A Long Finish - 6 (24 page)

‘There was nothing to it, really.’

‘Nothing to it? On the contrary! The way you manipulated that pair into giving crucial evidence against this friend of theirs, and then pinned them down on an alibi which both they and we know is false … It was masterly! And your strategy was a stroke of genius. When everyone was expecting a frontal assault on the Vincenzo case, you attack instead on the flanks with Gallizio and Scorrone. All three murders are linked, of course, so if you nail this Minot for one of them, it’s just a matter of time before we get him for the others as well.’

He started towards the door.

‘Just a moment!’

Nanni Morino turned back with an expectant look. Zen coughed and, perhaps by association, lit a cigarette.

‘Thanks for the compliments.’

‘I meant every word,’ Morino assured him. ‘It was an inspiration and a privilege to …’

‘But we seem to be at cross purposes. I want this Minot brought in so that we can go to work on him. But I don’t think he did it.’

Morino stared at him in amazement.

‘You don’t?’

‘No.’

‘Then who did?’

Zen jerked his forefinger towards the floor.

‘Our friends downstairs. At least, one of them.’

Nanni Morino looked down, scratching his eyebrow, as if reviewing the facts. Clearly they didn’t add up.

‘I don’t quite …’ he began.

‘Come and sit down,’ Zen told him.

Morino did so. Zen dragged his chair round from behind the desk and seated himself opposite the young inspector.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s go through the whole thing point by point. If we’re going to work this case together, we’d better get our agenda clear.’

The telephone woke him, a salvation as cruel as a harpoon descending fathoms to skewer a drowning man and haul him, gored but alive, back to the surface. Blind blunders with the lamp followed, then the brutality of light masking a tumbler of water which spread a glistening trail across the glass-topped table before rolling over the edge and landing on the ingrowing nail of his big toe. And when he finally got the receiver to his ear …

‘What’s going on? I heard screams. Are you all right?’

He did not answer.

‘Hello? Are you there? Is everything all right?’

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, everything’s all right.’

‘I’m sorry if I woke you,’
the robotic voice went on,
‘but I heard what sounded like someone yelling and I was worried. I thought you might have set the bed on fire or something.’

Zen took a succession of quick, short, shallow breaths.

‘Is it you, Carla?’

‘Of course it is!’

‘You sound funny.’

‘Do I? Oh, shit! Wait a moment …’

Various clicks and grunts.

‘Sorry about that!’ Carla Arduini resumed in her own voice. ‘I’d forgotten to disconnect the attachment I was using. No wonder the man from room service has been giving me odd looks.’

Zen glanced at the clock, marooned in the puddle of spilt water. It was twenty past five in the morning.

‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you,’ he said. ‘I must have been having a nightmare.’

‘What about?’

‘I can’t remember. Anyway, I hate discussing dreams. It seems to give them a credibility they don’t deserve, don’t you think? It’s like someone who mumbles things you can’t quite catch, and then when you ask him to speak up looks hurt and says, “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”’

‘Or those pieces of modern art entitled “Untitled”.’

‘Exactly,’ said Zen, although he couldn’t really understand the connection.

There was a pause.

‘Well, good night,’ said Carla.

‘Good night.’

Zen hung up with a sense of disappointment and loneliness. Sleep was out of the question, at least for the moment. His facetious persiflage about the insignificance of dreams had been pure bravado. While it was true that he couldn’t remember the precise content of the nightmare from which he had been awakened, its malign aura informed his every thought like the memory of an ancient atrocity in which he was somehow implicated.

His eye fell on the pile of papers he had brought back from the police station the night before. Confused memories of the case he was involved in surfaced like episodes from his dream, the events dimly recalled but their significance lost. When he outlined the whole thing to Nanni Morino, it had all made perfect sense, but now he had lost the connecting thread.

