by Franco Marks
In the place of Valdiluce there is now a sinister place, a cursed castle full of blood and crimes has appeared on those icy peaks. The valley of darkness: Valbuia.
21
Marzio decided to carry out a more detailed search of the area surrounding the Bucaneve. He’d walked it so many times, the map of the place was imprinted on his mind in every detail, down to the trees, the tufts of blackberries, the raspberry plants, the strawberries, the bumps, the holes, the ravines. All the hours he had spent looking for mushrooms in that beech wood had helped him memorise every inch of land. But apart from a lot of mushrooms, he’d never found anything significant. He activated all his higher talents: the sense of smell to trace and distinguish different odours, the sight to identify details that could have escaped him. He divided the map into dozens of strips no wider than a yard, and twenty long, and searched every point on those imaginary roads. Obstinately, one by one. A wild beast hunting its prey.
Under a large beech tree with gigantic roots that emerged from the ground to form a kind of cave, Marzio noticed something strange – there were no dry leaves around and the patchy earth was slightly loose, as though someone or some animal had been scratching at it. The place had been covered by snow until a few days earlier. Marzio leaned down – the humus was still wet. The beech shone above him, so powerful it looked like a missile on the launch pad. It must have been at least four hundred years old. Slight landslips and its continuous growth meant it now occupied much of a steep descent. The roots were entwined in an intricately woven pergola. Protected as it was by this natural strongbox, it wasn’t easy to work out what was hidden inside. Marzio put down his stick, knelt down and tried to look inside. He moved sideways to where a crack had been opened – someone must have cut the roots with a knife. From there, your eyes or your hand could get in.
Marzio tried to put his head inside. There was a scent of moss, white cyclamen, tufts of ivy, ferns, taut spider webs – no animal had been in there for a long time. In the deepest part, as deep as the den of a fox, a bright dot stood out. At first glance it looked like a vescia, a newborn mushroom shaped like a white ball.
Marzio put his hand into the hole and touched what he thought was a mushroom, but felt under his fingers something like a piece of fabric. He began to pull it toward him – the thing was heavy, dirty with soil, smelling of earthworms. He picked it up and shook it several times. A garment, so improbable in that context that he continued to clean it, to beat it against the trunk of the beech to make sure it really was what it seemed to be: a large, white, old fashioned pair of men’s underpants, Cagi brand. Dirty and stained with a cream coloured substance. It looked like a man’s semen.
Marzio put on his gloves and carried on rooting inside the den; in just a few minutes he had pulled out of the underground repository seven identical pairs of underpants, all stained with semen. Digging further, he unearthed five pornographic magazines. The soil had kept them as intact as ancient papyri. The den of the white Cagi pants was a place where someone went to masturbate, then hid the garment of shame under those twisted roots. The underpants were all the same size – medium. Too big for a child or a teenager, too small for Don Sergio. Just right for an athletic adult.
With those old Cagis in his hand, Marzio had opened up an unexpected lead that was easy to follow. In a small town, everything is known – especially anything regarding an obsolete, old fashioned garment. He took them to his office, catalogued them and placed them in sterile plastic bags, ready to be sent off to the laboratory for analysis.
He went out, climbed onto his Vespa and revved it as hard as it would go. It vibrated happily, as though pleased that Marzio had found an important clue. Its exhaust popping, they arrived in Borgo al Monte, a small district of Valdiluce. Fortunately, Sperino – the only shop in the area that sold underwear for men, women and children – was open. In the shop full of boxes, dusty clothes, striped flannel pyjamas and chequered lumberjack shirts, he found the answer to his first question.
“Is there anyone in town who wears Cagi underpants – the old type, the ones with the flap on the front?”
Sperino answered immediately. “The cotton ones?”
“Let me see a pair.”
Performing movements that were part of his everyday routine, Sperino took a long, heavy ladder, moved it to one side of the store and placed it against the frame of the shelves. He climbed slowly, those habitual steps giving him authority, part of his job. As light footed as a dancer, he grabbed a box, dusted it off with a handkerchief he kept in his pocket and climbed back down, holding it suspended in the air. He placed it on the counter. He opened it slowly and flipped aside the tissue paper, allowing a smell of the past to emerge, then pulled out a pair of white underpants. A ribbed pair of cotton Cagis. He laid them out as though they were a silk scarf.
“These?”
“Exactly.”
“Have you sold a couple of them recently? Do you remember who to?”
“Only one person in Valdiluce wears them: Agostino, the ski instructor who’s the caretaker at the Bucaneve and always serves mass.”
“Does he take a medium?”
“It’s the only size I have.” With the scent of haberdashery that he carried on his skin – a mix of fabrics, mothballs and spools of thread, Sperino approached Marzio’s ear.
“His sister Carlina always buys him Cagis because Agostino’s a mucky lad. He’s always touching himself inside his pants and he masturbates a lot of times every day. These are the only ones that will hold in the liquid…”
Marzio felt no indecision, just a straight, precise path ahead of him. He had to recover other clues. Search, root around in the Bucaneve and its surroundings. Revisit apartment twelve. From sunrise to sunset. Lodge inside the beech forest like a gold digger. Search, search. And then prove the guilt of the ‘weirdo’.
