taking on an army of rodents.

After that, Minot had resorted to the poison and traps, as well as ambushing them one night and shooting a dozen or so. He had even hacked one youngster in half with a shovel in his fury. But they kept coming, until one day — he still wasn’t sure why — he had set out some stale bread he had no further use for, unbaited this time. In the morning, it was gone. That evening he put down some more, together with a saucer of diluted milk.

From that moment on, the attacks on his stores of seed and grain gradually diminished, then ceased altogether. It was as if he and the rats had arrived at an arrangement. Minot did not reveal this to anyone else, of course. People already thought that he was a little eccentric. If they learned that he was feeding rats, it would merely confirm their prejudices. But Minot couldn’t see why rats had any less right to live than several humans he could think of, always providing that they respected him and his property, of course. After all, they only wanted to survive, like everything else. Was that too much to ask?

It was some months before his dependants risked appearing in person before their benefactor, and, when they did, it was at first the merest glimpse caught out of the corner of the eye, a flurry in the shadows at the edge of the room, the flick of a long thin tail abruptly withdrawn. Perhaps some folk-memory of the shotgun blasts which had decimated the pack still remained, or the squeals of the baby which Minot had cut in two with his spade.

But at length these faded, too, mere myths and old wives’ tales that no one took seriously any more. The younger generation knew nothing of this house beyond the food and drink they found there every night. That was real enough; the rest just stories. So out they came, snouts twitching, red eyes alert, tails stirring like autonomous life-forms parasitic upon these parasites. Minot sat on the sofa and watched them take the nightly offering he had put down. From time to time they glanced up at him in ways he might, had he been inclined to sentimentality, have interpreted as gratitude. But Minot was a realist, and knew exactly the extent of the interest which the rats took in him. He liked it that way. Cupboard love was the one kind you could depend on.

By now he fed his pets morning and evening, and they knew him well enough to venture up on to the sofa where he sat, even to the extent of perching on his legs and shoulders. He allowed them to scamper inquisitively about, squinting up at him and scenting the air, their whiskers keenly quivering, until he heard a car draw near and then pull up outside. With a brisk slap of his palms, he dismissed his familiars, stuffed the money which the truffles had brought him under the cushions of the sofa, and went to investigate.

The vehicle parked outside turned out to be a Carabinieri jeep. Out of it, squeezed into his uniform like a sausage in its casing, stepped Enrico Pascal.

‘ Marescia,’ said Minot.

Pascal winced.

‘My piles are killing me,’ he announced with an air of satisfaction, if not pride.

‘You spend too much time sitting at a desk!’ Minot returned. ‘Look at me. I’m out and about all day and half the night, and the old sphincter’s still as tight as a drum.’

Pascal shook his head.

‘The doctor says it runs in the family. Can I come in?’

Minot waved his hand carelessly. Enrico Pascal walked past him and stopped, surveying the floor in the room within.

‘Looks like you’ve got rats,’ he remarked, studying the droppings scattered about.

‘Eh, it’s hard to keep them out! Care for a glass of something?’

The maresciallo grimaced.

‘Maybe a splash, just to keep my edge.’

Minot nodded. The customs of the country dictated the consumption of a series of glasses of wine throughout the day, ‘just to keep an edge’. One was never drunk, it went without saying, but never entirely sober either.

With his curiously feminine gait, Minot stepped over to the ancient refrigerator in the corner and pulled out an unlabelled bottle of the white wine named Favorita, a grape native to the area since the dawn of time and still cultivated by a few producers for private consumption.

‘Even worse than mine,’ commented Enrico Pascal, surveying the cluttered interior of the fridge. ‘I always assumed the wife was doing it on purpose, to make me lose weight. “You could make a fortune selling this as a miracle diet,” I told her. “One look and your appetite disappears for hours.” What’s this, then?’

He pointed to a glass jar filled with some dark red liquid in which bits of meat were floating.

‘Hare,’ Minot replied, handing Pascal his wine. ‘Shot it just the other day. Do you like hare?’

Pascal did not reply. He tossed off his wine and returned to the centre of the room, where he stood looking around in a lordly way. Minot resumed his seat on the sofa. There was a silence which persisted for some time.

‘Saturday morning about six…’ Pascal began at length, and then broke off.

‘Yes?’

Enrico Pascal sighed deeply.

‘Where were you?’

Minot reflected a moment.

‘Out,’ he replied.

‘Out where?’

‘After truffles.’

With another wince, the maresciallo sank into a chair to Minot’s right, his back to the bleary light from the one window.

‘Yes, but where?’

Minot smiled cunningly.

‘Ah, you can’t expect me to answer that!’

‘I’m investigating the death of Beppe Gallizio. I expect full cooperation from every member of the public.’

The two men exchanged a glance.

