by Franco Marks
“Will there be a lot of them?”
“Definitely.”
“Sleeper mushrooms are so beautiful. They’re as white and fleshy as a woman’s arse.”
“I like them too.”
Marzio smiled, but Agostino’s face assumed a vulgar expression, with pursed lips. He was dwelling on thoughts that seemed private.
“And what about women’s arses? Do you like them too?”
“I’ll be going.”
“Ok.”
“Look after yourself.”
“There’ll be a lot of sleeper mushrooms, won’t there?” said Agostino with feverish eyes.
“Sure. And we’ll collect them all.”
“And me and Carlina will make a lot of money.”
*
As he went out into the garden, Marzio met Don Sergio. Don Sergio looked apprehensive. Agostino’s sister must have called him to her aid, because they were muttering to each other. The long beard glistened with electricity, every whisker a thought, and rebellious because it did not fall in a straight cascade but zigzagged, following the curves of mountain bends like the Nuvolari race track. Synchronised with some kind of agitation.
“Marzio, please, leave him in peace,” said Don Sergio. “It won’t be easy to make him forget this tragedy.”
“Sure, of course. He does seem very worked up.”
“If it was a shock for the rest of us, just think what a shock it must have been for him.”
Agostino suddenly appeared and came over to Marzio with a very aggressive look on his face. No longer holding himself in his habitual slight crouch, he had grown like some overwatered plant. His face was monstrous, his scar blazing, his shoulders massive. A wall of rock.
“He hates me,” he shouted, frenziedly. “He’s nasty to me.” With a pointing finger, Agostino indicated White Wolf. “He’s persecuting me.”
Suddenly athletic, despite his bulk and his stick, Don Sergio placed himself between the two. He put his hands on Agostino’s shoulders to hold back the violence the man wanted to vent on Marzio.
“Don’t worry, Inspector. I’ll take care of him. Now you come with me to the church, because we need to prepare for the rite of the ashes.”
Agostino was uncontrollable.
“It’s him that makes me feel bad. You’ll pay for this, you’ll see.”
“Calm down! That’s enough!”
Agostino was trembling and seemed on the verge of tears. Carlina hugged him and held him back with her powerful arms. “You had better go, White Wolf,” said Don Sergio courteously.
Marzio got on his Vespa. The priest came over to him. He whispered in his ear, his breath smelling of beans with pork rinds.
“Remember the DNA. Do it, please. My heart is weaker by the day. I could go at any moment.”
Marzio started the Vespa and rammed it into first gear. That priest really got on his fucking nerves. He left at speed, but after the first bend he stopped the scooter and hid it behind a pile of snow and went for a nose around behind Agostino’s house to see if there was anything odd. Strange footprints. Some tools, an abandoned spade… Garments left out to dry. In addition to the laundry, which was mostly made up of white vests and underwear, everything seemed quiet. What could Agostino have been doing in secret in the sun with his photochromic glasses? His whole life he’d never caused problems – he was an easy going type who’d never had problems with the law. The continuous and widespread allusions of the locals to his irrepressible sex life, on the other hand, meant that Don Sergio was a less reputable character. He had always looked after Carlina and Agostino: Agostino was a sexton and Carlina cleaned the church. They spent a lot of time together. The more malicious gossips hinted that Agostino might Don Sergio’s son. Was it just tittle-tattle? But there was a very close bond between them. What if Agostino was Don Sergio’s tool? If he used him for criminal acts? Agostino’s physical strength was legendary, and the perverseness of the priest no less so. What was hiding behind those walls? Could Carlina, the disciplined sister, she too, strong and healthy, have played a role?
He’d best slow down a bit, Marzio decided. His imagination was getting the better of him. Perhaps it was the remnants of Olimpia’s magic potion.
16
“Just the time to go to the toilet. When I came back, they’d disappeared.”
Ada, the ski instructor, was crying desperately on the phone. She was so confused that Marzio couldn’t understand what had actually happened.
“Who’s disappeared?”
“The twins, Piero and Paolo. The mayor’s sons.”
