Faigano pushed away his plate.
‘You asked what people are saying, dottore. I’m telling you. They’re saying that Aldo Vincenzo was killed just a few weeks before he was due to present himself before a judge in Asti to explain why certificates of origin made out in his name had been attached to a consignment of the cheapest vino sfuso. They’re saying that it will be much easier now for Bruno Scorrone to argue that he bought the wine in good faith from a renowned grower of the region. How was he to know it was contraband? If Aldo Vincenzo said it was Barbaresco, that was good enough for him!’
He paused significantly and looked around once again.
‘They’re also saying that Scorrone was seen driving up to Beppe Gallizio’s house the morning he was killed.’
Zen finished his wine as the waiter removed their plates.
‘So you believe Scorrone did it?’
Gianni Faigano smiled strangely.
‘I don’t believe anything any more, dottore. For me, the world stopped making sense a long time ago. But people around here have long memories. It’s all we do have left, some of us. Who knows? Maybe someone had waited years and years before taking revenge for something Aldo thought forgotten, or had even forgotten himself?’
He straightened up as the waiter returned with the cheese tray.
‘But that needn’t concern you!’ Faigano remarked loudly in a jocular tone. ‘If you were a policeman, now, I wouldn’t envy you the task of trying to solve this case. But as it is, you’ve got your story and can go home to Naples without bothering your head about it any more. Right, dottore?’
‘Mombaruzzo, bubbio coazzolo. Sommariva fello fontanile?’
The voice was distant yet loud, reverberant and insistent, with a hectoring tone covering an under-current of desperate pleading. It was absolutely essential that he understand! A matter, quite literally, of life and death.
‘La morra cravanzana neviglie perletto bene vagienna. Serralunga doglani cossano il bric belbo moglia d’inverno!’
But try as he might, nothing made sense. And the fact that it so nearly did just made matters worse, as if he were at fault. Perhaps if he got closer to the speaker he would be able to hear more clearly and do whatever was expected of him. Stumbling forward in the darkness, he moved in the direction from which the voice seemed to be coming.
‘Barbaresco! Santa Maria Maddalena, trezzo tinella?’
In the end, it was his own cry of pain that woke him. This was real in a different way. And – agonizingly, but reassuringly – it was not intermittent or qualified but immediate and continuous, with future consequences built in. A foot was involved, as well as the shin immediately above. He seemed to be naked. The surface beneath his bare soles was as rough and yet yielding as sand, but hard edges lurked in the darkness all around. It was against one of these that he must have struck his left leg.
After an interminable period of exploratory gestures in the surrounding obscurity, he eventually located something that seemed familiar. Further tactile tests seemed to confirm that this was indeed the edge of the bed. Working on this hypothesis, he groped his way along it. Sure enough, he soon came to a table-leg. Not only this, but the lamp was where it should be, according to his folk-memories of the presumed locality. A brief fiddle with the nipple on the base produced light. Stripped of its dream-enhanced pretensions, the room looked absurdly small. No wonder he had come to grief, when his mental chart had been erroneous not in a few details but on a totally different scale, like the map of a city mistaken for that of a continent.
But why had he left the safe haven of his bed in the first place? There had been an urgent reason, he remembered, connected with that resonant voice whose words he could still fugitively hear. It had exhorted him to save someone while there was still time. A life had been in danger, and he was at once deeply implicated and the only person who could prevent the atrocity. Only he hadn’t been able to understand the language in which this terrible appeal had been delivered, and so he was guilty. A child had died because he had not been quick or capable enough to save him.
A clamorous noise made itself felt in the room. Another Aurelio Zen – one who lived in the world called real and, unlike his incompetent dream double, understood its signs and portents – picked up the phone and answered.
‘Good morning, Dottor Zen. Did I wake you? My apologies, as they say. But I happened to be awake already, so I thought that we might as well get started.’
The voice was metallic, neutered, robotic.
‘Who is this?’
‘Ah, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? But don’t worry, you don’t have to answer it right away. I’ll even give you a few clues, to get you started. Here’s the first. Via Strozzi, number twenty-four.’
Zen gripped the receiver with growing anger.
‘What the hell is this? Do you know what time it is?’
A tinny laugh.
‘Questions, questions! You’re a detective, I hear. Why don’t you do a little detecting?’
‘Why don’t you go and fuck yourself?’
He slammed the phone down and lay back on the bed. Then, rolling up and over like a wounded animal, he located the bedside clock, rang the front desk and demanded to know why they had put a call through at half-past five in the morning. The clerk, who sounded as though he had been asleep himself, protested that he had not transferred any calls to Dottor Zen’s room, and indeed that there had been no calls of any sort to anyone since he had come on duty late the previous evening.
On the floor beside the bed lay the map which Tullio Legna had included with the dossier on the Vincenzo case; Zen had been studying it when he fell asleep the night before in an attempt to get some grip on the layout of the area. It was the standard 1:50,000 sheet covering Alba and the surrounding countryside and villages. He picked it up and located Palazzuole. A railway line ran nearby, and there appeared to be an isolated station which served the town.
