A Long Finish - 6

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  Zen looked at her seriously.

  ‘You’re the second person to ask me that.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should think about it!’ snapped Andrea Rodriguez. ‘You’ve already alienated everyone else here, and now you’ve made another enemy.’

  ‘I’ve executed your orders, dottore!’

  Enrico Pascal was still twenty metres away, but his voice carried clearly to Zen – and to everyone else assembled in the courtyard. The underlying message was made equally clear as Andrea Rodriguez turned her back pointedly on Zen and strode off to join the others.

  ‘The ambulance will here shortly, and meanwhile my orderly has secured the premises,’ the Carabinieri official continued in the same parade-ground tones. ‘Do you have any further orders?’

  ‘Not at present!’ bellowed Zen in return. In an undertone he added, ‘Where’s the winery?’

  ‘Over there, down the hill,’ whispered Pascal, nodding to one side. ‘Just follow the track.’

  ‘Meet me there in fifteen minutes.’

  Zen turned away. Pascal saluted ostentatiously and marched back towards the house as though he had been dismissed.

  Realizing that the funeral ceremony was indeed not going to take place, the assembled mourners were by now heading towards their cars and driving away. Zen walked past them and started at a leisurely pace down the concrete-paved track which connected the Scorrone residence with its commercial appendage, discreetly tucked away out of sight over a ridge of the hillside.

  Enrico Pascal appeared exactly fifteen minutes later, driving down the same track along which Zen had walked.

  ‘Make it brief,’ he warned, stepping out of the jeep. ‘Feelings are running high, I can tell you. You’re presently the most unpopular person in the Langhe, and if I’m seen consorting with you …’

  Zen laughed.

  ‘The most unpopular? I’m glad to hear it. After all the flannel I’ve been getting from everyone here, it’s a relief to be hated and feared again. I need that edge to work properly.’

  Enrico Pascal did not dignify this with a reply. Zen sighed.

  ‘All right, I’ll make it brief. My first question is what Bruno Scorrone was doing down here yesterday afternoon in the first place. I’ve taken a look around this installation. I don’t know much about vinification, but I can tell high technology when I see it. Once the controls are set, this equipment can run itself. In any case, Scorrone was not exactly in the fine wine business. Why should he cut short his Sunday lunch to come and check on the progress of some bulk wine which he was going to blend and sell for next to nothing anyway?’

  ‘According to his wife, he said that he had to take delivery of a shipment.’

  ‘On a Sunday?’

  ‘We haven’t been able to confirm it, but that’s not unusual. Bruno preferred to keep his paperwork to a minimum.’

  ‘You mean he was operating illegally?’

  The maresciallo gestured in an anguished way, to indicate the impossibility of conveying the complexities of the situation to an outsider.

  ‘Let’s say that he operated in a grey area, not necessarily crooked but not strictly legal either. Lots of people around here do. On the one hand there are the legitimate demands of the market, on the other the often unreasonable stipulations of the myriad bureaucracies anywhere between here and Brussels. A man has to make a living. Bruno didn’t adulterate his wine, at least not usually, but he was sometimes – how shall I put it? – imaginative as to its origins.’

  Zen looked around the concrete expanses of the winery. The staff had been given the day off, and in its stagnant desolation the place might have been any one of the ugly, light-industrial complexes of indeterminate purpose which littered the highways of the region. The only sign of its true function came in the form of a number of plastic-covered demijohns stacked on one of the loading platforms. Zen pointed them out to Pascal.

  ‘Do you think that could be the wine that was delivered the afternoon he died?’

  The maresciallo shrugged.

  ‘Who knows? Bruno did a lot of business on a small scale. You saw the occasional tanker from Puglia or Calabria pulling up here, but it was mainly local products he used. All good stuff, but, as I said, imaginatively labelled.’

  Zen led the way over to the cluster of flagons. There was no marking or other indication of origin on them.

  ‘These could have come from anywhere,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about anywhere.’

