‘It’s excellent.’
‘We don’t mess around with our wine,’ Gianni Faigano said solemnly. ‘We don’t make any money off it either. Some people might say that there’s a connection.’
‘But plenty of people around here do make money from their wine,’ Zen pointed out. ‘Aldo Vincenzo, for one. Did he mess around with his wine?’
Faigano shook his head decisively.
‘No, no! The top producers don’t need to. They can make their wine the same way I make mine, using the traditional methods and not cutting any corners, and then charge whatever they want. But that end of the market is very small and very crowded. The rest of us have to try to make a living further down. Most of us manage to get by, but others do rather better. Very much better, in a few cases.’
‘And what has this got to do with the Vincenzo case?’
Once again, Gianni Faigano leant forward conspiratorially across the table.
‘The Carabinieri are questioning Lamberto Latini about the death of Beppe Gallizio,’ he whispered. ‘What they don’t know is that Latini wasn’t the only person at Beppe’s house that morning.’
Zen allowed his eyes to open wide.
‘Who was the other?’
Faigano returned to eating his meal with the air of someone who has now earned it.
‘A little while ago,’ he said conversationally, ‘Aldo Vincenzo was implicated in a case involving the export of wine which had been falsely labelled.’
‘There’s money to be made in that?’
Faigano shrugged.
‘Wine’s not heroin. But buying generic Nebbiolo at a few hundred lire a litre, and then selling it as Barbaresco Riserva Denominazione di Origine Controllata at fifty to a hundred thousand a bottle? I’d say there was money to be made.’
Zen paused to swallow a morsel of the succulent hare stew.
‘But why would Aldo Vincenzo risk his reputation by getting involved in something like that?’
‘Because he was greedy!’
For the first time, Faigano showed some sign of personal feeling. He leant still nearer to Zen, his voice a fervent undertone and his stubby, gnarled fingers stabbing the table to emphasize every point.
‘He was one of the richest men in the area, with most of the best land. But he always wanted more. More money, more land, more power, more of everything! And he didn’t care what he had to do to get it. He tried to get that son of his to rape my niece so that the Vincenzo family would get its hands on our property when Maurizio and I died! What do you say to that?’
Zen took another sip of wine.
‘I’d say that it made you a suspect in his death, Signor Faigano.’
Gianni laughed.
‘Ah, but if I’d really done it, I wouldn’t have told you that, would I?’
Zen said nothing.
‘Anyway, the authorities claim that Aldo and another local producer were involved in a scheme to sell several thousand cases of falsely labelled wine,’ Faigano went on. ‘Apparently they’d bought off the local authorities, but when the shipment of bogus Barolo was seized in Germany, there was nothing they could do.’
Zen took out his notebook.
‘Who was the other man?’
Gianni Faigano paused a moment.
‘It’s all on record anyway, so there’s no harm in telling you. His name is Bruno Scorrone, and he runs a winery near Palazzuole. He buys in grapes from local growers, on a lowest-price-per-kilo basis. Sometimes wine, too, when there’s a glut or someone needs some cash fast. I’ve heard some people say he trucks in wine from down south, too, and uses it for blending, but that may just be malicious gossip.’
He grinned at Zen.
‘There’s a lot of that around here.’
‘I still don’t see how Aldo Vincenzo comes into all this.’
Gianni Faigano sighed expressively.
‘To sell wine as Barbaresco, you have to be able to show provenance from land in a DOC zone. Scorrone doesn’t own any such land, but the Vincenzo family do.’
‘But surely they use it to make their own wine.’
‘Ah, but here’s the trick! With controlled zones, there’s a maximum permitted yield — so many grapes to so much ground. Understand?’
Zen nodded.
‘But the best grapes are always the fewest. The flavour is denser and more concentrated, and so is the wine. Only the top growers can afford to prune their vines that hard, to keep their yields down and reject any grapes that don’t come up to scratch. Men like Aldo Vincenzo, whose wines command the highest prices. That leaves a gap between what they actually produce and the permissible regulated limit, wine which was never actually made but which would have been entitled to call itself Barbaresco if it had. It was that ghost wine that Bruno Scorrone was selling abroad.’
Zen shook his head.
‘All right, let’s assume that Vincenzo and this Scorrone were involved in a contraband wine racket. Why should Scorrone have killed him?’
Faigano pushed away his plate.
‘You asked what people are saying, dottore. I’m telling you. They’re saying that Aldo Vincenzo was killed just a few weeks before he was due to present himself before a judge in Asti to explain why certificates of origin made out in his name had been attached to a consignment of the cheapest vino sfuso. They’re saying that it will be much easier now for Bruno Scorrone to argue that he bought the wine in good faith from a renowned grower of the region. How was he to know it was contraband? If Aldo Vincenzo said it was Barbaresco, that was good enough for him!’
He paused significantly and looked around once again.
‘They’re also saying that Scorrone was seen driving up to Beppe Gallizio’s house the morning he was killed.’
Zen finished his wine as the waiter removed their plates.
‘So you believe Scorrone did it?’
Gianni Faigano smiled strangely.
‘I don’t believe anything any more, dottore. For me, the world stopped making sense a long time ago. But people around here have long memories. It’s all we do have left, some of us. Who knows? Maybe someone had waited years and years before taking revenge for something Aldo thought forgotten, or had even forgotten himself?’
He straightened up as the waiter returned with the cheese tray.
‘But that needn’t concern you!’ Faigano remarked loudly in a jocular tone. ‘If you were a policeman, now, I wouldn’t envy you the task of trying to solve this case. But as it is, you’ve got your story and can go home to Naples without bothering your head about it any more. Right, dottore?’
‘Mombaruzzo, bubbio coazzolo. Sommariva fello fontanile?’
The voice was distant yet loud, reverberant and insistent, with a hectoring tone covering an under-current of desperate pleading. It was absolutely essential that he understand! A matter, quite literally, of life and death.
‘La morra cravanzana neviglie perletto bene vagienna. Serralunga doglani cossano il bric belbo moglia d’inverno!’
But try as he might, nothing made sense. And the fact that it so nearly did just made matters worse, as if he were at fault. Perhaps if he got closer to the speaker he would be able to hear more clearly and do whatever was expected of him. Stumbling forward in the darkness, he moved in the direction from which the voice seemed to be coming.
‘Barbaresco! Santa Maria Maddalena, trezzo tinella?’
In the end, it was his own cry of pain that woke him. This was real in a different way. And — agonizingly, but