‘It was over Neviglie way,’ Minot replied. ‘A likely looking spot I noticed a couple of weeks ago on the way back from making a delivery.’

Pascal considered this for a moment.

‘But Beppe had taken Anna out that night,’ he said. ‘And you don’t own a hound of your own, Minot.’

Instead of answering, Minot got up and went out to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of wine.

‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded, returning to the other room.

Enrico Pascal shifted painfully from one buttock to the other.

‘At first, you see, we assumed that Beppe had killed himself,’ he announced discursively. ‘We may still come to that conclusion in the end. But in the meantime there are a few things which are bothering us.’

Minot took a swig of wine, leaning against the mantelpiece above the cold grate.

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well, there’s the gun, for instance. It’s Beppe’s all right, it was lying there beside the body and the only fingerprints on it are his. But Anna had been there, too, and Beppe had his mattock and his torch and all his truffle-hunting equipment with him. Why bother with that, if he’d meant to kill himself? And why bring his shotgun if not?’

He sighed.

‘And then the technical people have been on to me with some problems they’ve been having.’

‘Like what?’

‘I won’t bore you with the details. For that matter, I don’t really understand them myself. But when you fire a shotgun, it discharges nitrate on to your sleeve and hand. Now there were traces of nitrate on Beppe’s body and clothing, but they were apparently too weak and old to have been done that day. There was also something about the “angle of scatter”, or some such thing. They say that for the pellets which hit Beppe to have spread out the way they did, the end of the barrel must have been at least half a metre away, which would have been too far for him to reach the trigger.’

Minot knocked back his wine.

‘But what has this to do with me?’

His guest stood up and stuck his thumbs under the black belt of his tunic.

‘We have a witness who claims to have seen a truck like yours parked off the road a short distance from the wood where Beppe died.’

Minot turned on him in an instant, his body tensed, ready to spring.

‘Who’s that? Someone with a grudge against me, I’ll bet. They all hate me, God knows why. I’ve never done them any harm, but they treat me like a leper!’

Pascal did not lose his composure.

‘Not in this case, Minot. The witness in question was on his way into Alba early yesterday morning when he saw a vehicle parked in the copse to the left of the road, a red Fiat truck. He recognized it as yours, assumed that you were out after truffles and thought no more about it. Then he heard the news about Beppe’s suicide and called me to say that you might have heard or seen something.’

He stared fixedly at his host.

‘So now I’d like to hear your side of it.’

Minot sat down again. There was no point in trying to dominate the situation physically. Minot chit, they’d used to call him as a child — ‘Little Guglielmo’ — to distinguish him from another boy of the same name, a swaggering brute and bully known as Minot gross. The distinction ceased to have any meaning when the latter Guglielmo broke his neck while exploring the roof of an abandoned farm just outside the village, but somehow the mocking nickname had stuck.

‘I said I wasn’t there,’ Minot told Pascal. ‘I didn’t say anything about my truck.’

The maresciallo raised one eyebrow and waited.

‘I was out with friends that night,’ said Minot, after a pause. ‘They brought the dogs, and they drove. When I got back my truck was here, but not where I’d left it. There was mud on the paintwork, too, fresh mud. Someone must have taken it while I was out. The key was in the ignition. I never bother to take it out. No one around here wants to steal an old crock like mine.’

Enrico Pascal considered this.

‘And who were these friends?’ he asked.

Minot shook his head decisively.

‘I’m not going to drag them into the shit.’

Pascal twitched at the seat of his uniform trousers. He sat down again, drumming the fingers of one hand on his knee.

‘You’re making this very difficult for me, Minot,’ he said mildly.

The answer was a laugh.

‘You haven’t always made things that easy for me, marescia! I’m finally getting my own back for…’

He broke off abruptly. One of the rats had appeared on the back of the chair in which the Carabinieri official was sitting, and was now perched a few inches from his ear. Minot clapped his hands together loudly. The beast froze, then spun around in the air and vanished. Minot rubbed his palms together as though the slap had been a rhetorical gesture.

‘Here’s what I’ll do,’ he suggested in a conciliatory tone. ‘Let me have a word with these friends of mine. If there’s no problem, I’ll call you up and tell you their names.’

‘What makes you think there would be a problem?’

Minot shrugged.

‘You never know, do you? Look at Lamberto Latini. He didn’t want anyone to know where he’d been that night, did he?’

Enrico Pascal shook his head.

‘I don’t know, Minot. It’s very irregular. I mean, you could just go to them and work out a story together, construct an alibi for yourself…’

Minot laughed.

‘Don’t be ridiculous! Who’s going to take a risk like that for the likes of me?’

Pascal seemed not to have heard.

‘I should really take you in right now,’ he murmured, as though to himself.

