A Long Finish - 6

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen stared at him bleakly.

  ‘I can cope with anything. It’s my speciality.’

  The prince resumed his seat, looking over the papers in his hands.

  ‘Nevertheless, let’s just run over the background story. You say this woman Carla approached you at your hotel, claiming to be your daughter. Do you have any reason to believe her?’

  ‘I had an affair with her mother once, long ago. In Milan,’ he added, as though this explained everything.

  ‘You realize that if she were proven to be your daughter, you would have to take on various legal and financial responsibilities that might well be onerous?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘I just want to know the truth.’

  Lucchese gave him a smile spiced with a grain of contempt.

  ‘So, in theory, anyone could just walk up to you in a public place, having done a little research on your former mistresses, and claim to be your love child?’

  Zen turned away to the window. Down in the Via Maestra, a host of strangers passed to and fro in eager intent or sociable procrastination.

  ‘I’m no more credulous than the next man,’ he said. ‘But I suppose that having just lost Carlo …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That’s what I decided to call the child Tania was carrying. I decided that it was a boy, and I named him Carlo. So when a young woman named Carla appeared, claiming to be my daughter …’

  He swung around to confront Lucchese.

  ‘But my feelings are not important, principe. If Carla Arduini is my daughter, I’ll do the right thing by her, whatever it may cost me.’

  Lucchese rose to his feet and made a slightly ironic bow.

  ‘Your words do you credit, dottore. But, as it happens, you can relax. The tests carried out by my brother reveal beyond a shadow of a doubt that this Arduini woman is not related to you in any way whatsoever.’

  Zen gazed at him in silence.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  He held out the papers to Zen.

  ‘It’s all here, not that it will make any sense to you – or to me, for that matter. But my brother has assured me that it’s absolutely conclusive. Despite her impressive musical expertise, this Arduini woman is clearly a common gold-digger, out for what she can get. Luckily you have the might of science on your side, dottore. Tell her to try her luck elsewhere, or sue her for slander if you want. The courts will back you all the way.’

  Zen took the papers and glanced at them abstractedly.

  ‘Thank you,’ he mumbled.

  Lucchese frowned.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s just a shock, that’s all. I’d assumed …’

  ‘In the past, lots of men have been caught that way! But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can now get at the truth. Which in this case turns out to be a lie.’

  The doorbell sounded. Lucchese rose and left the room. Zen subsided on to the sofa and sat looking over the results of the DNA tests. At length the prince reappeared.

  ‘Minot has returned,’ he announced. ‘This is the item which he referred to. You have five minutes to examine it, following which you may question him if you wish. The item itself will remain in my keeping for the meantime. May I have the papers which you are offering in exchange, by the way?’

  Zen produced a long brown envelope from his coat pocket and handed it over. Lucchese perused the contents briefly, then passed Zen a crumpled piece of cheap paper which felt empty. He opened it gingerly, disclosing a sliver of what might have been plastic, translucent except for a brownish smear on one side.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘A fingernail, by the look of it,’ the prince remarked, inspecting the object. ‘From a male adult, in his fifties at least, used to manual work, and not overly fastidious about personal cleanliness. Oh, and he uses scissors rather than clippers to trim his nails, but you’d spotted that, of course!’

  Zen handed the object back to Lucchese.

  ‘Kindly send Minot in here,’ he said.

  Borrowing the tactics once used by Mussolini at his desk in the ex-Venetian embassy in Rome, Zen forced Minot to traverse the long distance from the door, hat in hand, before deigning to acknowledge his existence with an imperious glare.

  ‘E allora?’ he barked, once Minot had come to rest before him. ‘A fingernail. So what?’

  Minot smiled.

  ‘So whose, you mean.’

  Zen stared up at him from the cane chair which Lucchese had occupied earlier.

  ‘Look, Minot, I know you’re an unsophisticated fellow, but evidence is only admissible in law if there’s an unbroken sequence of links – each duly witnessed and notarized – leading back to the scene of the crime. Some broken fingernail, whatever its provenance, is of no more use to me than that button we were talking about earlier.’

  Having brushed the seat of his trousers in a perfunctory way, Minot perched on the edge of the embroidered sofa and leant forward. Despite that symbolic gesture towards the prince’s furnishings, he did not seem overawed by his surroundings, still less by Zen’s presence.

  ‘Let me make an admission, dottore,’ he whispered in a voice which was barely audible even to Zen.

  ‘Get on with it!’

  Minot looked from one side of the space to the other, as if checking that they were alone. Satisfied, he leant still closer to Zen.

  ‘Aldo’s body wasn’t discovered by that police dog, as everyone thinks.’

  Zen stared at him.

  ‘It was discovered by me,’ Minot went on. ‘I was trespassing on the Vincenzo’s property the morning after the festa, after some truffles I thought might be hiding in a bank at one end of the vineyard. Instead, I found Aldo.’

  He made a large gesture.