His eye drifted away, following the lines of hills and the course of rivers, until he was brought up short by the words Trezzo Tinella. He had heard that before, and recently, too. Then, with an almost superstitious shudder, he remembered the parting shot of the voice in his somnambulistic dream: ‘Barbaresco! Santa Maria Maddalena, trezzo tinella?’
For a moment it seemed as if he had stumbled unawares on some cosmic clue, a previously unsuspected secret passage between worlds believed to be separate. Then he noticed the word Barbaresco on the map. It was, he realized, not just the name of a wine but also of a village, not far from Palazzuole. He searched the sheet until he found Santa Maria Maddalena, Fontanile, Fello, Serralunga and Sommariva. No doubt the others were all there, too. He must have read the names unconsciously the night before and then combined them in his sleep to form those sentences which had hovered so disturbingly on the brink of some painful, urgent sense.
Meanwhile he had been sleepwalking again. On this occasion the experience had left no visible scars, but there was no telling where he might have ended up if he hadn’t stubbed his toe and barked his shin on the coffee table. What was happening to him? Was he to believe Doctor Lucchese’s theory of psychic disturbance or Gianni Faigano’s misogynous ramblings about a malevolent female influence? Or were they both right? And what about that phone call? ‘Via Strozzi, number twenty-four.’ The address, if that was what it was, meant nothing to him.
He took a shower to rinse away this mood of morbid introspection, then went over to his suitcase and dug out the battered, buff-coloured railway timetable he always carried with him. Alba looked the size of Rome on the 1:50,000 map, but it didn’t figure at all on the schematic map of the national railway network printed at the front of the timetable. Zen looked it up in the index, then consulted the schedule for the line wandering off into the hills to the east. The first train of the day left in just under fifteen minutes. On a whim, he decided to try to catch it. He had been spending too much time alone in his room, brooding about his own problems and state of mind. What
he needed was to get to work.
Outside the hotel, there was still no hint of the coming dawn. The street was dark and silent, the sky implacably opaque. He walked rapidly back in the direction he had taken when he arrived, glancing at his watch as he passed beneath a street lamp. Somewhere behind him, another set of solitary footsteps resounded comfortingly on the flagstones.
Once he reached the station, it became obvious that there had been no need to hurry. A two-car diesel unit stood dark and silent at the platform, but the booking office was closed and no one was about. Zen lit a cigarette and paced the platform as the clock moved spastically from three minutes to six to three minutes past. As though on cue, a door slammed and two men emerged. One wore the grey-blue uniform of the State Railways, the other was in jeans and a tattered green ski-jacket. Zen walked up to them.
‘For Palazzuole?’ he enquired, indicating the train.
‘Stop at Palazzuole!’ the uniformed man called to his unkempt companion, who was heading for the driver’s compartment.
‘Va bene.’
The engines roared into life amid a cloud of thick black smoke. There was only one other person on the platform, a young woman in a long coat and a hat who didn’t seem interested in this train. Zen boarded and took his seat, and after a brief delay the automotrice rumbled off into the darkness, crossing numerous sets of points. To all appearances, Zen was the only passenger.
He lay back on the hard plastic seat and turned to the blank screen of the window. It reflected his face back to him: old, tired, defeated, possibly even mad. ‘We had no idea! He always seemed perfectly normal.’ That’s what people said when someone cracked up, as though to reassure themselves that such conditions were invariably obvious and predictable, and so their own lack of symptoms meant that their future sanity was not in question.
Zen sat up and refocused his eyes on the seat opposite. For a moment, the glass had seemed to display two faces: his own, and – some distance behind and to one side – that of a boy about five years old. Only his face, of extraordinary beauty, was visible, the dark eyes fixed on Zen with a look of love and reproach.
‘Palazzuole!’
Zen swivelled round. The uniformed man was standing in the doorway at the end of the carriage.
‘Palazzuole,’ he repeated, as the brakes squealed beneath them.
Zen was about to say that he didn’t have a ticket, but the guard had already disappeared. The train jerked to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Zen walked hastily to the end of the carriage and stepped down. The train revved up and sidled away, leaving him in total darkness. Almost total, rather, for once his eyes had adjusted, he realized that he could just make out his surroundings by the faint suggestion of light which now tinted the sky, diffused down through a thick layer of mist. The station building was shuttered and obviously long disused. In faded black paint on the cracked and falling plaster he could just make out the letters PAL ZUO E and the information that he was currently 243 metres above mean sea level.
He walked past the station building into the gravel-covered area behind, and along a short driveway leading to a dirt road which crossed the tracks at a slight angle. Here he got out the map and his cigarette lighter, and determined that the village lay east of the railway station which nominally served it. He turned right on to the narrow road, towards the pallid glow which was slowly hollowing out the night.