‘You don’t want another mistake, though, do you?’ Minot returned maliciously. ‘First Manlio Vincenzo, then Latini. If you get it wrong a third time, people are going to start making jokes. “Maybe he should save time and just arrest us all!” I don’t think you want that, marescia. In the city you might be able to get away with it, but out here in the country you need people’s respect and cooperation. Lose that, and your job becomes impossible.’

Enrico Pascal stood up heavily.

‘You’ve got the whole thing worked out, Minot. I can’t afford another mistake, it’s true. On the other hand, I can’t afford to have two unsolved murders in my district either.’

‘What about this other policeman?’ Minot asked him. ‘The one who just arrived from Rome. He seemed to have some ideas about the Vincenzo business, at least.’

Enrico Pascal stared at him closely.

‘You’ve met him?’

Minot nodded and smiled.

‘Yesterday in Alba, at the market. The Faigano brothers and I were playing cards. He came over and introduced himself as a newspaper reporter from Naples. We pretended to believe him.’

The maresciallo seemed staggered by this revelation.

‘But how did you know who he was?’

‘Because I’d seen him earlier in the street with Dottor Legna, who was treating him with great respect. I knew then he must be this “supercop” they’ve been talking about in the press. When he turned up in the bar, I recognized him right away.’

He laughed.

‘So I started whistling the chorus to this old Fascist song! That’s what we used to do back in the war to tip each other off that there was an informer about. They couldn’t very well object, could they? We were just being patriotic.’

Pascal sniffed loudly.

‘Passing himself off as a reporter, was he? These Criminalpol types, I suppose they’re trained to do all that undercover stuff. Well, at least you’ve seen him and spoken to him. He hasn’t bothered to get in touch with me. But then why would he? I’m just a country bumpkin trying to keep order here in the village.’

He nodded to Minot.

‘Well, I’d better be going.’

They walked together to the front door.

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ said Pascal, turning on the threshold.

He took something from his pocket.

‘I think this is yours.’

Minot stood looking down at the knife lying on Pascal’s outstretched palm.

‘Where did you get that?’ he said.

‘It is yours, then?’

‘I’ve never seen it before.’

Their eyes locked.

‘Then why did you ask where I got it?’ asked Pascal.

Minot’s eyes narrowed unpleasantly.

‘I mean, why are you showing it to me? Why did you bring it here?’

Enrico Pascal examined the knife carefully, as if it might provide the answer to these questions. It was old and well-used, with a worn wooden handle and a long, dull blade. Both were completely clean.

‘It turned up at Beppe’s house,’ he replied at last.

‘And what makes you think it’s mine?’

The maresciallo reflected briefly, as though trying to recall.

‘This witness I was telling you about,’ he said at last. ‘When I showed him the knife, he said he thought you had one like it.’

‘Come on, Pasca!’ Minot exclaimed angrily. ‘Stop teasing me! Just who is this supposed witness of yours?’

Now it was Enrico Pascal’s turn to smile.

‘If you were under arrest, Minot, I’d have to reveal that information. As it is, I don’t see any reason to — how did you put it? — “drag him into the shit”.’

Minot’s face had become a hard, furious mask.

‘Don’t play games with me, marescia! People who do that…’

He broke off.

‘Well?’ queried Pascal.

Minot looked at him.

‘I don’t forget, that’s all. I don’t forget and I don’t forgive. Treat me like a man, and I’ll treat you the same way. Treat me like a rat, and I bite back.’

He went inside and slammed the door, leaving Enrico Pascal standing on the doorstep.

‘While she was alive, my mother did all the cooking herself, right up to the end, when the pain got too much. So the only time I’ve ever had any occasion to fend for myself is when I lived abroad. Still, I’ll see what I can do. I arranged for a neighbour to come by and feed the hens, so there should be eggs, at least. But first let’s crack a bottle.’

Manlio Vincenzo led the way downstairs to a cellar which appeared even larger than the house above. Striding confidently between the bins of stacked bottles, all identical to Zen’s untrained eyes, he unerringly selected three from differing locations. Back in the cold, austere kitchen, he unwound a wire cage surrounding the stopper of one bottle and poured a golden froth into two long-stemmed glasses.

‘A moscato from east of Asti,’ he said, offering one to Zen, ‘but not like any you’ll have had before. This is the authentic thing, made in small quantities for friends by someone who knows what he’s doing. It’s powerfully aromatic, but very light and barely sweet.’

He sniffed and sipped, staring up fixedly at the exposed beams on the ceiling, then swallowed and nodded once.

‘Even better than it was last time I tried it. No one believes this stuff improves, though. The big producers have spent a fortune persuading people that it doesn’t, which in the case of their products is true, since they are biologically dead.’

He put his glass down and turned away, waving to Zen to follow.

‘Now let’s go and see what we can forage. This is rather fun, don’t you think?’

