A Long Finish - 6 (18 page)

‘I suggest you let me do the talking,
dottore
,’ said Lucchese, getting out of the car. Zen followed, hastily wiping the tears from his face. Irena kissed him on the cheek.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she said in a kindly voice. ‘It’s not your fault.’

Zen watched her fade in and out of focus for a while.

‘What was it you said? “
Cherchez la femme
.” Do you mean a woman did it?’

But Irena had turned away to join her partner, who was surrounded by a dense knot of family members bent on lengthy and loud commiseration. The prince’s voice came floating back towards Zen like the commentary to an unwatched television programme.

‘… but before we go any further, I regret to say that I have an unpleasant but equally unavoidable duty to perform. Ah, there you are, my dear. This is my niece, Irena Francavilla, whom I have taken under my wing after she fell into some bad company in Turin. I’m glad to say that she’s now almost completely recovered, although as a safety measure I am continuing the treatment thrice daily on a regular basis for the moment lest any relapse occur.’

‘When’s my next shot due,
principe
?’ moaned Irena.

‘Soon, my child, soon. Where were we? Yes, of course, the unpleasant duty I referred to earlier. As you may be aware, it has been customary since time immemorial for members of my family to undergo cardiac puncture post-mortem. I have no reason to suppose that my dear cousin would have wished to break this tradition, although, given the tragic circumstances leading to his unexpected demise, it was naturally impossible for him to confirm this.’

‘What are you talking about?’ one of the women in mourning asked. ‘What tradition?’

‘In principle it dates back at least three hundred years, but in practice it was reinstituted by my great-great-grandfather, Guido Andrea.’

Andrea, thought Zen.
Cherchez la femme!
Suddenly it all made sense.

‘Guido’s morbid horror of being entombed alive was notorious in our family. Indeed, the memory of it survives to this day. I recall mentioning it on one occasion to my brother, and his replying that all we need do was to bury his portable phone with him! But, joking aside, I feel sure that poor dear Bruno would have wished to receive the usual formalities, and I have therefore come prepared. It won’t take long.’

‘What won’t?’

‘A simple medical procedure, my dear,’ the prince replied, ‘but you might prefer to be spared the details.’

‘
Medical?
But Bruno’s not … I mean, he’s …’

‘Dead. Yes, I’m sure he is, to all appearances. But these things are not always as certain as they might seem. There have been several cases of “corpses” showing signs of life during their own funeral service, which, needless to say, is extremely embarrassing for all concerned. Still more distressing is the case of those for whom reanimation has occurred a little later – too late, in fact. Scarcely a graveyard is excavated without at least one skeleton being discovered in a kneeling position, straining in vain to lift the lid of the coffin lying under several tons of solid earth.’

The women gasped and clutched their throats. Prince Lucchese nodded gravely.

‘It was to avoid the possibility of just such a fate that my great-great-grandfather instructed the family physician to drive a spike into his heart prior to the funeral. I believe they originally used a simple nail, but some time later an instrument was specifically fashioned for this purpose out of solid silver by a local craftsman. It is presently in my possession, and I now propose to put it to use, thus allowing my beloved cousin to rest in assured peace. My colleague, Dottor Aurelio Zen, will assist me.’

He waved to Zen, who followed him inside the house.

Afterwards, of course, it was clear to Aurelio Zen that he had been a victim of passive smoking. Although he had declined Lucchese’s offer of the hashish-spiked cigarette, the fumes circulating in the closed car had been quite strong enough for him to become drugged by proxy. All this was clear in retrospect, but at the time he had only the evidence of his senses to go on, and they told him a completely different story.

There were, for a start, three versions of Prince Lucchese. One was preparing to do something, the next was doing it, while the third told Zen the results of whatever had been done by the other two. This activity was disturbingly ambiguous, at once a hideous scenario involving a dead body, surgical knives and some very primitive butchery, and an entirely innocent, even praiseworthy activity of vital importance for reasons which, however, were not immediately apparent.

