A long finish az-6

by Michael Dibdin

  The witness had taken no particular notice of this event, assuming that it was someone out after game or vermin. People rose early in the country, and they all owned guns. But Lamberto Latini, it transpired, had not risen early that day. When Beppe Gallizio met his death in a grove of linden trees in the valley below Palazzuole, Latini had been asleep in the arms of Nina Mandola, wife of the local tobacconist. What made the situation more delicate, and explained the fact that it had only now been revealed, was that Signor Mandola was sleeping in the next bedroom at the time.

  This state of affairs, it turned out, was a longstanding and stable one. Everyone in the village knew about it — Lamberto left his car parked right in front of the house when he came visiting — but it was a private matter and none of them had dreamt of mentioning it to the police. Nor had Lamberto Latini. The truth had only come out when Pinot Mandola himself had called Enrico Pascal, the local maresciallo dei Carabinieri, and told him that Latini could not possibly have committed the murder since he was sleeping with the caller’s wife at the hour in question.

  If truth were told, Pascal was considerably more embarrassed than the complaisant husband himself at having to probe, as delicately as possible, the reasons for this unusual arrangement. Mandola himself was quite straightforward about it. As a result of a glandular illness, he had become impotent. Since he was unfortunately unable to provide for the sexual needs of his wife, his marital duty was clearly to find someone who could.

  ‘I immediately thought of Lamberto. He had long been a close friend to both of us, and I’d always had the idea that he admired Nina. And since his wife’s death, he had been running around all over the place having affairs and visiting whores and neglecting the restaurant. I felt it was time for him to settle down.’ With two such intimate witnesses, to say nothing of various villagers who came forward, now that the truth was in the public domain, to attest to having seen Latini’s Lancia in front of the Mandola house until after eight that morning, the Carabinieri had no choice but to release the restaurateur.

  ‘And so the mystery of Beppe Gallizio’s tragic death returns to haunt a community already traumatized by the horror which so recently afflicted the Vincenzo family,’ the article concluded. ‘Are the two connected in some way? “How can they be?” people are saying. But, in their hearts, they are thinking, “How can they not be?”’

  Zen’s reading was interrupted by the barman, who alerted him to the arrival of the bus. Ten minutes later, it dropped him before a large pair of wrought-iron gates on an isolated stretch of road outside the village. A deeply rutted driveway of packed gravel curved down a gentle slope between matching sets of poplars as rigidly erect as uniformed guards. To either side, the land flowed away in gentle curves and hillocks, the contours defined as though on a map by serried rows of vines covered in burnt-ochre foliage.

  As Zen strode along the drive, the house gradually came into view. It was set a little way down the hillside, so that the first thing visible was the roof. Roofs, rather: a quilt of russet tiles, each section covering a separate portion of the house, the rows all running slightly out of alignment with their neighbours. Stubby brick chimneys covered over with arched spires like miniature bell towers punctuated this mosaic.

  It soon became evident that the house itself was as complex and various as its roofs, not so much a single entity as a conglomerate of buildings of various size, shape and antiquity, huddled together along three sides of a large courtyard with a covered well at its centre. Some of the walls were open, consisting only of rows of large arches; others had a few ranks of shuttered windows; still others were blank.

  So far all had been silent, apart from the growl of a distant tractor, but when Zen approached the front door, a dog started to howl, alerted by some noise or scent. Judging by its appearance, this entrance had been disused for some time, so he followed the driveway around the outbuildings and into the courtyard. The dog’s yelps grew louder and more frantic. A blue farm-cart and a green Volvo estate stood side by side near the inner door, which was opened by a young man holding a shotgun in his right hand.

  In his late twenties, he was impeccably dressed in a brown and russet check suit with an English look but an unmistakably Italian cut, a triangle of brown kerchief protruding from his breast pocket echoing the bronze-and-black banded silk tie. A dark mustard V-necked pullover and button-down collared shirt in the subtlest of light blues and a pair of highly polished Oxfords completed the ensemble. His straight black hair, slightly receding from the temples and worn relatively long at the back, was perfectly waved and formed. A pair of wide-rimmed spectacles gave character to a pleasant, open, boyish face.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said in a firm, cultivated tone.

  Unpleasantly aware of the shotgun — which wasn’t exactly pointed at him, but wasn’t exactly not either — Aurelio Zen showed his police identification and introduced himself above the frantic barking of the still invisible dog. The young man nodded and set the gun down.

  ‘Shut up!’ he yelled loudly.

  The dog abruptly fell silent.

  ‘I apologize for the intrusion,’ Zen remarked. ‘If I’d known there was anyone here, I would have phoned first.’

  ‘Well, someone’s been at work on your behalf,’ the man replied. ‘There have been two calls for you so far this morning.’

  Zen looked at him in utter astonishment.

  ‘That’s impossible! No one knew I was coming here. I didn’t even know myself until a few hours ago.’

  ‘Neither did I, for that matter. I was released at seven o’clock this morning.’

  ‘Released?’

  The man stared at him defiantly.