He scooped up a trug from a cabinet by the back door and led the way out into the yard. Before long they had gathered a dozen eggs from the hen coop, potatoes and an onion from a vegetable bin, as well as a selection of herbs. Back in the kitchen, Manlio diced the vegetables and set them simmering in oil. Then he went into a room next door, where whole hams and cured sausages hung from hooks in the ceiling, and removed a selection, before disappearing to yet another larder in another part of the house, returning with about a quarter of a wheel of Parmesan.

‘There’s no need to go to all this trouble,’ Zen remarked awkwardly, aware of his ambiguous status.

‘It’s no trouble,’ Manlio returned. ‘On the contrary. You have no idea of the pleasure in something as simple as making an omelette without having to think twice or explain what I’m doing or how I’m doing it. But the real reason for all this is that I want to try to get across to you that rather dry subject I broached earlier, but in a more liquid way.’

He carved off a chunk of the Parmesan and grated it into a bowl, then added the beaten eggs, tipped in the cooked vegetables in their oil with some salt and pepper, then stirred it all up and returned the mixture to the pan.

‘You need to taste the wine,’ he declared, as though uttering a philosophical imperative. ‘After all, that’s what it’s all about, in the end.’

With the same darting energy, he set about carving slices of raw ham and salami which he laid out on chipped, hand-painted platters. Then he opened the two bottles of red wine and poured Zen a glass from each.

‘Try this one first,’ he directed.

Zen did as he was told, and almost spat it out. To his palate, the wine tasted like ink: intense and bitter, sincero but distinctly uncharming.

‘Now this,’ said his host.

Once again Zen raised his glass, more cautiously this time. But this wine was much more welcoming, with a rounder, fuller, fruity flavour. Relieved, Zen immediately took a second gulp.

‘Well?’ Manlio Vincenzo enquired archly.

Zen pointed to the second glass.

‘I prefer this one.’

His host grinned.

‘Clearly you don’t know much about wine, Dottor Zen.’

‘I know that,’ Zen admitted sheepishly.

‘The first glass I offered you is our 1982 riserva. It recently fetched almost two thousand dollars a case at an auction in New York.’

Zen looked suitably impressed.

‘And how much does the wrong one cost?’

A pause and a distant smile.

‘No one knows. It’s never been put on the market, partly because it’s “wrong” in a legal sense as well. I made it myself from some stalks I brought back from France and planted on a section of land which got washed out in a landslide a few years back. My father was involved in a legal dispute with the local council about compensation and payment for a new retaining wall. I knew that was likely to drag on for at least a decade — my father was extremely litigious — and so I put in my own plants meanwhile. What you’re drinking is the result.’

‘Congratulations.’

Manlio Vincenzo got to his feet and went over to check on the eggs.

‘This is nothing to what I could make on favoured slopes with fully mature vines. What you’re tasting is a blend of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. It would be interesting to try adding some Syrah, and maybe even mixing that in with the Nebbiolo. That’s what they’ve been doing in Tuscany for years now, having finally realized that Sangiovese usually isn’t terribly interesting, however “traditional” it may be. But up here tradition is still the word of God, protected by the full force of the law — and God help anyone who suggests otherwise.’

He flipped the frittata on to a plate, slipped it back into the pan to cook briefly on the other side, and then brought it to table.

‘Take that vineyard I just showed you,’ he said, serving Zen, ‘the one where my father died. It has good soil and ideal exposure. If we bottled it as a single-vineyard wine and gave it a dialect name, we could charge the same as Gaja does for his Sori Tildin or San Lorenzo. But that would be commercial suicide. We don’t have the marketing clout Angelo has, and we need the quality of that field and a few like it to keep our reserve Barbaresco up to par. So we hobble along, producing a good if no longer absolutely first-rate example of what is, in my opinion, a second-class varietal to begin with. Don’t tell anyone here I said that, though!’

They had just started to eat when the phone rang.

‘Damn!’ said Manlio. ‘If it’s those reporters again…’

But it wasn’t. After some monosyllabic exchanges, he turned to Zen.

‘It’s for you.’

Zen stared at him, then went over and took the phone.

‘Yes?’

‘ Hello again.’

It was the same dehumanized voice which had called him at his hotel that morning, a thin crackle like an aluminium can crushed in the hand.

‘First of all, a word of warning. Last time you hung up on me. That was a mistake I would advise you not to repeat if you are to have any chance of solving this puzzle before the solution is, so to speak, thrust upon you.’

‘How did you know I was here?’

He had spoken without thinking, and was answered with a tinny laugh.

‘You still don’t seem to understand. I ask the questions. You answer them. A bit of a change for someone in your position, but you’ll get used to it. Now, then, have you made any progress with the clue I gave you last night?’