The engines roared into life amid a cloud of thick black smoke. There was only one other person on the platform, a young woman in a long coat and a hat who didn’t seem interested in this train. Zen boarded and took his seat, and after a brief delay the automotrice rumbled off into the darkness, crossing numerous sets of points. To all appearances, Zen was the only passenger.
He lay back on the hard plastic seat and turned to the blank screen of the window. It reflected his face back to him: old, tired, defeated, possibly even mad. ‘We had no idea! He always seemed perfectly normal.’ That’s what people said when someone cracked up, as though to reassure themselves that such conditions were invariably obvious and predictable, and so their own lack of symptoms meant that their future sanity was not in question.
Zen sat up and refocused his eyes on the seat opposite. For a moment, the glass had seemed to display two faces: his own, and — some distance behind and to one side — that of a boy about five years old. Only his face, of extraordinary beauty, was visible, the dark eyes fixed on Zen with a look of love and reproach.
‘Palazzuole!’
Zen swivelled round. The uniformed man was standing in the doorway at the end of the carriage.
‘Palazzuole,’ he repeated, as the brakes squealed beneath them.
Zen was about to say that he didn’t have a ticket, but the guard had already disappeared. The train jerked to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Zen walked hastily to the end of the carriage and stepped down. The train revved up and sidled away, leaving him in total darkness. Almost total, rather, for once his eyes had adjusted, he realized that he could just make out his surroundings by the faint suggestion of light which now tinted the sky, diffused down through a thick layer of mist. The station building was shuttered and obviously long disused. In faded black paint on the cracked and falling plaster he could just make out the letters PAL ZUO E and the information that he was currently 243 metres above mean sea level.
He walked past the station building into the gravel-covered area behind, and along a short driveway leading to a dirt road which crossed the tracks at a slight angle. Here he got out the map and his cigarette lighter, and determined that the village lay east of the railway station which nominally served it. He turned right on to the narrow road, towards the pallid glow which was slowly hollowing out the night.
There was just enough light to distinguish the crushed gravel and glossy puddles of the unpaved strada bianca from the ditches to either side. Zen lit a cigarette and walked on through the damp, clinging mist, up the slight incline of the road which crossed the river and the railway. As he climbed out of the valley, the visibility steadily improved. Now he could see that the fields had recently been ploughed and that the turned earth was silvery with dew. The exercise and the fresh air exhilarated him.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Somewhere else, a church bell began to toll monotonously, summoning the faithful to early mass. By now the light clearly had the upper hand over the mist and the darkness. Every surface glistened and gleamed with moisture, as though it had just been freshly created. As imperceptibly as the dawn itself, the incline of the road increased until he found himself ascending a steep hill which forced the road to twist and turn. Stopping to catch his breath, Zen noticed lights behind him and heard the low growl of a motor.
The vehicle — a red Fiat pick-up truck — neared rapidly, gobbling up the road it had taken Zen so long to traverse on foot. He stepped on to the verge to let it pass, but the truck pulled to a stop and a window was rolled down.
‘ Buon giorno,’ said the driver.
Zen returned the greeting.
‘Get in.’
The tone was peremptory. After a moment’s hesitation, Zen walked around the truck and climbed into the passenger seat, which he found himself sharing with a small black-and-white dog. The cab reeked of a powerful odour to which he would not have been able, a few days before, to put a name, but which he could still smell faintly on his own skin.
‘Going to the village?’ asked the driver, restarting the truck. Glancing at the dog, which was whining nervously, he snapped, ‘Quiet, Anna!’
‘I’m going to Palazzuole,’ said Zen.
‘Did your car break down?’
‘No, I came on the train.’
The driver laughed humourlessly.
‘Probably the first passenger they’ve had all year.’
Zen studied the man’s face as he negotiated the bends in the narrow, steep road. Apart from the thin, weedy moustache which covered his upper lip, it reminded him of pictures he had seen of that iron-age corpse they had dug out of a glacier somewhere up in the Alps. It also reminded him of something else, something more recent, but he couldn’t think what.
