Free A Long Finish - 6 by Michael Dibdin Page B

not wishing to return to Rome any sooner than he had to, the prospect of going back to the hotel room where he had been cooped up for the past thirty-six hours, to say nothing of an immediate transfer to a front-line posting in Sicily, held no appeal either. At a loss, he paid for his drink and went outside again.
    The sun had now broken through the dispersing mist and was shining wanly, its attenuated light almost as insubstantial as the shadows cast by the buildings at the end of the piazza. Zen made his way slowly through the crowd, only too conscious that he had no set goal or purpose. The shoppers, mostly middle-aged or elderly, all well-dressed and seemingly prosperous, were going about their business without any noise or fuss. Almost everyone he had encountered since his arrival had been like that: pleasant, patient, good-natured, polite. After his experiences in Naples this struck him as slightly sinister, as though it were all some elaborate charade. No one could be that nice all the time.
    Nor were they, as Zen had known ever since scanning the file on the Vincenzo case. He had obtained this, after the usual delay, from the Defence Ministry in Rome, and read it on the train trip north. Aldo Vincenzo had been killed with a ferocity which almost defied belief; hence the extensive media interest, although this had abated since Manlio’s arrest. But the report of a medical witness – perhaps Lucchese’s friend – included among the documents which Tullio Legna had brought to the hotel the day before, was even more graphic:
    The body was lashed by the wrists and ankles to the wires supporting the laden vines, naked from the waist down. The shirt above was stained black with blood which had trickled down the thighs and legs in coagulating runnels, forming a pool between the legs which had already attracted the attention of a few early flies. The head was thrown back, the eyes wide as a startled horse. He had been stabbed again and again in the stomach and midriff below the breastbone: about forty times in all. The penis and scrotal sac had been hacked off and removed or concealed. No trace of these items has been found.
So the niceness was a pose, a way of keeping strangers at a distance and seeing off inconvenient intruders from Rome. It had happened to him many times before, although usually at the hands of interested parties less suave than Tullio Legna. But the principle remained the same; the door was being closed in his face. Well, too bad, he thought. He wasn’t in a mood to be seen off, no matter how politely. He was, in fact, in a mood to make a complete arsehole of himself, to offend as many of these secretive, hypocritical bastards as he could, even though it got him nowhere at all from a professional point of view. This was not business but pleasure.
    The grid of the market was defined by the traders’ vans and lorries drawn up in rows, their tail-gates opening on to wooden stalls piled high with the goods offered for sale. These were mostly household durables: bedlinen, clothes, kitchen utensils and hardware items, with a few of the usual labour-saving, miracle appliances which salesmen were loudly and enthusiastically demonstrating to a clientele of crumpled, compact women of a certain age, who looked suitably sceptical about these claims but at the same time enthralled by the attention they were receiving.
    Near the main door of the cathedral was a separate section, with open-sided vans selling cheese and fresh and cured meats, and stalls offering jars of preserves and honey from the mountains, and, of course, baskets of truffles and wild mushrooms. One of these consisted of a red Fiat truck covered in a tent-like tarpaulin. A hand-painted sign in old-fashioned block lettering above the tail-gate read FRATELLI FAIGANO – VINI E PRODOTTI TIPICI.
    Zen stared at it with a deepening frown. Where had he seen that name before? The answer came to him almost immediately. It had been in the report that he had