  Pascal walked back to the office at the end of the loading bays, returning a few moments later with a pipette and a glass. Handing both to Zen, he pulled out the rubber bung securing the mouth of one of the damigiane, then reclaimed the pipette and lowered it through the layer of olive oil floated on the surface of the wine to keep the air out. He pumped the bulb a few times, and repeated the procedure to expel the wine into the glass. Swirling the wine around, he sniffed deeply.

  ‘Ah!’

  He took a large sip, swishing it around his mouth like a gargle, and finally swallowing.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The procedure was repeated.

  ‘Definitely,’ Enrico Pascal pronounced.

  Zen stared at him bemusedly.

  ‘Definitely what?’

  Pascal emptied the remaining wine on to the ground and replugged the container.

  ‘I’d bet quite a large sum that this particular wine was made by the Faigano brothers.’

  ‘You can tell that just by tasting it?’

  A shrug.

  ‘I drink a lot of Gianni and Maurizio’s wines and I’d be prepared to swear that this is one of theirs.’

  Catching Zen’s glance, he added, ‘Off the record, of course. Anyway, there’s no proof that this is the delivery Bruno came to collect.’

  Zen sighed histrionically.

  ‘That seems to be the keynote of this whole case. Lots of hints and indications, but no proof. What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Ah, well, dottore, that’s for you to decide.’

  Zen got back to his hotel late that afternoon, having hired a local driver to take him to Alba. Above the wavering outline of the darkening hills, the sky was a molten glory, ranging from a creamy peach to a delicate glowing pink like sunlight filtered through a baby’s ear. The taxi dropped Zen in Piazza Savona, and he spent some time just wandering around aimlessly, as delighted as a child with the sense of purposeful but mysterious activity all around his brief excursion into the rural hinterland. Nature was neither benign nor malign, his genes told him. However cropped, parcelled and inhabited, it remained other. This was its fascination but also its horror. A few hours was enough.

  He crossed to the tree-lined promenade at the centre of the square and spent some time looking over the remaindered volumes offered for sale by the bancari. The east end of the central reservation was disfigured by an abstract fountain in early sixties’ Civic Modern style, beside which stood a pillar inscribed with the elliptical opening words from the book by Beppe Fenoglio about the heroic and tragic ‘Twenty-three days of Alba’, when the local partisans precipitately seized control of the city from the retreating Fascists: Two thousand of them took Alba on 10 October, and two hundred lost it on 2 November 1944.

  As Zen walked slowly round to the entrance of the hotel, his mind was on those eighteen hundred young men whose deaths Fenoglio had celebrated by implication, and the two hundred who had survived. If they were still alive, they would now be in their seventies. How did they view it all, looking back? Had it been worth the suffering, the bloodshed, the deaths? Were they bitter at having fought and risked everything in a desperate conflict for ideals that were almost immediately betrayed or compromised? Or was it simply the most exciting thing which had ever happened to them, an experience never to be forgotten, immune from judgement or regret, like the first time a woman gives herself to you?

  His room seemed a refuge, quiet and secure, against these and other
doubts. Zen took off his jacket and shoes and collapsed on the bed, closing his eyes for what he thought of as a ‘little rest’ amply earned by his exertions. When he awoke, it was to the trilling of the telephone. Disoriented and resentful, he snatched up the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Good afternoon, dottore. I trust I’m not disturbing you.’

  Zen groaned.

  ‘Who are you?’ he yelled into the phone. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone? What in God’s name do you want anyway?’

  ‘To invite you to dinner this evening, if you’re free. Seven o’clock, at the Maddalena on Via Gioberti.’

  The line went dead. Zen glanced at the clock. It was just after half-past six. At least eight hours had elapsed since he had inhaled hashish courtesy of the prince and his companion, but the room seemed to be moving slightly around him like a carousel which had been turned off but was still revolving just fast enough to make stepping off a hazardous affair. Nevertheless, this was what he was going to have to do. The appointment he had just been offered, whatever its purpose, could not be avoided. If he didn’t turn up, it would simply be reassigned to a later date.