‘The station’s a long way from the village,’ he replied idly.
‘It isn’t that!’ the man exclaimed. ‘But people round here remember the way the railway used to treat us, back when everyone depended on it. I can still remember my mother running to catch a train to town — this was before the war, I can’t have been more than a few years old. She was a minute or two late, but people like us didn’t have clocks. The guard saw her coming, waving and calling out, but he held out his flag just the same and the train took off, leaving her standing there. Her grandfather died that night, before she’d had a chance to see him for the last time. People round here have long memories, and they don’t have much use for the train.’
They were approaching the village now, but all that was visible was the lower row of brick dwellings. Everything above had disappeared behind another thick layer of mist.
‘I smell truffles,’ said Zen.
His driver glanced at him sharply, and Zen suddenly knew where he had seen him before: in the bar near the market, talking to the Faigano brothers. One of them had called him Minot.
‘I got a few. They’re easy enough to find if you know where to look. Providing someone else doesn’t get there first, of course!’
He barked his short explosive laugh again, and slowed the truck as they entered the bank of mist which enveloped the higher levels of the village. The road had abruptly become paved, and the thuds and rumbling beneath them died away.
‘You have friends here?’ Zen’s driver asked softly.
‘I’m on business.’
‘What kind of business?’
Zen thought quickly. The man didn’t seem to have recognized him, and if he repeated the story about being a Neapolitan newspaper reporter in this context it would be all round the village in no time, and might shut a lot of mouths he would prefer to stay open.
‘Wine,’ he said.
The truck turned through the mist-enshrouded streets as cautiously as a ship in shallow water.
‘Wine, eh?’ the man called Minot remarked. ‘I thought you people travelled around in Mercedes.’
The engine noise fell away as they emerged on to a broad, level piazza in the upper reaches of the mist.
‘I lost my licence a couple of months ago,’ Zen replied. ‘Drunk driving, they called it, although I was perfectly all right really. Just one of those lunches with clients that go on a little too long.’
The driver drew up in front of an imposing arcaded building.
‘Well, I’ll leave you here,’ he said. ‘The Vincenzo house is about a kilometre outside town on the other side. That’s where you’re headed, I take it?’
Zen got out, and the dog reclaimed its space, curling up on the seat.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said.
The man named Minot gave him an ironically polite smile.
‘A pleasure, dottore. Welcome to Palazzuole!’
By the time Aurelio Zen finally reached the Vincenzo property, the sun had dispersed the last traces of mist and the air was fresh and warm.
He had spent the intervening period in a cafe on the main square of Palazzuole, having discovered that there was a bus which stopped there shortly after ten o’clock which would not only drop him off at the gates of the Vincenzo estate but pick him up there on its return and take him all the way back to Alba.
Meanwhile he drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, read the newspapers and congratulated himself on having done the right thing. He felt a completely different person from the dream-drunk neurotic who had surfaced that morning. In short, he felt himself again. It might be a far from perfect self, but he determined to hang on to it if at all possible.
Two papers were available at the bar in Palazzuole: the Turin national La Stampa, and a local news-sheet resoundingly entitled Il Corriere delle Langhe. Apart from a filler about a partial eclipse of the sun due the following day, the former paper revealed nothing of any interest except the latest feints and gestures in various political and judicial games which had been going on for months if not years and in which Zen had long ceased to take any interest. The latter, on the other hand, turned out to contain some real news.
‘Suspect in Gallizio Killing Released’ read the headline. The article below explained that Lamberto Latini, the restaurateur whom the Carabinieri had found at Beppe Gallizio’s house when they arrived, had proved to have an unbreakable alibi for the time at which the murder took place. This had been fixed with some precision as shortly after six o’clock in the morning, thanks to a triangulation involving the medical examiner’s report, the time shown on the victim’s pocket watch, which had been stopped by the shotgun blast that killed him, and the testimony of a neighbour who had heard a shot at about that time.