  ‘Imagine how it feels, coming on something like that with no warning, and with the mist so thick you can barely see where you’re going! At that moment I became a child again.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Minot looked at him.

  ‘Children notice what’s close to them, what’s near enough to touch and hug and hold. That’s what I did then. I looked at the earth at my feet, so as not to have to look at that obscene apparition! There was something glinting there, as the light caught it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket as a kind of talisman against the horror.’

  He leant back and raised his voice to a normal level.

  ‘A couple of days later I was over at the Faigano house, helping them with some work, and I noticed that Gianni was missing a fingernail from the index of his right hand. I thought no more about it at the time, but later I remembered the thing I’d found beside Aldo’s body, and realized that it was a fingernail. A fingernail with blood on it.’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘If you tear a nail, it bleeds.’

  ‘But the blood on this nail is on the outside, too, dottore. What if it’s not Gianni’s?’

  The two men confronted each other in silence.

  ‘I can’t proceed on the basis of your word, Minot.’

  ‘Of course not. But you have ways of finding out the truth about these things. You did it with the knife they found at Beppe’s house. You can do it with the evidence I’m offering. I’m just telling you in advance that what you’ll find is that the nail is Gianni’s and the blood Aldo’s.’

  Zen looked at him with a curious, glazed expression.

  ‘So they did it?’ he asked.

  Minot laughed apologetically, as though not wanting to offend the outsider who had only now realized the self-evident truth.

  ‘Of course! Everyone knows that.’

  Aurelio Zen had already entered the revolving door of the Alba Palace Hotel when he noticed Carla Arduini slipping into a compartment on the other side, going out. He glanced at her, and she at him, and he gestured furiously, pushing the door around so hard that he found himself back outside again before he could stop. Carla had also m
ade the complete circuit, no doubt assuming that he would have exited, so the situation ended as it had begun – her inside, him out, and the door still between them. Zen held up his hand, indicating that she should stay where she was, and then plunged back into the roundabout.

  ‘Carla!’ he exclaimed awkwardly, when they were finally face to face.

  ‘I was just on my way to mass. I haven’t been for ages, but the cathedral is supposed to be very beautiful, and …’

  ‘Meet me afterwards, in the bar immediately to the left as you leave the church,’ Zen instructed her, as though giving operational instructions to a subordinate. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  Carla inspected his expression for a moment, with what results remained unclear.

  ‘Very well. In about an hour, then.’

  She strode off into the lively, impersonal bustle of the streets, and Zen went up to his room. He had felt the need for a break before resuming his interrogation of the Faigano brothers, but it had never occurred to him that he would meet Carla Arduini. The news he was going to have to break to her lodged in his chest like the silver spike with which Lucchese had punctured his late cousin’s heart.

  Zen showered, shaved and changed into clean clothes, then hastened back outside. The debilitated sunlight had finally broken through the clouds, and although the air was crisp and cool the scene might have suggested summer but for the deep shadows which trenched the street, revealing the fraud. Zen wandered through the purposeful crowds, deferring to their sense of urgency and competence. They all looked as though they knew exactly where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there. By contrast, Zen felt as insubstantial as a somnambulist.

  When he reached the bar, there were still fifteen minutes or so left before Carla emerged from the cathedral. Fifteen minutes for him to decide how to express himself, how to phrase the announcement that would put an end to all her hopes. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news …’ No, that sounded like a policeman addressing the nearest and dearest of the deceased. ‘The results of the blood tests we had done yesterday prove conclusively that …’ Too bureaucratic. ‘I would have been proud to have you as a daughter, but unfortunately …’ Patronizing bastard!

  His cappuccino cooled and subsided into an unappetizing beige puddle on the counter before him, untouched. Seemingly offended, the barman asked if there was something wrong with it. Zen just shook his head. The next thing he knew, the bells of the cathedral had begun their pagan clamour and the faithful were emerging, blinking, into the sunlight of the piazza. A head taller than the rest of the predominantly menopausal worshippers, Carla was easy to spot.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked mindlessly, as she took a place beside him at the bar.

  ‘It was the mass,’ she replied. ‘What did you expect?’

  She ordered an orange soda from the barman and turned to Zen with an unsympathetic eye.

  ‘Well?’ she enquired pointedly.

  ‘What? Oh, well, it’s nothing really. It’s just …’

  He broke off.

  ‘You see, I’m investigating the Vincenzo case, as you know, and … Well, it’s beginning to look as though an arrest is imminent. Probably two, in fact. They’re local and have a teenage daughter who lives with them. The press has gone quiet about the case recently, for lack of new developments, but when this gets out, they’re going to be back in force. I don’t want the girl to be hounded, but there’s nothing I can do officially. So I was just wondering whether by any chance you might know someone in Turin who has a spare room where she could hide out.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Just a few days, a week at most. Until the media lose interest again. It won’t take long.’

  Carla Arduini finished her drink and set the glass down with a decisive clack.

  ‘She can stay with me. I’m going back today anyway.’

  Zen grasped her arm.

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  She shrugged dismissively.

