Michael Dibdin - A long finish

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.

‘Signor Faigano?’

Two of the men looked up simultaneously.

‘Yes?’ one of them replied warily.

Zen took a card out of his wallet and placed it on the table. It was one of those he had had printed during his stay in Naples, identifying him as one Alfonso Zembla.

‘Excuse me for interrupting, but I wonder if you could spare a few minutes. I’m a reporter for the Mattino, the most important paper in Naples, and I’m working on a story about the Vincenzo case. I’ve got the basic facts, of course, but I need some colour and comment to round it out…’

The man sitting immediately beneath Zen picked up the card.

‘Naples, eh?’ he said.

‘You know it?’ asked Zen.

The man laughed shortly.

‘The furthest south I’ve ever been was Genoa, and that was back in the war…’

The third man at the table, who had not responded to Zen’s initial greeting, started to whistle a short, melodious refrain. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up.

‘Time I was off,’ he announced to no one in particular.

‘All right, Minot,’ said the other man, who had not spoken yet.

He, too, stood up, stretching lazily.

‘I’d better go back and give Lisa a hand with the stall,’ he said through a forced yawn.

‘Take care, Maurizio,’ said the first man.

‘You too.’

‘May I?’ asked Zen, sitting down in one of the chairs thus vacated.

The remaining man held out his hand.

‘Gianni Faigano. It’s an honour to meet you, Dottor Zembla, but to be perfectly honest I don’t know how much help I can give. I’m just a simple man, and I don’t read the papers. To tell you the truth, I can hardly read at all. My brother Maurizio, he’s the smart one. He does all the paperwork, but he doesn’t like to talk. So there you are! We make a good team.’

‘So can we,’ suggested Zen, with just the suspicion of a wink. ‘You do the talking and I’ll take care of the paperwork.’

Gianni Faigano shrugged.

‘Why me, dottore? Look at all the people in here, and out there at the market. Any of them could have told you what you want to know. Yet you chose me. Why?’

‘I’d heard the name.’

‘Where?’

Various possibilities presented themselves to Zen’s mind, and he decided instinctively to go for the riskiest. What had he to lose, after all?

‘Someone told me that it was you and your brother who did it.’

There was a long, intense silence.

‘Did what?’ demanded Gianni Faigano.

‘Killed Aldo Vincenzo.’

Faigano inclined his head and laughed with what seemed like genuine amusement.

‘Now who told you that, dottore?’

Zen frowned and pretended to consult his notebook.

‘Someone called… Wait a moment. Ah, here we are! Beppe Gallizio. So when I saw your stall in the market I asked the girl there — Lisa, is it? — where I could find you.’

Gianni Faigano turned his misty brown eyes on Zen.

‘I heard that Beppe met with an accident.’

‘That’s right. Which, of course, would make you even more of a suspect, if I were to tell the police what he said to me.’

Zen paused to light a cigarette.

‘But I’ve no intention of doing that. All I want to know is what happened the night Aldo Vincenzo was killed.’

A brief laugh from Faigano.

‘Eh, we’d all like to know that!’

‘What people think happened, then. What they’re saying about it. A bit of background for my story, and the more scandalous and colourful the better.’

Gianni Faigano glanced around, as though to check whether he could be overheard.

‘I’ve heard a couple of stories. I’m not saying there’s anything to them, mind you, but…’

‘Don’t worry, this is all off the record.’

The other man looked at him acutely.

‘But is it on… What do you call it?’

‘What?’

‘When the people who hired you pay for everything.’

‘On expenses? Of course.’

Gianni Faigano smiled slowly.

‘In that case, I think we should talk about it over lunch,’ he said.

The resulting meal was by no means the first time that Aurelio Zen had had occasion to dine out with men for whom the principal point of the exercise seemed to be to make themselves look good by giving the staff of the restaurant a hard time. Service, food, wine, the menu itself: nothing passed muster by their exacting standards. Other patrons — credulous, ignorant or weak — might be taken in, or too feeble to protest, but not them!

Dishes and bottles of wine would be sent back, or grudgingly accepted after a long critique of their multiple defects. The course of the meal would be interrupted by long negotiations with the waiter, the implication being that while the establishment was capable in principle of producing the genuine product, otherwise they would not have favoured it with their patronage, it equally obviously was not going to do so for just anyone, only for those who had aggressively demonstrated their credentials as true connoisseurs, not to be fobbed off with anything less.

So far from being the type to play games of this kind, Gianni Faigano had struck Zen as someone who would eat whatever was put in front of him and be grateful to have it. This erroneous impression was dispelled the moment they reached the restaurant his guest had suggested, in a side street just off the piazza where the weekly market was now winding down. Even before they were seated, Faigano had pointedly objected to the table they were offered. And once this was rectified, he proceeded to find fault with the selection of daily specials, and, most vociferously, with the truffle with which it was proposed to adorn their meal.

‘At least a week old,’ he declared, having taken a briefly dismissive sniff. ‘And it’s not even from the best area.’

A selection of other tubers was brought to the table, and one eventually met with Gianni’s grudging — sigh, grimace, shrug, not-much-but-what-can-you-expect-in-a-place-like-this? — gesture of heavily qualified approval.

Next it was the turn of the cellar.