‘The ambulance will here shortly, and meanwhile my orderly has secured the premises,’ the Carabinieri official continued in the same parade-ground tones. ‘Do you have any further orders?’
‘Not at present!’ bellowed Zen in return. In an undertone he added, ‘Where’s the winery?’
‘Over there, down the hill,’ whispered Pascal, nodding to one side. ‘Just follow the track.’
‘Meet me there in fifteen minutes.’
Zen turned away. Pascal saluted ostentatiously and marched back towards the house as though he had been dismissed.
Realizing that the funeral ceremony was indeed not going to take place, the assembled mourners were by now heading towards their cars and driving away. Zen walked past them and started at a leisurely pace down the concrete-paved track which connected the Scorrone residence with its commercial appendage, discreetly tucked away out of sight over a ridge of the hillside.
Enrico Pascal appeared exactly fifteen minutes later, driving down the same track along which Zen had walked.
‘Make it brief,’ he warned, stepping out of the jeep. ‘Feelings are running high, I can tell you. You’re presently the most unpopular person in the Langhe, and if I’m seen consorting with you…’
Zen laughed.
‘The most unpopular? I’m glad to hear it. After all the flannel I’ve been getting from everyone here, it’s a relief to be hated and feared again. I need that edge to work properly.’
Enrico Pascal did not dignify this with a reply. Zen sighed.
‘All right, I’ll make it brief. My first question is what Bruno Scorrone was doing down here yesterday afternoon in the first place. I’ve taken a look around this installation. I don’t know much about vinification, but I can tell high technology when I see it. Once the controls are set, this equipment can run itself. In any case, Scorrone was not exactly in the fine wine business. Why should he cut short his Sunday lunch to come and check on the progress of some bulk wine which he was going to blend and sell for next to nothing anyway?’
‘According to his wife, he said that he had to take delivery of a shipment.’
‘On a Sunday?’
‘We haven’t been able to confirm it, but that’s not unusual. Bruno preferred to keep his paperwork to a minimum.’
‘You mean he was operating illegally?’
The maresciallo gestured in an anguished way, to indicate the impossibility of conveying the complexities of the situation to an outsider.
‘Let’s say that he operated in a grey area, not necessarily crooked but not strictly legal either. Lots of people around here do. On the one hand there are the legitimate demands of the market, on the other the often unreasonable stipulations of the myriad bureaucracies anywhere between here and Brussels. A man has to make a living. Bruno didn’t adulterate his wine, at least not usually, but he was sometimes — how shall I put it? — imaginative as to its origins.’
Zen looked around the concrete expanses of the winery. The staff had been given the day off, and in its stagnant desolation the place might have been any one of the ugly, light-industrial complexes of indeterminate purpose which littered the highways of the region. The only sign of its true function came in the form of a number of plastic-covered demijohns stacked on one of the loading platforms. Zen pointed them out to Pascal.
‘Do you think that could be the wine that was delivered the afternoon he died?’
The maresciallo shrugged.
‘Who knows? Bruno did a lot of business on a small scale. You saw the occasional tanker from Puglia or Calabria pulling up here, but it was mainly local products he used. All good stuff, but, as I said, imaginatively labelled.’
Zen led the way over to the cluster of flagons. There was no marking or other indication of origin on them.
‘These could have come from anywhere,’ he said.
‘Oh, I don’t know about anywhere.’
Pascal walked back to the office at the end of the loading bays, returning a few moments later with a pipette and a glass. Handing both to Zen, he pulled out the rubber bung securing the mouth of one of the damigiane, then reclaimed the pipette and lowered it through the layer of olive oil floated on the surface of the wine to keep the air out. He pumped the bulb a few times, and repeated the procedure to expel the wine into the glass. Swirling the wine around, he sniffed deeply.
‘Ah!’
He took a large sip, swishing it around his mouth like a gargle, and finally swallowing.
‘Yes,’ he said.
The procedure was repeated.
‘Definitely,’ Enrico Pascal pronounced.
Zen stared at him bemusedly.
‘Definitely what?’
Pascal emptied the remaining wine on to the ground and replugged the container.
‘I’d bet quite a large sum that this particular wine was made by the Faigano brothers.’
‘You can tell that just by tasting it?’
A shrug.
‘I drink a lot of Gianni and Maurizio’s wines and I’d be prepared to swear that this is one of theirs.’
Catching Zen’s glance, he added, ‘Off the record, of course. Anyway, there’s no proof that this is the delivery Bruno came to collect.’
Zen sighed histrionically.
‘That seems to be the keynote of this whole case. Lots of hints and indications, but no proof. What am I supposed to do?’
‘Ah, well, dottore, that’s for you to decide.’
Zen got back to his hotel late that afternoon, having hired a local driver to take him to Alba. Above the wavering outline of the darkening hills, the sky was a molten glory, ranging from a creamy peach to a delicate glowing pink like sunlight filtered through a baby’s ear. The taxi dropped Zen in Piazza Savona, and he spent some time just wandering around aimlessly, as delighted as a child with the sense of purposeful but mysterious activity all around his brief excursion into the rural hinterland. Nature was neither benign nor malign, his genes told him. However cropped, parcelled and inhabited, it remained other. This was its fascination but also its horror. A few hours was enough.
He crossed to the tree-lined promenade at the centre of the square and spent some time looking over the remaindered volumes offered for sale by the bancari. The east end of the central reservation was disfigured by an abstract fountain in early sixties’ Civic Modern style, beside which stood a pillar inscribed with the elliptical opening words from the book by Beppe Fenoglio about the heroic and tragic ‘Twenty-three days of Alba’, when the local partisans precipitately seized control of the city from the retreating Fascists: Two thousand of them took Alba on 10 October, and two hundred lost it on 2 November 1944.
As Zen walked slowly round to the entrance of the hotel, his mind was on those eighteen hundred young men whose deaths Fenoglio had celebrated by implication, and the two hundred who had survived. If they were still alive, they would now be in their seventies. How did they view it all, looking back? Had it been worth the suffering, the bloodshed, the deaths? Were they bitter at having fought and risked everything in a desperate conflict for ideals that were almost immediately betrayed or compromised? Or was it simply the most exciting thing which had ever happened to them, an experience never to be forgotten, immune from judgement or regret, like the first time a woman gives herself to you?
His room seemed a refuge, quiet and secure, against these and other doubts. Zen took off his jacket and shoes and collapsed on the bed, closing his eyes for what he thought of as a ‘little rest’ amply earned by his exertions. When he awoke, it was to the trilling of the telephone. Disoriented and resentful, he snatched up the receiver.
‘Yes?’
‘Good afternoon, dottore. I trust I’m not disturbing you.’
Zen groaned.