had understood until the village pharmacist had explained over cards the next day that it meant passing someone else’s work off as your own.
That’s what had happened now, and it hurt as bad as any plague sore. It was he, Minot chit, who had done the work and taken the risks, and here was Gianni Faigano insolently muscling in to claim the credit! Of course the end result was the same, in a sense, but it didn’t feel the same. Minot had expected the Faigano brothers to deny everything indignantly, as befitted the innocent men they were. Then the results of the tests would come back, the scientific analysis of Gianni’s fingernail which Minot had dipped into that jar filled with Aldo’s gore. They would never be able to talk their way out of that!
But to his dismay, they hadn’t even tried to. Instead, Gianni Faigano had freely confessed to killing Aldo Vincenzo in revenge for the outrage he had visited upon Chiara Cravioli so long ago. What a heap of shit! Gianni had never had the balls to take on Aldo, and he damn well knew it. He also knew what everyone else in the village knew, or at least suspected — that although the teenage Chiara might have fancied herself in love with Gianni in a misty, moon-struck adolescent way, she had been genuinely swept off her feet by Aldo, who was twice the man Gianni would ever be.
The truth of it was that what she had felt for Gianni was not love but pity, or at best a cloying sort of companionship. ‘Gianni is the best girlfriend Chiara ever had,’ Aldo had sarcastically remarked apropos of his wife’s clandestine visits to the Faigano house. But now Gianni had indeed taken his revenge, not on Aldo but on the whole community. With one deft stroke he had rewritten history, casting himself as the romantic hero who bided his time patiently for years, obedient to his beloved’s wishes, and then exacted a terrible price the moment she was in the grave. What a figure to cut! True, he would be condemned and sentenced to life, but everyone would secretly murmur, ‘What a man!’ in admiring tones. Women would write to him in prison, and the media would tut-tut over the murder while gleefully celebrating the fact that the great days of chivalry were not dead after all.
Even if Minot were to come forward and confess — not that there was any prospect of that! — he would not be believed. People wanted a story, and unlike Gianni he could not offer that. They wouldn’t want to hear the truth, that on his annual pilgrimage ‘to lay flowers on Angelin’s tomb’ and clean out the unsuspected truffle bed he had found, Minot had been surprised by Aldo Vincenzo, who could not sleep and had come out to check on the progress of this problematic harvest.
They certainly wouldn’t believe, and for that matter Minot could never explain, why this chance encounter had led to death. Planning and executing Beppe’s killing had been a new experience for Minot, the exception to his proven rule: to follow his instincts. He had done so with Angelin, and, before that, with Minot gross up on the roof. He had done the same with Bruno Scorrone that afternoon at the winery, and with Aldo. Something in Vincenzo’s swaggering, contemptuous manner had been the trigger. Without even thinking, Minot had responded with a single blow from the zappetto he carried to excavate for truffles. It had caught Vincenzo high up on the forehead, a nasty blow which had laid him on his hands and knees, dazed and bloody.
Even then, he might have gone no further. But the consequences of stopping now seemed worse than those of continuing, so he’d taken out his knife. When Aldo saw that, he had spat out a word which proved to be his last, a dialect term so grossly insulting, and unfair, that subsequent events took on the momentum of a dislodged boulder rolling downhill. When it finally came to rest, Minot’s brain kicked in again. As a rule he preferred to make his killings look accidental, but that was not possible here. So he decided to go to the other extreme.
Remembering the angry scene between Aldo and his son at the festa the night before, he had dragged the gutted, blood-drenched corpse over to the vines and lashed the wrists to the wire supports. Then he bent down and added one last touch, something so macabre that no one would ever believe that this was anything other than a coldly premeditated act of personal revenge.
His first thought had been to stuff the severed genitals into Aldo’s mouth, the way they used to with informers during the war. But something restrained him, some sixth sense that possession of these glaringly absent items might enable him to tip the balance at some time in the future, should he ever come under suspicion. So he’d taken out the jar he’d brought to collect truffles in and scooped the slop in there instead.
