‘Why me?’ he demanded point-blank.
The famous director waved the hand holding his cigar, which left a convoluted wake of smoke hanging in the still air.
‘I made various enquiries, as a result of which someone mentioned your name and sketched in the details of your record. Most promising, I thought. You appear to be intelligent, devious and effective, compromised only by a regrettable tendency to insist on a conventional conception of morality at certain crucial moments — a weakness which, I regret to say, has hampered your career. In short, dottore, you need someone to save you from yourself.’
Zen said nothing.
‘In return for the services which I have outlined,’ his host continued seamlessly, ‘I offer myself in that capacity. I understand that at one time you enjoyed the favour of a certain notable associated with the political party based at Palazzo Sisti. His name, alas, no longer commands the respect it once did. Such are the perils of placing oneself under the protection of politicians, particularly in the present climate. They come and go, but business remains business. If you do the business for me, Dottor Zen, I’ll do the same for you. For your son, too, for that matter. What was his name again?’
‘Carlo.’
The famous director leant forward and fixed Zen with an intense gaze, as though framing one of his trademark camera angles.
‘Do we have a deal?’
Zen was briefly disabled by another internal convulsion.
‘On one condition,’ he said.
The man known to his friends as Giulio frowned. Conditions were not something he was used to negotiating with the class of hireling which Zen represented.
‘And what might that be?’ he asked with a silky hint of menace.
Aurelio Zen sniffed loudly and blew his nose again.
‘That when you next give a party here, I get an invitation.’
There was a moment’s silence, then the famous director roared with what sounded like genuine laughter.
‘Agreed!’
The meal over, the three men pushed back their chairs and returned to work. At first glance they appeared as interchangeable as pieces on a board. Gianni was slightly stockier than the others, Maurizio was significantly balder, while Minot, who was shorter and slighter than either of the two brothers, wore a foxy moustache above his cynical, down-turned lips. But their similarities were far more striking. They were all of an age, which might have been anywhere from fifty to eighty, worn down by constant labour and near-poverty, with proud, guarded expressions that revealed a common characteristic: the fierce determination never to be fooled again. Their clothes, too, were virtually identical: dark, durable knits and weaves, much patched and mended, each garment a manuscript in palimpsest of tales that would never be told.
They had eaten in silence, waited on by the only woman in the house, Maurizio’s teenage daughter Lisa. Back in the cellar, the long-maintained silence continued. It was not an empty silence, the void remaining once everything sayable has been said, nor yet the relaxed stillness which implies an intimacy or familiarity such that speech has become an irrelevance. This silence was tense with unspoken thoughts, facts and opinions not alluded to, a mutual reticence about things better left unsaid. It could be defused only by activity — filling mouths, or bottles.
The only light, from a single forty-watt bulb attached to a huge beam in the centre of the ceiling, died a lingering death in the lower reaches of the cellar, as though stifled by the darkness all around. The only sounds were repetitive and mechanical, muffled by the wooden casks mounted on wooden trestles which lined the walls. For lack of any other distractions, odour had it all its own way — an over-whelming profusion of smells fighting for prominence like plants in the jungle: yeast, mildew, alcohol, damp, fruit, corruption, fermentation. Their luxuriant variety created an olfactory arena whose dimensions apparently far exceeded those of the cellar itself, and this sense of concentration, of too much crammed into too little, gave an almost choking intensity to the musty reek which filled the lungs of the trio working silently in the gloom.
The division of labour had been established years before, and remained constant. Gianni Faigano, the elder of the two brothers, took the bottles from the rack of wooden pegs where they had been turned over to dry after being washed and sterilized. He filled each with a stream of red wine from a plastic tube inserted into one of the barrels, then passed the bottle to his brother, who positioned it under a metal lever loaded with a cork, which he rammed down into the opening. Maurizio then handed the bottle on to Minot, a neighbour who came by every year at this time to help out with this chore by applying the labels and capsules.
‘I hear Bruno’s got a new car,’ said Gianni.
The sound of his words died away so rapidly that a few seconds later it already seemed uncertain whether he had actually spoken, or if it had just been some natural noise arising from the work on hand, or of digestion, superficially mimicking speech. More than a dozen bottles passed from hand to hand, and were duly filled, corked and labelled. Crouched in their dusty sails among the shadows above, gigantic spiders surveyed the scene.
‘One of those off-road jobs,’ Maurizio remarked. ‘And bright red, into the bargain.’
Another six or eight bottles moved from the drying rack to the filling pipe and then the labelling bench before his brother replied. ‘It’s green.’
For a while everything continued as before. Then the spiders suddenly scuttled away to the furthest corner of their webs and crouched down, making themselves small and still. A bottle had broken, scattering jagged chunks of brown glass about the floor and releasing tongues of spilt wine to scout out the terrain.
‘I’ve had just about enough of this damned argument!’ said Minot.
There was a long silence. No one spoke or moved. Then Gianni Faigano filled another bottle, which Maurizio corked and handed to Minot, who pasted on a label. The arachnids above crawled back to their vantage points and took up their octagonal surveillance once more, while the bottles resumed their progress from one end of the cellar to the other.
‘You know what gets me most about it?’ demanded Maurizio. ‘Aldo Vincenzo’s turned into a national celebrity! There isn’t a man, woman or child from here to Calabria who hasn’t heard his name. He deserved to die like a dog — unknown, unburied and unmourned.’
‘It’s our fault for letting those television people talk us into setting up their equipment on our land,’ muttered his brother.
Minot stroked his moustache with a sly expression.
‘I hear you did quite nicely out of it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, if you’d refused, they’d have found someone else.’
‘I just wish whoever did it had simply killed the old bastard and left it at that,’ snapped Maurizio. ‘No one would have taken any interest then.’
They were down to the last few dozen bottles now, all destined for a couple of local restaurants and a select number of private individuals in Alba and Asti who ordered the Faigano brothers’ wine year in, year out, knowing it to be at least the equal of that made by growers fortunate enough to own land which fell within the officially classified area of Barbaresco, Denominazione di Origine Controllata. The property belonging to Maurizio and Gianni Faigano was only a stone’s throw away from that of the Vincenzo family, but unfortunately on the wrong side of the stream which marked the boundary of the DOC zone. Because of this, the resulting product could only be sold on the open market as generic Nebbiolo, which commanded a tenth of the price.
‘I ran into the maresciallo at market this morning,’ said Minot, setting another completed bottle in its crate. ‘You know what he told me? Apparently the police are opening their own investigation. Not only that, they’re sending some big shot up from Rome to lead it.’
The two brothers exchanged a brief glance, then returned to their work. This went without incident, except when the wine started overflowing and Gianni Faigano ripped off a fingernail grabbing for the spigot. Minot retrieved the severed sliver.
‘I’ll keep this for good luck,’ he joked, as though atoning for his earlier outburst.
Once the final bottles had made their way through the production line, the three men stood up stiffly.
‘Not like you to drop a bottle, Minot,’ said Gianni, sucking his injured finger. ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’
‘Why should I be?’
Gianni smiled.
‘I just wondered, since you mentioned this new investigation of la cosa…’
‘I’m not nervous, I’m angry!’ Minot snapped back. ‘As if there weren’t enough real problems facing the country, without sending some bastard up from Rome to make our lives a misery.’
‘Speaking of bastards…’ said Maurizio.
Minot whirled round on him.
‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’
Maurizio held up his hands.
‘The canine kind,’ he explained, alluding to one of the dialect terms for a mongrel.
‘Well?’ demanded Minot. ‘What about them?’
Maurizio hesitated a moment.