Authors: Michael Dibdin
‘And then, and only then, will I present my bill.’
Back in the living quarters of the house, Tullio Legna was deep in conversation with a young woman whom Zen assumed must be Lucchese’s daughter. The two policemen took their leave and walked down the echoing exterior steps to the courtyard.
‘So what’s this “new development” you mentioned on the phone?’ demanded Zen gruffly. He was still disconcerted by his exchange with Lucchese, as though the doctor had scored a point over him in some way.
Tullio Legna smiled broadly.
‘Well,
dottore
, despite this little mishap, it seems that you’re in luck!’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Come and have a coffee and I’ll tell you all about it.’
Legna led the way down the street to the Piazza del Duomo, where the Saturday morning market was in full swing. The two men skirted the crowded, bustling lanes of stalls and entered a venerable café in a narrow side street on the west side of the cathedral.
Zen stood sipping a coffee and listening with half an ear to some tale about a local truffle hunter named Beppe Gallizio who had been found shot dead in a copse near Palazzuole. The stitches in his forehead were beginning to ache as the anaesthetic faded, but what most bothered him was the doctor’s words: ‘Healing your spirit will be more difficult.’ The man was clearly a charlatan, some sort of amateur psychoanalyst or New Age guru. He would go elsewhere to have the stitches removed.
‘… holding a knife stained with blood,’ Tullio Legna was saying. ‘He claimed to have found it on the table, but of course there’s no proof of that. On the basis of the preliminary tests the Carabinieri have done, there seems every possibility that it is the weapon which was used to stab and mutilate Aldo Vincenzo. You appreciate what that means, of course.’
‘Of course,’ murmured Zen vaguely.
‘Manlio Vincenzo will be released.’
‘He will?’
‘Of course! This Gallizio either committed suicide or he was murdered. If it was suicide, the knife must have been in his possession all along, in which case the presumption is that he killed Aldo. If, on the other hand, it turns out that Gallizio was murdered, then his killer – who was also Vincenzo’s – must have planted the knife at his house to throw suspicion for the original crime on a dead man.’
Zen frowned.
‘Yes, I see,’ he said.
Tullio Legna laughed.
‘It’ll take ages to work out what actually happened, but the beauty of it from your point of view is that it doesn’t matter. Your remit was to free Manlio Vincenzo, right? Well, he’s been in prison the whole time, and therefore can’t have had anything to do with Gallizio’s death and the incriminating knife. He’s off the hook, and so are you. The whole balance of the case has shifted. You’ve successfully fulfilled your assignment, and without even getting out of bed!’
The police chief of Alba paid the bill and led the way outside. He turned to Zen and shook his hand vigorously.
‘In a perverse way, I’m sorry it’s worked out so smoothly,
dottore
. It would have been good to have had you here longer and been able to show you some of the wonderful things which the Langhe has to offer. But I’m sure that you’re eager to get back to your family and friends, and at least you had a chance to sample our famous white truffles, eh? It’s been a pleasure working with you. If there’s anything more I can do for you before you leave, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Arriverderci!
’
With that Tullio Legna walked off and was soon lost in the constantly shuffled pack of market shoppers and traders. Zen stood looking after him with the distinct feeling of having been seen off the premises – very elegantly and very painlessly, but also very finally.
He went back inside the café and ordered an
amaro
, a local variety of the sweet, sticky liqueur flavoured, in this case, with truffles. He knocked it back, lit a cigarette and reviewed the situation. According to the local police chief, who did not strike Zen as the type to lie about verifiable matters, the case he had been sent to solve had solved itself without him. There was therefore nothing to stop him from packing his bags and returning to Rome by the first available train. He might as well take a ticket all the way to Palermo, in fact, and save the bother of breaking his journey.
That consideration aside, the prospect of going home just at the moment was far from inviting. His tour of duty in Naples had ended in professional triumph and private turmoil. The most disturbing aspect of the latter had been the discovery that Tania Biacis, with whom he had once had a transient, desultory affair, was pregnant – and that, according to her, he was the father.
