Authors: Michael Dibdin
‘And then phoned me later at the Vincenzo house. But how did you know I was there?’
‘I didn’t. But I heard you tell the guard to let you off at Palazzuole. I thought you might be going to the Vincenzo house, so I phoned up, pretending to be a reporter. To my surprise, the son himself answered, quite rudely, I must say. That confirmed my suspicions, so I kept trying until you showed up. It was a shot in the dark, but it hit the target. God, you must have been scared.’
She smiled wryly.
‘How long ago that seems now! Like years, not days. To think that I was set on terrorizing you with anonymous phone calls. But it all seemed to matter so much to me back then.’
Zen gazed at her expressionlessly.
‘And now?’
A shrug, brief, almost irritable. Zen looked away.
‘I’ll get dressed,’ he mumbled. ‘Then let’s go and try this café of yours.’
When they came for him, he was asleep, if you could call it sleep. Once again, there were two of them: one in plain clothes, the other a uniformed recruit cradling a machine-gun.
That first time, the evening before, Minot had just finished eating a bowl of the lentil soup he made every Sunday, and which sat in its cauldron on the stove for the rest of the week. Eating lentils made you rich, his father had told him; every one you swallowed would come back one day as a gold coin. Minot still believed this obscurely, even though he knew that they didn’t make gold coins any more.
He’d grated some raw carrot and onion into the warmed-up soup, poured in a fat slick of olive oil and then spooned it up, dunking in the heel of the day-old loaf he kept in a battered canister, where it was safe from his familiars. The lid was decorated with a faded picture of a smiling woman and the name of a once-famous brand of boiled sweets.
When he’d finished eating, Minot sluiced out the bowl under the tap and left it to dry. Then he went next door, sat down and turned on the television, an old black-and-white set given to him by a neighbour who had changed to colour. He could only get two channels, and either the picture or the sound was often indecipherable, but Minot didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in any of the programmes anyway. He just liked having the set on. It made the room more lively.
He was watching a film when the police arrived. There was heavy interference on the screen, with ghost doubles floating about and the picture skipping upwards repeatedly like the facial tic which used to afflict Angelin when things got tense. But the soundtrack was clear enough, and at first Minot thought that the noise of the jeep drawing up and the imperious knocking was part of the movie. It was only when the rat perched on top of the set swivelled towards the door, nostrils twitching, then leapt down and disappeared, that he had realized his mistake.
He was taken by surprise this second time, but for a different reason. Ever since they had locked him into his cell the previous evening, the air had been throbbing with loud music from a radio which someone had left on somewhere close by. He had tried shouting and banging on the door to get them to turn it off, but all in vain. In the end he had lain down on the bench provided and tried to get some sleep.
The bench made a primitive bed, but Minot was not fussy in this respect, any more than in others. The cot he slept on at home was no more spacious and hardly any softer, but the only time he’d ever had trouble sleeping was when the resident rodents used to scurry over the covers and tickle his face with their feet or whiskers. He’d solved that problem by fixing rounded wooden caps just below the frame, one at the top of each leg, so that the bed seemed to be resting on four giant mushrooms. The rats couldn’t climb past the caps, and after that Minot slept in peace.
As he would have done that night, too, if it hadn’t been for that damned music! He hadn’t made any fuss when the cops told him they were taking him into detention. He’d been more or less expecting something of the sort anyway, ever since the
maresciallo
had taken to dropping in – and to dropping heavy hints. In any case, Minot wasn’t the type to give them any satisfaction by getting upset.
But after being assaulted for several hours by that thudding, repetitive, tuneless barrage that he’d heard kids listening to in their cars or at the local café, he was finding it hard to remember the motto by which he lived: keep cool, say nothing, make them show their hand. In the end, he’d drifted off into a state which was neither sleep nor wakefulness, but seemed to combine the disadvantages of both. While in this stressful but disoriented condition, a succession of sounds detached themselves from the hellish cacophony with which he was being tormented, the light in his cell was turned on, and he awoke to find himself confronting the two policemen. The armed and uniformed one guarded the door, the other advanced into the cell.
