A Long Finish - 6 Read online

  ‘Carlo.’

  The famous director leant forward and fixed Zen with an intense gaze, as though framing one of his trademark camera angles.

  ‘Do we have a deal?’

  Zen was briefly disabled by another internal convulsion.

  ‘On one condition,’ he said.

  The man known to his friends as Giulio frowned. Conditions were not something he was used to negotiating with the class of hireling which Zen represented.

  ‘And what might that be?’ he asked with a silky hint of menace.

  Aurelio Zen sniffed loudly and blew his nose again.

  ‘That when you next give a party here, I get an invitation.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then the famous director roared with what sounded like genuine laughter.

  ‘Agreed!’

  The meal over, the three men pushed back their chairs and returned to work. At first glance they appeared as interchangeable as pieces on a board. Gianni was slightly stockier than the others, Maurizio was significantly balder, while Minot, who was shorter and slighter than either of the two brothers, wore a foxy moustache above his cynical, down-turned lips. But their similarities were far more striking. They were all of an age, which might have been anywhere from fifty to eighty, worn down by constant labour and near-poverty, with proud, guarded expressions that revealed a common characteristic: the fierce determination never to be fooled again. Their clothes, too, were virtually identical: dark, durable knits and weaves, much patched and mended, each garment a manuscript in palimpsest of tales that would never be told.

  They had eaten in silence, waited on by the only woman in the house, Maurizio’s teenage daughter Lisa. Back in the cellar, the long-maintained silence continued. It was not an empty silence, the void remaining once everything sayable has been said, nor yet the relaxed stillness which implies an intimacy or familiarity such that speech has become an irrelevance. This silence was tense with unspoken thoughts, facts and opinions not alluded to, a mutual reticence about things better left unsaid. It could be defused only by activity – filling mouths, or bottles.

  The only light, from a single forty-watt bulb attached to a huge beam in the centre of the ceiling, died a lingering death in the lower reaches of the cellar, as though stifled by the darkness all around. The only sounds were repetitive and mechanical, muffled by the wooden casks mounted on wooden trestles which lined the walls. For lack of any other distractions, odour had it all its own way – an over-whelming profusion of smells fighting for prominence like plants in the jungle: yeast, mildew, alcohol, damp, fruit, corruption, fermentation. Their luxuriant variety created an olfactory arena whose dimensions apparently far exceeded those of the cellar itself, and this sense of concentration, of too much crammed into too little, gave an almost choking intensity to the musty reek which filled the lungs of the trio working silently in the gloom.

  The division of labour had been established years before, and remained constant. Gianni Faigano, the elder of the two brothers, took the bottles from the rack of wooden pegs where they had been turned over to dry after being washed and sterilized. He filled each with a stream of red wine from a plastic tube inserted into one of the barrels, then passed the bottle to his brother, who positioned it under a metal lever loaded with a cork, which he rammed down into the opening. Maurizio then handed the bottle on to Minot, a neighbour who came by every year at this time to help out with this chore by applying the labels and capsules.

  ‘I hear Bruno’s got a new car,’ said Gianni.

  The sound of his words died away so rapidly that a few seconds later it already seemed uncertain whether he had actually spoken, or if it had just been some natural noise arising from the work on hand, or of digestion, superficially mimicking speech. More than a dozen bottles passed from hand to hand, and were duly filled, corked and labelled. Crouched in their dusty sails among the shadows above, gigantic spiders surveyed the scene.

  ‘One of those off-road jobs,’ Maurizio remarked. ‘And bright red, into the bargain.’

  Another six or eight bottles moved from the drying rack to the filling pipe and then the labelling bench before his brother replied. ‘It’s green.’

  For a while everything continued as before. Then the spiders suddenly scuttled away to the furthest corner of their webs and crouched down, making themselves small and still. A bottle had broken, scattering jagged chunks of brown glass about the floor and releasing tongues of spilt wine to scout out the terrain.

  ‘I’ve had just about enough of this damned argument!’ said Minot.

