than clippers to trim his nails, but you’d spotted that, of course!’
Zen handed the object back to Lucchese.
‘Kindly send Minot in here,’ he said.
Borrowing the tactics once used by Mussolini at his desk in the ex-Venetian embassy in Rome, Zen forced Minot to traverse the long distance from the door, hat in hand, before deigning to acknowledge his existence with an imperious glare.
‘ E allora? ’ he barked, once Minot had come to rest before him. ‘A fingernail. So what?’
Minot smiled.
‘So whose, you mean.’
Zen stared up at him from the cane chair which Lucchese had occupied earlier.
‘Look, Minot, I know you’re an unsophisticated fellow, but evidence is only admissible in law if there’s an unbroken sequence of links — each duly witnessed and notarized — leading back to the scene of the crime. Some broken fingernail, whatever its provenance, is of no more use to me than that button we were talking about earlier.’
Having brushed the seat of his trousers in a perfunctory way, Minot perched on the edge of the embroidered sofa and leant forward. Despite that symbolic gesture towards the prince’s furnishings, he did not seem overawed by his surroundings, still less by Zen’s presence.
‘Let me make an admission, dottore,’ he whispered in a voice which was barely audible even to Zen.
‘Get on with it!’
Minot looked from one side of the space to the other, as if checking that they were alone. Satisfied, he leant still closer to Zen.
‘Aldo’s body wasn’t discovered by that police dog, as everyone thinks.’
Zen stared at him.
‘It was discovered by me,’ Minot went on. ‘I was trespassing on the Vincenzo’s property the morning after the festa, after some truffles I thought might be hiding in a bank at one end of the vineyard. Instead, I found Aldo.’
He made a large gesture.
‘Imagine how it feels, coming on something like that with no warning, and with the mist so thick you can barely see where you’re going! At that moment I became a child again.’
‘How do you mean?’
Minot looked at him.
‘Children notice what’s close to them, what’s near enough to touch and hug and hold. That’s what I did then. I looked at the earth at my feet, so as not to have to look at that obscene apparition! There was something glinting there, as the light caught it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket as a kind of talisman against the horror.’
He leant back and raised his voice to a normal level.
‘A couple of days later I was over at the Faigano house, helping them with some work, and I noticed that Gianni was missing a fingernail from the index of his right hand. I thought no more about it at the time, but later I remembered the thing I’d found beside Aldo’s body, and realized that it was a fingernail. A fingernail with blood on it.’
Zen shrugged.
‘If you tear a nail, it bleeds.’
‘But the blood on this nail is on the outside, too, dottore. What if it’s not Gianni’s?’
The two men confronted each other in silence.
‘I can’t proceed on the basis of your word, Minot.’
‘Of course not. But you have ways of finding out the truth about these things. You did it with the knife they found at Beppe’s house. You can do it with the evidence I’m offering. I’m just telling you in advance that what you’ll find is that the nail is Gianni’s and the blood Aldo’s.’
Zen looked at him with a curious, glazed expression.
‘So they did it?’ he asked.
Minot laughed apologetically, as though not wanting to offend the outsider who had only now realized the self-evident truth.
‘Of course! Everyone knows that.’
Aurelio Zen had already entered the revolving door of the Alba Palace Hotel when he noticed Carla Arduini slipping into a compartment on the other side, going out. He glanced at her, and she at him, and he gestured furiously, pushing the door around so hard that he found himself back outside again before he could stop. Carla had also made the complete circuit, no doubt assuming that he would have exited, so the situation ended as it had begun — her inside, him out, and the door still between them. Zen held up his hand, indicating that she should stay where she was, and then plunged back into the roundabout.
‘Carla!’ he exclaimed awkwardly, when they were finally face to face.
‘I was just on my way to mass. I haven’t been for ages, but the cathedral is supposed to be very beautiful, and…’
‘Meet me afterwards, in the bar immediately to the left as you leave the church,’ Zen instructed her, as though giving operational instructions to a subordinate. ‘I have something to tell you.’
Carla inspected his expression for a moment, with what results remained unclear.
‘Very well. In about an hour, then.’
She strode off into the lively, impersonal bustle of the streets, and Zen went up to his room. He had felt the need for a break before resuming his interrogation of the Faigano brothers, but it had never occurred to him that he would meet Carla Arduini. The news he was going to have to break to her lodged in his chest like the silver spike with which Lucchese had punctured his late cousin’s heart.
Zen showered, shaved and changed into clean clothes, then hastened back outside. The debilitated sunlight had finally broken through the clouds, and although the air was crisp and cool the scene might have suggested summer but for the deep shadows which trenched the street, revealing the fraud. Zen wandered through the purposeful crowds, deferring to their sense of urgency and competence. They all looked as though they knew exactly where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there. By contrast, Zen felt as insubstantial as a somnambulist.
When he reached the bar, there were still fifteen minutes or so left before Carla emerged from the cathedral. Fifteen minutes for him to decide how to express himself, how to phrase the announcement that would put an end to all her hopes. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news…’ No, that sounded like a policeman addressing the nearest and dearest of the deceased. ‘The results of the blood tests we had done yesterday prove conclusively that…’ Too bureaucratic. ‘I would have been proud to have you as a daughter, but unfortunately…’ Patronizing bastard!
His cappuccino cooled and subsided into an unappetizing beige puddle on the counter before him, untouched. Seemingly offended, the barman asked if there was something wrong with it. Zen just shook his head. The next thing he knew, the bells of the cathedral had begun their pagan clamour and the faithful were emerging, blinking, into the sunlight of the piazza. A head taller than the rest of the predominantly menopausal worshippers, Carla was easy to spot.
‘How was it?’ he asked mindlessly, as she took a place beside him at the bar.
‘It was the mass,’ she replied. ‘What did you expect?’
She ordered an orange soda from the barman and turned to Zen with an unsympathetic eye.
‘Well?’ she enquired pointedly.
‘What? Oh, well, it’s nothing really. It’s just…’
He broke off.
‘You see, I’m investigating the Vincenzo case, as you know, and… Well, it’s beginning to look as though an arrest is imminent. Probably two, in fact. They’re local and have a teenage daughter who lives with them. The press has gone quiet about the case recently, for lack of new developments, but when this gets out, they’re going to be back in force. I don’t want the girl to be hounded, but there’s nothing I can do officially. So I was just wondering whether by any chance you might know someone in Turin who has a spare room where she could hide out.’
‘For how long?’
‘Just a few days, a week at most. Until the media lose interest again. It won’t take long.’
Carla Arduini finished her drink and set the glass down with a decisive clack.
