Michael Dibdin - A long finish

Zen passed him the bottle. His visitor inspected the label, sniffed the contents, and handed it back.

‘No,’ he said decidedly.

‘Not good?’ queried Zen.

‘Not even bad.’

Tullio Legna wiped his hands together as if to remove a contaminating stain.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said. ‘In an hour, shall we say? The sooner we start, the sooner you’ll be back on your feet. Which brings me to my reason for coming, apart, of course, from the pleasure of making your acquaintance.’

He pursed his lips and gazed thoughtfully at Zen, who felt the full force of his disadvantage for the first time.

‘When it was announced that a Criminalpol officer was being transferred here to open an investigation into the Vincenzo case, the news naturally excited much comment,’ Legna continued in a studiously neutral voice. ‘This case had been in the hands of my Carabinieri colleagues — we had had no hand in it — and they had made an arrest. There has therefore been a considerable amount of speculation as to why the Ministry should suddenly have decided to take a hand, and at such a high level.’

‘Naturally,’ Zen replied in an equally bland tone.

Tullio Legna smiled sympathetically.

‘I don’t want to burden you with questions when you’re unwell, dottore. But it would considerably facilitate my position if you would, however briefly, clarify yours.’

Semi-recumbent, half-drunk, stinking of garlic and feeling like death partially defrosted, thought Zen.

‘My position?’ he repeated.

‘Your interest, let’s say.’

‘In the Vincenzo case?’

‘Exactly.’

Zen put out his cigarette in the dregs of wine remaining in his glass.

‘I have no interest in it.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s a question of someone else’s interest.’

‘And what is that?’

‘To ensure that the Vincenzo wine gets made.’

Legna looked probingly at Zen for a moment, then smiled ironically.

‘And who on earth is this well-connected intenditore?’

Zen lit another Nazionale. When it became evident that he was not going to reply, Tullio Legna nodded gravely.

‘Ah, like that, is it? Excuse my indiscretion, dottore. We’re just simple country people here in the Langhe. I’m not accustomed to the Roman way of doing things.’

Zen gestured feebly.

‘It’s I who should apologize. You’ve been very kind, and I’m not trying to play games. I can assure you that the identity of the person who was instrumental in having me sent here is of absolutely no relevance to the case or to my assignment.’

‘Which is to get Manlio Vincenzo out of gaol,’ Legna remarked expressionlessly.

Zen shrugged.

‘I understand that this year’s wine promises to be exceptional.’

The Alba police chief got up and crossed over to the window. He opened the curtains, then wound up the external metal shutters. A bleak, pallid light reluctantly made its presence felt in the room. From the bed, Zen could see nothing but a section of rain-drenched plaster on the building opposite.

‘Not if this keeps up,’ Legna commented. ‘Until a few days ago, it looked like being one of the best years of the decade, possibly even the best since 1990. So the growers decided to delay picking and try to squeeze a little more flavour into the grapes. Now they’re out there clearing leaves and thinning clusters and praying that the rain lets up in time to save the harvest.’

He turned back to face Zen.

‘Well, I won’t tire you any more, dottore. You’ll need to be fully recovered if you’re to have any hope of getting Signor Manlio released in time to oversee the vintage. In my humble opinion, it’s a very tall order indeed.’

‘You think he’s guilty, then?’

A silent glance passed between the two men. Tullio Legna walked back to the bed.

‘The real problem is that there are no other suspects. Short of someone else coming forward and confessing, I can’t see any way of bringing it off.’

He paused, as though about to take his leave, then continued in a quieter tone.

‘And even if you did, it might not make any difference.’

Zen stared up at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘Meaning what?’

Legna eyed him acutely.

‘This is a small, tightly-knit community, dottore. Aldo Vincenzo may not have been the most popular member of it, to put it mildly, but to die like that! It’s the sort of atrocity which people remember from the war years, but which they never thought they’d witness again. Feelings are running very high.’

He placed the envelope he had been carrying on the bedside table.

‘All the information we have on the case is in there, together with a map of the district. But, as you no doubt know, Manlio and his father had a public row at the village festa on the evening in question. They were seen leaving the family house together later that night, and as far as we know Aldo never returned. If Manlio walks free without clear proof of his innocence, I’m afraid it may only be a matter of time before he… meets with an accident, shall we say?’

The two men confronted each other in silence for a moment.

‘And now I’ll go and order your lunch,’ Tullio Legna exclaimed in a loud, hearty voice. ‘Eat it all up, and try to get as much rest as you can. You’re going to need it.’

When the dog first appeared, snuffling and scratching at his door, Bruno Scorrone had a moment of weakness. Between thirty and forty million lire were staring him in the face, not to mention pawing at his knee, whining confusedly and surveying his hallway as though sighting invisible beings.

Somewhere safely far away — north of Asti, for instance, up in the Monferrato — Bruno could easily have disposed of a trained tabui like this for cash with no questions asked. But he had quite enough legal worries already, and knew exactly how much the hound meant to its owner. This made it all the more remarkable that she should be running around loose, her leash trailing behind her, at the mercy of less scrupulous and responsible citizens than Bruno, of whom there was no shortage in the locality. In the end he loaded the reluctant, hysterical Anna into his car and drove the two miles along back roads to Beppe Gallizio’s house. The rain had finally stopped, at least for now. The air was cool and slightly hazy, yielding a diffident, diffused light.

When he reached the house, on the outskirts of the village, there was no sign of Beppe. His car was there, but the front door was locked and Bruno Scorrone’s increasingly irritated thumping produced no response. Anna was behaving oddly, too. She circled the yard continually, sniffing and searching, running back to Bruno, planting her nose on his shoes and pawing the ground, then scuttling off to one side, where a path led down the hill. Bruno’s only interest in dogs was to scare off intruders and undercover tax agents, and in terms of their cash value as sniffers-out of truffles. He had no time to play whatever childish game the bitch was proposing. Fetching a length of rope from the barn, he tied one end to the leash dangling from her collar and the other to a spike protruding from the wall of the house, and then drove away.

Several hours passed. There is no way of knowing what this interval might mean to a dog, let alone one desperate to communicate urgent and terrible news. One of our days? One of our years? At all events, by the time Lamberto Latini showed up, Anna had worn her neck to a bloody mess in her frantic efforts to escape. Appalled at her condition, he freed the dog, which immediately displayed the same behaviour as she had with Bruno Scorrone, sprinting to and fro between Latini and the path winding down the hill between Beppe’s vegetable garden and a neighbour’s ploughed field.