  There was a long silence. No one spoke or moved. Then Gianni Faigano filled another bottle, which Maurizio corked and handed to Minot, who pasted on a label. The arachnids above crawled back to their vantage points and took up their octagonal surveillance once more, while the bottles resumed their progress from one end of the cellar to the other.

  ‘You know what gets me most about it?’ demanded Maurizio. ‘Aldo Vincenzo’s turned into a national celebrity! There isn’t a man, woman or child from here to Calabria who hasn’t heard his name. He deserved to die like a dog – unknown, unburied and unmourned.’

  ‘It’s our fault for letting those television people talk us into setting up their equipment on our land,’ muttered his brother.

  Minot stroked his moustache with a sly expression.

  ‘I hear you did quite nicely out of it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, if you’d refused, they’d have found someone else.’

  ‘I just wish whoever did it had simply killed the old bastard and left it at that,’ snapped Maurizio. ‘No one would have taken any interest then.’

  They were down to the last few dozen bottles now, all destined for a couple of local restaurants and a select number of private individuals in Alba and Asti who ordered the Faigano brothers’ wine year in, year out, knowing it to be at least the equal of that made by growers fortunate enough to own land which fell within the officially classified area of Barbaresco, Denominazione di Origine Controllata. The property belonging to Maurizio and Gianni Faigano was only a stone’s throw away from that of the Vincenzo family, but unfortunately on the wrong side of the stream which marked the boundary of the DOC zone. Because of this, the resulting product could only be sold on the open market as generic Nebbiolo, which commanded a tenth of the price.

  ‘I ran into the maresciallo at market this morning,’ said Minot, setting another completed bottle in its crate. ‘You know what he told me? Apparently the police are opening their own investigation. Not only that, they’re sending some big shot up from Rome to lead it.’

  The two brothers exchanged a brief glance, then returned to their work. This went without incident, except when the wine started overflowing and Gianni Faigano ripped off a fingernail grabbing for the spigot. Minot retrieved the severed sliver.

  ‘I’ll keep this for good luck,’ he joked, as though atoning for his earlier outburst.

  Once the final bottles had made their way through the production line, the three men stood up stiffly.

  ‘Not like you to drop a bottle, Minot,’ said Gianni, sucking his injured finger. ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  Gianni smiled.

  ‘I just wondered, since you mentioned this new investigation of la cosa …’

  ‘I’m not nervous, I’m angry!’ Minot snapped back. ‘As if there weren’t enough real problems facing the country, without sending some bastard up from Rome to make our lives a misery.’

  ‘Speaking of bastards …’ said Maurizio.

  Minot whirled round on him.

  ‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

  Maurizio held up his hands.

  ‘The canine kind,’ he explained, alluding to one of the dialect terms for a mongrel.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Minot. ‘What about them?’

  Maurizio hesitated a moment.

  ‘The day Aldo died, I happened to be outside the house here, clearing my head with some fresh a
ir and a raw egg.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I heard a dog barking over on the Vincenzo land.’

  ‘Why do you keep going on about Aldo Vincenzo? Let the son of a bitch rot in peace!’

  ‘By all means. Only if there’s going to be another investigation, we’d better get our story straight.’

  ‘My story is straight!’

  ‘Of course, Minot,’ said Gianni evenly. ‘We know that. But some people may be more awkwardly placed, you understand? The owner of that dog, for instance.’

  Minot turned to face him.

  ‘You recognized it?’

  Gianni looked at his brother.

  ‘Why don’t you two go on upstairs? I’ll clean up down here and join you in a minute.’

  ‘An excellent idea,’ said Maurizio. ‘Come on, Minot. After helping us out like this, the least you deserve is a glass of something. I don’t know what we’d do without you, I don’t really.’

  The earlier silence had been replaced by a verbosity almost equally oppressive. But Minot allowed himself to be taken in hand and steered up to the large sitting room at one end of the brothers’ house, where he accepted a glass of the wine he had helped bottle several years earlier. Maurizio left the open bottle on the table and sat down, shaking his head sadly.