‘Time to go,’ he said shortly.
Minot stood up. Time to go, the man had said, but what time was it? Minot never wore a watch, relying on his knowledge of the seasonal and diurnal rhythms, with occasional data from a distant church bell floating past on the breeze. Now he had a panicky feeling of being completely lost. It might be midnight or midday. Both made sense, so neither did.
The policemen gestured him out of the cell and escorted him upstairs. As the pounding of the music receded into the distance, Minot began to feel better. Passing a window on the stairs, he saw that the darkness outside the window, although still seemingly complete, had lost its inner confidence, sensing the inevitable defeat to come. Half-six to seven, he thought automatically, probably nearer seven. By the time the uniformed patrolman knocked at a door on the second floor, he was once again in control of the situation.
His new-found confidence was almost cancelled by the discovery that the officer sitting behind the desk inside was the one from Rome he’d seen the day before at the Faigano house. This was bad news, for it meant that the Vincenzo case was involved. The uniformed man led Minot to a stool opposite the desk and then returned to keep the door, his gun at the ready, while the plain-clothed cop plonked his ample bum down on a stool beside the desk and opened a notepad.
‘I suppose you want a lawyer,’ announced Zen.
Minot made a vestigial bow, just like everyone used to in such situations years ago.
‘A lawyer?’ he said, with an air of astonishment. ‘Eh, no,
dottore
! A lawyer? He would just waste your time and my money.’
Aurelio Zen looked at him with unfeigned interest.
‘Well, that’s an original approach, at least.’
He dragged some papers towards him.
‘All right, what’s your real name? Minot is what people call you, but it won’t do for our records. Official forms come with blanks which need to be filled in, you understand.’
Minot nodded briskly.
‘Piumatti Guglielmo,
dottore
.’
Zen noted this down, then got to his feet.
‘Right!’ he said. ‘You’ve declined the offer of legal representation, Signor Piumatti. This being so, I shall proceed directly to the interrogation. Present Inspector Nanni Morino and Patrolman Dario …’
He glanced at the uniformed man, who responded, ‘Tamburino,
dottore
.’
‘Date such and such,’ continued Zen, ‘time whatever, place etc, etc.’
While talking, he had moved around the desk and was now standing directly in front of Minot. Bending forward suddenly, he caught the prisoner by the jaw and pulled his entire head back by a fistful of hair.
‘We know you did it, you son of a whore! You’ll confess in the end. Why not save yourself any more pain?’
He glanced at Nanni Morino.
‘Delete that from the record.’
Zen smiled at Minot.
‘Sorry about that. Nothing personal, and thanks for the ride the other day. But I’ve had just about enough of this sleepy, friendly, crime-free community where everyone has been pissing me around ever since I arrived. I’m in a mood to do a little damage myself, and it’s your bad luck that it happened this morning.’
Minot looked him straight back in the eye.
‘Go ahead! Beat me up, if that’s what you want. But if you think you can get anything out of me that way, you’re even more stupid than I thought. I’ve seen far worse than you!’
Aurelio Zen shook his head slowly, holding Minot’s eyes all the while.
‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘You’ve never seen worse than me, Minot. I’m as bad as it gets.’
A contemptuous laugh.
‘I faced up to the Gestapo and the Republican death squads while you were still sucking on your mother’s tit! What can you do that they couldn’t?’
Zen continued to hold his eyes.
‘I can destroy you, Minot. Unless you cooperate, I
will
destroy you.’
Another laugh.
‘Go ahead!’
Zen leaned forward, his face a breath away from the other man’s.
‘Let’s talk about your father, Minot.’
The prisoner’s eyes flared briefly, then dulled again.
‘My father? What has he to do with anything?’
‘He had quite a bit to do with your mother, I’m told,’ Zen said evenly. ‘And not just in the usual way. I hear they had a – how shall I say? – a previous connection.’
Minot froze into a tense stasis.
‘Meaning,’ Zen continued, ‘that they were related not only in bed but by blood. Meaning that your father was also
her
father.’
He straightened up and took a step back.
