A Long Finish - 6

by Michael Dibdin

  Leaving the bloodstained knife at Beppe’s house had been a last-minute inspiration, and Minot had to admit to himself that it had not really been taken as he had hoped. Anna’s barking, Beppe’s death and the murder weapon had seemed to form one of those triangles with which he had been tormented at school, an absolute and irrefutable demonstration of the facts of the case leaving no margin for further doubt. Quod erat demonstrandum, the police would conclude, and that would be that.

  But he hadn’t counted on the arrival of this outsider, and the impact which his ignorance and innocence would make on subsequent events. Aurelio Zen didn’t even know that Anna had been heard in the Vincenzo vineyards that morning, still less that Beppe had been in trouble over his truffle dealings. He couldn’t see the beauty of the solution which Minot had created for him, was utterly unappreciative of its clarity and elegance. Instead of grabbing the simple outcome on offer, he had blundered about like a myope who has lost his glasses, ignoring all Minot’s thoughtful clues and overturning his carefully crafted design.

  Nevertheless, everything had turned out for the best, he thought, as he reached his house and tethered Anna to the eye-bolt in the wall before taking out his key; unlike poor Beppe, he was scrupulous about locking up. A scabrous rustle announced that the rats were still about. Minot took off his coat and opened the jar in which he kept his ‘white diamonds’ safely tucked up in a cloth napkin.

  An astonishing avalanche of scent instantly invested the room, spreading out in successive waves, each more powerful than the last, until every other odour was buried beneath countless strata of that infinitely suggestive but fugitive profumo di tartufo. Even the speedy conspiracy of rats fell still and silent, as though acknowledging this massive new presence in their midst. Minot set the jar down on the counter. Later he would sort and weigh his catch, then drive into Alba and see what sort of deal he could strike. But first a bite to eat. It had been a long night.

  As soon as he opened the fridge, he realized that it had broken down yet again. The light did not come on, and everything inside was at the temperature of the room, chilly but not cold. This did not surprise him. He had picked the thing out of the ravine on the outskirts of Palazzuole, where the villagers had dumped their garbage since time immemorial, and it had only ever worked intermittently. He used it mainly as a secure cupboard, the one place that even the most enterprising rodent could not enter.

  Then he caught sight of the glass jar on the top shelf and smelt something even stronger than the truffles: the stench of bad blood. Hare, he had told Enrico Pascal! That had been a close call, although keeping the container and its contents had certainly paid off in the end. Enough was enough, though. Even Minot had his limits, as his suddenly queasy stomach reminded him. He was still hungry, but the thought of food was now an abomination.

  He removed the jar full of curdled blood and bits of flesh and set it on the counter next to the one in which he had brought back this night’s catch. They were identical, down to the shreds of yellow label still adhering to the glass and the white lids bearing the name of a well-known brand of jam. Despite his slight nausea, Minot couldn’t repress a satisfied smile. Yes, everything had turned out for the best, and in ways he couldn’t have imagined, still less planned for!

  When he had brought back this trophy, for instance, he’d had no clue how vital it would prove. At the time it had seemed a mere whim, a fancy which had taken him. Even that other time, when he’d picked up the nail which Gianni broke off during the bottling, had been little more than a sudden inspiration, a vague hedge against some undefined threat. But when he’d put the two of them together – like the commonplace and inert chemicals they’d used to make bombs during the war – the results were literally explosive.

  And just as effective, he thought, walking through to the living room. How easily he had manipulated events, vanishing from the picture he himself had painted like one of those anonymous daubers of old church frescoes, leaving the credulous and ignorant to gawk at the colourful scenes he had created, but no clue as to the identity of the artist.

  Except there was, and it was faked. That was why Gianni Faigano’s confession still rankled. It was one thing to leave one’s work deliberately anonymous, quite another to have another break in, scrawl his signature on the drying pigment and claim it as his own. That was worse than cheating. It was … What was that word they’d used in the paper at the time of the wine scandal Bruno Scorrone had been implicated in? Something like ‘plague’. No one had understood until the village pharmacist had explained over cards the next day that it meant passing someone else’s work off as your own.

  That’s what had happened now, and it hurt as bad as any plague sore. It was he, Minot chit, who had done the work and taken the risks, and here was Gianni Faigano insolently muscling in to claim the credit! Of course the end result was the same, in a sense, but it didn’t feel the same. Minot had expected the Faigano brothers to deny everything indignantly, as befitted the innocent men they were. Then the results of the tests would come back, the scientific analysis of Gianni’s fingernail which Minot had dipped into that jar filled with Aldo’s gore. They would never be able to talk their way out of that!

  But to his dismay, they hadn’t even tried to. Instead, Gianni Faigano had freely confessed to killing Aldo Vincenzo in revenge for the outrage he had visited upon Chiara Cravioli so long ago. What a heap of shit! Gianni had never had the balls to take on Aldo, and he damn well knew it. He also knew what everyone else in the village knew, or at least suspected – that although the teenage Chiara might have fancied herself in love with Gianni in a misty, moon-struck adolescent way, she had been genuinely swept off her feet by Aldo, who was twice the man Gianni would ever be.

