A long finish

‘Good morning,’ said Zen.

Much to his surprise, the crone responded with a complacent smile. Dear God, he thought, she used to be a beauty.

‘I’m here to see Prince Lucchese,’ he continued, standing up. ‘My name’s Aurelio Zen. He’s expecting me.’

The woman sighed and made a compendious gesture suggesting that the prince was a busy man, even slightly eccentric in his way, and not to be held to prior appointments or arrangements; that she herself had been battling with this situation for longer than she cared to remember; and that if Zen had just arrived, he should join the queue.

‘Wait here,’ she told him. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

The door closed behind her. Zen resumed his seat and smoked quietly for some time. Eventually the door opened again and a withered hand waved impatiently.

‘The prince will see you now.’

Inside, the sense of spacious gloom and dilapidated gentility was unchanged, like a museum exhibit preserved under a bell jar. The old woman indicated a door to the left at the end of the hall.

‘In there.’

It was yet a different room from his previous visits, as though the prince had decided to give Zen a gradual guided tour of the palace. This one was a sort of antechamber, as long and narrow as a corridor, but with a hexagonal bay at the far end. The walls were bare, the ceiling high. A small teak table, an embroidered sofa and a darkened cane chair were the only furnishings. Lucchese was sitting in the latter, resplendently casual in the now-familiar silk dressing-gown.

‘Ah, there you are!’ exclaimed Lucchese in a tone of irritation. ‘I almost changed my mind about this business after speaking to you. My upbringing does not permit me to display spontaneous emotion, but when you rang earlier, I was working on the allemande from Bach’s D major partita. Do you know Wanda Landowska’s famous mot on the subject? She’d had an argument with another musician over stylistic issues. “Very well,” was her parting shot, “you play Bach your way and I’ll play him his way!” This morning, for the first time, I felt I was playing Bach his way, and then the phone rings…’

A gesture.

‘What did you make of Arianna?’

‘The cleaning lady?’

‘My mother, actually.’

Zen gulped.

‘I didn’t realize…’

‘My real reason for agreeing to see you,’ the prince continued evenly, ‘has nothing to do with this hand-over you called about. For various reasons, not least a demand I received this morning from the electricity company, leads me to think that the moment has come for me to present my bill. Before doing so, however, we need to conclude two pieces of outstanding business. The first concerns your recent tendency to somnambulism. What time is this Minot person arriving with the “item” you wish to appraise?’

Zen snapped his fingers apart and together again.

‘An hour? Maybe less.’

‘In that case, we’re going to have to deal with this more peremptorily than I would ideally wish,’ Lucchese replied, flexing his own fingers with a loud detonation of joints, which apparently caused him no discomfort. ‘My preliminary analysis has led me to the conclusion that you have recently suffered the loss — or, what is almost more disturbing, the unexpected reappearance — of a child, sibling or parent. Is this in fact the case?’

Zen nodded.

‘Which?’ demanded Lucchese.

‘All three.’

The prince stared at him in disbelief.

‘I recently discovered that my mother’s husband was not in fact my father,’ Zen explained. ‘Also that I have a half-sister living in Naples.’

‘That’s two,’ Lucchese prompted him in a deliberately unempathetic tone.

Zen gazed down at the puddle of unclean light forming on the floorboards as the sun grazed up against the cloud cover outside.

‘A former girlfriend of mine also informed me that she was pregnant, and that I was the father. She subsequently announced that she had had an abortion. In which case, I have lost a child as well.’

Lucchese’s mask of professional indifference withered and crisped like a letter thrown on a fire. He rose and embraced Zen warmly, patting his back.

‘In a case like this, caro dottore, it’s not a question of trying to work out why you were sleepwalking, but of asking ourselves why you didn’t throw yourself off the nearest high building! You must have the constitution of a rock.’

Unseen, Zen smiled wearily.

‘Several times, I thought I might be going mad.’

‘A sure sign that you weren’t.’

Lucchese released him and reached into his pocket for some papers which he shuffled about nervously.

‘I needed to get that straight, you see, because of the second piece of business I mentioned. I refer, of course, to the results on those DNA tests you wanted done. They arrived this morning.’

Zen stared at him as though in terror.

‘So soon? But I thought…’

‘My brother runs the lab in Turin which processes these things. I arranged for your samples to be moved to the top of the list.’

‘And what…? That’s to say, are we…?’

Lucchese did not reply. Zen sighed.

‘It’s bad, then.’

‘That depends. It’s certainly definitive. I talked to my brother in person this morning, and he made that absolutely clear. So I wanted to make sure that you are aware of the potential consequences, psychological and otherwise, and to assure myself that you are strong enough to cope with it.’

Zen stared at him bleakly.

‘I can cope with anything. It’s my speciality.’

The prince resumed his seat, looking over the papers in his hands.

‘Nevertheless, let’s just run over the background story. You say this woman Carla approached you at your hotel, claiming to be your daughter. Do you have any reason to believe her?’

‘I had an affair with her mother once, long ago. In Milan,’ he added, as though this explained everything.

‘You realize that if she were proven to be your daughter, you would have to take on various legal and financial responsibilities that might well be onerous?’

Zen shrugged.

‘I just want to know the truth.’

Lucchese gave him a smile spiced with a grain of contempt.

‘So, in theory, anyone could just walk up to you in a public place, having done a little research on your former mistresses, and claim to be your love child?’

Zen turned away to the window. Down in the Via Maestra, a host of strangers passed to and fro in eager intent or sociable procrastination.

‘I’m no more credulous than the next man,’ he said. ‘But I suppose that having just lost Carlo…’

‘Who?’

‘That’s what I decided to call the child Tania was carrying. I decided that it was a boy, and I named him Carlo. So when a young woman named Carla appeared, claiming to be my daughter…’

He swung around to confront Lucchese.

‘But my feelings are not important, principe. If Carla Arduini is my daughter, I’ll do the right thing by her, whatever it may cost me.’

Lucchese rose to his feet and made a slightly ironic bow.

‘Your words do you credit, dottore. But, as it happens, you can relax. The tests carried out by my brother reveal beyond a shadow of a doubt that this Arduini woman is not related to you in any way whatsoever.’

Zen gazed at him in silence.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

He held out the papers to Zen.

‘It’s all here, not that it will make any sense to you — or to me, for that matter. But my brother has assured me that it’s absolutely conclusive. Despite her impressive musical expertise, this Arduini woman is clearly a common gold-digger, out for what she can get. Luckily you have the might of science on your side, dottore. Tell her to try her luck elsewhere, or sue her for slander if you want. The courts will back you all the way.’

Zen took the papers and glanced at them abstractedly.

‘Thank you,’ he mumbled.

Lucchese frowned.

‘Aren’t you pleased?’

‘I suppose so. It’s just a shock, that’s all. I’d assumed…’

‘In the past, lots of men have been caught that way! But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can now get at the truth. Which in this case turns out to be a lie.’

The doorbell sounded. Lucchese rose and left the room. Zen subsided on to the sofa and sat looking over the results of the DNA tests. At length the prince reappeared.

‘Minot has returned,’ he announced. ‘This is the item which he referred to. You have five minutes to examine it, following which you may question him if you wish. The item itself will remain in my keeping for the meantime. May I have the papers which you are offering in exchange, by the way?’

Zen produced a long brown envelope from his coat pocket and handed it over. Lucchese perused the contents briefly, then passed Zen a crumpled piece of cheap paper which felt empty. He opened it gingerly, disclosing a sliver of what might have been plastic, translucent except for a brownish smear on one side.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘A fingernail, by the look of it,’ the prince remarked, inspecting the object. ‘From a male adult, in his fifties at least, used to manual work, and not overly fastidious about personal cleanliness. Oh, and he uses scissors rather than clippers to trim his nails, but you’d spotted that, of course!’

Zen handed the object back to Lucchese.

‘Kindly send Minot in here,’ he said.