Under the circumstances, Zen decided to take a back seat – literally, in this case. There was a wicker chair near the door where he sat down, watching the trinity of princes at work and responding as best he could to their baffling comments. The centre of the room was occupied by a dining table on which stood an ornate, oblong wooden chest. The threefold Lucchese opened the black bag he had brought with him and set to work on whatever was inside, talking in a low, purposeful voice the whole time.

‘No visible injuries apart from some superficial lesions to the thorax … Probably gouged himself on some metal edge on the way in … Massive loss of blood pre-mortem, though, and visible traumas don’t account for same … Now let’s have a look inside … God, look at this subcutaneous fat … Just hack through the costal cartilage and whip out the … Forgotten how easy all this is … That’s odd … No trace of wine in the lungs, but he must have sucked some in unless … Heart attack before he hit the surface, perhaps … Let’s take another look at that neck … Ah … Well, now, that’s interesting …’

The doctor and his two assistants left the room, returning in due course as one person. Confronted by this miracle, Zen emerged from his wake with a sense of panic.

‘What? Who? When?’ he spluttered, leaping to his feet.

‘Probable homicide, person or persons unknown, at or about the stated time of death,’ Lucchese replied succinctly, wiping his blood-stained instruments on a filthy rag.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure that he was dead when he went into the wine vat. And I’m almost sure that it was not a natural death. That lesion in his neck is a lot deeper than it looks. The artery is severed, and there are small fragments of broken glass embedded in the surrounding flesh.’

‘And you’ll testify to that?’

Lucchese looked at him haughtily.

‘Of course not. I haven’t been invited to examine the cadaver, and therefore no such examination has taken place. I’m merely performing the last secular rites for my cousin, according to a long-standing tradition in our family. Speaking of which, I suppose I’d better do the damned thing, just in case anyone checks.’

He took the silver spike and set it down on the dead man’s chest, then lifted the mallet. There were a number of dull-sounding blows, the last accompanied by a guttural grunt from Lucchese. Feeling nauseous, Zen went back outside. The cloud had burned off and the sun shone softly in a flawless azure sky.

‘The priest is here!’ a woman said excitedly. ‘Can we proceed?’

‘Out of the question,’ a voice proceeding from Zen’s throat pronounced. ‘It is my sad duty to inform you that your late relative’s body is evidence in a criminal case.’

Cries of astonishment burst out all around. The door of the house banged shut and Lucchese emerged, clutching his black bag.

‘This man,’ Zen continued, pointing to him, ‘has been apprehened mutilating a corpse in direct contravention of section 1092 paragraph 3A of the Criminal Code. He is now under arrest, and the said corpse is material evidence in the case. This house and its contents are therefore sealed and under my direct and personal jurisdiction. No one can enter and nothing can be removed until further notice.’

‘But the funeral!’ an elderly woman exclaimed. ‘It’s all arranged!’

‘I regret that it will have to be rearranged. The law is the law, and I’m here to uphold it.’

‘Me, too,’ said a voice behind him.

Turning, Zen found himself face to face with a plump, stolid man in a dark grey suit.

‘Enrico Pascal,
maresciallo dei Carabinieri
,’ he said. ‘Forgive me,
dottore
, but I’m not familiar with the article of the code you just cited.’

‘Of course not. I just made it up.’

The Carabinieri officer stared at him.

‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Yes.’

It was only now that he was sure of this. He must definitely have gone out of his mind, because night seemed to be falling. It was not yet dark, but the light had been gutted and thinned down to a tenuous essence with no more substance than moonshine. Luckily no one was paying any attention to him. They were all looking up at the sky, many of them holding up wafers of plastic like a priest displaying the host. Occasional cries and exclamations broke the silence. Narrowing his eyes to a squint, Zen tried to look at the sun. Its hazy outline eluded him, but it seemed damaged.

‘Look through this,’ said a voice he recognized as Irena’s.

A piece of blank photographic negative was pressed into his hand. He raised it to his eyes and beheld in sudden terror the pallid disc of the sun occluded on one side, as though by a huge wing.

‘You were blinded by the light,’ said the voice.