  His mind went back to the Burolo affair in Sardinia, of which he had spoken to Lucchese, when he had been hounded down and confronted by a gangster he had once sent to prison, who now sought his revenge. This must be something similar, he thought wearily. A policeman inevitably made many enemies. Reaching for the phone again, he called the local Commissariato.

  ‘Police!’ snapped a voice he recognized.

  ‘Ciao, Dario.’

  A brief indignant pause.

  ‘This is the Alba police station! What do you want?’

  ‘Too bad about that penalty,’ Zen continued smoothly. ‘But Juve are still looking good for the championship.’

  ‘Who the …’

  ‘Aurelio Zen, Vice-Questore, Criminalpol, Rome. I have just received a phone call summoning me to a restaurant in Via Gioberti, the Maddalena. I’m to be there at seven, and I have reason to think that the person I am meeting may be armed and dangerous. Quite apart from my own safety, I have no wish to endanger the lives of the other patrons of the establishment in question.’

  Dario took a moment to digest this information.

  ‘In view of this,’ Zen went on, ‘I suggest that a uniformed officer meet me here at the hotel in fifteen minutes and accompany me to the restaurant.’

  ‘I’ll see to it in person, dottore!’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘To be honest, there’s no one else on duty.’

  Ten minutes later, bundled up in an overcoat and with his hat in hand, Aurelio Zen patrolled the grotesquely ample spaces of the lobby, taking care to stay well away from the windows and door where he would be visible from the street.

  ‘Good evening!’ said a female voice.

  Startled out of his increasingly paranoid meditations, he turned to find himself facing the young woman who had introduced herself to him as Carla Arduini. She, too, was dressed to go out.

  ‘Buona sera, signorina.’

  For a moment she seemed inclined to linger, and perhaps to say something else, but to Zen’s relief she walked on and vanished through the revolving door. The last thing he needed at this point was any further complications, such as her taking him up on the dinner invitation he had thoughtlessly extended the previous evening for reasons he could no longer remember. These speculations were abruptly cancelled by the appearance of a uniformed figure carrying a machinegun with the air of someone not only prepared but eager to use it.

  ‘Dottore!’ he said hoarsely, catching sight of Zen.

  ‘Good evening, Dario.’

  The young policeman scanned the lobby rapidly, as though armed enemies might be concealed anywhere. Failing to locate them, he consulted his watch.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Not just yet.’

  ‘But it’s time.’

  ‘Never turn up when you’re expected,’ Zen pronounced solemnly. ‘Keep them waiting. Their nerve will start to fray and they’ll be more likely to make a mistake.’

  Dario nodded as though all this made sense.

  ‘Let’s have a drink here and arrive about ten minutes late,’ Zen told him.

  At the bar, Dario ordered a Coke, Zen a spumante.

  ‘Are you from these parts?’ he asked the patrolman, pushing the muzzle of the submachine-gun aside.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Barolo.’

  ‘Do you know anything about a woman named Chiara Vincenzo? Widow of the late lamented Aldo.’

  ‘She was my great-aunt.’

  Zen stared at him.

  ‘Is everyone here related to each other?’

  ‘Well, not everyone. Not incomers.’

  Zen gave him a still harder look.

  ‘Present company excepted, of course!’ Dario responded hastily.

  ‘I understand your great-aunt Chiara died recently,’ said Zen, pressing his advantage.

  ‘That came as no surprise. She had been suffering from cancer for some time.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Sixty-one.’

  He made an apologetic gesture.

  ‘Women normally last to seventy at least, sometimes ninety. But Aunt Chiara seemed to have lost the will to live a long time ago. There was a story about some tragedy in her youth which she never got over, I can’t remember the details.’

  ‘So she died just before her husband?’ asked Zen.

  ‘I suppose so, yes. A matter of weeks.’