And once again his instincts had not betrayed him. He’d got away with it, more completely than he could ever have imagined. His feelings of anger about Gianni’s false confession were completely irrational. What did it matter, after all? If Faigano was so keen to act the great lover that he was prepared to accept a wrongful conviction for murder, let him rot in prison.
All around, the rats were out, speedy, furtive presences swarming in the shadows at the corners of the room, some bolder individual occasionally darting diagonally from one patch of imagined refuge to another. There was no refuge, of course. With a couple of blasts of his shotgun Minot could have turned the room into a bloodbath. He could do that any time he wanted, which was why he had no interest in doing so. Minot was above the rats, in the scheme of things. Nothing they did could threaten him, and his generosity or patronage was entirely at his own discretion. He could exterminate them any time he wanted, so he let them live.
Which reminded him that it was time for their feed, if not for his. Then off to Alba, maybe stopping at Lamberto Latini’s restaurant to see what sort of price he could get there. He got to his feet, creating a brief scuffle among the more impressionable members of the pack, and went back into the kitchen to fetch some bread.
When he returned, the rats had taken over the entire floor, scurrying this way and that, looking up at him as expectantly as dogs. Minot broke the bread into irregular crusts and tossed them out like fireworks. The rats went crazy. Fights broke out, blood was drawn, and a chorus of shrill squeals scored the silence like nails on a blackboard. Minot laughed and cut more bread, flinging each piece into a different corner of the room so that the rats surged forward like a wave that lapped and broke over the morsel which instantly disappeared down the throat of some animal quicker or more aggressive than the rest. Given enough time and patience, you could tame anything, thought Minot with a flicker of contempt. Anything except him, that was. He could not be tamed, and those who had dared to try had paid the price.
It was time to go. Minot put on his coat and reached for the jar filled with truffles. Then he noticed the other, identical jar. Thank God he hadn’t gone out leaving that sitting there on the counter in plain view! With a reputation for shady wine transactions such as he had, even transporting and disposing of it in the wild was a risk. Suppose he got stopped by some officious police patrolman who insisted on searching the truck?
Maybe it would be best just to bury it in his vegetable garden. He could do that unobtrusively enough, then rinse out the bottle and reuse it. Waste not, want not. It was a question of how far gone the contents were. If they’d started to decompose seriously, he’d have all the village dogs round there, scratching and sniffing. The neighbours might get curious.
Minot unscrewed the lid cautiously. The smell was definitely on the high side, but not unbearably so. On the surface floated a small grey pouch of flesh which he realized with a shock was Aldo Vincenzo’s penis. He smiled wryly, thinking of the power that organ had once wielded, of the pain and damage it had wrought. It had transferred the Cravioli estate to the Vincenzo family and made a hollow, self-pitying mockery of Gianni Faigano’s life. Look at it now!
It was at this moment that Minot felt a delicate shiver at his wrist, and looked down to see a rat sniffing at the open jar. Immediately some atavistic trigger was thrown. The rats were welcome to his bread, even some stale cheese or ham on occasion. When it came to human flesh things changed. Without the slightest reflection, Minot lashed out at the beast with his left hand, knocking it on to its back. It lay there, its pale furry stomach exposed and feet wiggling, as if astonished at this unwonted aggression. With a snort of disgust, Minot smashed his fist down on top of it.
But the rat was no longer there. With an astonishing spiral leap, it twisted up and around and sank its incisors into Minot’s hand. He yelled and lashed out with his other hand, knocking over the glass jar, which shattered on the floor. The rat had already vanished, along with all its fellows.
Minot inspected the wound. It looked insignificant, just a couple of punctures below the thumb. The real problem was the incriminating mess on the floor. With a heavy sigh, he set about cleaning it up, scooping the solid items on to an old newspaper and mopping the blood into a pail. He did his best, but in the event it wasn’t good enough to escape detection by the forensic team which arrived a week later. Aldo’s blood had not only coated the tiles but seeped into the cracks and crevices in the grout between them, from which it was laboriously removed, analysed and identified. Soon afterwards, police dogs discovered the shallow pit where Minot had hurriedly buried the whole mess. The case against Gianni Faigano collapsed and, protesting his guilt to the last, he was released.
But that was all in the future. Having completed his clean-up, Minot drove off to dispose of his truffles, which
