Authors: Michael Dibdin
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 café 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
goût 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?’