Borrowing the tactics once used by Mussolini at his desk in the ex-Venetian embassy in Rome, Zen forced Minot to traverse the long distance from the door, hat in hand, before deigning to acknowledge his existence with an imperious glare.

‘ E allora? ’ he barked, once Minot had come to rest before him. ‘A fingernail. So what?’

Minot smiled.

‘So whose, you mean.’

Zen stared up at him from the cane chair which Lucchese had occupied earlier.

‘Look, Minot, I know you’re an unsophisticated fellow, but evidence is only admissible in law if there’s an unbroken sequence of links — each duly witnessed and notarized — leading back to the scene of the crime. Some broken fingernail, whatever its provenance, is of no more use to me than that button we were talking about earlier.’

Having brushed the seat of his trousers in a perfunctory way, Minot perched on the edge of the embroidered sofa and leant forward. Despite that symbolic gesture towards the prince’s furnishings, he did not seem overawed by his surroundings, still less by Zen’s presence.

‘Let me make an admission, dottore,’ he whispered in a voice which was barely audible even to Zen.

‘Get on with it!’

Minot looked from one side of the space to the other, as if checking that they were alone. Satisfied, he leant still closer to Zen.

‘Aldo’s body wasn’t discovered by that police dog, as everyone thinks.’

Zen stared at him.

‘It was discovered by me,’ Minot went on. ‘I was trespassing on the Vincenzo’s property the morning after the festa, after some truffles I thought might be hiding in a bank at one end of the vineyard. Instead, I found Aldo.’

He made a large gesture.

‘Imagine how it feels, coming on something like that with no warning, and with the mist so thick you can barely see where you’re going! At that moment I became a child again.’

‘How do you mean?’

Minot looked at him.

‘Children notice what’s close to them, what’s near enough to touch and hug and hold. That’s what I did then. I looked at the earth at my feet, so as not to have to look at that obscene apparition! There was something glinting there, as the light caught it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket as a kind of talisman against the horror.’

He leant back and raised his voice to a normal level.

‘A couple of days later I was over at the Faigano house, helping them with some work, and I noticed that Gianni was missing a fingernail from the index of his right hand. I thought no more about it at the time, but later I remembered the thing I’d found beside Aldo’s body, and realized that it was a fingernail. A fingernail with blood on it.’

Zen shrugged.

‘If you tear a nail, it bleeds.’

‘But the blood on this nail is on the outside, too, dottore. What if it’s not Gianni’s?’

The two men confronted each other in silence.

‘I can’t proceed on the basis of your word, Minot.’

‘Of course not. But you have ways of finding out the truth about these things. You did it with the knife they found at Beppe’s house. You can do it with the evidence I’m offering. I’m just telling you in advance that what you’ll find is that the nail is Gianni’s and the blood Aldo’s.’

Zen looked at him with a curious, glazed expression.

‘So they did it?’ he asked.

Minot laughed apologetically, as though not wanting to offend the outsider who had only now realized the self-evident truth.

‘Of course! Everyone knows that.’

Aurelio Zen had already entered the revolving door of the Alba Palace Hotel when he noticed Carla Arduini slipping into a compartment on the other side, going out. He glanced at her, and she at him, and he gestured furiously, pushing the door around so hard that he found himself back outside again before he could stop. Carla had also made the complete circuit, no doubt assuming that he would have exited, so the situation ended as it had begun — her inside, him out, and the door still between them. Zen held up his hand, indicating that she should stay where she was, and then plunged back into the roundabout.

‘Carla!’ he exclaimed awkwardly, when they were finally face to face.

‘I was just on my way to mass. I haven’t been for ages, but the cathedral is supposed to be very beautiful, and…’

‘Meet me afterwards, in the bar immediately to the left as you leave the church,’ Zen instructed her, as though giving operational instructions to a subordinate. ‘I have something to tell you.’

Carla inspected his expression for a moment, with what results remained unclear.

‘Very well. In about an hour, then.’

She strode off into the lively, impersonal bustle of the streets, and Zen went up to his room. He had felt the need for a break before resuming his interrogation of the Faigano brothers, but it had never occurred to him that he would meet Carla Arduini. The news he was going to have to break to her lodged in his chest like the silver spike with which Lucchese had punctured his late cousin’s heart.

Zen showered, shaved and changed into clean clothes, then hastened back outside. The debilitated sunlight had finally broken through the clouds, and although the air was crisp and cool the scene might have suggested summer but for the deep shadows which trenched the street, revealing the fraud. Zen wandered through the purposeful crowds, deferring to their sense of urgency and competence. They all looked as though they knew exactly where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there. By contrast, Zen felt as insubstantial as a somnambulist.

When he reached the bar, there were still fifteen minutes or so left before Carla emerged from the cathedral. Fifteen minutes for him to decide how to express himself, how to phrase the announcement that would put an end to all her hopes. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news…’ No, that sounded like a policeman addressing the nearest and dearest of the deceased. ‘The results of the blood tests we had done yesterday prove conclusively that…’ Too bureaucratic. ‘I would have been proud to have you as a daughter, but unfortunately…’ Patronizing bastard!

His cappuccino cooled and subsided into an unappetizing beige puddle on the counter before him, untouched. Seemingly offended, the barman asked if there was something wrong with it. Zen just shook his head. The next thing he knew, the bells of the cathedral had begun their pagan clamour and the faithful were emerging, blinking, into the sunlight of the piazza. A head taller than the rest of the predominantly menopausal worshippers, Carla was easy to spot.

‘How was it?’ he asked mindlessly, as she took a place beside him at the bar.

‘It was the mass,’ she replied. ‘What did you expect?’

She ordered an orange soda from the barman and turned to Zen with an unsympathetic eye.

‘Well?’ she enquired pointedly.

‘What? Oh, well, it’s nothing really. It’s just…’

He broke off.

‘You see, I’m investigating the Vincenzo case, as you know, and… Well, it’s beginning to look as though an arrest is imminent. Probably two, in fact. They’re local and have a teenage daughter who lives with them. The press has gone quiet about the case recently, for lack of new developments, but when this gets out, they’re going to be back in force. I don’t want the girl to be hounded, but there’s nothing I can do officially. So I was just wondering whether by any chance you might know someone in Turin who has a spare room where she could hide out.’

‘For how long?’

‘Just a few days, a week at most. Until the media lose interest again. It won’t take long.’

Carla Arduini finished her drink and set the glass down with a decisive clack.

‘She can stay with me. I’m going back today anyway.’

Zen grasped her arm.

‘You’re leaving?’

She shrugged dismissively.

‘Why not? There doesn’t seem much point in staying here, does there? I did what I came to do, or rather failed to do it. It was a silly idea anyway. It’s time to put it behind me and get on with my life.’

Now she was avoiding his eyes, looking studiously out of the window at the passers-by in the piazza. Zen took a deep breath.

‘About that blood test…’

Carla laughed briefly.

‘Oh, that! Send me the results when you get them. It’ll take months, probably. Anyway, it’s of no importance.’

Zen removed his hand from her arm.

‘Of no importance? But I thought…’

‘What did you think?’

‘I thought…’ He paused lamely. ‘I thought it was.’

‘I used to think so, too, but I’ve changed my mind. Now it just seems absurd. I mean, here am I, spending a fortune staying for a week at a hotel in a dreary provincial town, and all for what? Because my mother told me a story about having slept with some policeman the year before I was born!’

She sniffed scornfully.

‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, but when I started looking into this business, I kept running into the names of men my mother had slept with in the years before I was born — and after, for that matter. Not that I blame her for that! God knows, she had little enough else in the way of pleasure. But the chances of you being my real father, Dottor Zen, are frankly next to nothing. She couldn’t even get the story straight herself towards the end. Half the time it was you, and half the time it was Paolo or Piero or Pietro. But I had no way of tracing them, so when you showed up here…’

She took a two-thousand lire note out of her purse and dropped it on the bar.

‘Send this Lisa to the hotel. I’ll be glad to take care of her for you. Consider it a way of apologizing for the distress I’ve caused you. And don’t worry, I won’t bother you again.’

