Michael Dibdin: A long finish

No one would dare question him further after that, he reckoned. His evident sincerity would speak for itself, for the oddest thing of all was that by now he had come to believe this version of events himself. And so as he made his way up the vineyard that autumn morning, he was simultaneously two quite different people on two very different quests: a wary and unscrupulous truffle poacher, and an elderly veteran of the Resistance honouring a dead brother-in-arms.

It was then that he saw something moving among the vines up ahead, heavy with ripe clusters of the fat blood-red grapes which would produce the Barbaresco wine for which the region was famous. All might have been well, even then. He had always been good at moving silently and at speed, and could easily have slipped through the rows of vines to his left and then worked back the way he had come. But Anna had scented the extraneous presence. Restrained by the leash, she couldn’t bound forward and investigate and so, as dogs will, she began to bark. The figure concealed in amongst the vines straightened up and turned towards him.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

There was no reply.

‘Didn’t you see the signs on the fence? “No trespassing,” it says. Do you know what that means, or are you illiterate on top of everything else?’

The dog stood between them, looking from one to the other as though uncertain which side to take, which one to defend and which to attack. Then the man who had brought her took the initiative, walking forward at a slow, confident lope, his right hand gripping his sapet, the adze-shaped mattock used to unearth truffles.

That was how it began.

‘Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello. I am a purist, Dottor Zen. I also happen to be able to afford that classical austerity which is the ultimate luxury of those who can have anything they want. In wine, as in music, the three Bs suffice me.’

‘I see,’ said Aurelio Zen, who didn’t see anything except the bins of bottles stretching away into the gloomy reaches of the vast, cold, damp cellar, its vaulted roof encrusted with a white mesh of saltpetre.

‘Barolo is the Bach of wine,’ his host continued. ‘Strong, supremely structured, a little forbidding, but absolutely fundamental. Barbaresco is the Beethoven, taking those qualities and lifting them to heights of subjective passion and pain that have never been surpassed. And Brunello is its Brahms, the softer, fuller, romantic afterglow of so much strenuous excess.’

Aurelio Zen was spared the necessity of answering by an attack of coughing which rendered him speechless for almost a minute.

‘How long have you had that cough?’ the other man asked with a solicitude which was all too evidently feigned. ‘Come, let us go back upstairs.’

‘No, no. It’s only a touch of chestiness. A cough won’t kill me.’

Zen’s host looked at him sharply. To someone who did not instantly recognize him — no such person was known to exist — he might have appeared an unremarkable figure: trim and fit for his sixty-odd years, but distinguished mostly by the layers of expensive tailoring which clad him like a second skin, and by a face whose wrinkles and folds seemed an expression not of calendar age but of inheritance, as though it had been worn by countless other eminent and powerful members of the family before being bequeathed to the present owner.

‘Kill you?’ he exclaimed. ‘Of course not!’

With an abrupt laugh, he led the way further into the labyrinth of subterranean caverns. The only light was provided by the small torch he carried, which swung from right to left, picking out stacks of dark brown bottles covered in mildew and dust.

‘I am also a purist in my selection,’ he announced in the same didactic tone. ‘Conterno and Giacosa for Barolo, Gaja and Vincenzo for Barbaresco. And, until the recent unfortunate events, Biondi Santi for Brunello. Poco ma buono has always been my motto. I possess an excellent stock of every vintage worth having since 1961, probably the best collection in the country of the legendary ’58 and ’71, to say nothing of a few flights of fancy such as a Brunello from the year of my birth. Under these exceptional circumstances, vertical tastings acquire a classical rigour and significance.’

He turned and shone his torch into Zen’s face.

‘You are Venetian. You drink fruity, fresh vino sfuso from the Friuli intended to be consumed within the year. You think I am crazy.’

Another prolonged outburst of coughing was the only reply, ending in a loud sneeze. The other man took Zen by the arm.

‘Come, you’re unwell! We’ll go back.’

‘No, no, it’s nothing.’

Aurelio Zen made a visible effort to get a grip on himself.

‘You were saying that I don’t understand wine. That’s true, of course. But what I really don’t understand is the reason why I have been summoned here in the first place.’

His host smiled and raised one eyebrow.

‘But the two are the same!’

He turned and strode off down the paved alley between the bins. The darkness closing in about him, Zen had no choice but to follow.

The instruction to attend this meeting at the Rome residence of the world-famous film and opera director, whose artistic eminence was equalled only by the notoriety of the rumours surrounding his private life, had come in the form of an internal memorandum which appeared on his desk at the Ministry of the Interior a few days earlier. ‘With respect to a potential parallel enquiry which the Minister is considering regarding the Vincenzo case (see attached file), you are requested to present yourself at 10.30 hrs on Friday next at Palazzo Torrozzo, Via del Corso, for an informal background briefing by…’

The name which followed was of such resonance that Giorgio De Angelis, the one friend Zen still had in the Criminalpol department, whistled loudly, having read it over Zen’s shoulder.

‘Mamma mia! Can I come too? Do we get autographs? I could dine out on this for a year!’

‘Yes, but who’ll pay the bill?’ Zen had murmured, as though to himself.

And that was the question which posed itself now, but with renewed force. The celebrity in question clearly hadn’t invited Zen to his palazzo, scene of so many widely reported parties ‘demonstrating that the ancient tradition of the orgy is still not dead’, merely to show off his wine collection. There was a bottom line, and the chances were that behind it there would be a threat.

‘I can appreciate your point of view,’ his host’s voice boomed from the darkness ahead. ‘I myself grew up in the estuary of the Po, and we drank the local rotgut — heavily watered to make it palatable — as a sort of medicine to aid digestion and kill off undesirable germs. But perhaps there is some other way I can make you understand. Surely you must at some time have collected something. Postage stamps, butterflies, first editions, firearms, badges, matchboxes…’

‘What’s that got to do with wine?’

The famous director, known to his equally famous friends as Giulio, stopped and turned, admitting Zen back into the feeble nimbus of light.

‘The object of the collection is as unimportant as the quantities inserted in an algebraic formula. To the collector, all that matters is selection and completeness. It is an almost exclusively male obsession, an expression of our need to control the world. Women rarely collect anything except shoes and jewellery. And lovers, of course.’

Zen did not reply. His host pointed the torch up at the curved ceiling of stone slabs.

‘The nitre! It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are now below Via del Corso. Young men, my sons perhaps included, are racing up and down in their cars as they once did on their horses, yet not a murmur of that senseless frenzy reaches us here. The wine sleeps like the dead.’