Michael Dibdin: A long finish

But what was bad for wine was good for truffles, as traditional wisdom had it, and this local saying was borne out by Minot’s bag that night. He had spent over eight hours skulking through groves of oak and linden with Anna, encouraging the hound with the constant muffled chant, ‘Peila ca je! Peila ca je!’ He then excavated the heavy clay the dog pointed out with his mattock, revealing the nest of tubers, and finally teased out the buff-coloured nuggets and stashed them safely away in his pocket. Anna had meanwhile been bought off with a dog biscuit, a token of her master’s appreciation.

He must have gathered over a dozen truffles, several the size of new potatoes, and more than half of the superior female variety. Depending on where he placed them, he could be looking at almost a million lire for his night’s work. For Anna’s work, rather, but she was no more demanding than the rats. The biscuits, at a few hundred lire a box, were enough to keep her sweet. What she craved was to feel appreciated. It was not the gift but the thought behind it which counted. She and Minot understood each other perfectly.

Their relationship went back a long way, well before her legal owner’s death. It had started when Minot discovered some hand-written receipts one day at Beppe’s house while the latter was absent, proving that Gallizio had earned substantial sums of money from the sale of truffles supposedly from the prized Alba region, but in fact imported from such far-off and unfashionable localities as Lombardy, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and even Umbria.

It amazed Minot that Beppe was capable of such entrepreneurial initiative, and still more that he would be fool enough to keep the evidence stashed away in an unlocked drawer, like a bunch of love letters! There it was, nevertheless, and once he had outlined to Beppe the likely consequences of such documents falling into the hands of the fisc — tax evasion plus commercial fraud was a lethal combination — it had proved relatively easy to negotiate a compromise permitting Minot to borrow Anna for his nocturnal expeditions on those occasions when Beppe was otherwise employed.

Unfortunately, and through no fault of his own, this arrangement was to lead to Beppe’s untimely demise. It had all started when one of the Faigano brothers had mentioned hearing Anna barking from the neighbouring Vincenzo land on the morning of Aldo’s death. That chance remark had tied them all together like one of those cords they used to have on the railway, running back from the locomotive to the guard’s van, for use in case of emergency. Once it was pulled, the whole train ground to a halt, while the tell-tale sag in one compartment pointed to the guilty party.

So Beppe had to go. The prospect of having Anna at his unrestricted disposal had helped to stiffen Minot’s resolve, but it had still been a wrench. He had never killed anyone like that before, Coldly and calculatedly, with malice afore-thought, and it rattled him. The actual deed had been simple enough. Having ‘borrowed’ Anna the day before, he had painted her paws with a dilute solution of aniseed, imperceptible to the human nose but gross olfactory overload to another dog, in this case a half-wild pup which Minot had saved from drowning with the rest of the litter and kept to guard the house. A crash course involving the undiluted aniseed and some chunks of ham and cheese did the trick, and the snuffling pup led Minot all the way from Gallizio’s house to the wood he had elected to work that night. After that it was just a matter of heading home, tossing the corpse of his strangled guide into a thicket on the way, and then returning at his leisure in the truck to confront Beppe with his own shotgun. He had seemed as startled as the puppy by the outcome — as helpless and as hurt.

Leaving the bloodstained knife at Beppe’s house had been a last-minute inspiration, and Minot had to admit to himself that it had not really been taken as he had hoped. Anna’s barking, Beppe’s death and the murder weapon had seemed to form one of those triangles with which he had been tormented at school, an absolute and irrefutable demonstration of the facts of the case leaving no margin for further doubt. Quod erat demonstrandum, the police would conclude, and that would be that.

But he hadn’t counted on the arrival of this outsider, and the impact which his ignorance and innocence would make on subsequent events. Aurelio Zen didn’t even know that Anna had been heard in the Vincenzo vineyards that morning, still less that Beppe had been in trouble over his truffle dealings. He couldn’t see the beauty of the solution which Minot had created for him, was utterly unappreciative of its clarity and elegance. Instead of grabbing the simple outcome on offer, he had blundered about like a myope who has lost his glasses, ignoring all Minot’s thoughtful clues and overturning his carefully crafted design.

Nevertheless, everything had turned out for the best, he thought, as he reached his house and tethered Anna to the eye-bolt in the wall before taking out his key; unlike poor Beppe, he was scrupulous about locking up. A scabrous rustle announced that the rats were still about. Minot took off his coat and opened the jar in which he kept his ‘white diamonds’ safely tucked up in a cloth napkin.

An astonishing avalanche of scent instantly invested the room, spreading out in successive waves, each more powerful than the last, until every other odour was buried beneath countless strata of that infinitely suggestive but fugitive profumo di tartufo. Even the speedy conspiracy of rats fell still and silent, as though acknowledging this massive new presence in their midst. Minot set the jar down on the counter. Later he would sort and weigh his catch, then drive into Alba and see what sort of deal he could strike. But first a bite to eat. It had been a long night.

As soon as he opened the fridge, he realized that it had broken down yet again. The light did not come on, and everything inside was at the temperature of the room, chilly but not cold. This did not surprise him. He had picked the thing out of the ravine on the outskirts of Palazzuole, where the villagers had dumped their garbage since time immemorial, and it had only ever worked intermittently. He used it mainly as a secure cupboard, the one place that even the most enterprising rodent could not enter.

Then he caught sight of the glass jar on the top shelf and smelt something even stronger than the truffles: the stench of bad blood. Hare, he had told Enrico Pascal! That had been a close call, although keeping the container and its contents had certainly paid off in the end. Enough was enough, though. Even Minot had his limits, as his suddenly queasy stomach reminded him. He was still hungry, but the thought of food was now an abomination.

He removed the jar full of curdled blood and bits of flesh and set it on the counter next to the one in which he had brought back this night’s catch. They were identical, down to the shreds of yellow label still adhering to the glass and the white lids bearing the name of a well-known brand of jam. Despite his slight nausea, Minot couldn’t repress a satisfied smile. Yes, everything had turned out for the best, and in ways he couldn’t have imagined, still less planned for!

When he had brought back this trophy, for instance, he’d had no clue how vital it would prove. At the time it had seemed a mere whim, a fancy which had taken him. Even that other time, when he’d picked up the nail which Gianni broke off during the bottling, had been little more than a sudden inspiration, a vague hedge against some undefined threat. But when he’d put the two of them together — like the commonplace and inert chemicals they’d used to make bombs during the war — the results were literally explosive.