  ‘Cherchez la femme,’ Zen intoned with a superior air.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He glanced at his watch.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Outside, the streets were dark and almost deserted. A fine drizzle was falling, backed up by a powerful but lazy wind lolling around like a drunken braggart at the street corners. The few pedestrians about glanced nervously at the tall man and his armed escort, and hastened past.

  As they turned into Via Gioberti, Zen began to have serious doubts about the wisdom of his plan. If there were an assassin, resentment with a rifle, this is where he would be waiting, in a doorway or at a window opposite the restaurant. He would take down young Dario first, then the unprotected Zen. But it was too late to back out now.

  There were no shots. When they reached the Maddalena, Dario burst inside ahead of Zen, brandishing his machine-gun. The restaurant was packed, but when Zen made his entrance, there was not a sound to be heard. Everyone in the place had come to a halt in the midst of whatever they were doing, the waiters poised in mid-delivery or removal of dishes, the diners stilled, forks half-way to their mouths.

  ‘Aurelio Zen,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m meeting someone for dinner. Has he arrived?’

  A deferential elderly man in a suit and tie emerged from behind a desk.

  ‘Sì, certo,’ he said imperturbably, as though the appearance of armed men in uniform were a daily occurrence. ‘This way, please.’

  Accompanied by the ever-watchful Dario, Zen and the head waiter traversed the crowded room and another beyond it, to come to rest at a table at the very rear of the premises. It was occupied by Carla Arduini. She and Zen stared at each other in silence for a long time. Then the head waiter coughed self-consciously.

  ‘You may go,’ Zen told him. ‘You too, Dario.’

  The patrolman pulled him aside.

  ‘This could be a set-up, chief! They put this young woman out front to get you relaxed and off your guard while the killer awaits his chance …’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Dario looked distinctly disappointed that the promised excitements and risks of the evening had come to nothing, leaving him to return to his routine duties at the police station.

  ‘Don’t you think I should take a seat at one of those tables over there and just keep an eye on things, just in case?’ he asked hopefully.

  Z
en scanned the room.

  ‘Those tables seem to be reserved.’

  Dario smiled and patted his machine-gun.

  ‘Believe me, I’m not going to have any problem getting seated.’

  Zen sighed and nodded.

  ‘All right. I’ll have some food sent over. But don’t wave that thing around too much. You’ll scare the customers.’

  Dario grinned impishly.

  ‘We’ll get great service, though!’

  Indeed, waiters appeared with extraordinary promptness, bearing menus and wine lists of such complexity that Zen finally shrugged and said, ‘Just bring me something good to eat. A warm starter and a main course. I don’t care what it is, as long as it has truffles grated thickly all over it.’

  He glanced at Carla Arduini, who nodded.

  ‘The same for me.’

  ‘And take some over to that lad over in the corner with the gun,’ Zen added. ‘He gets nervous if he isn’t fed properly.’

  When the flurry of attendance had died away, he looked up at his companion.

  ‘So it was you?’

  She nodded. Zen lit a cigarette and studied her.

  ‘And who is your collaborator? The man on the phone.’

  ‘I have no collaborator.’

  ‘But that voice …’

  ‘It’s an electronic device which alters your voice to any register you desire,’ Carla Arduini explained. ‘I bought one and hooked it up to my telephone at the hotel. It can make you sound like a man, a woman, a child, even an opera singer. For my purposes, a slightly metallic man’s voice seemed best.’

  Zen puffed away, studying her face closely all the while.

  ‘And what were those purposes?’

  She smiled wanly.

  ‘I planned to make a series of threatening phone calls, each with a vague clue to the mystery, and leave you to twist slowly in the wind, tormented by nameless fears. I’m not sure what I planned to do after that. I certainly didn’t intend you any physical harm, despite my threats. I just wanted to scare you.’

  She gestured to the table where Dario was sitting.

  ‘It certainly looks as if I succeeded.’

  A bottle of wine arrived. Zen poured them both a glass and drank his off at a gulp.