With a vague, mislaid smile, she turned and walked out.

‘Carla! Wait!’

He caught up with her in the piazza.

‘Listen, I…’

‘Look, dottore, I don’t want to seem rude, but will you please leave me alone? Every time I see you, I’m reminded of what a fool I’ve made of myself. In a few hours I’ll be gone, and I promise that you’ll never hear from me again. All right?’

‘No! No, it’s not all right!’

She looked at him with astonishment.

‘And just what is that supposed to mean?’ she demanded angrily.

They were speaking so animatedly that a small crowd had formed around them, but Zen had eyes for no one but Carla Arduini.

‘You didn’t make a fool of yourself,’ he said.

She smiled scornfully.

‘Very kind, I’m sure. I happen to disagree.’

‘Those tests you mentioned? They’re already complete.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Lucchese’s brother runs the clinic where they’re done. He put our samples to the top of the pile and faxed the results through this morning. I’ve seen them, Carla. I’ll show them to you if you want, not that they’ll make any sense to you, or to me for that matter. But the prince explained them all to me, and the result is perfectly clear.’

They stared at each other with silent intensity.

‘Well?’ Carla burst out at last.

‘I’m afraid it may be bad news. But there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘Tell me!’

Zen sighed and looked away.

‘The tests prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are indeed my daughter.’

Carla Arduini took a step back.

‘You’re joking.’

‘Do you think I would joke about something as important as this?’

He shook his head sadly.

‘You’re stuck with me, Carla. I may not be much of a father, but you’ll have to make the best of it, because I’m the only one you’ll ever have.’

There was a seemingly endless silence. Then Carla Arduini rushed at Zen and flung her arms around his neck.

‘Daddy!’

‘It wasn’t in vain!’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Everything your mother went through, everything you’ve been through. None of it was in vain.’

She broke the embrace and stepped back, biting her lip.

‘I’d given up hope.’

‘So had I.’

A ripple of polite applause recalled them to the realities of the situation. The assembled onlookers beamed their good wishes and congratulations, then tactfully dispersed.

‘Now then!’ said Zen decisively. ‘I’ve still got work to do, but I think this calls for a glass of spumante, don’t you?’

‘It won’t work,’ said Tullio Legna, chopping his right hand through the air as though to finish off this sickly idea once and for all.

Zen shrugged.

‘It might. And if it doesn’t, we still have the evidence to fall back on. But that will take longer. I think we should go in for the kill.’

‘You really believe the evidence will stand up?’

‘Why not? Minot may be an odd type in many ways, but he’s not stupid. He knows we can prove or disprove his assertions, and he knows we will. He has nothing to gain by lying, and everything to lose.’

The Alba police chief raised his eyebrows and emitted an expressive sigh.

‘He’s not the only one, dottore!’

Zen frowned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nanni Morino gave me an account of the methods you’ve been using so far,’ Legna continued in a bureaucratic tone. ‘I must say that I find them highly irregular, to say the least. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, Dottor Zen. Maybe your approach is standard procedure at Criminalpol. I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that you’ve been interviewing individuals without a lawyer present, telling each a different story, and then doing a deal with one of them in exchange for a piece of supposed evidence whose value and authenticity we have had no chance to evaluate. And now you tell me that you’re going to invent a pack of lies and use them to get a confession out of someone who wasn’t even a suspect until now!’

‘He wasn’t, was he? Which is somewhat surprising, given the fact that he had both a strong motive and a perfect opportunity.’

‘I wasn’t aware of that!’ Tullio Legna insisted with undisguised anger.

‘Maybe that’s why I’m handling this case and not you, Dottor Legna,’ remarked Zen sweetly.

He turned to Dario.

‘Go and find Morino, then bring the Faigano brothers up here.’

The patrolman glanced at Tullio Legna, who stalked out of the room. Dario followed. Left alone, Zen wandered over to the window, collecting his thoughts for the coming performance. He had no doubts about the course he was taking. The encounter with Carla, and its unexpected but wholly logical conclusion, seemed to have clarified his mind like a breeze carrying off mist. He had been sleepwalking for too long. Now he was awake once more, responsible for his actions, and confident about the result.

Nevertheless, despite the bravado with which he had answered Tullio Legna, he was well aware that it could all go very wrong. He felt like a sculptor confronting a block of expensive marble, sheer to all appearances but with a slight internal flaw. If he selected an instrument of the correct size and shape, and applied it with precisely the proper force at exactly the right place, the whole mass would open up and reveal its inner essence to him, and he could finish his work with ease. But if he miscalculated, he would be left with a botched lump of masonry which no amount of subsequent labour could ever repair.

He turned round expectantly as the door opened, but it was only Nanni Morino, shuffling in with his notepad and a sheepish expression.

‘Ah, it’s you!’ Zen remarked coldly. ‘I gather you’ve been ratting on me to the chief.’

‘I was just keeping him informed about developments in the case,’ Morino replied with righteous embarrassment. ‘He has a right to know what’s going on in the section under his command.’

‘That’s all right. In your position, I’d probably have done the same. There’s no reason why you should risk your own career just to follow me.’

‘On the contrary, dottore,’ Morino protested, as Dario ushered in the Faigano brothers, ‘I’d follow you anywhere!’

In a barely audible undertone, he added, ‘If only out of morbid curiosity.’

‘Ah, there you are!’ Aurelio Zen exclaimed, going round the desk to greet the new arrivals, his right hand held out. With expressions of mild bemusement, both brothers automatically responded. Maurizio’s hand was given a perfunctory shake, but Zen grasped Gianni’s and brought it up to his face for closer examination.

‘One of your nails is missing,’ he observed.

Gianni snatched his hand away.

‘So?’

‘How did it happen?’

‘Working the land isn’t a desk job,’ Gianni returned with a touch of contempt.

‘Do you remember the occasion?’

Gianni looked at his brother, frowning.

‘It was when we were bottling last year’s wine,’ Maurizio prompted. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Oh, that’s right! I’d forgotten.’

‘It’s common enough round here,’ Maurizio explained. ‘And that’s not counting the ones from the war. The Fascists used to specialize in that, when they ran out of more inventive ideas. They used to do it properly, with pliers. And slowly. Half the men round here are still missing a few. Once the roots get ripped out, the nail never grows back.’

He glanced keenly at Zen, as though suddenly recalling the situation.

‘But why are you asking about this?’

For a moment, Aurelio Zen looked puzzled. Then he waved at Nanni Morino, who was assiduously noting all this down.

‘Just “morbid curiosity”, to quote my colleague. I’ll only need to keep you a moment, and then Dario will take you downstairs and do the necessary for your release.’

The brothers glanced at each other.

‘Release?’ queried Gianni.

‘Yes, it’s all over. Once I got the confession, of course…’

‘Minot has confessed?’

Zen nodded briskly.

‘And that’s why I need your help. It was off the record, you see. No lawyers present, no witnesses, no notes taken. The cunning bastard waited until everyone else had left, and then confessed to the whole thing!’

Zen burst into laughter.

‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it!’ he exclaimed in a tone of aggrieved admiration. ‘This Minot is certainly quite a character. He even told me why he’d done it, but as a challenge. “Now try and prove it!” he said. “You won’t be able to. There isn’t a scrap of evidence. You’ll never be able to take me to court, much less get a conviction.”’

Gianni Faigano nodded sourly.

‘That sounds like Minot all right. But where do we come in?’

‘Because I accept his challenge, and to win I need some background information.’

‘About what?’ asked Maurizio.

Zen gave a declamatory sigh.

‘When I searched your house yesterday, following your arrest, I noticed an old photograph on display. It was a portrait of Chiara Cravioli, later Signora Vincenzo.’

The silence which followed had a new quality, like a fresh sheet of sandpaper replacing one worn smooth.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ snapped Gianni.

‘Well, you see, Minot claims that she’s the reason he murdered Aldo.’

