‘No visible injuries apart from some superficial lesions to the thorax… Probably gouged himself on some metal edge on the way in… Massive loss of blood pre-mortem, though, and visible traumas don’t account for same… Now let’s have a look inside… God, look at this subcutaneous fat… Just hack through the costal cartilage and whip out the… Forgotten how easy all this is… That’s odd… No trace of wine in the lungs, but he must have sucked some in unless… Heart attack before he hit the surface, perhaps… Let’s take another look at that neck… Ah… Well, now, that’s interesting…’
The doctor and his two assistants left the room, returning in due course as one person. Confronted by this miracle, Zen emerged from his wake with a sense of panic.
‘What? Who? When?’ he spluttered, leaping to his feet.
‘Probable homicide, person or persons unknown, at or about the stated time of death,’ Lucchese replied succinctly, wiping his blood-stained instruments on a filthy rag.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure that he was dead when he went into the wine vat. And I’m almost sure that it was not a natural death. That lesion in his neck is a lot deeper than it looks. The artery is severed, and there are small fragments of broken glass embedded in the surrounding flesh.’
‘And you’ll testify to that?’
Lucchese looked at him haughtily.
‘Of course not. I haven’t been invited to examine the cadaver, and therefore no such examination has taken place. I’m merely performing the last secular rites for my cousin, according to a long-standing tradition in our family. Speaking of which, I suppose I’d better do the damned thing, just in case anyone checks.’
He took the silver spike and set it down on the dead man’s chest, then lifted the mallet. There were a number of dull-sounding blows, the last accompanied by a guttural grunt from Lucchese. Feeling nauseous, Zen went back outside. The cloud had burned off and the sun shone softly in a flawless azure sky.
‘The priest is here!’ a woman said excitedly. ‘Can we proceed?’
‘Out of the question,’ a voice proceeding from Zen’s throat pronounced. ‘It is my sad duty to inform you that your late relative’s body is evidence in a criminal case.’
Cries of astonishment burst out all around. The door of the house banged shut and Lucchese emerged, clutching his black bag.
‘This man,’ Zen continued, pointing to him, ‘has been apprehened mutilating a corpse in direct contravention of section 1092 paragraph 3A of the Criminal Code. He is now under arrest, and the said corpse is material evidence in the case. This house and its contents are therefore sealed and under my direct and personal jurisdiction. No one can enter and nothing can be removed until further notice.’
‘But the funeral!’ an elderly woman exclaimed. ‘It’s all arranged!’
‘I regret that it will have to be rearranged. The law is the law, and I’m here to uphold it.’
‘Me, too,’ said a voice behind him.
Turning, Zen found himself face to face with a plump, stolid man in a dark grey suit.
‘Enrico Pascal, maresciallo dei Carabinieri,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, dottore, but I’m not familiar with the article of the code you just cited.’
‘Of course not. I just made it up.’
The Carabinieri officer stared at him.
‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘Yes.’
It was only now that he was sure of this. He must definitely have gone out of his mind, because night seemed to be falling. It was not yet dark, but the light had been gutted and thinned down to a tenuous essence with no more substance than moonshine. Luckily no one was paying any attention to him. They were all looking up at the sky, many of them holding up wafers of plastic like a priest displaying the host. Occasional cries and exclamations broke the silence. Narrowing his eyes to a squint, Zen tried to look at the sun. Its hazy outline eluded him, but it seemed damaged.
‘Look through this,’ said a voice he recognized as Irena’s.
A piece of blank photographic negative was pressed into his hand. He raised it to his eyes and beheld in sudden terror the pallid disc of the sun occluded on one side, as though by a huge wing.
‘You were blinded by the light,’ said the voice.
At once fascinated and appalled by the spectacle unfolding in the skies, Zen did not turn for some time. When he did, Irena was nowhere to be seen. The landscape still had a ghostly pallor, but the eclipse had passed its peak and the light was gradually recovering its former vitality. The Carabinieri official materialized at Zen’s side.
‘That’s a nasty-looking cut you’ve got there, dottore,’ he said. ‘Quite fresh, too, by the look of it.’
He pointed down the hill, where the Bugatti could just be seen turning on to the road back to Alba.
‘It seems that your suspect in this alleged crime has escaped.’
Zen looked Pascal in the eye.
‘You must think I’m mad.’
The maresciallo made a puffing noise and performed a full-body shrug, indicating that he wouldn’t hold a little thing like madness against a colleague.
‘But there’s actually a good reason for this farce,’ Zen went on. ‘I have preliminary evidence leading me to believe that Bruno Scorrone was murdered. A full autopsy will prove that, and this gives us a pretext for ordering one. Can you call one of your men out here to guard the corpse until the ambulance arrives? Meanwhile I’d like to have a chat with you in private.’
Pascal returned his stare for a moment.
‘Well, this will set people’s tongues wagging!’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll play along. But you’d better be right about this, dottore. If it turns out that this really is a farce, I won’t be able to show my face in public again.’
While the maresciallo strode off to find a phone, Zen did some preliminary damage assessment. By now the light had almost completely recovered, and with it his grasp of the situation. He anxiously reviewed what he could remember doing and saying during his own partial eclipse. Most of it seemed acceptable, given the circumstances, although no doubt disconcertingly erratic to those who had not abused the substance in question. But there was one aspect that he felt less confident about, something he had now forgotten but which he could sense lurking at the fringes of his consciousness like a stage villain concealed behind a curtain.
‘ Buon giorno, dottore.’
Andrea Rodriguez was wearing a black suit whose cut and fabric suggested board meetings and power lunches rather than funerals.
‘Manlio insisted that I come and greet you,’ she continued in her laboured but correct Italian. ‘This is his coming-out party, you see, and he’s nervous about his reception. “They’ll never forgive me if I don’t go,” he said, “and if I do, they’ll cut me dead.”’
She nodded towards a knot of men standing in the centre of the courtyard.
‘He was wrong, I’m glad to say. But he thought that being seen fraternizing with you might be pushing his luck, so he sent me instead. Most of these people have rearranged their schedules specially in order to be here, you see, and then you burst in and cancel the whole event on some specious pretext. You’re not very popular with the locals just now, I’m afraid.’
Zen conceded the point with a nod.
‘Neither am I,’ Andrea Rodriguez added. ‘It’s not easy being a foreigner here, particularly when everyone expected you to be a man.’
The ironies of the situation had been borne in on Zen the day before, after their introduction at the Vincenzo house. In Italian, Andrea is a man’s name; in English, he had learned, a woman’s. When Aldo Vincenzo had read a letter addressed to his son and signed ‘Andrea’, he had drawn the seemingly obvious conclusion: the real reason why Manlio refused to entertain his suggestion of forcing a marriage with Lisa Faigano was that he had ‘come out’ during his stay in California.
Although undeniably Californian, Andrea was not only female but of Italian descent on her mother’s side, her father stemming from one of the presettlement Spanish families. Manlio had been so insulted by his father’s intransigent attitude that he had refused to explain.
‘Why should I deign to correct someone who assumed he already understood everything?’ he had demanded rhetorically. ‘In the end, I assumed, the truth would come out and I would be vindicated. Instead, my father died as