‘Meaning that he fucked his own daughter and that you’re the outcome. Meaning that you’re not just a bastard but an incest bastard, Minot! A gene pool so swampy that nothing can live there, a cloning experiment gone badly wrong, an abortion on two legs …’
Minot sprang up like one of his rats, the raised stool in his hands. But his intended victim was no longer where he had been a moment before and then a huge pain erupted in his body – a pain without precedent, an unthinkable and outrageous intrusion.
‘Well done, Nanni,’ said Zen.
‘No problem,
capo
.’
Minot stared up through a mist of agony at the plain-clothed brute who had kicked him in the groin from behind.
‘You son of a bitch! You assaulted me! I’ll kill you, you scum!’
‘So you admit to murderous tendencies,’ commented Zen. ‘Note that down, Morino. As for assault,
you
assaulted
me
. That’s a crime in and of itself, and I hereby charge you with attacking a police official in the course of his duties and remand you in custody until further notice.’
Minot struggled to his knees, then clambered painfully back on to the stool.
‘That was a very silly thing to do,’ Zen told him condescendingly. ‘Not only are you on a charge, but I’m afraid that my colleagues will be tempted to have some fun at your expense while you’re in custody, particularly now that we know how sensitive you are about your family background. It’s highly unprofessional, I know, but I have a feeling that some of them won’t be able to resist the urge to tease you about it once in a while.’
‘You think I chose my stinking family?’ demanded Minot, his face taut with anger.
Zen sat down again, tapping the desk with the end of his pen.
‘Of course not,’ he said in a soft, soothing voice. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t care less about any of that. But I have a job to do, Minot, a case to solve. And at the moment you’re the prime suspect. We have witnesses who tie you into the killings of both Gallizio and Scorrone. The knife used to stab and mutilate Vincenzo was found at Gallizio’s house after he was shot. Scorrone told the Carabinieri about seeing your truck close to where Gallizio’s body was found, and a few days later he dies, too, and at about the time you made a delivery of wine to his
azienda
. There’s a pattern here, in other words, and it points to you.’
He paused, looking Minot in the eyes.
‘Unless, of course, you have any alternative suggestions to make.’
‘I have an alibi for Gallizio’s death,’ Minot gasped. ‘I was out after truffles with Gianni and Maurizio Faigano. They’ll vouch for me on that.’
Zen nodded.
‘Yes, but will you vouch for them?’
Minot looked at him acutely, his eyes dilating as though in an attempt to correct some error of vision.
‘But they’re not … I mean, you said …’
Zen gave him a devastatingly arch smile.
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t believe
everything
I say,’ he suggested.
*
Subject:
interrogation of Faigano, Gianni Edoardo
Present:
as above
Place and date:
as above
Time:
08.11
Z: Not until ten? But I have an important case which I’m … Do you realize who you’re talking to? The suspect in question has requested the presence of a lawyer, as is his statutory right, and now you tell me … I thought I was in Piedmont, not Sardinia. Very well. All right. I’ll call back then. Dario, take him back down.
G: Wait a minute. What was that about?
Z: You told me last night that you weren’t prepared to make further statements without legal representation, Signor Faigano. I’ve just contacted our pool of court-appointed lawyers – I take it you don’t have someone on retainer yourself? – and find to my astonishment that the bastards … Substitute ‘lawyers’ for ‘bastards’, Morino. That they don’t get in to work until ten o’clock. I apologize for disturbing you. Were you asleep?’
G: What do you think?
Z: It’s too early to think. I’m just doing my job, that’s all. At least I’m awake, unlike those lawyers. Maybe a coffee would help. If anyone’s open at this hour. There’s a place I went to earlier, down by the station, but …
G: Alberto’s, on the corner where we met the other day. He’s open as soon as it’s light. He makes no money to speak of till mid-morning, but that’s the way Alberto is. If he isn’t working, he’s fretting.
Z: Got that, Dario? I’ll have it strong and short, in fact make it a double. And you?
G: The same. Why’s he taking notes?
Z: That’s his job. OK, Dario, off you go. No, leave the gun here. If Signor Faigano’s right, you won’t have any trouble getting served. Oh, for Christ’s sake, Morino, you’re not writing all this down, are you? This isn’t part of the interrogation, you idiot.