‘That’s absurd! He didn’t even know Chiara!’

Zen gestured for calm.

‘One thing at a time, Signor Faigano, if you please. I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I’m telling the story back to front. It’s been a long night for all of us, and I’m getting confused. Let’s begin at the beginning.’

He sat down, looking over some notes scribbled hastily on the back of various envelopes and departmental circulars.

‘Yes, here we are. According to Minot, he and this Chiara Cravioli were lovers long ago…’

Gianni Faigano took a step forward.

‘That’s bullshit!’

‘Oh!’ called Dario from the door.

His weapon was cocked and levelled. Maurizio gripped his brother’s arm and drew him back to his place.

‘As I was saying,’ Zen continued in the same bored tone, ‘Minot claims that he and Chiara used to be lovers. In itself, this is of no particular interest. But he also claims that the relationship did not cease once la Cravioli married Aldo Vincenzo. In fact, he went on to say, Manlio Vincenzo is not Aldo’s son at all, but the fruit of Minot’s loins.’

Gianni Faigano stepped forward again, unable to control himself.

‘That’s a damned lie! A filthy blasphemy!’

Zen gestured helplessly, as though to apologize for an unintentional gaffe.

‘I’m only telling you what Minot said. And the reason I’m mentioning it is in the hope that you might be able to corroborate his story. It would give me a motive, you see, which is the one thing I don’t have at present. Once I’ve got that, I’ll call a lawyer and formally charge Minot with murder.’

He got to his feet, shaking his head.

‘But first I need a credible reason for him to have killed Aldo. If the victim first stole his girlfriend and then claimed Minot’s only son as his own, it all makes sense. Even the timing fits in. According to Minot, he’d wanted to get even with Aldo for years, but Chiara had forbidden it. She was apparently a conventional person, in that sense at least, and even though Vincenzo allegedly raped her to force the marriage…’

Maurizio grasped his brother’s shoulders and held him still.

‘… Chiara took the view that she was married to him for better or worse, and made Minot swear on the ashes of their youthful love that he would not harm Aldo. So it wasn’t until she died that he was able to carry out his long-premeditated revenge.’

Zen clapped his hands together.

‘It’s a pretty tale, and of course the press will eat it up. “Ex-partisan kills to avenge teenage sweet-heart! A love affair that triumphed over death!” But what I need is independent confirmation of this alleged love affair between Minot and Chiara Cravioli. And that’s where I was hoping that you might be able to help.’

He gave the Faigano brothers an inane smile. Maurizio glanced hesitantly at his brother.

‘I’ve never heard anything about that,’ he said.

‘And you, Signor Gianni?’ asked Zen.

Gianni Faigano did not reply. He no longer seemed agitated. He stood perfectly still, gazing down at the tiled floor with an air of almost beatific calm, his features relaxed, his bearing simple and natural.

‘Presumably one of you knew this Cravioli woman?’ Zen went on. ‘To keep her photograph in the living room like that, I mean. I didn’t notice any other pictures.’

‘I knew her,’ said Gianni Faigano at length.

‘And was she in love with Minot?’

‘Of course not! The whole idea’s a joke. A sick joke.’

Zen shrugged.

‘Minot isn’t anyone’s idea of Adonis, to be sure, but women can be funny that way. It isn’t so much the looks that get to them, I always say, it’s the force of personality. And Minot certainly has plenty of that, even now. Forty years ago, I can see him bowling over some impressionable young girl and…’

‘It’s an obscene pack of lies,’ Gianni Faigano stated in a quiet, hard tone. ‘A total travesty of justice.’

Zen frowned.

‘I don’t see how justice comes into it. Minot’s not even under arrest yet. But since you two apparently can’t help me, I’ll have to try elsewhere. Somebody must know something. Why would Minot make up a story like that?’

‘Because he’s a dirty, scheming, treacherous piece of shit!’ retorted Maurizio Faigano.

‘Possibly, but I still don’t see what he hopes to get out of lying about it. Anyway, the local newspaper has been trying to get an interview from me ever since I arrived. This might be the moment to arrange for a non-attributable leak. I’ll make sure Minot’s story about him and Signora Cravioli gets maximum exposure and hope that something comes of it.’

‘You mustn’t do that,’ Gianni Faigano said with an air of finality.

Zen looked at him oddly.

‘I mustn’t?’ he repeated with a sardonic smile. ‘And why not, might I ask?’

For a moment it seemed as if Gianni was not going to answer this question. Then he pushed his shoulders back and looked straight at Zen with an air of renewed resolution.

‘Because it would make a mockery of everything.’

‘I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,’ Zen said impatiently. ‘In any case, I have no choice. There’s a murder to solve, and this is the only way to do it.’

‘It’s not the only way,’ replied Gianni Faigano.

Zen stared at him in silence.

‘What would you need to get a proper confession?’ Gianni asked. ‘Not a teasing perjury like the one Minot tried to make you fall for. I mean something that would stand up in court, and which no one could challenge?’

‘Well, we’d need a lawyer to represent the deponent and certify that no improper methods had been used in obtaining the statement…’

He waved his hands helplessly.

‘But it’s no use! Minot will never repeat what he said under those conditions.’

‘I’m not talking about Minot,’ Gianni Faigano remarked, as though Zen should have grasped this obvious fact.

‘Then who?’

Maurizio grabbed hold of his brother once more, but with a desperation which suggested that he knew the effort to be futile. Gianni Faigano brushed him off and turned to Aurelio Zen with a perfectly serene expression.

‘I killed Aldo Vincenzo. Get a lawyer up here and I’ll tell you the whole story.’

Like some children, the following day was born with a mild, sunny disposition which time merely focused and intensified. The air was still and bright, with just a hint of winter to add some welcome edge, the sky a flawless, bleached blue whose diffident haziness made it seem infinitely distant and desirable.

On such a day, Zen felt, it would be a kind of sacrilege to stay cooped up in Alba, particularly after the spectacular breakthrough which had crowned his labours and brought his mission to a triumphant conclusion. He therefore arranged for a car to pick him up at his hotel and prepared to perform in person a task he could equally well have accomplished by telephone, or delegated, or even neglected.

Before doing so, he called Carla Arduini. Following Zen’s declaration in the piazza outside the cathedral, her planned return to Turin had been delayed for twenty-four hours, at his expense. At this rate, he explained, outlining the successful conclusion of his investigation, they might even be able to leave together — with or without Lisa Faigano, who had angrily rejected Zen’s offer of asylum from the press once she learned that her uncle and father had been arrested for conspiracy to murder Aldo Vincenzo. In the meantime, at any rate, he had an errand to run in the country near Palazzuole. Would Carla care to join him?

Twenty minutes later they were sitting side by side in the back seat of an unmarked police car provided through the offices of Tullio Legna. The only aspect of the situation which troubled Zen’s pleasure was that the Alba police chief himself was at the wheel. On the surface, Legna was his usual urbane self, but Zen quickly detected an undercurrent of pique, not to say hostility, in his continual expressions of amazement at the way in which Zen had ‘succeeded where all others had failed, and in so short a time, knowing nothing of the people and background involved’.

Despite his conviction that Legna had insisted on acting as chauffeur in order to spy on Zen’s last hours in his domain, and possibly even wring some last-minute credit from a casual indiscretion, Zen appeared to take it all in good spirits. He had merely been lucky, he claimed, and sooner or later the truth would have emerged anyway. But when they reached the gates to the Vincenzo property, he told Legna to pull up and let them out.

‘My daughter and I will walk the rest of the way.’

‘But don’t you want me to stay and run you back to town?’ Tullio Legna protested.

Zen shook his head with a polite smile.

‘It’s a private call which may take some time, and I’m sure a busy man like you has plenty to do. Particularly in the present situation.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s still the Gallizio and Scorrone cases unaccounted for,’ Zen reminded him. ‘Gianni Faigano explicitly denied any part in those events, and there’s no clear evidence linking him to either. Now that the Vincenzo affair has been cleared up, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of pressure on you to make an arrest in the two unsolved killings.’