In the afternoon, during the umpteenth search, a violent storm broke out, with hail and wind, and Marzio took shelter under the roof of the Bucaneve building. The storm seemed to cleanse the world, water rushing down like a river bursting its banks and a flurry of snow joining the lightning bolts in that Armageddon.
White Wolf looked mystical, like an angel illuminated by thunderbolts – as if the weather conditions were not coincidental. Driven by his instinct, sure of being in the right place at the right time.
He had returned to apartment twelve on other occasions, had checked every detail, refined his technique, sharpened his extraordinary powers of concentration, but nothing had emerged – the place was as unyielding as the marble headstone of a tomb. He still had the keys with him and he opened the door which had remained closed after the tragedy. Darkness. He found the central light switch and turned the lights on. The lamps were dim. While the world outside was exploding, Marzio walked up the stairs, his shadow rocking slightly as the chandelier swayed in the wind. With apprehension he came to the first floor. The flashes of lightning slipped between the badly closed blinds. The door was ajar. Excited, he entered. In apartment twelve there was no scent of the past. That environment too, had been copied and pasted in his mind with absolute precision: the three dimensional map, a photographic structure, occupied a large surface inside his brain, set there like a perfect model. A place where he had lived, slept, eaten and above all imagined what might have happened that night.
Actually coming back there was a different emotion: the window with the shutters raised, the light just barely hinted at by the black clouds, the lightning flashing off the white walls, the thunder that disturbed his thinking.
In the apartment everything was in its place, and a powerfully synthetic smell of curtains, cushions, sofas, rugs, sheets and tablecloths had taken over. There was nothing left of the smell of a human body, or even of death. A strange hospital cleanliness.
Upon entering, Marzio felt a different sensation from usual: he felt a wave of cold come over him, seeping into his muscles, his head, his lips. It was because the storm had lowered the temperature – he was a
lready wearing lighter spring clothes. Furthermore, as the room had been left lifeless for a long time, frost and damp had gathered which penetrated into the bones. A strange discomfort. Yet when he had first gone into the gas filled room on the morning of the crime, he remembered feeling a terrible heat in the room. As if the radiators had been on for hours. Did the heating, which had certainly been on during the night, have a central boiler, or was each apartment autonomous?
He went into the bathroom. Attached to the wall was the autonomous system, and the boiler switch was turned to off. Since that day, no one had reactivated it. Marzio switched it on to warm the place up a bit. But there was no reaction. He tried to turn the heating on several times. He thought that after such a long time the boiler must be having problems burning the gas. It was old, from the eighties perhaps, with a natural draft. Very dangerous, as it had no safety system.
After a few tries, it finally started. A strange noise, a hiss, as if it were compressed. Marzio returned to the bedroom to check that the radiators were warming up. They were cold, the flame wasn’t feeding them. Instead, something familiar was gathering in the apartment. Not the suggestion of memory, the corpses in the room, his Elisabetta abandoned on the bed, but a real smell. Gas. Again. Very strong.
White Wolf followed the trail and it brought him back to the bathroom. The gas was coming from under the boiler, as though it wasn’t venting outside. Very dangerous. Marzio opened the bathroom window to get some air. He looked out to see where the drain ended – the pipe came out from the wall under the canopy, but it seemed to be disconnected – it wasn’t producing smoke, something was obstructing it. Marzio turned off the boiler. He had a kind of epiphany.
Very rapidly, he performed a series of combined actions. Perhaps the same ones the killer had performed that night. He climbed out into the rain, took a ladder that was resting against a cherry tree, leaned it against the outside wall near the boiler vent pipe. He climbed to the top, under the canopy, took off the chimney filter, slipped an arm into it and felt that there was something inside that was blocking the passage. He climbed down the ladder, found a dry, forked beech branch and climbed back up again.
He repeatedly screwed the stick into the flue pipe, trying to pull out a corner and after many attempts, dragged the branch towards him. Something was caught on the end. A white bundle that could be the proof he was looking for. Marzio grabbed the edge like a fisherman and slowly dragged the object towards him, a little fish fallen into his net. He retrieved the garment from the flue. Amidst the rain, lightning and thunder, he felt a burst of emotion – the fireworks that announced the party. It was an immense moment.
He felt like a child who had discovered a treasure. In moments like that, it was nice to be a detective. There was no doubt, it was another pair of white Cagi underpants, thick cotton, wide, almost shorts. The eighth pair he’d found. Various pale yellowish patches completely covered the flap at the front.
Marzio immediately imagined what it would be, there would be no need to do DNA testing – those were patches of sperm. Someone had blocked the flue of the pipe to fill the four women’s room with deadly gas. Despite it being a hot winter, the drop in temperature at night had made the boiler come on, so someone had decided to kill the girls by forcing the carbon monoxide into the apartment. The collective suicide had been staged. A demonic trick that, from a criminal point of view, was perfect. The acrid smell had awakened Agostino, who had raised the alarm.
“Inspector, there’s been a gas leak, something terrible has happened! Hurry!”