  The truth of it was that what she had felt for Gianni was not love but pity, or at best a cloying sort of companionship. ‘Gianni is the best girlfriend Chiara ever had,’ Aldo had sarcastically remarked apropos of his wife’s clandestine visits to the Faigano house. But now Gianni had indeed taken his revenge, not on Aldo but on the whole community. With one deft stroke he had rewritten history, casting himself as the romantic hero who bided his time patiently for years, obedient to his beloved’s wishes, and then exacted a terrible price the moment she was in the grave. What a figure to cut! True, he would be condemned and sentenced to life, but everyone would secretly murmur, ‘What a man!’ in admiring tones. Women would write to him in prison, and the media would tut-tut over the murder while gleefully celebrating the fact that the great days of chivalry were not dead after all.

  Even if Minot were to come forward and confess – not that there was any prospect of that! – he would not be believed. People wanted a story, and unlike Gianni he could not offer that. They wouldn’t want to hear the truth, that on his annual pilgrimage ‘to lay flowers on Angelin’s tomb’ and clean out the unsuspected truffle bed he had found, Minot had been surprised by Aldo Vincenzo, who could not sleep and had come out to check on the progress of this problematic harvest.

  They certainly wouldn’t believe, and for that matter Minot could never explain, why this chance encounter had led to death. Planning and executing Beppe’s killing had been a new experience for Minot, the exception to his proven rule: to follow his instincts. He had done so with Angelin, and, before that, with Minot gross up on the roof. He had done the same with Bruno Scorrone that afternoon at the winery, and with Aldo. Something in Vincenzo’s swaggering, contemptuous manner had been the trigger. Without even thinking, Minot had responded with a single blow from the zappetto he carried to excavate for truffles. It had caught Vincenzo high up on the forehead, a nasty blow which had laid him on his hands and knees, dazed and bloody.

  Even then, he might have gone no further. But the consequences of stopping now seemed worse than those of continuing, so he’d taken out his knife. When Aldo saw that, he had spat out a word which proved to be his last, a dialect term so grossly insulting, and unfair, that subsequent events took on the momentum of a dislodged boulde
r rolling downhill. When it finally came to rest, Minot’s brain kicked in again. As a rule he preferred to make his killings look accidental, but that was not possible here. So he decided to go to the other extreme.

  Remembering the angry scene between Aldo and his son at the festa the night before, he had dragged the gutted, blood-drenched corpse over to the vines and lashed the wrists to the wire supports. Then he bent down and added one last touch, something so macabre that no one would ever believe that this was anything other than a coldly premeditated act of personal revenge.

  His first thought had been to stuff the severed genitals into Aldo’s mouth, the way they used to with informers during the war. But something restrained him, some sixth sense that possession of these glaringly absent items might enable him to tip the balance at some time in the future, should he ever come under suspicion. So he’d taken out the jar he’d brought to collect truffles in and scooped the slop in there instead.

  And once again his instincts had not betrayed him. He’d got away with it, more completely than he could ever have imagined. His feelings of anger about Gianni’s false confession were completely irrational. What did it matter, after all? If Faigano was so keen to act the great lover that he was prepared to accept a wrongful conviction for murder, let him rot in prison.

  All around, the rats were out, speedy, furtive presences swarming in the shadows at the corners of the room, some bolder individual occasionally darting diagonally from one patch of imagined refuge to another. There was no refuge, of course. With a couple of blasts of his shotgun Minot could have turned the room into a bloodbath. He could do that any time he wanted, which was why he had no interest in doing so. Minot was above the rats, in the scheme of things. Nothing they did could threaten him, and his generosity or patronage was entirely at his own discretion. He could exterminate them any time he wanted, so he let them live.

  Which reminded him that it was time for their feed, if not for his. Then off to Alba, maybe stopping at Lamberto Latini’s restaurant to see what sort of price he could get there. He got to his feet, creating a brief scuffle among the more impressionable members of the pack, and went back into the kitchen to fetch some bread.

  When he returned, the rats had taken over the entire floor, scurrying this way and that, looking up at him as expectantly as dogs. Minot broke the bread into irregular crusts and tossed them out like fireworks. The rats went crazy. Fights broke out, blood was drawn, and a chorus of shrill squeals scored the silence like nails on a blackboard. Minot laughed and cut more bread, flinging each piece into a different corner of the room so that the rats surged forward like a wave that lapped and broke over the morsel which instantly disappeared down the throat of some animal quicker or more aggressive than the rest. Given enough time and patience, you could tame anything, thought Minot with a flicker of contempt. Anything except him, that was. He could not be tamed, and those who had dared to try had paid the price.

  It was time to go. Minot put on his coat and reached for the jar filled with truffles. Then he noticed the other, identical jar. Thank God he hadn’t gone out leaving that sitting there on the counter in plain view! With a reputation for shady wine transactions such as he had, even transporting and disposing of it in the wild was a risk. Suppose he got stopped by some officious police patrolman who insisted on searching the truck?

