‘It was about wine,’ he said.
Zen looked at him sharply, suspecting a joke. Clearly he was wrong, however.
‘Our family has owned this land for about a hundred years,’ Manlio went on, striding away again. ‘My great-grandfather grew rich in the cotton business, and bought himself a country estate outside the village his father had come from. He made wine for his own consumption, but that was all. When my father inherited the property after the war, those vines and the wine they produced had acquired a significant commercial value, and by the time I was born the market had taken another leap. I managed to persuade him that if we were to continue to compete effectively, we needed to keep track of the latest developments in the field. So when I finished university, he sent me abroad to study viticulture.’
‘Where abroad?’
‘Initially to Bordeaux, and then to the United States.’
Zen stared at him in amazement.
‘America? But all they drink is milk and Coca-Cola!’
Manlio Vincenzo smiled.
‘Exactly what my father said when I suggested the idea. But you’re both wrong. The University of California at Davis was at that time, and probably still is, one of the best places in the world to study wine production in all its aspects, with no preconceptions and nothing taken for granted. The Americans may have started late, but they’ve caught up quickly.’
‘This doesn’t explain why you and your father almost came to blows at the Festa della Vendemmia that night,’ Zen remarked pointedly.
‘I’m coming to that. My father sent me abroad to study because he wanted to emulate the other top growers in the area, people like Gaja, Di Gresy and Bruno Rocca. He resented their growing fame, not to mention the prices they could command, and wanted me to find out how we could match them. As for me, I wanted to travel, to meet new people and to see the world. At that point I didn’t even want to be a wine-maker particularly. My degree was in engineering. But I went along with his idea, because it was a way to get out of this place.’
‘And away from him?’ suggested Zen.
Vincenzo gestured loosely.
‘To an extent, yes. In return, I was prepared to do the courses and come back with some useful tips on oak and pruning and fermentation techniques. Instead, I came back as someone quite unrecognizable to him, with ideas he found profoundly disturbing.’
‘What sort of ideas?’
‘About grape varieties, for one thing. That, of course, had never entered my father’s head as a subject for discussion. Like everyone else around here, we grew only one grape, Nebbiolo. That was taken for granted, as though it had been ordained by God. All Aldo wanted me to learn was how to manage and vinify it more profitably. But after my experiences abroad, I had different ideas, which he…’
Manlio Vincenzo inspected Zen briefly through his owl-like glasses.
‘This is the spot where he told me to go and suck my boyfriend’s prick, to quote his expression. Just here in this slight hollow where the water collects. You can feel how spongy the earth is here compared with the well-drained section we’ve been walking over.’
Zen, who could feel nothing of the kind, nodded. Manlio Vincenzo stood still, looking into the distance.
‘Then he turned and walked off without another word. I started after him, but I realized it was useless. I made my way back to the house and went to sleep. I never saw him alive again.’
‘What time did you get up the next morning?’ asked Zen after a moment’s silence.
‘About seven.’
‘But you didn’t see your father?’
‘No, he was gone by then. The door to his room was open, but he wasn’t there. That didn’t surprise me. He was always an early riser, and at this time of year you could hardly drag him away from his vines. I think that’s really why he went out the night before, to tell you the truth, even though it was too dark to see anything. As the vintage approached, he would spend hours just tramping the fields, snipping back leaves and checking on the ripeness of the fruit. He was like a mother with a new-born baby.’
Moving quickly, he led the way up the other side of the gulley and over a ridge. The rows of vines were interrupted here by a narrow track to allow mechanical access. Manlio climbed rapidly up the hillside, leaving Zen some distance behind. At last he turned left into the ploughed alley between two rows of vines leading up to a scruffy patch of oak trees at the edge of the field. A lorry lumbered into view, revealing the road by which Zen had arrived.
Suddenly Manlio slowed to a hesitant, stealthy gait, as though stalking some timid creature. He pointed to a bare stretch where three vines had been brutally hacked off just above ground level. The soil showed signs of having been recently turned over.