“Is there another teacher with you?”
“Yes, and we’ve alerted mountain rescue. But the helicopter can’t fly in this weather. I’ve looked everywhere for them, I’ve searched the Sassone shelter, but they aren’t there. And with this fog, it’ll be hard to find them. Hurry, Marzio. Please come right away.”
White Wolf looked out of the window. Fog, wind, sleet. A frightening day. Piero and Paolo were children but they were skilled skiers. They had already started doing their first races, but in these conditions anything could happen. The temperature was near zero. On Mount Sassone it was easy to lose sight of the horizon and fall into a crevasse. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, there was no time to waste. In extreme cases, when the lifts were closed, or there was thick fog, or at night, Marzio was forced to use the snowmobile. He hated it. The racket it made removed the peace from the silence. A snowstorm, a whirlwind or the wind whistling through the ravines were real sounds: the snowmobile produced noises that were alien. Sure, his Vespa was dirty too, and it made a racket as it went around the hairpin bends, but it travelled on the tarmac, along the curves where the Mille Miglia had once been raced.
It was an insane journey, and his phone rang the whole time. The desperate mayor threatening terrible retribution, the other ski instructors who were trying to coordinate the search, big boss Soprani, who had been informed immediately.
“Inspector, make sure that these two children are found immediately, beautiful and intact. This must be a story with a happy ending. Don’t talk to anyone, the whole thing must remain between us. Explain that carefully to the others taking part in the search. Silence, even if there’s a happy ending.”
“And if there’s isn’t?”
“Don’t piss me off – we have to be optimistic about our work. Find a solution. You’re a ski instructor, the head of the rescue team. A great detective. You have all the skills to solve the problem.”
Soprani’s last words were eaten up by the snow.
The impact with a snowdrift jolted the phone out of Marzio’s hand and it fell in a small avalanche down into a ravine. The snow had swallowed it up. There was no time to get it back. In his haste, White Wolf hadn’t brought the walkie-talkie with him. Alone, in the swirl of the fog and the snow that was growing thicker and thicker, he regained his mind. In those conditions he could reason better, despite the roaring of the snowmobile.
In the Mount Sassone shelter there was a surreal calm, and all that could be heard were the soft steps of the ski instructors’ boots and Ada’s sobs. There was a rotten smell as though the sewers were churning because of a sudden change in climate.
“I don’t know how it’s possible. Piero and Paolo were both perfectly calm, sitting here with their cups of hot chocolate. I just went downstairs to the bathroom to brush my hair, I wasn’t gone more than five minutes, when I came back up, there were only two half empty cups of chocolate and their snowshoes leaning against the chairs. Their skis in the rack. They disappeared like a couple of ghosts.”
Outside the shelter the wind whistled. A blizzard that would complicate the situation was all they needed. By now it was about half past two in the afternoon, and dusk was approaching. Marzio was extremely worried. In those conditions the two small children risked freezing to death.
Ada – blonde, thin and with the red face of someone who has spent a lot of time in the sun – was upset. She smelled of dried Ambra
Solaire. Tears flooded her blue eyes as though they’d been building up behind a dam. The fact of two pupils – who, to make things worse, were small children – disappearing would be unforgivable for anyone, but for a ski instructor it would mean losing her licence and job even if things turned out well. To alleviate her sense of guilt, Ada said, “Could they have been kidnapped?”
Everyone in Valdiluce seemed to think they were a criminologist nowadays.
“They would have chosen an easier place if they were going to kidnap them,” Marzio replied with irritation. “A road. With this weather there are hardly any escape routes. They’d have to know how to ski. And anyway, where would they put them? In their rucksacks?”
There was no time to look for other details, right now they had to find the twins and that was all there was to it. They could think about who it had been afterwards.
Tonioli, the mayor, arrived, accompanied by Kristal aboard another snowmobile. As green as his parka, he accentuated his habitual anger with violent outbursts at Ada.
“You lunatic, I’ll kill you if you don’t find my children right away.”
