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.
‘God rest him, Beppe’s dead,’ was the reply. ‘If you want to pay market prices, drive into town. If you want home delivery, this is the going rate.’
They paid, all but one, and Minot made his way home a hundred thousand lire nearer to being able to buy Anna from Beppe’s sons and heirs. They lived in the city, and not only were they uninterested in owning a truffle hound but they seemed blissfully ignorant of the animal’s real value. For the meantime Minot had kindly offered to take care of the bitch, and, needless to say, was putting her to good use, although he kept her in a shed outside the house because of the rats.
The rats had made their appearance some years earlier: a brief incursion here, a nocturnal raid there, some grain missing from the supply Minot fed his chickens, a few chewed sacks of seed, and lots of hard, black droppings. Minot had already tried setting Anna on them once, one night when Beppe had to go to Turin for his younger son’s wedding and had let Minot borrow her in accordance with their long-standing arrangement. But Anna had been bred to sniff out truffles, and showed no interest in taking on an army of rodents.
After that, Minot had resorted to the poison and traps, as well as ambushing them one night and shooting a dozen or so. He had even hacked one youngster in half with a shovel in his fury. But they kept coming, until one day — he still wasn’t sure why — he had set out some stale bread he had no further use for, unbaited this time. In the morning, it was gone. That evening he put down some more, together with a saucer of diluted milk.
From that moment on, the attacks on his stores of seed and grain gradually diminished, then ceased altogether. It was as if he and the rats had arrived at an arrangement. Minot did not reveal this to anyone else, of course. People already thought that he was a little eccentric. If they learned that he was feeding rats, it would merely confirm their prejudices. But Minot couldn’t see why rats had any less right to live than several humans he could think of, always providing that they respected him and his property, of course. After all, they only wanted to survive, like everything else. Was that too much to ask?
It was some months before his dependants risked appearing in person before their benefactor, and, when they did, it was at first the merest glimpse caught out of the corner of the eye, a flurry in the shadows at the edge of the room, the flick of a long thin tail abruptly withdrawn. Perhaps some folk-memory of the shotgun blasts which had decimated the pack still remained, or the squeals of the baby which Minot had cut in two with his spade.
But at length these faded, too, mere myths and old wives’ tales that no one took seriously any more. The younger generation knew nothing of this house beyond the food and drink they found there every night. That was real enough; the rest just stories. So out they came, snouts twitching, red eyes alert, tails stirring like autonomous life-forms parasitic upon these parasites. Minot sat on the sofa and watched them take the nightly offering he had put down. From time to time they glanced up at him in ways he might, had he been inclined to sentimentality, have interpreted as gratitude. But Minot was a realist, and knew exactly the extent of the interest which the rats took in him. He liked it that way. Cupboard love was the one kind you could depend on.
By now he fed his pets morning and evening, and they knew him well enough to venture up on to the sofa where he sat, even to the extent of perching on his legs and shoulders. He allowed them to scamper inquisitively about, squinting up at him and scenting the air, their whiskers keenly quivering, until he heard a car draw near and then pull up outside. With a brisk slap of his palms, he dismissed his familiars, stuffed the money which the truffles had brought him under the cushions of the sofa, and went to investigate.
The vehicle parked outside turned out to be a Carabinieri jeep. Out of it, squeezed into his uniform like a sausage in its casing, stepped Enrico Pascal.
‘ Marescia,’ said Minot.
Pascal winced.
‘My piles are killing me,’ he announced with an air of satisfaction, if not pride.
‘You spend too much time sitting at a desk!’ Minot returned. ‘Look at me. I’m out and about all day and half the night, and the old sphincter’s still as tight as a drum.’
Pascal shook his head.
‘The doctor says it runs in the family. Can I come in?’
Minot waved his hand carelessly. Enrico Pascal walked past him and stopped, surveying the floor in the room within.
‘Looks like you’ve got rats,’ he remarked, studying the droppings scattered about.
‘Eh, it’s hard to keep them out! Care for a glass of something?’
The maresciallo grimaced.
‘Maybe a splash, just to keep my edge.’
Minot nodded. The customs of the country dictated the consumption of a series of glasses of wine throughout the day, ‘just to keep an edge’. One was never drunk, it went without saying, but never entirely sober either.
With his curiously feminine gait, Minot stepped over to the ancient refrigerator in the corner and pulled out an unlabelled bottle of the white wine named Favorita, a grape native to the area since the dawn of time and still cultivated by a few producers for private consumption.
‘Even worse than mine,’ commented Enrico Pascal, surveying the cluttered interior of the fridge. ‘I always assumed the wife was doing it on purpose, to make me lose weight. “You could make a fortune selling this as a miracle diet,” I told her. “One look and your appetite disappears for hours.” What’s this, then?’
He pointed to a glass jar filled with some dark red liquid in which bits of meat were floating.
‘Hare,’ Minot replied, handing Pascal his wine. ‘Shot it just the other day. Do you like hare?’
Pascal did not reply. He tossed off his wine and returned to the centre of the room, where he stood looking around in a lordly way. Minot resumed his seat on the sofa. There was a silence which persisted for some time.
‘Saturday morning about six…’ Pascal began at length, and then broke off.
‘Yes?’
Enrico Pascal sighed deeply.
‘Where were you?’
Minot reflected a moment.
‘Out,’ he replied.
‘Out where?’
‘After truffles.’
With another wince, the maresciallo sank into a chair to Minot’s right, his back to the bleary light from the one window.
‘Yes, but where?’
Minot smiled cunningly.
‘Ah, you can’t expect me to answer that!’
‘I’m investigating the death of Beppe Gallizio. I expect full cooperation from every member of the public.’
The two men exchanged a glance.
‘It was over Neviglie way,’ Minot replied. ‘A likely looking spot I noticed a couple of weeks ago on the way back from making a delivery.’
Pascal considered this for a moment.
‘But Beppe had taken Anna out that night,’ he said. ‘And you don’t own a hound of your own, Minot.’
Instead of answering, Minot got up and went out to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of wine.
‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded, returning to the other room.
Enrico Pascal shifted painfully from one buttock to the other.
‘At first, you see, we assumed that Beppe had killed himself,’ he announced discursively. ‘We may still come to that conclusion in the end. But in the meantime there are a few things which are bothering us.’
Minot took a swig of wine, leaning against the mantelpiece above the cold grate.
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, there’s the gun, for instance. It’s Beppe’s all right, it was lying there beside the body and the only
