‘Oh, really?’ asked Maurizio with a sarcastic edge. ‘Have you got a valid licence to gather truffles? And what about receipts for all your transactions, showing that sales tax was duly paid? All of which income you will, of course, have declared on your…’
‘What the hell’s that got to do with it? There’s a lot of stuff I could tell the cops about you two, for that matter.’
Gianni Faigano nodded earnestly.
‘That’s the whole point. We’re all in this together, like during the war.’
‘Except during the war you knew which side everyone was on. And we knew what we were fighting for.’
‘For our country, right? For our beliefs. Well, now we’re fighting for our community.’
Maurizio sighed.
‘A community in which someone stabbed an old man to death and cut off his cock and balls.’
Unexpectedly, Minot laughed, a tearing peal of hilarity with a slightly intoxicated edge.
‘That son of a bitch! If he’d known how he would end up…’
Gianni nodded.
‘But the fact remains that whoever did it is living right here amongst us.’
‘Right here in the village,’ Maurizio chipped in, ‘where I’ve yet to hear a single person speak a sincere word of regret for the victim.’
‘It’s us against them,’ said Gianni. ‘What’s done is done. It’s time to get on with our lives.’
Minot gave a series of earnest nods.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s just like the war.’
Gianni smiled.
‘It’s like the war all over again. And we know who the enemy is.’
With trembling fingers, Aurelio Zen unwrapped the medicinal potion from its layers of packaging, each as thin and transparent as tissue paper. A tight rain beat against the windows, while the hard wind behind it exploited every crack and weakness in the hotel’s ageing structure, seeping through the shutters and curtains to manifest itself as an intangible but ubiquitous presence in the room. The ancient cast-iron concertina of the radiator gurgled and spluttered and hissed, impotent against such virulently intrusive malevolence.
The phone again rang several times, just as it had earlier, breaking off with the same stifled cheep. Ignoring it, Zen worked patiently to free another clove of garlic from its enclosing membranes with the blade of his pocket- knife. The bulb had yielded eleven cloves in all. A few of the insiders were too small to bother with, but the outer monsters more than made up for these runts. Flakes of the frail integument lay all over the table, stirring sluggishly in the pervasive draught like some nightmare dandruff problem.
His task completed, Zen gathered the peelings into a heap, which he tipped into the waste-basket along with the vaguely pubic stalk. Outside, car horns blared and voices were raised in momentary anger. The sudden appearance of cold winds and relentless rain after so many weeks of glorious late-summer weather was trying enough in itself. But there was a more substantial reason why the tempers of the local citizenry should be frayed, for at least half the town was economically dependent, directly or indirectly, on the wine harvest. Until recently all the indications had been that this would be an exceptional vintage in terms of both quality and quantity. But the Nebbiolo grape from which all the best local wines were made sopped up water like blotting-paper, and the resulting product was thin, pale and insubstantial. Another week like this and the whole crop would be downgraded to one of the marginal years such as ’92 or ’94. A few more and it would be a total write-off, fit only for bulking up and marketing in litre flasks of generic red like the one which stood at Aurelio Zen’s elbow.
For Zen, this would not have represented any great tragedy. As the famous director and connoisseur responsible for his posting to Alba had pointed out, wine came in just two forms as far as Zen was concerned: sincero or sofisticato. The latter category, in its strictest interpretation, comprised anything not made by a family member or close personal friend with his own hands from grapes grown by him, and most certainly included anything in a bottle with a printed label on sale in shops and supermarkets. The former term of approbation was extended to any wines sold by the glass or jug in a few carefully vetted bars and restaurants, the understanding being that the proprietor had obtained them from producers known and trusted by him, and that they had not been messed about with.
But despite his inability to sympathize with the problems which were aggravating the good people of Alba, Zen had his own reasons for feeling wretched. The slight malady he had felt coming on in Rome had transformed itself into a full-blown, all-stops-out misery for which the word ‘cold’ seemed completely inadequate. As someone who almost never got ill, Zen found this especially hard to deal with. He knew plenty of people who, without being hypochondriacs precisely, nevertheless always seemed to be suffering to some degree or other from one of a range of minor ailments. They were used to it, indeed appeared almost to welcome it. Above all, they were good at it. Practice had made perfect. They were accomplished patients, well-versed in the skills of home remedies and medical treatment alike. They accepted illness as an old if rather tiresome friend whose visits were nevertheless preferable to solitude, to say nothing of giving them a perfect excuse for a multitude of personal shortcomings or lapses.
But to Zen illness was an enemy he had no idea how to placate or control, a barbarian horde which descended without warning and made life impossible until, just as suddenly, it went off to wreak havoc elsewhere. And as such invasions went, this particular one was not only in the Attila the Hun class, but could hardly have been worse timed.
He had arrived in Alba the previous night after a six-and-half-hour journey from the capital. He had never visited the town before, indeed had barely ever set foot in Piedmont except for a few trips to Turin during his years at the Questura in Milan. Asti, the provincial capital where he had changed trains, meant nothing to him except the sparkling, fulsomely sweet wine one got offered at weddings when the host was too stingy or ignorant to come up with anything better.
There had been nothing sparkling about Asti at nine o’clock the previous night, however, with a blustering and buffeting wind and sheets of rain which spattered on the platform like liquid hail. The user-friendly genius of the State Railways had ensured that the two-coach diesel unit which serviced the branch line to his final destination was waiting on a track as far as possible from the platform where the Rome-Turin express had arrived. Trembling and breathless, with aching limbs and a sinking heart, Zen grabbed his bags and ran the length of the dank, ill-lit underpass, terrified that the connection would leave before he could reach it.
He needn’t have worried. Another fifteen minutes passed before the automotrice finally revved up its engines and nosed off along the single-line track across the Tanaro river and south to Alba. Zen soon fell into a shallow, confused, snuffly sleep, from which he was awakened by a member of the crew, who curtly informed him that they had reached the end of the line. His interrupted dream had been set back in Naples, his last posting, and as he gathered his belongings together and clambered out of the train he braced himself for the crowds, the noise, the vibrant chaos and confusion of that city…
It did not take him long to realize his error. The rainswept streets were as deserted as the small station, the taxi rank empty, the shops and houses shuttered and dark. Fortunately it proved to be a relatively short walk to his hotel, where it took several minutes of continuous ringing on the bell to rouse the night porter, who seemed to have no idea who Zen was or what he was doing there, or even that the establishment over which he presided existed for the purpose of offering accommodation to travellers.
But all this had been as nothing to the discovery, next morning, that getting out of bed and going to the bathroom presented a physical challenge roughly equivalent to walking across Antarctica. He was shivering, aching, sneezing, snivelling, coughing and moaning, and felt utterly exhausted and disoriented. Somehow he made it back to bed and lay down for a few minutes, during which, according to the clock, an hour and a half went by. When he finally surfaced, two hours after that, he crawled to the phone, rang for a waiter and arranged for delivery of the ingredients whose preparation he was now embarked upon.
The remedy was an ancient tradition of the Zen family, a secret nostrum at once venerable and slightly shameful, given its reputed connection with an ancestor who had been Governor of the Venetian stronghold of Durazzo, now in Albania, and who had gone native in such a spectacular way that the Council of Ten had not only recalled him but had had him quietly strangled. For Zen its mystique derived from the fact that as a child he had not been allowed to take it. For his colds he was dosed with aspirin ground up in a spoonful of honey. Only adults got the full-strength, gloves-off, no-holds-barred treatment: a whole head of peeled garlic eaten raw with copious quantities of strong red wine.