*
Z: For Christ’s sake, Morino, why aren’t you writing this down? That’s your job, you idiot. Don’t tempt me, Morino, I’ve had a hard night, just like Signor Faigano. Did you like the music we laid on, by the way?
G: It was all right. But we’ve got better stuff at home. My niece Lisa knows someone in Latin America who sends her tapes of the real thing, not these tame commercial groups.
Z: Your niece has good stuff, all right.
G: Meaning what?
Z: Speaking of her friend in Peru, she told me that she’d had to interrupt a chess game they were having the evening of the
festa
because you needed to make an urgent telephone call to Aldo Vincenzo. Oh, you don’t want to talk about that without your … I quite understand. No problem.
*
Z: I’ve been talking to Minot.
G: Who?
Z: What the hell’s his real name? Thank you, Morino. Signor Piumatti, popularly known as Minot, seemed convinced that you and your brother would give him the alibi he so desperately needs in the Gallizio case. Which would be a problem for me.
G: A problem? Why?
Z: Because this Minot is my principal suspect in the Vincenzo case. The problem is that I have no substantive evidence. It’s all a matter of circumstantial detail, a chain of connections and inferences. And, like any chain, it’s only as strong as its weakest link.
G: Meaning?
Z: The alibi I just mentioned. If Minot was out after truffles with you two the night Bruno Gallizio was killed, you see, then he can’t have killed Gallizio and planted the knife smeared with Aldo Vincenzo’s blood at the house. In which case there’s no proof that he killed Vincenzo either, and I’m back at square one.
G: That phone call.
Z: Yes?
G: I did make it.
Z: To Aldo Vincenzo?
G: Yes.
Z: A few hours before he was killed.
G: I didn’t know he was going to be killed.
Z: Of course not. But it was very late at night, and you’d both been at the
festa
earlier. Why didn’t you tell him whatever it was then?
G: Do you have children,
dottore
?
Z: Two, as it happens.
G: A boy and a girl?
Z: How did you guess? And you, Signor Faigano?
G: I’ve never had this great responsibility. But my brother … To me, Lisa’s like the ghost of some child I never had. I’m sorry, this sounds crazy.
Z: Not at all. I understand exactly what you mean. Unborn children are as real as the dead, after all. Or as unreal.
G: So when I heard that Vincenzo wanted that son of his to marry Lisa, I … Maurizio was calmer than me – how strange! He said there was nothing in it, that it was not like the old days any more, when a man could just … When he had this power to …
Z: But you were not so sure.
G: He was right, of course. I knew tßÓhat. But when Vincenzo started shouting at his son that evening across the table, calling him impotent and I don’t know what else besides, and then dragged Lisa’s name into it …
Z: What did he say?
G: If you’re that interested, you can find out from other people. There were plenty of them there, the whole village. It was about breaking a woman, the way you break a horse. I didn’t say anything at the time. It would only have drawn attention to his insults, and he would have repeated them still louder. But as soon as I got home I called him up and told him that if he ever mentioned my niece’s name in that way again …
Z: You’d kill him. Good for you. I’d have done the same.
G: I didn’t say that.
Z: It doesn’t matter. Now about this alibi. Are you prepared to swear in court that you were with Minot on the night Beppe Gallizio died? I need to know, you see, before I decide what to do next. God, this coffee certainly hit the spot. Careful with that gun, Dario. There’s one more thing you should know before you answer, Signor Faigano. After I’m finished with you, I’m going to have your brother up here and put exactly the same question to him. If your stories don’t match, of course, then that’s the end of that. You’ll both be entirely discredited as witnesses and will have no influence whatsoever on future developments. Just a thought.
G: There’s a problem.
Z: (grunt)
G: I need to talk to Maurizio.
Z: First it’s a lawyer you want, now it’s your brother. Maybe I should just have Dario take you downstairs and beat the shit out of you. Delete that, Morino. Dario, as you were. Very well, Signor Faigano, what do you need to talk to your beloved brother about?