He held out his hand to Legna.

‘In a perverse way, I’m sorry it’s worked out so smoothly,’ he recited with an unctuous smile. ‘It would have been good to have been able to stay longer and see some of the wonderful things which the Langhe has to offer. But I’m eager to get back to my family and friends, and at least I had a chance to sample the famous white truffles and some good wine. It’s been a pleasure working with you. If there’s anything I can do for you once I’m back in Rome, don’t hesitate to contact me. Arriverderci! ’

Taking Carla by the arm, he started off briskly down the track leading to the Vincenzo property, leaving Tullio Legna no choice but to drive off.

‘You still haven’t explained why we’re here,’ Carla pointed out mildly.

‘Officially, because I need to tie up a few loose ends. But really that’s just a pretext. The fact is that I wanted to spend my last day here out in the country with you.’

He hoped this was the right answer. Carla seemed to agree, or at least to feel that she ought to appear to do so, squeezing his arm affectionately. The rapport between them inevitably felt a little strained, since each felt the need to reassure the other, and slightly resented this.

Reciprocity went this far, but Zen’s view of the situation was inevitably different from Carla’s. They both might be wondering how, or even whether, the relationship would work out, but he alone knew that it was not a destiny but a choice, and one that he had made; a lie he had sponsored in the interests of maintaining what had seemed a greater and more important truth.

So in addition to whatever doubts Carla Arduini might have about this dramatic turn of events, Zen had to deal with a succession of nagging internal queries about whether he had done the right thing. It had seemed a good idea at the time, but then so had all the failed initiatives which littered his personal history, and which he now saw quite clearly for the disasters they were. Why should this be any different?

That logic, though, would induce paralysis. Life was not a spectator sport, he told himself. You couldn’t opt out, and you couldn’t ever be sure of doing the right thing. All you could hope for, perhaps, was to do the wrong thing better, or at least more interestingly. Acquiring a twenty-something daughter about whom he knew next to nothing certainly promised to be interesting — and if it goes seriously off the rails, a weasel voice reminded him, you can always tell her the truth.

They walked in silence down the track, through the mild air and the strata of sunlight, the Vincenzo house gradually emerging from behind its screens of soil and vegetation. There was a low rumble of machinery at work somewhere, as well as the distant and disconsolate barking of the dog, but the house itself appeared deserted. Zen freed himself from Carla’s arm and strode across the courtyard to the main door, which lay wide open. He knocked, without effect.

‘Hello?’ he called inside.

The silence bulged lightly, like a silk drapery with a faint draught behind it. Zen rapped again, more loudly.

‘Anyone home?’

He was on the point of turning away when an elderly woman suddenly appeared in a window on the second floor.

‘ Si ’

‘Signora Rosa?’ asked Zen.

‘Well?’

‘We came to see Dottor Manlio.’

The woman sized them up shrewdly for a moment, then pointed to a row of buildings at the far end of the courtyard.

‘They’re making the wine,’ she replied, and disappeared inside.

Zen thanked the empty window and then walked with Carla across the courtyard towards the line of adjoining sheds, each a different size and design, which had apparently been added to the main structure at different periods as needed. The first few additions were similar to the main house and the other outbuildings surrounding it, but by the end of the row the idiom had changed to the efficient brutalities of modern construction.

Open steel doors in the concrete-block wall of this section revealed signs of activity within. The mechanical rumble grew louder as they approached, then was swallowed by the louder racket of a tractor pulling a cart laden with garishly coloured plastic baskets containing bunches of dull, bruise-blue grapes. A group of young people emerged from the building and started carrying the baskets inside, helped by the driver of the tractor. Zen and Carla followed.

The scene inside resembled some light-industrial plant rather than the picturesque squalor which Zen had always associated with wine-making. The floor was a bleak, runnelled expanse of poured concrete, the roof an exposed matrix of metal girders and corrugated sheeting, the lighting provided by glaring fluorescent strips hanging from the beams.

In the middle of the floor stood a raised trough made of stainless steel, lined on either side by women of all ages. Within this ran a wide rubber belt, like a supermarket checkout, upon which the grapes that had just arrived were unloaded. These precessed slowly past the waiting lines of women, whose nimble fingers darted in among the clusters, sorting out the spoiled or unripe grapes. The fruit which passed this test tumbled into yet another gleaming machine at the end of the belt, connected to a wide metal tube which ran at a slight angle straight into the end wall.

There were so many people coming and going in the shed that it was some time before Zen recognized Manlio Vincenzo, standing at one end of the conveyor belt, scrutinizing the work of the women to either side and occasionally leaning out to inspect a cluster of grapes more closely. It was still longer before he looked up and noticed the presence of the two intruders.

‘Well?’ he said sharply. ‘What do you want?’

Zen gestured vaguely, as though at a loss.

‘Just a word with you, Signor Vincenzo. But I can see that you’re busy. I’ll phone later, perhaps.’

Manlio Vincenzo ducked under the inclined metal tube and came towards them, frowning.

‘Oh, it’s you, Dottor Zen!’ he exclaimed, his expression changing to one of guarded welcome. ‘I hope you haven’t come to arrest me.’

They shook hands.

‘On the contrary,’ said Zen. ‘In fact I have some good news.’

Manlio smiled warily.

‘That’s always welcome. I made the decision to start harvesting yesterday. I don’t trust this weather. Too stable, too settled. All we need now is a hailstorm and the whole harvest could be wiped out.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘We’re almost finished for the morning, as it happens. Can you stay to lunch, dottore? And of course…’

He looked at Zen’s companion.

‘My daughter, Carla Arduini,’ Zen told him.

‘Delighted to meet you, signorina, although it’s a far from ideal moment. Who was it said that no one should watch sausages or laws being made? He should have added wine.’

He waved at the moving belt.

‘This is only the first stage, of course, but I’m doing a much more rigorous triage than we used to in the past. Since this will be the first and last vintage that I will oversee, I wanted to do an exemplary job.’

He glanced at Zen.

‘Tell your Roman friend to invest with confidence. This is going to be a quite exceptional wine. At a quite exceptional price, naturally.’

‘I don’t think the price is a problem.’

‘Unless you set it too low! The market’s so hot these days that you can sell practically anything as long as it’s expensive enough. But if you don’t charge stellar prices, the serious collectors will sneer at you. “Why, anyone could afford that,” they think.’

He gestured towards a door in the wall.

‘Let’s go and find Andrea.’

Manlio Vincenzo led the way into the next part of the connected sheds, closing the door carefully behind him. In the sorting room which Zen and Carla had first entered, there was little evidence apart from the bunches of grapes themselves that wine was being produced there, rather than knitwear or ceramics. In the room in which they now found themselves, this fact was primary and dominant, confirmed by a pervasive stench at once as heady as petroleum and as dank and dark as hanging meat or rotten leaves.

The space was almost entirely occupied by a number of huge fermentation vats made of deeply stained oak banded with metal. The pipe which had disappeared into the wall next door emerged here at the same inclined angle, running up to a level above the vats, into one of which it discharged a gush of rich red juice. Manlio waved to a woman standing on a ladder attached to the side of the vat being filled. He climbed up to join her and peer down into the internal cavity. They had a brief discussion, then came down to join their impromptu guests.

Once Carla and Andrea had been introduced, Manlio led them outside into the blissfully fresh air.

‘You’ll have to forgive Rosa,’ he warned Zen. ‘She’s a little eccentric at times, but a wonderful housekeeper. I shall miss her.’

‘Is she leaving?’ asked Carla.

‘No, we are,’ Andrea replied.

‘I hope we’re not inconveniencing you,’ said Zen.

Manlio laughed.

‘At vintage time Rosa cooks for everyone, including all the student pickers and the sorting ladies. It’s a sort of informal festa, and there’s always too much food. Rosa grew up on a big farm, but now she lives alone in an apartment in the village with no one to care for except herself, and she doesn’t care about herself. So at this time of year, it’s as if the world has suddenly started to make sense again. Lots of people around, masses of food being served, a scene of chaos and purpose. I’ll swear she looks about ten years younger!’