  ‘From prison. I am Manlio Vincenzo. What can I do for you, dottore? My recent experiences have not been such as to endear me to representatives of the law, but I am aware of my duties as a citizen, and still more of the precarious nature of my present position. I repeat, what can I do for you?’

  Zen gave an almost embarrassed laugh.

  ‘I’m not sure, to be perfectly honest. I suppose I wanted to take a look at the scene of the crime. To see for myself, I mean, to get the feel of the…’ Manlio Vincenzo nodded.

  ‘I quite understand. What we in the wine business call the gout de terroir. Well, you’re in luck. Whatever else we may lack here in the Langhe, we have any amount of that. Let me get my boots on.’

  He went back inside, taking the shotgun with him. Zen turned to face the sunlight streaming into the courtyard. Protected from the slight breeze, to say nothing of the noise of traffic on the road above, it felt incredibly warm and quiet, a haven of sanity in a harsh world. It cost Zen a distinct effort to remind himself that its late owner had walked out of here to an atrocious death, and that as yet no one knew why. When Manlio Vincenzo reappeared, clad in a pair of green rubber boots and a coat, he seemed to have been reading Zen’s thoughts.

  ‘My father would have gone this way the morning he died,’ he said, leading Zen around the far side of the house.

  ‘The night he died, you mean.’

  Manlio shook his head.

  ‘No, dottore. He spent his last night in bed. My father snored very loudly. It was not the least of the many things which my poor mother had to put up with from him. I got up in the night to fetch a glass of water, and the whole upstairs of the house was vibrating from that unmistakable stertorous rasping. It was always particularly bad when he’d been drinking heavily.’

  Zen frowned.

  ‘There was nothing about this in the reports I read.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Manlio snapped bitterly. ‘It’s only my unsupported evidence, and I was already under arrest. Why spoil a perfectly good case by dragging in the truth?’

  ‘What time was it when you heard him?’

  ‘About half-past three. I’ve been waking around then ever since I got back from abroad. Or rather I used to. In prison I slept like the dead, as they say.’

  They had emerged into the open, with an ex
tensive view of a series of hummock-like hills covered in vines, each surmounted by a clump of low, solid, brick buildings similar to the one behind them. In the washed-out blue sky, patches of cloud massed like foam on water.

  ‘Rosa, your housekeeper, told the Carabinieri that Aldo left the house after returning from the village festa, and that you followed him,’ Zen remarked.

  ‘Quite right. Rosa preferred to stay here and watch the shopping channel. It’s her one pleasure in life, although she never orders anything. Anyway, I left the festivities early, as you no doubt know, following a much-publicized quarrel with my father. When he got back, I tried to talk it through with him. He walked out and I followed. Rosa, who was clearly embarrassed by the whole scene, went off to bed. She was asleep when I returned.’

  ‘Why did your father go out at that time of night in the first place?’

  ‘There was a phone call shortly after he got home. It may have had something to do with that, but when I asked him where he was going, he just said he wanted to clear his head. He’d had quite a lot to drink at the festa. I told him that I’d come too, and he shouted that he’d had quite enough of me for one evening. But I tagged along anyway. I didn’t like the idea of him going to bed in that frame of mind. Besides, he’d got the whole thing wrong, and I wanted to talk the thing through.’

  The lines of heavy-fruited vines stretched away before them across the curve of the hillside. Manlio Vincenzo turned off between two rows and started to walk downhill.

  ‘This is the way we came,’ he said. ‘My father a pace or two ahead, me following at his heels like a dog.’

  ‘How can you be sure it was this row of vines? It was pitch dark and you admit you were drunk…’

  Vincenzo turned to him.

  ‘ Dottore, you could blindfold me and take me to any point on our property and I would know exactly where I was, to the nearest metre. Believe me, this was the way we came.’

  They walked on in silence for some time.

  ‘What was the quarrel between you and your father about?’ asked Zen eventually.

  ‘There were two causes. The one which has fascinated the press and public, needless to say, is that he had opened and read a private letter addressed to me by a friend, had misunderstood the contents and then used them to abuse me in public. But that was relatively superficial. The real reason for his animus lay much deeper. I’m afraid it will seem quite incomprehensible, if not absurd, to an outsider.’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘Tell me anyway. That’s why I’m here.’

  Manlio Vincenzo paused to inspect the clusters of grapes nestled amongst the leaves to one side.

  ‘It was about wine,’ he said.

  Zen looked at him sharply, suspecting a joke. Clearly he was wrong, however.

  ‘Our family has owned this land for about a hundred years,’ Manlio went on, striding away again. ‘My great-grandfather grew rich in the cotton business, and bought himself a country estate outside the village his father had come from. He made wine for his own consumption, but that was all. When my father inherited the property after the war, those vines and the wine they produced had acquired a significant commercial value, and by the time I was born the market had taken another leap. I managed to persuade him that if we were to continue to compete effectively, we needed to keep track of the latest developments in the field. So when I finished university, he sent me abroad to study viticulture.’

  ‘Where abroad?’

  ‘Initially to Bordeaux, and then to the United States.’

  Zen stared at him in amazement.

  ‘America? But all they drink is milk and Coca-Cola!’

  Manlio Vincenzo smiled.