Kristal, as awkward as always, numb from the cold, clad in normal shoes and a light cotton coat, hesitated. “Inspector, I came to give you a hand.”
“You stay with the mayor and try to calm him down.”
Marzio immediately set about organising the search teams, entrusting to himself the most difficult job – that of searching the ridges.
*
“Pierooooo! Paolooooo!”
His voice echoed like shots fired at a rubber wall. For a few minutes, there hadn’t been a single opening in the fog. It enveloped everything and he was travelling through an abstract world without a horizon, where a rise would suddenly carry you up and then you slid down just as quickly into a dip. It was dangerous.
Marzio stopped. The north wind buried the words – it was hard to tell if it was the storm or an answer. He had to lean on his snowshoes to avoid falling.
“Pierooooo! Paolooooo!”
They could have been kidnapped, someone could have taken them out of the shelter to hurt them, kill them or torture them. Nothing could be taken for granted, even though Marzio hoped that the two children had simply let themselves be tempted by the thought of an adventure. White Wolf knew something about that. As a child of six, he had opened the door during a furious snowstorm and run away from home. He’d looked like a little gnome in his windbreaker and a red cap. He’d got lost. After two days of aimless waiting, his mother, Elisa, and his father, Alfonso, both desperate, had resigned themselves to never seeing their child again. And then, on the afternoon of the third day, with the storm still raging, the Valdiluce ski club team had found him, inside a kind of igloo – a little ice temple. Dusted with white and as immobile as a statue, but they realised that he was still alive from his blue eyes. They were gleaming. Adventure fever. The local people said it was a miracle: only a wolf could have survived in that cold for three days. And so, thanks to this extraordinary feat, Marzio had become White Wolf. Any thought, even the most daring, can pop into a child’s head. The twins had left their skis and snowshoes in the ski shelter so they had to have followed the crest on foot – that line along the strip that separated the two cliffs that you could walk with a certain confidence, almost as if it were flat. It wasn’t easy to move on the ice wearing boots, though. White Wolf was trying to find a clue, but the wind blew everything smooth and carried his words far away.
“Pierooooo! Paolooooo!”
He stopped on the white ridge. It wasn’t easy to stand, even for him – the ice and the wind made it almost impossible for him to keep his balance. White Wolf’s eyes scanned the expanse for a sign, something that stood out in the desolate whiteness. Under a mound he noticed a dark shadow, something protruding from beneath the snow. He bent down, scratched with his bare hands and pulled out a Goretex ski glove. Given the storm underway, it could have put down the best part of an inch of snow in the last quarter of an hour – recent then. There was no doubt, though, that the glove had belonged to a child. Evidence that the twins had passed by there, and perhaps fallen in that very icy spot. Marzio shouted with all the power in his lungs.
“Pierooooo! Paolooooo!”
He moved closer the mound to shield himself from the gusts of wind and gather his thoughts. And in that moment of waiting, something huge fell on him from above. There was a violent impact. He thought for a moment that an advertising billboard must have been blown off one of the chairlift pylons. He staggered, his brain unable to work out what had happened. His senses were cloudy, the scene around him blurred, but as soon as the surprise faded, he realised he had been attacked. A man was trying to throw him down into the ravine. Strong arms clad in the purple suit of the Valdiluce ski instructors. The impact had been extremely fast, like a truck travelling at full speed. The wind had masked the sound of skis on the ice. Marzio defended himself, but he was trying to keep his balance with his snowshoes pointed towards the valley – an unstable position from which to do so.
In the struggle between them, White Wolf encountered an animal violence. They came face to face, the man’s features covered with a balaclava and sunglasses – there was no clear distinguishing feature, no word that could be identified, only steely muscles. From the slit of his mouth, a warm breath of exertion reached Marzio’s nose. A strange odour. There was something odd about the man’s breath – it didn’t smell of onion, salami, wine and Ginpin. There was a singular, sweetish smell that was difficult to identify. It stayed entangled in his odoriferous bulb. An indelible memory. A file saved forever.
