He finished the last of his risotto and looked round critically for the waiter.
‘That’s a nasty-looking cut you’ve got there, dottore,’ he remarked, still looking over his shoulder. ‘Quite fresh, too, by the look of it.’
‘I slipped in the shower.’
Now that the anaesthetic was wearing off, he could feel the stitches as a dull, persistent tugging in his forehead.
‘Probably a woman,’ said Gianni Faigano, signalling to the negligent minion.
Zen peered at him.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘They used to burn them for it, round here.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Zen replied, indignant yet oddly disturbed by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘I was completely alone. It was just an accident.’
Faigano smiled.
‘There are no such things as accidents, dottore. Everything that happens has its cause. And when a healthy man like you injures himself as badly as that, it’s almost certainly woman’s work. Someone’s put a hex on you, maybe even without knowing it herself. But there’s a way to break the spell.’
‘What’s that?’ Zen found himself asking, despite his better judgement.
Gianni Faigano leant forward, as though imparting some forbidden mystery.
‘Find another woman, one who really loves you. Then the other one won’t be able to harm you any more. Despite everything, good is more powerful than evil in the end.’
They were distracted from these abstruse speculations by the arrival of the lepre al civet, which Gianni Faigano proceeded to damn with praise so faint as to be practically imperceptible.
‘Let’s get back to the subject,’ Zen interrupted briskly. ‘You say that no one here believes that Manlio killed his father. So who do they think did it?’
‘That depends who you ask. Everyone’s got their own theory.’
And what’s yours?’
Gianni Faigano poured them both some more of the dark brick-red wine.
‘You like it?’ he asked, tapping his glass. The wrinkled skin of his finger contrasted oddly with the smooth, pink tip whose nail had apparently been torn away.
‘It’s excellent.’
‘We don’t mess around with our wine,’ Gianni Faigano said solemnly. ‘We don’t make any money off it either. Some people might say that there’s a connection.’
‘But plenty of people around here do make money from their wine,’ Zen pointed out. ‘Aldo Vincenzo, for one. Did he mess around with his wine?’
Faigano shook his head decisively.
‘No, no! The top producers don’t need to. They can make their wine the same way I make mine, using the traditional methods and not cutting any corners, and then charge whatever they want. But that end of the market is very small and very crowded. The rest of us have to try to make a living further down. Most of us manage to get by, but others do rather better. Very much better, in a few cases.’
‘And what has this got to do with the Vincenzo case?’
Once again, Gianni Faigano leant forward conspiratorially across the table.
‘The Carabinieri are questioning Lamberto Latini about the death of Beppe Gallizio,’ he whispered. ‘What they don’t know is that Latini wasn’t the only person at Beppe’s house that morning.’
Zen allowed his eyes to open wide.
‘Who was the other?’
Faigano returned to eating his meal with the air of someone who has now earned it.
‘A little while ago,’ he said conversationally, ‘Aldo Vincenzo was implicated in a case involving the export of wine which had been falsely labelled.’
‘There’s money to be made in that?’
Faigano shrugged.
‘Wine’s not heroin. But buying generic Nebbiolo at a few hundred lire a litre, and then selling it as Barbaresco Riserva Denominazione di Origine Controllata at fifty to a hundred thousand a bottle? I’d say there was money to be made.’
Zen paused to swallow a morsel of the succulent hare stew.
‘But why would Aldo Vincenzo risk his reputation by getting involved in something like that?’
‘Because he was greedy!’
For the first time, Faigano showed some sign of personal feeling. He leant still nearer to Zen, his voice a fervent undertone and his stubby, gnarled fingers stabbing the table to emphasize every point.
‘He was one of the richest men in the area, with most of the best land. But he always wanted more. More money, more land, more power, more of everything! And he didn’t care what he had to do to get it. He tried to get that son of his to rape my niece so that the Vincenzo family would get its hands on our property when Maurizio and I died! What do you say to that?’
Zen took another sip of wine.
‘I’d say that it made you a suspect in his death, Signor Faigano.’
Gianni laughed.
‘Ah, but if I’d really done it, I wouldn’t have told you that, would I?’
Zen said nothing.
‘Anyway, the authorities claim that Aldo and another local producer were involved in a scheme to sell several thousand cases of falsely labelled wine,’ Faigano went on. ‘Apparently they’d bought off the local authorities, but when the shipment of bogus Barolo was seized in Germany, there was nothing they could do.’
Zen took out his notebook.
‘Who was the other man?’
Gianni Faigano paused a moment.