Nor were they, as Zen had known ever since scanning the file on the Vincenzo case. He had obtained this, after the usual delay, from the Defence Ministry in Rome, and read it on the train trip north. Aldo Vincenzo had been killed with a ferocity which almost defied belief; hence the extensive media interest, although this had abated since Manlio’s arrest. But the report of a medical witness — perhaps Lucchese’s friend — included among the documents which Tullio Legna had brought to the hotel the day before, was even more graphic:
The body was lashed by the wrists and ankles to the wires supporting the laden vines, naked from the waist down. The shirt above was stained black with blood which had trickled down the thighs and legs in coagulating runnels, forming a pool between the legs which had already attracted the attention of a few early flies. The head was thrown back, the eyes wide as a startled horse. He had been stabbed again and again in the stomach and midriff below the breastbone: about forty times in all. The penis and scrotal sac had been hacked off and removed or concealed. No trace of these items has been found.
So the niceness was a pose, a way of keeping strangers at a distance and seeing off inconvenient intruders from Rome. It had happened to him many times before, although usually at the hands of interested parties less suave than Tullio Legna. But the principle remained the same; the door was being closed in his face. Well, too bad, he thought. He wasn’t in a mood to be seen off, no matter how politely. He was, in fact, in a mood to make a complete arsehole of himself, to offend as many of these secretive, hypocritical bastards as he could, even though it got him nowhere at all from a professional point of view. This was not business but pleasure.
The grid of the market was defined by the traders’ vans and lorries drawn up in rows, their tail-gates opening on to wooden stalls piled high with the goods offered for sale. These were mostly household durables: bedlinen, clothes, kitchen utensils and hardware items, with a few of the usual labour-saving, miracle appliances which salesmen were loudly and enthusiastically demonstrating to a clientele of crumpled, compact women of a certain age, who looked suitably sceptical about these claims but at the same time enthralled by the attention they were receiving.
Near the main door of the cathedral was a separate section, with open-sided vans selling cheese and fresh and cured meats, and stalls offering jars of preserves and honey from the mountains, and, of course, baskets of truffles and wild mushrooms. One of these consisted of a red Fiat truck covered in a tent-like tarpaulin. A hand- painted sign in old-fashioned block lettering above the tail-gate read
FRATELLI FAIGANO — VINI E PRODOTTI TIPICI.
Zen stared at it with a deepening frown. Where had he seen that name before? The answer came to him almost immediately. It had been in the report that he had just been thinking of, the one on the Vincenzo case which Tullio Legna had delivered the day before, together with a map of the area and Zen’s truffle-laden cure. The Faigano brothers, or one of them, had been among the witnesses who had testified to the loud and public row which Manlio Vincenzo had had with his father at the village festa the night before Aldo was killed. This had apparently originated in a series of sarcastic gibes by Aldo on the subject of his son’s supposed homosexual inclinations, and had ended with Aldo disclosing in a loud voice that he had read a letter from Manlio’s lover, a young man named Andrea. It had been at this point that Manlio had stormed out of the gathering, not to be seen again until after the discovery of his father’s body.
The Faiganos’ improvised stall was tended by a teenage girl perched on a stool reading a pop music magazine. She looked up with a bored expression as Zen approached.
‘Good morning, signorina.’
She flashed him a dazzling smile which revealed the embryonic beauty that would soon remake her pasty adolescence.
‘Is it possible to speak to either of the brothers?’ asked Zen. ‘It’s a business matter.’
The girl pointed in an over-emphatic manner almost certainly copied unconsciously from one of her teachers.
‘They’re in the bar over there. The one across from the town hall.’
Zen thanked her and threaded his way through the crowds to the corner of the Via Vittorio Emanuele, which Tullio Legna had referred to as Via Maestra. In a similarly confusing touch, the cathedral square was officially billed as Piazza Risorgimento. The original designations would have been officially changed during the era of reunification — Zen could imagine the ceremony, complete with brass bands playing selections from Verdi — in a fit of patriotic fervour and keeping-up-with-the-rest-of-the-country, but now the ancient names were showing through the scrofulous paint of those discredited ideals.
The bar which the girl had pointed out to Zen was crowded with elderly men whose worn, wary faces and heavy-duty clothing contrasted sharply with those of the townspeople. The air was thick with rumbling dialect and cigarette smoke. Zen told the barman he was looking for someone called Faigano. The latter in turn consulted a group of men standing at the counter, one of whom nodded mutely towards a trio playing cards at a table in the corner. Zen made his way through the throng.
‘Signor Faigano?’
Two of the men looked up simultaneously.
‘Yes?’ one of them replied warily.
Zen took a card out of his wallet and placed it on the table. It was one of those he had had printed during his stay in Naples, identifying him as one Alfonso Zembla.
‘Excuse me for interrupting, but I wonder if you could spare a few minutes. I’m a reporter for the Mattino, the most important paper in Naples, and I’m working on a story about the Vincenzo case. I’ve got the basic facts, of course, but I need some colour and comment to round it out…’
The man sitting immediately beneath Zen picked up the card.
‘Naples, eh?’ he said.
‘You know it?’ asked Zen.
The man laughed shortly.
‘The furthest south I’ve ever been was Genoa, and that was back in the war…’
The third man at the table, who had not responded to Zen’s initial greeting, started to whistle a short, melodious refrain. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up.
‘Time I was off,’ he announced to no one in particular.
‘All right, Minot,’ said the other man, who had not spoken yet.
He, too, stood up, stretching lazily.
‘I’d better go back and give Lisa a hand with the stall,’ he said through a forced yawn.
‘Take care, Maurizio,’ said the first man.
‘You too.’
‘May I?’ asked Zen, sitting down in one of the chairs thus vacated.
The remaining man held out his hand.
‘Gianni Faigano. It’s an honour to meet you, Dottor Zembla, but to be perfectly honest I don’t know how much help I can give. I’m just a simple man, and I don’t read the papers. To tell you the truth, I can hardly read at all. My brother Maurizio, he’s the smart one. He does all the paperwork, but he doesn’t like to talk. So there you are! We make a good team.’
‘So can we,’ suggested Zen, with just the suspicion of a wink. ‘You do the talking and I’ll take care of the paperwork.’
Gianni Faigano shrugged.
‘Why me, dottore? Look at all the people in here, and out there at the market. Any of them could have told you what you want to know. Yet you chose me. Why?’
‘I’d heard the name.’
‘Where?’
Various possibilities presented themselves to Zen’s mind, and he decided instinctively to go for the riskiest. What had he to lose, after all?
‘Someone told me that it was you and your brother who did it.’
There was a long, intense silence.
‘Did what?’ demanded Gianni Faigano.
‘Killed Aldo Vincenzo.’
Faigano inclined his head and laughed with what seemed like genuine amusement.
‘Now who told you that, dottore?’