‘That was where they found it,’ he said in a stonily neutral tone.
‘The corpse?’
A curt nod.
‘I had the vines cut right back, of course. There was no question of making wine from those grapes. Before that, the spot was well hidden both from the road and from the house. That’s why it took so long to find him. My father often used to go off for the day somewhere or other without letting anyone know. If I’d sounded the alarm and then it turned out he’d gone into town on some private business, I’d never have heard the end of it. Things were bad enough between us as it was. I didn’t call the police until the evening of the next day, and it wasn’t until the following morning that they brought in the dogs.’
‘By which time, according to the medical report, it was impossible to determine the time of death with any precision,’ Zen remarked in a deliberately casual tone.
Manlio smiled and nodded.
‘Yes, I know. The investigating magistrate made great play with that particular point. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I didn’t kill my father.’
‘Someone did,’ Zen said quietly.
‘Yes, someone did. And someone else knows who that someone is, and yet another person knows that that someone knows. That’s the way it is around here, dottore.’
He had spoken with such bitterness that Zen was amazed to hear him add, ‘Are you free for lunch, by any chance?’
‘Lunch?’ he echoed vaguely.
‘Well, let’s not exaggerate. Rosa has been staying with her daughter since I was arrested, so we’ll have to improvise. But the wine will be good.’
He glanced at Zen with an expression of solicitude.
‘That’s a nasty-looking cut you’ve got there, dottore. Quite fresh, too, by the look of it.’
After Minot had dropped Aurelio Zen in Palazzuole, he drove a few miles out of town to pay calls on some private clients and a restaurant owner with whom he sometimes did business. His pickings that night had not been good enough to warrant going into Alba and selling directly on the street.
His customers initially balked at the discovery that prices had risen by an average of ten per cent.
‘Beppe didn’t used to charge this much!’ they all said, in one form or other.
‘God rest him, Beppe’s dead,’ was the reply. ‘If you want to pay market prices, drive into town. If you want home delivery, this is the going rate.’
They paid, all but one, and Minot made his way home a hundred thousand lire nearer to being able to buy Anna from Beppe’s sons and heirs. They lived in the city, and not only were they uninterested in owning a truffle hound but they seemed blissfully ignorant of the animal’s real value. For the meantime Minot had kindly offered to take care of the bitch, and, needless to say, was putting her to good use, although he kept her in a shed outside the house because of the rats.
The rats had made their appearance some years earlier: a brief incursion here, a nocturnal raid there, some grain missing from the supply Minot fed his chickens, a few chewed sacks of seed, and lots of hard, black droppings. Minot had already tried setting Anna on them once, one night when Beppe had to go to Turin for his younger son’s wedding and had let Minot borrow her in accordance with their long-standing arrangement. But Anna had been bred to sniff out truffles, and showed no interest in taking on an army of rodents.
After that, Minot had resorted to the poison and traps, as well as ambushing them one night and shooting a dozen or so. He had even hacked one youngster in half with a shovel in his fury. But they kept coming, until one day — he still wasn’t sure why — he had set out some stale bread he had no further use for, unbaited this time. In the morning, it was gone. That evening he put down some more, together with a saucer of diluted milk.
From that moment on, the attacks on his stores of seed and grain gradually diminished, then ceased altogether. It was as if he and the rats had arrived at an arrangement. Minot did not reveal this to anyone else, of course. People already thought that he was a little eccentric. If they learned that he was feeding rats, it would merely confirm their prejudices. But Minot couldn’t see why rats had any less right to live than several humans he could think of, always providing that they respected him and his property, of course. After all, they only wanted to survive, like everything else. Was that too much to ask?
It was some months before his dependants risked appearing in person before their benefactor, and, when they did, it was at first the merest glimpse caught out of the corner of the eye, a flurry in the shadows at the edge of the room, the flick of a long thin tail abruptly withdrawn. Perhaps some folk-memory of the shotgun blasts which had decimated the pack still remained, or the squeals of the baby which Minot had cut in two with his spade.