Michael Dibdin: A long finish

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.

But to Zen illness was an enemy he had no idea how to placate or control, a barbarian horde which descended without warning and made life impossible until, just as suddenly, it went off to wreak havoc elsewhere. And as such invasions went, this particular one was not only in the Attila the Hun class, but could hardly have been worse timed.

He had arrived in Alba the previous night after a six-and-half-hour journey from the capital. He had never visited the town before, indeed had barely ever set foot in Piedmont except for a few trips to Turin during his years at the Questura in Milan. Asti, the provincial capital where he had changed trains, meant nothing to him except the sparkling, fulsomely sweet wine one got offered at weddings when the host was too stingy or ignorant to come up with anything better.