G: It’s only fair. He’s in it as much as me.
Z: In what?
G: I can’t tell you until I’ve talked to Maurizio.
Z: Or maybe I’ll take care of it myself. Why should Dario have all the fun? Have we got any rubber truncheons, Morino? All right, get the little bastard up here. Jesus Christ, I can remember when interrogations used to be run by the police officer in charge. Now it’s like room service. Give me this, bring me that, and where’s the drink I ordered?
*
As above, plus Faigano, Maurizio Ernesto.
Z: Take off those cuffs and sit him down here. All right, Signor Gianni, he’s all yours.
G: It’s about Minot.
M: (gesture)
G: That alibi for the night Gallizio died. The
dottore
wants to know if we will support it in court. He thinks Minot is responsible for that murder and the other two as well, but he can’t arrest him if we say we were out with him after truffles when Bruno was shot.
M: (gesture)
G: (shrug)
M: (shrug)
G: We’re prepared to answer your question,
dottore
. But there’s a complication we want you to know about. Minot has had a hard life in many ways. He’s never really been accepted, you understand what I mean? As a result, he can be extremely vindictive on occasion. This might be one of them.
Z: Don’t worry, I can look after myself.
M: But what about us?
G: He won’t like us if we withdraw his alibi. He’ll probably tell you a pack of lies about us to get even. That’s the only reason we hesitated about cooperating.
Z: I’m used to dealing with lies. But why did you agree to perjure yourselves in the first place?
M: We didn’t.
G: We never swore an oath that this was true. We never even had any dealings with the police until you showed up. We were just doing a favour for a neighbour, that’s all.
Z: Putting yourself at risk with the law, and all out of the kindness of your hearts? That’s quite a favour.
G: Well, he sort of made a threat, too.
M: Not really a threat, but …
Z: What did he say?
G: He said he’d found some evidence connected to the Vincenzo case which could look bad for me, and that as former partisans we should all stick together.
Z: You fought together?
M: That was long ago.
G: Not for Minot. It was the only time he’s ever really been accepted, you see.
Z: Did he tell you what this supposed evidence was?
G: A button.
Z: That’s all?
G: From one of my jackets.
Z: What about it?
M: He said he’d found it near the spot where Vincenzo was killed.
Z: And what was he doing there?
G: He didn’t say.
Z: Did he show you the button?
G: No. He just mentioned it in passing, as though it wasn’t important. It was just a hint, not a threat.
Z: Have you lost a button recently?
G: There’s no woman to take care of us any more, except young Lisa, and she’s too modern to know anything about sewing. I’ve got a lot of missing buttons. What does that prove?
Z: Nothing. Even if Minot does have a button to show me, and we could match it to your jacket, it doesn’t amount to evidence of anything. Minot does deliveries and other work for you on a regular basis, so I’ve been told. He could have picked up one of your stray buttons, or even snipped it off. There’s nothing to tie it to the Vincenzo murder.
M: That’s what I thought. But Gianni said, ‘If the police drag us into this, we’ll never hear the end of it, and people will say there’s no smoke without fire. Better to agree to what Minot wants.’ And I saw what he meant. We didn’t know we would be dealing with a man like you, you see. Most of the cops round here are ignorant arseholes.
Z: Delete that reference, Morino. So do I understand that you unreservedly withdraw the story that you were out with Minot the night Beppe Gallizio died?
G: (nod)
Z: Say it, please.
M: Yes, we do.
G: That’s right, we do.
Z: So what
were
you doing?
M: Watching television.
Z: Was your daughter there?
M: She was staying with her aunt. Her school’s here in Alba, so she can go straight there on Friday, help us out at the Saturday market, then come home after school on Monday. I’d like to telephone her, by the way, to let her know that everything’s all right.
Z: That can be arranged. Well, I do believe we’re finally getting somewhere. I’m afraid I’m going to have to detain you for a little longer, until I’ve had a chance to interview Minot again. After that, the situation should sort itself out quite quickly. Take them down, Dario. Oh, and turn off the music. Apparently it’s just making us look bad. That’ll do, Morino. Save your wrist for our next client.