  ‘Why not? There doesn’t seem much point in staying here, does there? I did what I came to do, or rather failed to do it. It was a silly idea anyway. It’s time to put it behind me and get on with my life.’

  Now she was avoiding his eyes, looking studiously out of the window at the passers-by in the piazza. Zen took a deep breath.

  ‘About that blood test …’

  Carla laughed briefly.

  ‘Oh, that! Send me the results when you get them. It’ll take months, probably. Anyway, it’s of no importance.’

  Zen removed his hand from her arm.

  ‘Of no importance? But I thought …’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I thought …’ He paused lamely. ‘I thought it was.’

  ‘I used to think so, too, but I’ve changed my mind. Now it just seems absurd. I mean, here am I, spending a fortune staying for a week at a hotel in a dreary provincial town, and all for what? Because my mother told me a story about having slept with some policeman the year before I was born!’

  She sniffed scornfully.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, but when I started looking into this business, I kept running into the names of men my mother had slept with in the years before I was born – and after, for that matter. Not that I blame her for that! God knows, she had little enough else in the way of pleasure. But the chances of you being my real father, Dottor Zen, are frankly next to nothing. She couldn’t even get the story straight herself towards the end. Half the time it was you, and half the time it was Paolo or Piero or Pietro. But I had no way of tracing them, so when you showed up here …’

  She took a two-thousand lire note out of her purse and dropped it on the bar.

  ‘Send this Lisa to the hotel. I’ll be glad to take care of her for you. Consider it a way of apologizing for the distress I’ve caused you. And don’t worry, I won’t bother you again.’

  With a vague, mislaid smile, she turned and walked out.

  ‘Carla! Wait!’

  He caught up with her in the piazza.

  ‘Listen, I …’

  ‘Look, dottore, I don’t want to seem rude, but will you please leave me alone? Every time I see you, I’m reminded of what a fool I’ve made of myself. In a few hours I’ll be gone, and I promise that you’ll never hear from me again. All right?’

  ‘No! No, it’s not all right!’

  She looked at him with astonishment.

  ‘And just what is that supposed to mean?’ she demanded angrily.

  They were speaking so animatedly that a small crowd had formed around them, but Zen had eyes for no one but Carla Arduini.

  ‘You didn’t make a fool of yourself,’ he said.

  She smiled scornfully.

  ‘Very kind, I’m sure. I happen to disagree.’

  ‘Those tests you mentioned? They’re already complete.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Lucchese’s brother runs the clinic where they’re done. He put our samples to the top of the pile and faxed the results through this morning. I’ve seen them, Carla. I’ll show them to you if you want, not that they’ll make any sense to you, or to me for that matter. But the prince explained them all to me, and the result is perfectly clear.’

  They stared at each other with silent intensity.

  ‘Well?’ Carla burst out at last.

  ‘I’m afraid it may be bad news. But there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  Zen sighed and looked away.

  ‘The tests prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are indeed my daughter.’

  Carla Arduini took a step back.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Do you think I would joke about something as important as this?’

  He shook his head sadly.

  ‘You’re stuck with me, Carla. I may not be much of a father, but you’ll have to make the best of it, because I’m the only one you’ll ever have.’

  There was a seemingly endless s
ilence. Then Carla Arduini rushed at Zen and flung her arms around his neck.

  ‘Daddy!’

  ‘It wasn’t in vain!’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Everything your mother went through, everything you’ve been through. None of it was in vain.’

  She broke the embrace and stepped back, biting her lip.

  ‘I’d given up hope.’

  ‘So had I.’

  A ripple of polite applause recalled them to the realities of the situation. The assembled onlookers beamed their good wishes and congratulations, then tactfully dispersed.

  ‘Now then!’ said Zen decisively. ‘I’ve still got work to do, but I think this calls for a glass of spumante, don’t you?’

  ‘It won’t work,’ said Tullio Legna, chopping his right hand through the air as though to finish off this sickly idea once and for all.

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘It might. And if it doesn’t, we still have the evidence to fall back on. But that will take longer. I think we should go in for the kill.’

  ‘You really believe the evidence will stand up?’

  ‘Why not? Minot may be an odd type in many ways, but he’s not stupid. He knows we can prove or disprove his assertions, and he knows we will. He has nothing to gain by lying, and everything to lose.’

  The Alba police chief raised his eyebrows and emitted an expressive sigh.

  ‘He’s not the only one, dottore!’

  Zen frowned.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nanni Morino gave me an account of the methods you’ve been using so far,’ Legna continued in a bureaucratic tone. ‘I must say that I find them highly irregular, to say the least. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, Dottor Zen. Maybe your approach is standard procedure at Criminalpol. I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that you’ve been interviewing individuals without a lawyer present, telling each a different story, and then doing a deal with one of them in exchange for a piece of supposed evidence whose value and authenticity we have had no chance to evaluate. And now you tell me that you’re going to invent a pack of lies and use them to get a confession out of someone who wasn’t even a suspect until now!’