The prince resumed his seat, looking over the papers in his hands.
‘Nevertheless, let’s just run over the background story. You say this woman Carla approached you at your hotel, claiming to be your daughter. Do you have any reason to believe her?’
‘I had an affair with her mother once, long ago. In Milan,’ he added, as though this explained everything.
‘You realize that if she were proven to be your daughter, you would have to take on various legal and financial responsibilities that might well be onerous?’
Zen shrugged.
‘I just want to know the truth.’
Lucchese gave him a smile spiced with a grain of contempt.
‘So, in theory, anyone could just walk up to you in a public place, having done a little research on your former mistresses, and claim to be your love child?’
Zen turned away to the window. Down in the Via Maestra, a host of strangers passed to and fro in eager intent or sociable procrastination.
‘I’m no more credulous than the next man,’ he said. ‘But I suppose that having just lost Carlo…’
‘Who?’
‘That’s what I decided to call the child Tania was carrying. I decided that it was a boy, and I named him Carlo. So when a young woman named Carla appeared, claiming to be my daughter…’
He swung around to confront Lucchese.
‘But my feelings are not important, principe. If Carla Arduini is my daughter, I’ll do the right thing by her, whatever it may cost me.’
Lucchese rose to his feet and made a slightly ironic bow.
‘Your words do you credit, dottore. But, as it happens, you can relax. The tests carried out by my brother reveal beyond a shadow of a doubt that this Arduini woman is not related to you in any way whatsoever.’
Zen gazed at him in silence.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’
He held out the papers to Zen.
‘It’s all here, not that it will make any sense to you — or to me, for that matter. But my brother has assured me that it’s absolutely conclusive. Despite her impressive musical expertise, this Arduini woman is clearly a common gold-digger, out for what she can get. Luckily you have the might of science on your side, dottore. Tell her to try her luck elsewhere, or sue her for slander if you want. The courts will back you all the way.’
Zen took the papers and glanced at them abstractedly.
‘Thank you,’ he mumbled.
Lucchese frowned.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’
‘I suppose so. It’s just a shock, that’s all. I’d assumed…’
‘In the past, lots of men have been caught that way! But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can now get at the truth. Which in this case turns out to be a lie.’
The doorbell sounded. Lucchese rose and left the room. Zen subsided on to the sofa and sat looking over the results of the DNA tests. At length the prince reappeared.
‘Minot has returned,’ he announced. ‘This is the item which he referred to. You have five minutes to examine it, following which you may question him if you wish. The item itself will remain in my keeping for the meantime. May I have the papers which you are offering in exchange, by the way?’
Zen produced a long brown envelope from his coat pocket and handed it over. Lucchese perused the contents briefly, then passed Zen a crumpled piece of cheap paper which felt empty. He opened it gingerly, disclosing a sliver of what might have been plastic, translucent except for a brownish smear on one side.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘A fingernail, by the look of it,’ the prince remarked, inspecting the object. ‘From a male adult, in his fifties at least, used to manual work, and not overly fastidious about personal cleanliness. Oh, and he uses scissors rather than clippers to trim his nails, but you’d spotted that, of course!’
Zen handed the object back to Lucchese.
‘Kindly send Minot in here,’ he said.
Borrowing the tactics once used by Mussolini at his desk in the ex-Venetian embassy in Rome, Zen forced Minot to traverse the long distance from the door, hat in hand, before deigning to acknowledge his existence with an imperious glare.
‘ E allora? ’ he barked, once Minot had come to rest before him. ‘A fingernail. So what?’
Minot smiled.
‘So whose, you mean.’
Zen stared up at him from the cane chair which Lucchese had occupied earlier.
‘Look, Minot, I know you’re an unsophisticated fellow, but evidence is only admissible in law if there’s an unbroken sequence of links — each duly witnessed and notarized — leading back to the scene of the crime. Some broken fingernail, whatever its provenance, is of no more use to me than that button we were talking about earlier.’
Having brushed the seat of his trousers in a perfunctory way, Minot perched on the edge of the embroidered sofa and leant forward. Despite that symbolic gesture towards the prince’s furnishings, he did not seem overawed by his surroundings, still less by Zen’s presence.
‘Let me make an admission, dottore,’ he whispered in a voice which was barely audible even to Zen.
‘Get on with it!’
Minot looked from one side of the space to the other, as if checking that they were alone. Satisfied, he leant still closer to Zen.
‘Aldo’s body wasn’t discovered by that police dog, as everyone thinks.’
Zen stared at him.
‘It was discovered by me,’ Minot went on. ‘I was trespassing on the Vincenzo’s property the morning after the festa, after some truffles I thought might be hiding in a bank at one end of the vineyard. Instead, I found Aldo.’
He made a large gesture.
‘Imagine how it feels, coming on something like that with no warning, and with the mist so thick you can barely see where you’re going! At that moment I became a child again.’