Authors: Michael Dibdin
‘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.