Then it came to him. The Faigano brothers! That had been the insight he had suddenly but quite characteristically had the day before, the sensed presence of a pattern which abruptly made the hitherto disparate elements of the puzzle picture snap into place. Long ago, after the war, Gianni Faigano had been in love with Chiara Cravioli, but Aldo Vincenzo had raped her and thus forced a marriage to obtain ownership of the family’s land. That was motive enough for the killing, and it also explained the subsequent mutilations. The violator’s body had been violated, the offending parts cut away and destroyed.

Lisa Faigano’s testimony showed that Gianni had made a phone call to the Vincenzo house that night, and had subsequently gone down to the cellar, from which he could easily have left the house without being observed. Manlio Vincenzo had testified that his father received a phone call at about the same time, and had then gone out for a walk claiming that he needed ‘to get some air’, had discouraged his son from accompanying him and finally provoked Manlio to return alone by an extraordinary and gratuitous display of brutal rudeness.

Let us suppose, Zen had told Morino, that Gianni Faigano lured his loathed rival out to the fields under some specious pretext and stabbed him to death. Manlio Vincenzo is arrested for the killing and everything looks good for Gianni, until he discovers that Zen has been sent up from Rome to conduct a fresh investigation. Sooner or later, he knows, the love affair between him and Chiara Cravioli
in Vincenzo
must come to light. The time to act is now, but he needs a suitable scapegoat.

He selects Minot, whose reputation as an odd and potentially violent recluse with dark secrets in the family cupboard makes him a perfect choice. Minot is also an associate of the Faigano brothers, so his movements are relatively easy to predict. One night when both Minot and Beppe Gallizio are out after truffles, Gianni enters the Gallizio house through the back door, which sticks slightly and is never locked. Using gloves to prevent fingerprints, he takes Beppe’s shotgun and leaves the knife with which he killed Aldo Vincenzo on the kitchen table. He then lies in wait for Gallizio …

‘What about Minot’s truck being seen down there?’ Nanni Morino had interjected.

‘I’m coming to that,’ replied Zen with a satisfied smile.

With Gallizio dead, possibly by his own hand, and the Vincenzo murder weapon found in his house, either he or his assailant becomes the primary suspect in the earlier case. But now something unforeseen arises. Bruno Scorrone has noticed a red Fiat truck down in the hollow where Gallizio was shot, possibly belonging to Minot, who is questioned by the Carabinieri. To cover himself, he goes to the Faigano brothers and requests an alibi for the night in question. A less astute pair of conspirators might have refused, but Gianni and Maurizio realize that the same alibi also protects them, and that they can withdraw it at any time. So they agree.

‘As for that truck,’ Zen continued, ‘Minot is not the only person round here with a red Fiat pick-up. It’s a common enough model, and it so happens that the Faigano brothers own one too. I saw it at the market here in Alba on Saturday.’

Nanni Morino nodded dumbly.

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘So when Bruno Scorrone contacted the local
maresciallo
and mentioned the vehicle he had seen, Gianni Faigano realized that with one more murder he could complete his grand design. Scorrone had not testified under oath, so once he had been silenced his previous evidence would not be admissible in court. Even better, his death could be made to tighten the noose around Minot’s neck. The Faigano brothers – I’m still not sure how much Maurizio was involved – set up a sale of wine to Scorrone and arrange for Minot to deliver it. Then they kill Scorrone and heave his body into the wine vat, leaving a trail of evidence connecting all three murders and pointing straight to Minot, whose sole alibi depends on them!’

He appealed to the younger man in triumph.

‘Well, what do you think?’

Nanni Morino shrugged.

‘It’s ingenious,’ he admitted. ‘And it all makes sense. But what about Manlio’s evidence? He told the judges that his father was still alive in the middle of the night, that he heard him snoring. If that’s true, Gianni Faigano couldn’t have killed him after the supposed assignation he made by telephone.’

‘
If
it’s true,’ emphasized Zen. ‘But when he told the judges that, Manlio was trying to save his own neck. He repeated the same story to me, but he’s still a suspect, remember. There is no independent evidence to support his claim. He might easily be lying.’

Morino nodded dubiously.

‘I suppose so. But there’s another thing.’

‘What now?’ snapped Zen testily.