He had barely started coming to terms with this development when he was transferred back to the Ministry in Rome, where Tania was also employed, and reinstated in the ranks of the élite
Criminalpol
division as a just recompense for having supposedly smashed a murderous terrorist conspiracy single-handed. But when he cornered Tania in the corridor one day and tried to arrange a meeting to discuss the situation, her response had been brutal.
‘There’s nothing to discuss, Aurelio. It’s all taken care of.’
He literally had no idea what she was talking about.
‘I had an abortion,’ she explained icily. ‘Termination of pregnancy, yes?’
‘But you … I mean, it’s dead?’
‘He, actually. Yes, very dead indeed.’
Her tone had an exaggerated brutality about it, a determined refusal to admit feeling directed as much at herself as at him.
‘If it makes you feel any better,’ she went on, ‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure it was yours in the first place. But after seeing you again, carrying on in that high-handed, arrogant, selfish way, I knew that I couldn’t afford to take the risk. So I had it removed. End of story.’
But it wasn’t, at least for Zen. His initial sense of shameful relief had quickly proved itself to be illusory – a deceptively fragile crust covering a quagmire in which he was now struggling, as it sometimes seemed, for his sanity, if not his life. Every instinct told him to put the episode behind him, to wipe it out of his consciousness as thoroughly as the foetus had apparently been expunged from its mother’s womb. But there seemed to be no surgical procedures prescribed for this particular intervention.
To make matters worse, he had to see Tania every day at work. Not even Zen’s current celebrity gave him any leverage over the rigid employment hierarchies of the Ministry of the Interior. He could no more have had his ex-mistress transferred to another department than he could have had the building moved from the Viminale hill to the Aventine on the grounds that the air was more salubrious and the view superior.
As though sensing his discomfiture, Tania appeared to go out of her way to discover or manufacture reasons for crossing his path. Zen had no idea how she herself felt about what had happened. His one attempt to find out had been repulsed with a heavy barrage of rhetoric about a woman’s right to choose, all of which he agreed with but which brought him no closer to understanding this particular instance of the general principle.
There was no one he could discuss it with, either. He was no longer on speaking terms with his former friend, Gilberto Nieddu, after what Zen saw as the latter’s betrayal in the Naples case when Nieddu had been entrusted with the prototype of a video game, which he had promptly taken off to Russia and sold to the local mafia for a figure which he gloatingly declined to disclose.
His only other resource in a matter as personal as this was his mother, and she seemed to have taken a turn not so much for the worse as towards the far distance, from which zone – like an assiduous but incompetent spy – she relayed incomprehensible or misleading messages, with the names all muddled up and the dates and times confused. Even the unfailing good sense of Maria Grazia, their Calabrian housekeeper, had been tried to the limit at times. To raise the question of dead babies and hypothetical sons with someone who had so recently made startling disclosures about Zen’s own paternity – all of which she now denied having ever uttered – would be merely asking for more and deeper trouble.
But if Zen had good reasons for not wishing to return to Rome any sooner than he had to, the prospect of going back to the hotel room where he had been cooped up for the past thirty-six hours, to say nothing of an immediate transfer to a front-line posting in Sicily, held no appeal either. At a loss, he paid for his drink and went outside again.
The sun had now broken through the dispersing mist and was shining wanly, its attenuated light almost as insubstantial as the shadows cast by the buildings at the end of the piazza. Zen made his way slowly through the crowd, only too conscious that he had no set goal or purpose. The shoppers, mostly middle-aged or elderly, all well-dressed and seemingly prosperous, were going about their business without any noise or fuss. Almost everyone he had encountered since his arrival had been like that: pleasant, patient, good-natured, polite. After his experiences in Naples this struck him as slightly sinister, as though it were all some elaborate charade. No one could be
that
nice all the time.