  ‘All this, coming so soon after Chiara’s death,’ he sighed.

  Minot sniffed.

  ‘You mean there’s a connection?’

  ‘For some of us there is,’ Maurizio replied, with a sigh. ‘I suppose it’s stupid, after all this time, but Gianni was hit hard when she died. In his mind, she was immortal.’

  Minot stared into his wine and said nothing.

  ‘And just when he’d started to get used to the idea,’ Maurizio Faigano continued, ‘this happened. Every time someone mentions la cosa, it’s as if Chiara’s tomb has been descrated.’

  Minot reached out and grasped Maurizio’s arm sympathetically.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.’

  Maurizio nodded sadly. After a while, Minot let go of his arm and took another gulp of wine.

  ‘What was that about hearing some dog in Aldo’s vines the night it happened?’

  Maurizio looked at him.

  ‘Oh, nothing, I suppose. I couldn’t see anything, what with the mist, but I thought I recognized the dog’s bark. You know how distinctive they are.’

  The door opened and in came Gianni, a large smile on his rumpled, slept-in face.

  ‘Well, that’s all taken care of,’ he said. ‘How’s the wine, Minot?’

  ‘Discreto,’ was the guarded reply. ‘Maybe I should have kept more for myself.’

  He glanced at Gianni, who waved negligently.

  ‘I expect we can let you have a few bottles, in return for all the help you’ve given us. Eh, Maurizio?’

  ‘Minot was asking about the dog.’

  ‘Ah, yes! Maybe it was just a runaway. Who knows?’

  ‘Not with those fences that Aldo put in,’ said Minot.

  Gianni poured himself a glass of wine.

  ‘Perhaps someone found a way through them. Or made one. All I know is that Maurizio heard this bastardin barking down there. Which is odd in itself. No one’s ever found any truffles on Vincenzo land, as far as I know.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘So whose dog was it?’ asked Minot.

  He knew, as they did, that the hound would have been instantly identifiable. All men of their age in the Langhe either kept a truffle dog themselves or knew someone who did. Their noises and utterances were as familiar as those of neighbouring children.

  ‘I thought it was Anna,’ said Maurizio.

  ‘Beppe’s dog?’

  ‘I might have been wrong.’

  They drank in silence for a while.

  ‘There are two ways we can handle this snooper from Rome,’ said Gianni. ‘Either we come up with a suitable suspect to hand him on a plate, or we just clam up.’

  ‘There already is a suspect,’ Minot pointed out.

  ‘But if they’re starting from scratch again, that means they don’t believe that he did it.’

  ‘And neither do I,’ said Maurizio. ‘What son would do something like that to his father? And still less a milksop like Manlio Vincenzo.’

  ‘They can be the worst if you push them too far,’ observed his brother. ‘They take it and take it for years, and then one day they crack. And God knows Aldo pushed Manlio. Remember what he said to him that evening at the festa, calling him a faggot and a queer in a voice you could hear all over the hall?’

  Maurizio shrugged.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what we think. The important thing is to work out what to tell this cop from Rome.’

  ‘Or what not to tell him,’ Minot put in.

  ‘Or both,’ said Gianni. ‘Like in the war. Remember our motto? “Tell them anything, so long as you tell them nothing.” That’s what we’ve got to do now.’

  Minot knocked back his wine.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ asked Maurizio with a sarcastic edge. ‘Have you got a valid licence to gather truffles? And what about receipts for all your transactions, showing that sales tax was duly paid? All of which income you will, of course, have declared on your …’

  ‘What the hell’s that got to do with it? There’s a lot of stuff I could tell the cops about you two, for that matter.’

  Gianni Faigano nodded earnestly.

  ‘That’s the whole point. We’re all in this together, like during the war.’

  ‘Except during the war you knew which side everyone was on. And we knew what we were fighting for.’

  ‘For our country, right? For our beliefs. Well, now we’re fighting for our community.’