As promised, the meal was copious, simple and good: homemade pasta ribbons with a wild mushroom sauce, followed by roast chicken and a selection of fruit. Several of Manlio’s neighbours who were helping him out with the vintage joined them at table, so the subject which had brought Zen there was not raised until the meal was over and the neighbours had returned to work, along with Andrea, who quickly sized up the situation and suggested that Carla join her.

When Zen and Manlio Vincenzo were alone, the younger man poured them both another glass of the wine they had been drinking, regarding Zen in the manner which he recognized by now as an invitation to make a fool of himself by commenting on the beverage in question.

‘Interesting,’ he remarked urbanely, choosing an adjective which seemed promisingly vague.

The look which Manlio Vincenzo gave him suggested that this was not quite enough.

‘A very long finish,’ Zen added. ‘Which brings me to my reason for troubling you today, Signor Vincenzo. As I mentioned earlier, I have some good news. We have made an arrest in the matter of your father’s murder. It is supported by a full and voluntary confession, not to mention various pieces of material evidence. There is thus no doubt that the judges responsible will confirm your unconditional discharge within a few days. In short, your legal worries are over.’

Manlio Vincenzo nodded coolly.

‘So who did it?’

Zen lit a Nazionale with the air of someone who didn’t care if the bouquet of the wine was adversely affected.

‘My report to the judiciary will conclude that the crime was a conspiracy between Gianni and Maurizio Faigano, although the former has tried to take all the blame on himself.’

Manlio started forward so suddenly that he upset his water glass.

‘The Faigano brothers? But that’s absurd!’

He picked up his toppled glass mechanically, frowning.

‘There was that stupid business of my father trying to talk me into marrying the daughter, but I explained the whole thing to her privately, and of course it came to nothing. Why on earth should the Faiganos have wanted to kill my father?’

Zen slurped some more wine into his glass, blinking from the cigarette smoke which had got in his eyes.

‘According to the confession deposed by Gianni Faigano before me and a court-appointed lawyer in my office yesterday, the motive for the crime dates back more than four decades. Signor Faigano claims that he and your late mother, Chiara Cravioli as she then was, were sweethearts at that time. They planned to marry, but since Gianni was unemployed, Chiara’s father would not approve the marriage. It was at this point that your father entered the picture.

‘What happened next is based on Faigano’s account of what your mother told him when she explained why she was breaking off their unofficial engagement. There is no proof that it is true, and at this late stage there probably never will be, but your father allegedly went to Signor Cravioli and asked permission to court his daughter. This was readily given, since Aldo Vincenzo was a man of property and an excellent match.

‘As for Chiara, she agreed to the engagement, partly out of fear of her father and partly to provide her with a screen behind which she and Gianni could continue, however infrequently, to see each other. Whenever Aldo tried to fix the date of the marriage, she pleaded for more time, hoping that he would eventually lose interest. But he didn’t, because his interest wasn’t in her but in the Cravioli property, which would come to Chiara when her parents died.

‘And then one day — this is all according to Gianni Faigano, I repeat — Aldo took her out for a drive in the country, and in a wood down by a river he raped her. Repeatedly. And then he looked at her and said, “From now on, I won’t bother you any more. Let nature take its course. If you’re with child, I’ll marry you and legitimize my heir. If you’re not, I’ll put it about that I’ve had you, and you’ll be ruined unless you accept me. The choice is all yours, signorina.”’

Manlio Vincenzo was staring down at the spreading stain of damp on the tablecloth with the silent intensity of a gambler watching a spinning roulette wheel. The door opened and Rosa appeared, a creature from another world, blithe and unconcerned.

‘ Vattene! ’ barked Manlio rudely.

The old woman looked at him as though he had struck her, then shuffled out again, slamming the door behind her. Manlio glanced up at Zen.

‘Go on.’

Zen crushed out his cigarette.

‘Well, it turned out that Chiara was pregnant. She went to Gianni, explained what had happened and what she had to do as a result, which was to marry Aldo. Her child was more important than her feelings, and her duty was to ensure its future by marrying the father. Gianni broke down and wept at this point of his confession. He said that that day was the blackest in his entire life, for he couldn’t fault her logic, despite the fact that it put an end to any chance of happiness for either of them.

‘Chiara duly married your father, only to suffer a miscarriage in her eighth month. Gianni claimed that your father struck her while they were having an argument, but that may be malicious gossip. At all events, almost ten years passed before you were born. And all that time, and ever since, Gianni Faigano carried this terrible secret about with him. At their last meeting before the marriage, Chiara had explicitly forbidden him to denounce or harm the man who had raped her and whom she was now forced to marry. That was why he could do nothing until she died.’

There was a long silence. Then Manlio looked up at Zen.

‘But is it true?’

Zen stared at him coldly.

‘I don’t criticize your wine, Signor Vincenzo. Please accord me the same professional courtesy. The truth of the matter is, of course, for the courts to decide, but let me tell you that if you’d been present in the room when Gianni Faigano made his statement, sobbing and distraught, you wouldn’t doubt its truth.’

He lit another cigarette.

‘Besides, who’s going to confess without the slightest pressure to a murder he didn’t commit?’

‘I suppose you’re right. It’s just that I’ve never thought of Gianni as a killer. He might want to be — who hasn’t? — but he never struck me as someone who could actually bring it off.’

‘When you’ve had as much experience as I have, Signor Vincenzo, you realize that murderers don’t have forked tails and horns on their heads.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, dottore. In any case, this is certainly good news as far as I’m concerned. Not only that, but you’ve helped me make a decision that I’ve been dithering over for days. Or rather, you’ve helped me realize that I’d actually already made it.’

‘What decision?’

Manlio smiled.

‘Andrea and I have been toying with the idea of selling up here and moving to Chile. It’s an exciting place for wine these days, and she knows a lot of people there. We have an option on some land in the Maipo Valley, which is their equivalent of Napa. My idea is to retain a few non-DOC fields here in Piedmont and replant them with Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah, from which I would make an unofficial “signature” wine I could sell for a fortune to collectors less single-minded than your Roman intenditore.’

He raised his right forefinger.

‘And because Chile’s in the other hemisphere, their vintage is in January and February. Andrea and I could make our wine down there, then fly back here to look after this end of things. Two harvests a year, and perpetual summer! What more could anyone want?’

‘It sounds delightful.’

‘Yes, but at some level I was still undecided. After what you’ve just told me, I have no further doubts. The land my father acquired in the way you’ve just described will be tainted for as long as it remains in the Vincenzo family. I knew nothing about this terrible story, but my intuition was correct. I’ll make this one last vintage of Vincenzo Barbaresco, and then put the property on the market. Thanks to you, dottore, my mind’s made up!’

He looked at Zen and gestured to the door.

‘Shall we go and see how the women are doing?’

Minot was the way he liked it: alone. His recent forays into the world had been entirely successful. That was why he was able to be alone. That was success, to so arrange things that they left you alone.

It was almost dawn by the time he got home. A bitter, recalcitrant glimmer had begun to infect the darkness, revealing the extent of the devastation caused by the gales which had swept the region for the past week. Bare tree limbs poked the sky like reinforcing wire bereft of its concrete cladding. Stripped of their fruit, the vines looked like a beaten army, their serried rank and order a hollow mockery.

Still worse were those fields whose owners had gambled on the good weather holding out another precious few days, and whose harvest now languished in a heavy, sodden, putrescent mess beyond retrieval. Like the invaders they were, the wind and rain had come from the north, sweeping down without warning and laying waste to whatever remained of the summer; an impersonal obliteration, impartial and absolute.