Marzio slipped and fell, down into the valley, and rolled himself into a ball with all the strength of White Wolf. He tensed his muscles, dropped for hundreds of metres, tried to rebound off the rocks. He banged his head violently against a sharp stone and lost consciousness for a minute, or perhaps a day. When he came round, he couldn’t tell if what had happened to him was some confused, mistaken memory or if someone really had tried to kill him. The memory was blurred, swollen; as is often the case, it was difficult to make out what was real. He was holding the child’s black glove. He had brought it with him in the fall. Marzio heard a mewling like a kitten next to him, and turned a little further round.
“Mummy, mummy, help!”
A dirty trick of destiny.
“Mummy, mummy!”
His legs felt weak. It was the twins. Nearby. Fallen from the same glistening slab of ice from which Marzio had slipped. Had someone thrown them off the same cliff? It was like a nightmare. Paolo had only a few grazes, a dislocated wrist, his bare hand almost frozen. He immediately put the black glove back on him. Piero had a broken leg.
White Wolf couldn’t look those two suffering children in the face. It hurt his heart. With the passing of the years an adult learned to hide the pain but a child let it show, and it felt indecent. Despair, the impossibility of being embraced by those who love you, the crying.
“Mummy, mummy!”
He took off his gloves, opened his backpack, looked for something, found a sweatshirt, a small torch that, luckily, still worked, and a tube of condensed milk glittering in the bottom. He pulled it out – it had been left in there after a trip with Elisabetta to Turchino lake. She had adored condensed milk, she would have drunk pints of the stuff. A sudden memory of the sun that brought nostalgia, a sense of guilt, as though over the last few days he had pulled away from her. He offered the twins a little milk and they sucked it as greedily as though it were from their mother’s breast. That sweet taste made them a little calmer. Marzio had some too, and felt a powerful energy inside himself. He found again the warm soul of Elisabetta and he came back into himself, and with that strength he came back to life as well. He took off his ski over trousers, wrapped one of the children in them, then stripped off his jacket and wrapped up the other in that, and made a kind of sled by tying some fir branches together with the laces of the backpack.
The desperate caravan set off.
They had to reach Valdiluce. A journey that, thanks to the fog and the blizzard, became increasingly difficult. The mountain was a mouth ready to devour them, kill them, crush them like three ants in the valley. Under his feet the blanket of snow formed traps, crevasses, frozen rivers. The massif, split in two like a chunk of nougat, was tightening. White Wolf looked up at the sky, saw mounds of snow lurking, ready to turn into avalanches. He had in mind the route that would take him back to Valdiluce, but in those conditions, the territory he knew so well disguised itself, created never-before-seen paths, unfamiliar forests, mountains that looked as if they belonged in other places. He absolutely had to get to the old sledge lift route – from there he would be able to reach the town. Piero and Paolo complained about the cold and the pain. Marzio wasn’t used to dealing with children, but to reassure them he gave them more condensed milk, then spoke aloud, as though he wanted to tell a story.
“We’ll soon be at the old sledge lift track, and it’s not far to home from there.”
At the word ‘home’, Piero and Paolo began to cry more forcefully. Marzio tried to distract them with a story.
“The sledge lift was a carriage with lots of seats that was pulled along by a cable. Instead of wheels, it had runners for sliding over the snow. The driver had a kind of whip, and he used to slide it over an electric wire that ran alongside the track. That signal made a bell ring and at the top, an attendant turned on the engine and the sledge suddenly set off with a jolt.” Marzio shone the flashlight beam on them. The children were on the verge of passing out. His strength was starting to fade too. Perhaps he was about to freeze to death. He looked at his watch, which had broken in the fall, its hands steady at half past two. He turned on the eyes of White Wolf and, as though guided by a radar, analysed what was around him. The two children were almost motionless, showing the first signs of hypothermia. He tried to wake them by slapping their faces, then he checked himself – he too, had a numb foot. He glanced at the tips of the fir trees, synchronised his mind with the snow, the wind, the noises, scratched at the world, looked for any grappling hooks that might allow him to attach himself to life. It would be stupid to die like that, especially with two young children.