  Maurizio sighed.

  ‘A community in which someone stabbed an old man to death and cut off his cock and balls.’

  Unexpectedly, Minot laughed, a tearing peal of hilarity with a slightly intoxicated edge.

  ‘That son of a bitch! If he’d known how he would end up …’

  Gianni nodded.

  ‘But the fact remains that whoever did it is living right here amongst us.’

  ‘Right here in the village,’ Maurizio chipped in, ‘where I’ve yet to hear a single person speak a sincere word of regret for the victim.’

  ‘It’s us against them,’ said Gianni. ‘What’s done is done. It’s time to get on with our lives.’

  Minot gave a series of earnest nods.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s just like the war.’

  Gianni smiled.

  ‘It’s like the war all over again. And we know who the enemy is.’

  With trembling fingers, Aurelio Zen unwrapped the medicinal potion from its layers of packaging, each as thin and transparent as tissue paper. A tight rain beat against the windows, while the hard wind behind it exploited every crack and weakness in the hotel’s ageing structure, seeping through the shutters and curtains to manifest itself as an intangible but ubiquitous presence in the room. The ancient cast-iron concertina of the radiator gurgled and spluttered and hissed, impotent against such virulently intrusive malevolence.

  The phone again rang several times, just as it had earlier, breaking off with the same stifled cheep. Ignoring it, Zen worked patiently to free another clove of garlic from its enclosing membranes with the blade of his pocket-knife. The bulb had yielded eleven cloves in all. A few of the insiders were too small to bother with, but the outer monsters more than made up for these runts. Flakes of the frail integument lay all over the table, stirring sluggishly in the pervasive draught like some nightmare dandruff problem.

  His task completed, Zen gathered the peelings into a heap, which he tipped into the waste-basket along with the vaguely pubic stalk. Outside, car horns blared and voices were raised in momentary anger. The sudden appearance of cold winds and relentless rain after so many weeks of glorious late-summer weather was trying enough in itself. But there was a
more substantial reason why the tempers of the local citizenry should be frayed, for at least half the town was economically dependent, directly or indirectly, on the wine harvest. Until recently all the indications had been that this would be an exceptional vintage in terms of both quality and quantity. But the Nebbiolo grape from which all the best local wines were made sopped up water like blotting-paper, and the resulting product was thin, pale and insubstantial. Another week like this and the whole crop would be downgraded to one of the marginal years such as ’92 or ’94. A few more and it would be a total write-off, fit only for bulking up and marketing in litre flasks of generic red like the one which stood at Aurelio Zen’s elbow.

  For Zen, this would not have represented any great tragedy. As the famous director and connoisseur responsible for his posting to Alba had pointed out, wine came in just two forms as far as Zen was concerned: sincero or sofisticato. The latter category, in its strictest interpretation, comprised anything not made by a family member or close personal friend with his own hands from grapes grown by him, and most certainly included anything in a bottle with a printed label on sale in shops and supermarkets. The former term of approbation was extended to any wines sold by the glass or jug in a few carefully vetted bars and restaurants, the understanding being that the proprietor had obtained them from producers known and trusted by him, and that they had not been messed about with.

  But despite his inability to sympathize with the problems which were aggravating the good people of Alba, Zen had his own reasons for feeling wretched. The slight malady he had felt coming on in Rome had transformed itself into a full-blown, all-stops-out misery for which the word ‘cold’ seemed completely inadequate. As someone who almost never got ill, Zen found this especially hard to deal with. He knew plenty of people who, without being hypochondriacs precisely, nevertheless always seemed to be suffering to some degree or other from one of a range of minor ailments. They were used to it, indeed appeared almost to welcome it. Above all, they were good at it. Practice had made perfect. They were accomplished patients, well-versed in the skills of home remedies and medical treatment alike. They accepted illness as an old if rather tiresome friend whose visits were nevertheless preferable to solitude, to say nothing of giving them a perfect excuse for a multitude of personal shortcomings or lapses.