But what was bad for wine was good for truffles, as traditional wisdom had it, and this local saying was borne out by Minot’s bag that night. He had spent over eight hours skulking through groves of oak and linden with Anna, encouraging the hound with the constant muffled chant, ‘Peila ca je! Peila ca je!’ He then excavated the heavy clay the dog pointed out with his mattock, revealing the nest of tubers, and finally teased out the buff-coloured nuggets and stashed them safely away in his pocket. Anna had meanwhile been bought off with a dog biscuit, a token of her master’s appreciation.

He must have gathered over a dozen truffles, several the size of new potatoes, and more than half of the superior female variety. Depending on where he placed them, he could be looking at almost a million lire for his night’s work. For Anna’s work, rather, but she was no more demanding than the rats. The biscuits, at a few hundred lire a box, were enough to keep her sweet. What she craved was to feel appreciated. It was not the gift but the thought behind it which counted. She and Minot understood each other perfectly.

Their relationship went back a long way, well before her legal owner’s death. It had started when Minot discovered some hand-written receipts one day at Beppe’s house while the latter was absent, proving that Gallizio had earned substantial sums of money from the sale of truffles supposedly from the prized Alba region, but in fact imported from such far-off and unfashionable localities as Lombardy, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and even Umbria.

It amazed Minot that Beppe was capable of such entrepreneurial initiative, and still more that he would be fool enough to keep the evidence stashed away in an unlocked drawer, like a bunch of love letters! There it was, nevertheless, and once he had outlined to Beppe the likely consequences of such documents falling into the hands of the fisc — tax evasion plus commercial fraud was a lethal combination — it had proved relatively easy to negotiate a compromise permitting Minot to borrow Anna for his nocturnal expeditions on those occasions when Beppe was otherwise employed.

Unfortunately, and through no fault of his own, this arrangement was to lead to Beppe’s untimely demise. It had all started when one of the Faigano brothers had mentioned hearing Anna barking from the neighbouring Vincenzo land on the morning of Aldo’s death. That chance remark had tied them all together like one of those cords they used to have on the railway, running back from the locomotive to the guard’s van, for use in case of emergency. Once it was pulled, the whole train ground to a halt, while the tell-tale sag in one compartment pointed to the guilty party.

So Beppe had to go. The prospect of having Anna at his unrestricted disposal had helped to stiffen Minot’s resolve, but it had still been a wrench. He had never killed anyone like that before, Coldly and calculatedly, with malice afore-thought, and it rattled him. The actual deed had been simple enough. Having ‘borrowed’ Anna the day before, he had painted her paws with a dilute solution of aniseed, imperceptible to the human nose but gross olfactory overload to another dog, in this case a half-wild pup which Minot had saved from drowning with the rest of the litter and kept to guard the house. A crash course involving the undiluted aniseed and some chunks of ham and cheese did the trick, and the snuffling pup led Minot all the way from Gallizio’s house to the wood he had elected to work that night. After that it was just a matter of heading home, tossing the corpse of his strangled guide into a thicket on the way, and then returning at his leisure in the truck to confront Beppe with his own shotgun. He had seemed as startled as the puppy by the outcome — as helpless and as hurt.

Leaving the bloodstained knife at Beppe’s house had been a last-minute inspiration, and Minot had to admit to himself that it had not really been taken as he had hoped. Anna’s barking, Beppe’s death and the murder weapon had seemed to form one of those triangles with which he had been tormented at school, an absolute and irrefutable demonstration of the facts of the case leaving no margin for further doubt. Quod erat demonstrandum, the police would conclude, and that would be that.

But he hadn’t counted on the arrival of this outsider, and the impact which his ignorance and innocence would make on subsequent events. Aurelio Zen didn’t even know that Anna had been heard in the Vincenzo vineyards that morning, still less that Beppe had been in trouble over his truffle dealings. He couldn’t see the beauty of the solution which Minot had created for him, was utterly unappreciative of its clarity and elegance. Instead of grabbing the simple outcome on offer, he had blundered about like a myope who has lost his glasses, ignoring all Minot’s thoughtful clues and overturning his carefully crafted design.

Nevertheless, everything had turned out for the best, he thought, as he reached his house and tethered Anna to the eye-bolt in the wall before taking out his key; unlike poor Beppe, he was scrupulous about locking up. A scabrous rustle announced that the rats were still about. Minot took off his coat and opened the jar in which he kept his ‘white diamonds’ safely tucked up in a cloth napkin.

An astonishing avalanche of scent instantly invested the room, spreading out in successive waves, each more powerful than the last, until every other odour was buried beneath countless strata of that infinitely suggestive but fugitive profumo di tartufo. Even the speedy conspiracy of rats fell still and silent, as though acknowledging this massive new presence in their midst. Minot set the jar down on the counter. Later he would sort and weigh his catch, then drive into Alba and see what sort of deal he could strike. But first a bite to eat. It had been a long night.

As soon as he opened the fridge, he realized that it had broken down yet again. The light did not come on, and everything inside was at the temperature of the room, chilly but not cold. This did not surprise him. He had picked the thing out of the ravine on the outskirts of Palazzuole, where the villagers had dumped their garbage since time immemorial, and it had only ever worked intermittently. He used it mainly as a secure cupboard, the one place that even the most enterprising rodent could not enter.

Then he caught sight of the glass jar on the top shelf and smelt something even stronger than the truffles: the stench of bad blood. Hare, he had told Enrico Pascal! That had been a close call, although keeping the container and its contents had certainly paid off in the end. Enough was enough, though. Even Minot had his limits, as his suddenly queasy stomach reminded him. He was still hungry, but the thought of food was now an abomination.

He removed the jar full of curdled blood and bits of flesh and set it on the counter next to the one in which he had brought back this night’s catch. They were identical, down to the shreds of yellow label still adhering to the glass and the white lids bearing the name of a well-known brand of jam. Despite his slight nausea, Minot couldn’t repress a satisfied smile. Yes, everything had turned out for the best, and in ways he couldn’t have imagined, still less planned for!

When he had brought back this trophy, for instance, he’d had no clue how vital it would prove. At the time it had seemed a mere whim, a fancy which had taken him. Even that other time, when he’d picked up the nail which Gianni broke off during the bottling, had been little more than a sudden inspiration, a vague hedge against some undefined threat. But when he’d put the two of them together — like the commonplace and inert chemicals they’d used to make bombs during the war — the results were literally explosive.

And just as effective, he thought, walking through to the living room. How easily he had manipulated events, vanishing from the picture he himself had painted like one of those anonymous daubers of old church frescoes, leaving the credulous and ignorant to gawk at the colourful scenes he had created, but no clue as to the identity of the artist.

Except there was, and it was faked. That was why Gianni Faigano’s confession still rankled. It was one thing to leave one’s work deliberately anonymous, quite another to have another break in, scrawl his signature on the drying pigment and claim it as his own. That was worse than cheating. It was… What was that word they’d used in the paper at the time of the wine scandal Bruno Scorrone had been implicated in? Something like ‘plague’. No one had understood until the village pharmacist had explained over cards the next day that it meant passing someone else’s work off as your own.

That’s what had happened now, and it hurt as bad as any plague sore. It was he, Minot chit, who had done the work and taken the risks, and here was Gianni Faigano insolently muscling in to claim the credit! Of course the end result was the same, in a sense, but it didn’t feel the same. Minot had expected the Faigano brothers to deny everything indignantly, as befitted the innocent men they were. Then the results of the tests would come back, the scientific analysis of Gianni’s fingernail which Minot had dipped into that jar filled with Aldo’s gore. They would never be able to talk their way out of that!

But to his dismay, they hadn’t even tried to. Instead, Gianni Faigano had freely confessed to killing Aldo Vincenzo in revenge for the outrage he had visited upon Chiara Cravioli so long ago. What a heap of shit! Gianni had never had the balls to take on Aldo, and he damn well knew it. He also knew what everyone else in the village knew, or at least suspected — that although the teenage Chiara might have fancied herself in love with Gianni in a misty, moon-struck adolescent way, she had been genuinely swept off her feet by Aldo, who was twice the man Gianni would ever be.