  Maybe it would be best just to bury it in his vegetable garden. He could do that unobtrusively enough, then rinse out the bottle and reuse it. Waste not, want not. It was a question of how far gone the contents were. If they’d started to decompose seriously, he’d have all the village dogs round there, scratching and sniffing. The neighbours might get curious.

  Minot unscrewed the lid cautiously. The smell was definitely on the high side, but not unbearably so. On the surface floated a small grey pouch of flesh which he realized with a shock was Aldo Vincenzo’s penis. He smiled wryly, thinking of the power that organ had once wielded, of the pain and damage it had wrought. It had transferred the Cravioli estate to the Vincenzo family and made a hollow, self-pitying mockery of Gianni Faigano’s life. Look at it now!

  It was at this moment that Minot felt a delicate shiver at his wrist, and looked down to see a rat sniffing at the open jar. Immediately some atavistic trigger was thrown. The rats were welcome to his bread, even some stale cheese or ham on occasion. When it came to human flesh things changed. Without the slightest reflection, Minot lashed out at the beast with his left hand, knocking it on to its back. It lay there, its pale furry stomach exposed and feet wiggling, as if astonished at this unwonted aggression. With a snort of disgust, Minot smashed his fist down on top of it.

  But the rat was no longer there. With an astonishing spiral leap, it twisted up and around and sank its incisors into Minot’s hand. He yelled and lashed out with his other hand, knocking over the glass jar, which shattered on the floor. The rat had already vanished, along with all its fellows.

  Minot inspected the wound. It looked insignificant, just a couple of punctures below the thumb. The real problem was the incriminating mess on the floor. With a heavy sigh, he set about cleaning it up, scooping the solid items on to an old newspaper and mopping the blood into a pail. He did his best, but in the event it wasn’t good enough to escape detection by the forensic team which arrived a week later. Aldo’s blood had not only coated the tiles but seeped into the cracks and crevices in the grout between them, from which it was laboriously removed, analysed and identified. Soon afterwards, police dogs discovered the shallow pit where Minot had hurriedly buried the whole mess. The case against Gianni Faigano collapsed and, protesting his guilt to the last, he was released.

  But that was all in the future. Having completed his clean-up, Minot drove off to dispose of his truffles, which he did at a price which astonished him. As for the bite, he thought nothing more of it. There was a small red swelling and an irritating itching sensation, but that gradually subsided.

  It wasn’t until the following day that other symptoms manifested themselves, a sort of feverish lassitude which felt like some virus or other; a mild case of flu, perhaps. Then that evening, while he was heating up some soup, Minot suddenly collapsed. To his astonishment, he was unable to get up again. In fact, he could hardly move at all, except for an occasional convulsive jerking of his limbs. He tried calling for help, but all that emerged was a feeble croak.

  Minot was a notorious recluse, and several more days passed before his disappearance was remarked on. In the end it was Lamberto Latini who found him, having called by arrangement to collect an order of truffles placed during Minot’s earlier visit. By then nearly a week had gone by, and the corpse was almost unrecognizable. Denied their usual food, the rats had had to make do with what there was.

  Acknowledgement

  The days are past when Poe could get away with having a character demonstrate his wine connoisseurship (in The Cask of Amontillado, a few echoes of which may be discerned in the second chapter) by claiming that a rival ‘cannot distinguish Sherry from Amontillado’. To protect myself from similar or worse gaffes I appealed to the incomparable Jancis Robinson, who very kindly read the manuscript and made numerous suggestions, many of which have been incorporated in the final text. Needless to say, responsibility for the opinions voiced by my characters, as well as for any subsequent errors, is mine alone.

  The Zen Series from Michael Dibdin

  Ratking

  Zen is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy’s most powerful families.

  Vendetta

  An impossible murder in a top-security Sardinian fortress leads Zen to a menacing and violent world where his own life is soon at risk.

  Cabal

  When a man falls to his death in a chapel in St Peter’s, Zen must crack the secret of the Vatican to solve the crime.

  Dead Lagoon

  Zen returns to his native Venice to investigate the disappearance of a rich American resident, while confronting distur
bing revelations about his own life.

  Così Fan Tutti

  Zen finds himself in Naples, a city trying to clean up its act – perhaps too literally, as politicians, businessmen and mafiosi begin to disappear off the streets.

  A Long Finish

  Back in Rome, Zen is given an unorthodox assignment: to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family who is accused of a brutal murder.

  Blood Rain

  The gruesome discovery of an unidentified corpse in a railway carriage in Sicily marks the beginning of Zen’s most difficult and dangerous case.

  And Then You Die

  After months in hospital recovering from a bomb attack on his car, Zen is trying to lie low at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, but an alarming number of people are dropping dead around him.

  Medusa

  When human remains are found in abandoned military tunnels, the case leads Zen back into the murky history of post-war Italy.

  Back to Bologna

  Zen is called to Bologna to investigate the murder of the shady industrialist who owns the local football team.

  End Games