  ‘Exactly what my father said when I suggested the idea. But you’re both wrong. The University of California at Davis was at that time, and probably still is, one of the best places in the world to study wine production in all its aspects, with no preconceptions and nothing taken for granted. The Americans may have started late, but they’ve caught up quickly.’

  ‘This doesn’t explain why you and your father almost came to blows at the Festa della Vendemmia that night,’ Zen remarked pointedly.

  ‘I’m coming to that. My father sent me abroad to study because he wanted to emulate the other top growers in the area, people like Gaja, Di Gresy and Bruno Rocca. He resented their growing fame, not to mention the prices they could command, and wanted me to find out how we could match them. As for me, I wanted to travel, to meet new people and to see the world. At that point I didn’t even want to be a wine-maker particularly. My degree was in engineering. But I went along with his idea, because it was a way to get out of this place.’

  ‘And away from him?’ suggested Zen.

  Vincenzo gestured loosely.

  ‘To an extent, yes. In return, I was prepared to do the courses and come back with some useful tips on oak and pruning and fermentation techniques. Instead, I came back as someone quite unrecognizable to him, with ideas he found profoundly disturbing.’

  ‘What sort of ideas?’

  ‘About grape varieties, for one thing. That, of course, had never entered my father’s head as a subject for discussion. Like everyone else around here, we grew only one grape, Nebbiolo. That was taken for granted, as though it had been ordained by God. All Aldo wanted me to learn was how to manage and vinify it more profitably. But after my experiences abroad, I had different ideas, which he…’

  Manlio Vincenzo inspected Zen briefly through his owl-like glasses.

  ‘This is the spot where he told me to go and suck my boyfriend’s prick, to quote his expression. Just here in this slight hollow where the water collects. You can feel how spongy the earth is here compared with the well-drained section we’ve been walking over.’

  Zen, who could feel nothing of the kind, nodded. Manlio Vincenzo stood still, looking into the distance.

  ‘Then he turned and walked off without another word. I started after him, but I realized it was useless. I made my way back to the house and went to sleep. I never saw him alive again.’

  ‘What time did you get up the next morning?’ asked Zen after a moment’s silence.

  ‘About seven.’

  ‘But you didn’t see your father?’

  ‘No, he was gone by then. The door to his room was open, but he wasn’t there. That didn’t surprise me. He was always an early riser, and at this time of year you could hardly drag him away from his vines. I think that’s really why he went out the night before, to tell you the truth, even though it was too dark to see anything. As the vintage approached, he would spend hours just tramping the fields, snipping back leaves and checking on the ripeness of the fruit. He was like a mother with a new-born baby.’

  Moving quickly, he led the way up the other side of the gulley and over a ridge. The rows of vines were interrupted here by a narrow track to allow mechanical access. Manlio climbed rapidly up the hillside, leaving Zen some distance behind. At last he turned left into the ploughed alley between two rows of vines leading up to a scruffy patch of oak trees at the edge of the field. A lorry lumbered into view, revealing the road by which Zen had arrived.

  Suddenly Manlio slowed to a hesitant, stealthy gait, as though stalking some timid creature. He pointed to a bare stretch where three vines had been brutally hacked off just above ground level. The soil showed signs of having been recently turned over.

  ‘That was where they found it,’ he said in a stonily neutral tone.

  ‘The corpse?’

  A curt nod.

  ‘I had the vines cut right back, of course. There was no question of making wine from those grapes. Before that, the spot was well hidden both from the road and from the house. That’s why it took so long to find him. My father often used to go off for the day somewhere or other without letting anyone know. If I’d sounded the alarm and then it turned out he’d gone into town on some private business, I’d never have heard the end of it. Things were bad enough between us as it was. I didn’t call th
e police until the evening of the next day, and it wasn’t until the following morning that they brought in the dogs.’

  ‘By which time, according to the medical report, it was impossible to determine the time of death with any precision,’ Zen remarked in a deliberately casual tone.

  Manlio smiled and nodded.

  ‘Yes, I know. The investigating magistrate made great play with that particular point. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I didn’t kill my father.’

  ‘Someone did,’ Zen said quietly.

  ‘Yes, someone did. And someone else knows who that someone is, and yet another person knows that that someone knows. That’s the way it is around here, dottore.’

  He had spoken with such bitterness that Zen was amazed to hear him add, ‘Are you free for lunch, by any chance?’

  ‘Lunch?’ he echoed vaguely.

  ‘Well, let’s not exaggerate. Rosa has been staying with her daughter since I was arrested, so we’ll have to improvise. But the wine will be good.’

  He glanced at Zen with an expression of solicitude.

  ‘That’s a nasty-looking cut you’ve got there, dottore. Quite fresh, too, by the look of it.’

  After Minot had dropped Aurelio Zen in Palazzuole, he drove a few miles out of town to pay calls on some private clients and a restaurant owner with whom he sometimes did business. His pickings that night had not been good enough to warrant going into Alba and selling directly on the street.

  His customers initially balked at the discovery that prices had risen by an average of ten per cent.

  ‘Beppe didn’t used to charge this much!’ they all said, in one form or other.