The truth of it was that what she had felt for Gianni was not love but pity, or at best a cloying sort of companionship. ‘Gianni is the best girlfriend Chiara ever had,’ Aldo had sarcastically remarked apropos of his wife’s clandestine visits to the Faigano house. But now Gianni had indeed taken his revenge, not on Aldo but on the whole community. With one deft stroke he had rewritten history, casting himself as the romantic hero who bided his time patiently for years, obedient to his beloved’s wishes, and then exacted a terrible price the moment she was in the grave. What a figure to cut! True, he would be condemned and sentenced to life, but everyone would secretly murmur, ‘What a man!’ in admiring tones. Women would write to him in prison, and the media would tut-tut over the murder while gleefully celebrating the fact that the great days of chivalry were not dead after all.

Even if Minot were to come forward and confess — not that there was any prospect of that! — he would not be believed. People wanted a story, and unlike Gianni he could not offer that. They wouldn’t want to hear the truth, that on his annual pilgrimage ‘to lay flowers on Angelin’s tomb’ and clean out the unsuspected truffle bed he had found, Minot had been surprised by Aldo Vincenzo, who could not sleep and had come out to check on the progress of this problematic harvest.

They certainly wouldn’t believe, and for that matter Minot could never explain, why this chance encounter had led to death. Planning and executing Beppe’s killing had been a new experience for Minot, the exception to his proven rule: to follow his instincts. He had done so with Angelin, and, before that, with Minot gross up on the roof. He had done the same with Bruno Scorrone that afternoon at the winery, and with Aldo. Something in Vincenzo’s swaggering, contemptuous manner had been the trigger. Without even thinking, Minot had responded with a single blow from the zappetto he carried to excavate for truffles. It had caught Vincenzo high up on the forehead, a nasty blow which had laid him on his hands and knees, dazed and bloody.

Even then, he might have gone no further. But the consequences of stopping now seemed worse than those of continuing, so he’d taken out his knife. When Aldo saw that, he had spat out a word which proved to be his last, a dialect term so grossly insulting, and unfair, that subsequent events took on the momentum of a dislodged boulder rolling downhill. When it finally came to rest, Minot’s brain kicked in again. As a rule he preferred to make his killings look accidental, but that was not possible here. So he decided to go to the other extreme.

Remembering the angry scene between Aldo and his son at the festa the night before, he had dragged the gutted, blood-drenched corpse over to the vines and lashed the wrists to the wire supports. Then he bent down and added one last touch, something so macabre that no one would ever believe that this was anything other than a coldly premeditated act of personal revenge.

His first thought had been to stuff the severed genitals into Aldo’s mouth, the way they used to with informers during the war. But something restrained him, some sixth sense that possession of these glaringly absent items might enable him to tip the balance at some time in the future, should he ever come under suspicion. So he’d taken out the jar he’d brought to collect truffles in and scooped the slop in there instead.

And once again his instincts had not betrayed him. He’d got away with it, more completely than he could ever have imagined. His feelings of anger about Gianni’s false confession were completely irrational. What did it matter, after all? If Faigano was so keen to act the great lover that he was prepared to accept a wrongful conviction for murder, let him rot in prison.

All around, the rats were out, speedy, furtive presences swarming in the shadows at the corners of the room, some bolder individual occasionally darting diagonally from one patch of imagined refuge to another. There was no refuge, of course. With a couple of blasts of his shotgun Minot could have turned the room into a bloodbath. He could do that any time he wanted, which was why he had no interest in doing so. Minot was above the rats, in the scheme of things. Nothing they did could threaten him, and his generosity or patronage was entirely at his own discretion. He could exterminate them any time he wanted, so he let them live.

Which reminded him that it was time for their feed, if not for his. Then off to Alba, maybe stopping at Lamberto Latini’s restaurant to see what sort of price he could get there. He got to his feet, creating a brief scuffle among the more impressionable members of the pack, and went back into the kitchen to fetch some bread.

When he returned, the rats had taken over the entire floor, scurrying this way and that, looking up at him as expectantly as dogs. Minot broke the bread into irregular crusts and tossed them out like fireworks. The rats went crazy. Fights broke out, blood was drawn, and a chorus of shrill squeals scored the silence like nails on a blackboard. Minot laughed and cut more bread, flinging each piece into a different corner of the room so that the rats surged forward like a wave that lapped and broke over the morsel which instantly disappeared down the throat of some animal quicker or more aggressive than the rest. Given enough time and patience, you could tame anything, thought Minot with a flicker of contempt. Anything except him, that was. He could not be tamed, and those who had dared to try had paid the price.

It was time to go. Minot put on his coat and reached for the jar filled with truffles. Then he noticed the other, identical jar. Thank God he hadn’t gone out leaving that sitting there on the counter in plain view! With a reputation for shady wine transactions such as he had, even transporting and disposing of it in the wild was a risk. Suppose he got stopped by some officious police patrolman who insisted on searching the truck?

Maybe it would be best just to bury it in his vegetable garden. He could do that unobtrusively enough, then rinse out the bottle and reuse it. Waste not, want not. It was a question of how far gone the contents were. If they’d started to decompose seriously, he’d have all the village dogs round there, scratching and sniffing. The neighbours might get curious.

Minot unscrewed the lid cautiously. The smell was definitely on the high side, but not unbearably so. On the surface floated a small grey pouch of flesh which he realized with a shock was Aldo Vincenzo’s penis. He smiled wryly, thinking of the power that organ had once wielded, of the pain and damage it had wrought. It had transferred the Cravioli estate to the Vincenzo family and made a hollow, self-pitying mockery of Gianni Faigano’s life. Look at it now!

It was at this moment that Minot felt a delicate shiver at his wrist, and looked down to see a rat sniffing at the open jar. Immediately some atavistic trigger was thrown. The rats were welcome to his bread, even some stale cheese or ham on occasion. When it came to human flesh things changed. Without the slightest reflection, Minot lashed out at the beast with his left hand, knocking it on to its back. It lay there, its pale furry stomach exposed and feet wiggling, as if astonished at this unwonted aggression. With a snort of disgust, Minot smashed his fist down on top of it.

But the rat was no longer there. With an astonishing spiral leap, it twisted up and around and sank its incisors into Minot’s hand. He yelled and lashed out with his other hand, knocking over the glass jar, which shattered on the floor. The rat had already vanished, along with all its fellows.

Minot inspected the wound. It looked insignificant, just a couple of punctures below the thumb. The real problem was the incriminating mess on the floor. With a heavy sigh, he set about cleaning it up, scooping the solid items on to an old newspaper and mopping the blood into a pail. He did his best, but in the event it wasn’t good enough to escape detection by the forensic team which arrived a week later. Aldo’s blood had not only coated the tiles but seeped into the cracks and crevices in the grout between them, from which it was laboriously removed, analysed and identified. Soon afterwards, police dogs discovered the shallow pit where Minot had hurriedly buried the whole mess. The case against Gianni Faigano collapsed and, protesting his guilt to the last, he was released.

But that was all in the future. Having completed his clean-up, Minot drove off to dispose of his truffles, which he did at a price which astonished him. As for the bite, he thought nothing more of it. There was a small red swelling and an irritating itching sensation, but that gradually subsided.

It wasn’t until the following day that other symptoms manifested themselves, a sort of feverish lassitude which felt like some virus or other; a mild case of flu, perhaps. Then that evening, while he was heating up some soup, Minot suddenly collapsed. To his astonishment, he was unable to get up again. In fact, he could hardly move at all, except for an occasional convulsive jerking of his limbs. He tried calling for help, but all that emerged was a feeble croak.

Minot was a notorious recluse, and several more days passed before his disappearance was remarked on. In the end it was Lamberto Latini who found him, having called by arrangement to collect an order of truffles placed during Minot’s earlier visit. By then nearly a week had gone by, and the corpse was almost unrecognizable. Denied their usual food, the rats had had to make do with what there was.