At once fascinated and appalled by the spectacle unfolding in the skies, Zen did not turn for some time. When he did, Irena was nowhere to be seen. The landscape still had a ghostly pallor, but the eclipse had passed its peak and the light was gradually recovering its former vitality. The Carabinieri official materialized at Zen’s side.

‘That’s a nasty-looking cut you’ve got there,
dottore
,’ he said. ‘Quite fresh, too, by the look of it.’

He pointed down the hill, where the Bugatti could just be seen turning on to the road back to Alba.

‘It seems that your suspect in this alleged crime has escaped.’

Zen looked Pascal in the eye.

‘You must think I’m mad.’

The
maresciallo
made a puffing noise and performed a full-body shrug, indicating that he wouldn’t hold a little thing like madness against a colleague.

‘But there’s actually a good reason for this farce,’ Zen went on. ‘I have preliminary evidence leading me to believe that Bruno Scorrone was murdered. A full autopsy will prove that, and this gives us a pretext for ordering one. Can you call one of your men out here to guard the corpse until the ambulance arrives? Meanwhile I’d like to have a chat with you in private.’

Pascal returned his stare for a moment.

‘Well, this will set people’s tongues wagging!’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll play along. But you’d better be right about this,
dottore
. If it turns out that this really is a farce, I won’t be able to show my face in public again.’

While the
maresciallo
strode off to find a phone, Zen did some preliminary damage assessment. By now the light had almost completely recovered, and with it his grasp of the situation. He anxiously reviewed what he could remember doing and saying during his own partial eclipse. Most of it seemed acceptable, given the circumstances, although no doubt disconcertingly erratic to those who had not abused the substance in question. But there was one aspect that he felt less confident about, something he had now forgotten but which he could sense lurking at the fringes of his consciousness like a stage villain concealed behind a curtain.

‘
Buon giorno, dottore
.’

Andrea Rodriguez was wearing a black suit whose cut and fabric suggested board meetings and power lunches rather than funerals.

‘Manlio insisted that I come and greet you,’ she continued in her laboured but correct Italian. ‘This is his coming-out party, you see, and he’s nervous about his reception. “They’ll never forgive me if I don’t go,” he said, “and if I do, they’ll cut me dead.”’

She nodded towards a knot of men standing in the centre of the courtyard.

‘He was wrong, I’m glad to say. But he thought that being seen fraternizing with you might be pushing his luck, so he sent me instead. Most of these people have rearranged their schedules specially in order to be here, you see, and then you burst in and cancel the whole event on some specious pretext. You’re not very popular with the locals just now, I’m afraid.’

Zen conceded the point with a nod.

‘Neither am I,’ Andrea Rodriguez added. ‘It’s not easy being a foreigner here, particularly when everyone expected you to be a man.’

The ironies of the situation had been borne in on Zen the day before, after their introduction at the Vincenzo house. In Italian, Andrea is a man’s name; in English, he had learned, a woman’s. When Aldo Vincenzo had read a letter addressed to his son and signed ‘Andrea’, he had drawn the seemingly obvious conclusion: the real reason why Manlio refused to entertain his suggestion of forcing a marriage with Lisa Faigano was that he had ‘come out’ during his stay in California.

Although undeniably Californian, Andrea was not only female but of Italian descent on her mother’s side, her father stemming from one of the presettlement Spanish families. Manlio had been so insulted by his father’s intransigent attitude that he had refused to explain.

‘Why should I deign to correct someone who assumed he already understood everything?’ he had demanded rhetorically. ‘In the end, I assumed, the truth would come out and I would be vindicated. Instead, my father died as he had lived – in ignorance.’

All this should have made Zen and Andrea natural partners, as outsiders and rejects from the community. But he saw things differently. Perhaps it was the last sigh of the hashish, undulating up from the bottom of his cranium like long weed from the seabed, or perhaps just a natural bloody-mindedness, but instead of accepting the olive branch being extended to him, Zen turned on the American with a bureaucratic glint in his eye.

‘I think you told me that your mother’s family was Sicilian,
signorina
,’ he said, emphasizing the final, status-diminishing epithet.