There was just enough light to distinguish the crushed gravel and glossy puddles of the unpaved strada bianca from the ditches to either side. Zen lit a cigarette and walked on through the damp, clinging mist, up the slight incline of the road which crossed the river and the railway. As he climbed out of the valley, the visibility steadily improved. Now he could see that the fields had recently been ploughed and that the turned earth was silvery with dew. The exercise and the fresh air exhilarated him.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Somewhere else, a church bell began to toll monotonously, summoning the faithful to early mass. By now the light clearly had the upper hand over the mist and the darkness. Every surface glistened and gleamed with moisture, as though it had just been freshly created. As imperceptibly as the dawn itself, the incline of the road increased until he found himself ascending a steep hill which forced the road to twist and turn. Stopping to catch his breath, Zen noticed lights behind him and heard the low growl of a motor.
The vehicle – a red Fiat pick-up truck – neared rapidly, gobbling up the road it had taken Zen so long to traverse on foot. He stepped on to the verge to let it pass, but the truck pulled to a stop and a window was rolled down.
‘Buon giorno,’ said the driver.
Zen returned the greeting.
‘Get in.’
The tone was peremptory. After a moment’s hesitation, Zen walked around the truck and climbed into the passenger seat, which he found himself sharing with a small black-and-white dog. The cab reeked of a powerful odour to which he would not have been able, a few days before, to put a name, but which he could still smell faintly on his own skin.
‘Going to the village?’ asked the driver, restarting the truck. Glancing at the dog, which was whining nervously, he snapped, ‘Quiet, Anna!’
‘I’m going to Palazzuole,’ said Zen.
‘Did your car break down?’
‘No, I came on the train.’
The driver laughed humourlessly.
‘Probably the first passenger they’ve had all year.’
Zen studied the man’s face as he negotiated the bends in the narrow, steep road. Apart from the thin, weedy moustache which covered his upper lip, it reminded him of pictures he had seen of that iron-age corpse they had dug out of a glacier somewhere up in the Alps. It also reminded him of something else, something more recent, but he couldn’t think what.
‘The station’s a long way from the village,’ he replied idly.
‘It isn’t that!’ the man exclaimed. ‘But people round here remember the way the railway used to treat us, back when everyone depended on it. I can still remember my mother running to catch a train to town – this was before the war, I can’t have been more than a few years old. She was a minute or two late, but people like us didn’t have clocks. The guard saw her coming, waving and calling out, but he held out his flag just the same and the train took off, leaving her standing there. Her grandfather died that night, before she’d had a chance to see him for the last time. People round here have long memories, and they don’t have much use for the train.’
They were approaching the village now, but all that was visible was the lower row of brick dwellings. Everything above had disappeared behind another thick layer of mist.
‘I smell truffles,’ said Zen.
His driver glanced at him sharply, and Zen suddenly knew where he had seen him before: in the bar near the market, talking to the Faigano brothers. One of them had called him Minot.
‘I got a few. They’re easy enough to find if you know where to look. Providing someone else doesn’t get there first, of course!’
He barked his short explosive laugh again, and slowed the truck as they entered the bank of mist which enveloped the higher levels of the village. The road had abruptly become paved, and the thuds and rumbling beneath them died away.
‘You have friends here?’ Zen’s driver asked softly.
‘I’m on business.’
‘What kind of business?’
Zen thought quickly. The man didn’t seem to have recognized him, and if he repeated the story about being a Neapolitan newspaper reporter in this context it would be all round the village in no time, and might shut a lot of mouths he would prefer to stay open.
‘Wine,’ he said.
The truck turned through the mist-enshrouded streets as cautiously as a ship in shallow water.
‘Wine, eh?’ the man called Minot remarked. ‘I thought you people travelled around in Mercedes.’
The engine noise fell away as they emerged on to a broad, level piazza in the upper reaches
of the mist.
‘I lost my licence a couple of months ago,’ Zen replied. ‘Drunk driving, they called it, although I was perfectly all right really. Just one of those lunches with clients that go on a little too long.’
The driver drew up in front of an imposing arcaded building.
‘Well, I’ll leave you here,’ he said. ‘The Vincenzo house is about a kilometre outside town on the other side. That’s where you’re headed, I take it?’
Zen got out, and the dog reclaimed its space, curling up on the seat.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said.
The man named Minot gave him an ironically polite smile.
‘A pleasure, dottore. Welcome to Palazzuole!’
By the time Aurelio Zen finally reached the Vincenzo property, the sun had dispersed the last traces of mist and the air was fresh and warm.
He had spent the intervening period in a café on the main square of Palazzuole, having discovered that there was a bus which stopped there shortly after ten o’clock which would not only drop him off at the gates of the Vincenzo estate but pick him up there on its return and take him all the way back to Alba.
Meanwhile he drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, read the newspapers and congratulated himself on having done the right thing. He felt a completely different person from the dream-drunk neurotic who had surfaced that morning. In short, he felt himself again. It might be a far from perfect self, but he determined to hang on to it if at all possible.
Two papers were available at the bar in Palazzuole: the Turin national La Stampa, and a local news-sheet resoundingly entitled Il Corriere delle Langhe. Apart from a filler about a partial eclipse of the sun due the following day, the former paper revealed nothing of any interest except the latest feints and gestures in various political and judicial games which had been going on for months if not years and in which Zen had long ceased to take any interest. The latter, on the other hand, turned out to contain some real news.
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