Nor were they, as Zen had known ever since scanning the file on the Vincenzo case. He had obtained this, after the usual delay, from the Defence Ministry in Rome, and read it on the train trip north. Aldo Vincenzo had been killed with a ferocity which almost defied belief; hence the extensive media interest, although this had abated since Manlio’s arrest. But the report of a medical witness – perhaps Lucchese’s friend – included among the documents which Tullio Legna had brought to the hotel the day before, was even more graphic:
The body was lashed by the wrists and ankles to the wires supporting the laden vines, naked from the waist down. The shirt above was stained black with blood which had trickled down the thighs and legs in coagulating runnels, forming a pool between the legs which had already attracted the attention of a few early flies. The head was thrown back, the eyes wide as a startled horse. He had been stabbed again and again in the stomach and midriff below the breastbone: about forty times in all. The penis and scrotal sac had been hacked off and removed or concealed. No trace of these items has been found.
So the niceness was a pose, a way of keeping strangers at a distance and seeing off inconvenient intruders from Rome. It had happened to him many times before, although usually at the hands of interested parties less suave than Tullio Legna. But the principle remained the same; the door was being closed in his face. Well, too bad, he thought. He wasn’t in a mood to be seen off, no matter how politely. He was, in fact, in a mood to make a complete arsehole of himself, to offend as many of these secretive, hypocritical bastards as he could, even though it got him nowhere at all from a professional point of view. This was not business but pleasure.
The grid of the market was defined by the traders’ vans and lorries drawn up in rows, their tail-gates opening on to wooden stalls piled high with the goods offered for sale. These were mostly household durables: bedlinen, clothes, kitchen utensils and hardware items, with a few of the usual labour-saving, miracle appliances which salesmen were loudly and enthusiastically demonstrating to a clientele of crumpled, compact women of a certain age, who looked suitably sceptical about these claims but at the same time enthralled by the attention they were receiving.
Near the main door of the cathedral was a separate section, with open-sided vans selling cheese and fresh and cured meats, and stalls offering jars of preserves and honey from the mountains, and, of course, baskets of truffles and wild mushrooms. One of these consisted of a red Fiat truck covered in a tent-like tarpaulin. A hand-painted sign in old-fashioned block lettering above the tail-gate read FRATELLI FAIGANO – VINI E PRODOTTI TIPICI.
Zen stared at it with a deepening frown. Where had he seen that name before? The answer came to him almost immediately. It had been in the report that he had just been thinking of, the one on the Vincenzo case which Tullio Legna had delivered the day before, together with a map of the area and Zen’s truffle-laden cure. The Faigano brothers, or one of them, had been among the witnesses who had testified to the loud and public row which Manlio Vincenzo had had with his father at the village
festa
the night before Aldo was killed. This had apparently originated in a series of sarcastic gibes by Aldo on the subject of his son’s supposed homosexual inclinations, and had ended with Aldo disclosing in a loud voice that he had read a letter from Manlio’s lover, a young man named Andrea. It had been at this point that Manlio had stormed out of the gathering, not to be seen again until after the discovery of his father’s body.
The Faiganos’ improvised stall was tended by a teenage girl perched on a stool reading a pop music magazine. She looked up with a bored expression as Zen approached.
‘Good morning,
signorina
.’
She flashed him a dazzling smile which revealed the embryonic beauty that would soon remake her pasty adolescence.
‘Is it possible to speak to either of the brothers?’ asked Zen. ‘It’s a business matter.’
The girl pointed in an over-emphatic manner almost certainly copied unconsciously from one of her teachers.
‘They’re in the bar over there. The one across from the town hall.’
Zen thanked her and threaded his way through the crowds to the corner of the Via Vittorio Emanuele, which Tullio Legna had referred to as Via Maestra. In a similarly confusing touch, the cathedral square was officially billed as Piazza Risorgimento. The original designations would have been officially changed during the era of reunification – Zen could imagine the ceremony, complete with brass bands playing selections from Verdi – in a fit of patriotic fervour and keeping-up-with-the-rest-of-the-country, but now the ancient names were showing through the scrofulous paint of those discredited ideals.
The bar which the girl had pointed out to Zen was crowded with elderly men whose worn, wary faces and heavy-duty clothing contrasted sharply with those of the townspeople. The air was thick with rumbling dialect and cigarette smoke. Zen told the barman he was looking for someone called Faigano. The latter in turn consulted a group of men standing at the counter, one of whom nodded mutely towards a trio playing cards at a table in the corner. Zen made his way through the throng.