‘If this was a crime of passion, a premeditated act of revenge for some alleged incident dating back forty years or more, why did Faigano wait so long? Why was he so patient? After all this time, you would think he might have resigned himself to the situation. Why didn’t he kill Vincenzo years ago?’

Zen had had no reply to this the night before, and he had none now, but he felt sure that he was on the right track at last. The details would take care of themselves. What he had to do now was to hold on to the insight he had gained, and to get this Minot in the palm of his hand. He was the key to the whole affair, of that Zen was certain.

From behind the adjoining wall came a faint stirring and banging, then a sound of flushing water. Evidently Carla couldn’t sleep either. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He wished he could remember Amalia Arduini better, but she had faded to an impoverished set of fixed images, like worn snapshots endlessly reshuffled.

What remained? A vision of her supine and naked, her large breasts lolling around on her chest like half-trained puppies with a mind of their own. He recalled her crying one day at a restaurant when he’d said something – he had long forgotten what – which upset her, and the pleasure with which she greeted him at the door of her apartment in Via Strozzi, as if perpetually amazed that he’d actually shown up. And he also remembered moments when she would drift away from him, when his spell no longer held, and she was sucked back into personal and familial labyrinths from which he was excluded.

He sat up and reached for the phone.

‘Carla?’

‘Are you still up, too?’

‘It seems so.’

‘What are we going to do about it?’

A pause.

‘I wondered if you might want to drop by,’ Zen continued. ‘Or I could come there. I mean, you know, just so as …’

‘So as not to be alone?’

‘Yes, that’s it exactly. So as not to be alone.’

Another pause.

‘I’ll be there shortly.’

He hung up and went to put on his dressing-gown. A door closed in the hallway, and then there was a knock at his. Carla Arduini was wearing a stylish orange track-suit and a pair of running shoes. Her hair was combed back and secured by a sweat band. Zen gestured her into the room.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘this
is
odd.’

‘Isn’t it?’

She walked inside, looking around as though for a place to sit down, but in the end remained standing.

‘I was just thinking about your mother,’ said Zen, and immediately cursed his thoughtlessness.

Carla gave a hard little snort.

‘You never thought about her while she was alive. Why bother now she’s dead?’

Zen stared at her in shock.

‘Dead?’

She tossed her head.

‘But of course! Why do you think I made my move
now,
when I’ve known about it for years? I could easily have come to Rome and tracked you down. But she forbade me to do so. She was poor and proud. Pride was all she had left, once her looks went. She didn’t want to give you the satisfaction of knowing how much you’d hurt her. So I had to wait until she died before doing anything about it.’

Zen was now staring at her with manic intensity.

‘Until she died,’ he repeated.

A curt nod.

‘Which was recently?’

‘Back in the spring. A stroke.’

Zen looked away, his eyes narrowing.

‘So Irena was right. Of course!’

‘The doctor’s friend?’

‘Cherchez la femme,’
returned Zen. ‘I understand it all now. He had to wait until she died!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, let alone how that bitch Irena comes into it.’

Carla laughed maliciously.

‘She couldn’t get over the fact that I was able to spot what Lucchese was playing and to name the harpsichord! She obviously doesn’t care for competition.’

Zen looked at her, frowning.

‘How
did
you know that, anyway?’

‘I used to have a boyfriend who listened to classical music a lot. Scarlatti was one of his favourites, and if you’ve heard one of those clattery, repetitive pieces, you’ve heard them all.’

‘And the instrument?’

‘Even easier! It was written right there above the keyboard.
Andreas Ruckers me fecit
. Latin was one of my best subjects at school. But you still haven’t told me what that Irena was right about.’

Zen waved the subject away.

‘It’s not important. Take no notice of me, I’m still half-asleep.’

Carla consulted her watch.

‘Why don’t we go and get a coffee? There’s a place I know which should be open, down by the station. I noticed it the morning you caught the train to Palazzuole.’

‘That was you?’ exclaimed Zen. ‘I remember seeing some woman standing there in the shadows.’

‘I heard you rummaging around in here, and when you went out I decided to follow you.’