A Long Finish - 6 Read Free

up the muddy alley between the two rows of vines, he knew that the chances of anyone being up and about, never mind vigilant and suspicious, in the misty half-light before sunrise on that particular Sunday morning were as close to zero as made no difference. And while he had put in an appearance at the celebrations the day before – not to do so would inevitably attract comment – he had made a few glasses of wine go a lot further than it had appeared, and had woken fresh and alert at five o’clock that morning, ready for his annual, but very private, ceremony.
    He thought of this as ‘laying flowers on Angelin’s tomb’, even though the supposed victim of a barbaric enemy was not, of course, buried at the spot where he had been killed. The flowers were real, though: a touchingly artless bouquet of white chrysanthemums he had bought the day before in full view of several witnesses. He had told them that the flowers were for his mother, but with an awkward shrug which both ended the conversation and would be remembered in the event of his being caught and asked the reason for his presence on the Vincenzo land that morning. ‘I just wanted to honour my fallen comrade,’ he would say, his voice breaking with long-denied emotion. ‘People called him simple, but to me he was a friend …’
    No one would dare question him further after that, he reckoned. His evident sincerity would speak for itself, for the oddest thing of all was that by now he had come to believe this version of events himself. And so as he made his way up the vineyard that autumn morning, he was simultaneously two quite different people on two very different quests: a wary and unscrupulous truffle poacher, and an elderly veteran of the Resistance honouring a dead brother-in-arms.
    It was then that he saw something moving among the vines up ahead, heavy with ripe clusters of the fat blood-red grapes which would produce the Barbaresco wine for which the region was famous. All might have been well, even then. He had always been good at moving silently and at speed, and could easily have slipped through the rows of vines to his left and then worked back the way he had come. But Anna had scented the extraneous presence. Restrained by the leash, she couldn’t bound forward and investigate and so, as dogs will, she began to bark. The figure concealed in amongst the vines straightened up and turned towards him.
    ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
    There was no reply.
    ‘Didn’t you see the signs on the fence? “No trespassing,” it says. Do you know what that means, or are you illiterate on top of everything else?’
    The dog stood between them, looking from one to the other as though uncertain which side to take, which one to defend and which to attack. Then the man who had brought her took the initiative, walking forward at a slow, confident lope, his right hand gripping his sapet , the adze-shaped mattock used to unearth truffles.
    That was how it began.
     

     
    ‘Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello. I am a purist, Dottor Zen. I also happen to be able to afford that classical austerity which is the ultimate luxury of those who can have anything they want. In wine, as in music, the three Bs suffice me.’
    ‘I see,’ said Aurelio Zen, who didn’t see anything except the bins of bottles stretching away into the gloomy reaches of the vast, cold, damp cellar, its vaulted roof encrusted with a white mesh of saltpetre.
    ‘Barolo is the Bach of wine,’ his host continued. ‘Strong, supremely structured, a little forbidding, but absolutely fundamental. Barbaresco is the Beethoven, taking those qualities and lifting them to heights of subjective passion and pain that have never been surpassed. And Brunello is its Brahms, the softer, fuller, romantic afterglow of so much strenuous excess.’
    Aurelio Zen was spared the necessity of answering by an attack of coughing which rendered him speechless for almost a minute.
    ‘How long have you had that cough?’