Marzio was overcome by a bewildering onrush of questions. It felt as though the whole thing was unravelling. Finally. And the thread led to Agostino.
Everyone in Valdiluce knew that he wasn’t well and that he had problems with relationships, but living in a small community allowed him to be protected and defended, considered as healthy as everyone else, treated as normal, and this habit had led the investigation astray. And there was also that fact that he was religious, and was always with Don Sergio.
The scar on his head, the cut from that rock during the ski race, represented his differentness: it was a brand, the stigmata of his madness. Camouflaged by the cooperation of the others, no one had seen him as a possible killer. Sheltered by his mild nature, but also by the powerful body of Don Sergio, by his long beard, by the incense of the church. And beside him, Carlina, the sister who kept him wrapped in her black shawls, preventing everyone from really knowing his personality. A vicious crazed killer?
22
Marzio didn’t disturb his colleagues, he didn’t inform Soprani. He had to establish the truth using all the means available to him. Above all, his own astuteness. He decided that it would be a good idea if he handled the investigation by treating Agostino Uberti like a child. Try to flatter him, win his trust. Everyone knew that he had two unhealthy passions. The ski instructor Ada – the one who had lost the twins and with whom he was madly in love – and mushrooms. He was an inveterate mushroom hunter. He spent whole days in the woods. Along with Carlina he had even made a profession out of it, for they dried the mushrooms and sold them in oil.
Marzio was weaving along the road on the scooter. The salt that had been thrown onto the asphalt to melt the snow had formed a layer of gravel and it felt like driving on eggs: you had to know how to handle the Vespa to avoid falling off. He presented himself in front of Agostino’s house with a basket of ‘sleeper’ mushrooms. He found him in the garden, intent on sorting the newly cut logs.
“Look what I found, Agostino.”
He didn’t approach, just stood looking at him like a suspicious dog, until Marzio raised up the basket of mushrooms, white, pristine, fleshy and fragrant in the sunlight.
“Come and see, they’re lovely sleepers.”
Agostino gave a start of amazement, then ran over to him and began to look at them, asking if he could hold them. He was clearly overcome by powerful emotion – it was the way he always approached things. He picked them up one by one, touched them, sniffed them. His hands were shaking as though he were stroking a woman’s naked body.
“They’re beautiful. Where did you find them?”
“You know very well that the place is a secret.”
“Near the outlet of the Lupo river?”
“It’s a secret.”
Agostino was softening.
“Once I found a porcino mushroom by the outlet of the Lupo that weighed at least twenty pounds. I’d never seen anything like it. And it was hard too. I knelt down and pulled it up – it was difficult – and then I put my head under the cap and started carrying it on my shoulders to the village. I followed the paths farthest from the woods so as not to ruin it. When it got difficult, I put the giant mushroom on the ground and used my axe to cut away the branches and the brambles. I was almost at the Morello plain, near the village, when dozens of elves arrived from the woods. Little men with red hats and long noses. They attacked my giant porcino. I tried to defend it, pulled out my axe, I managed to hit some of them, but it was like fighting the air. In a few minutes they’d eaten it up and all I was left with was a tiny piece that didn’t even look like it came from a giant porcino.”
Agostino finished his story with tears in his eyes and Marzio began using tales of his own mushroom picking exploits to win him over. He had found the keystone, and was now conquering Agostino’s imagination.
“I’ve seen the elves too.”
“They’re nasty.”
“They were nice to me. I met them when I was little, they saved me from a storm for three days.”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re White Wolf.”
Agostino started and his mood suddenly changed. As though thunder had sounded in his head. “I don’t like you, you’re a policeman and you’re always annoying me with questions.”
“Let’s make a deal – for you, I’ll just be White Wolf, the ski instructor and friend of the elves.”
“Not an inspector?”
“Just White Wolf.�
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“Swear it.”
“I swear. Why don’t we go out together at dawn tomorrow looking for mushrooms?”
Agostino seemed very interested in the idea.
“Where?”
“I’m only going to tell you, it has to be our secret.”
Agostino crossed his index fingers and kissed them. “I swear.”
“In the beech forest by the Bucaneve.”
“I don’t think there’ll be many sleepers there. Isn’t under the fir trees better?”
“I found these near the Bucaneve. It’s my secret place. Now you know, but you mustn’t tell anyone.”
“Are you sure? All there?”
“Yes, I am, and I left a lot more little ones under the leaves, tomorrow they’ll be perfect for us to pick.”
“Okay.”
“See you tomorrow.”
“See you at six in the Bucaneve beech forest. And promise me you won’t tell anyone where the sleepers are.”
“I promise.”
The conversation was growing longer and making less sense, but Marzio was dragging it out because he had scented a strange aroma in the air. The inspector moved closer to Agostino to say goodbye. He tried to take in every particle of his breath, pretended to stumble and leaned on Agostino’s shoulder, almost brushing against his mouth. Marzio breathed in deeply and analysed that delicate, sweetish smell, made up of a central element that might be sugar. It was pleasant, and didn’t have the smell of onion or garlic. A jam? He superimposed his breath over the one he had memorised on the day of the ridge, when the bogeyman had pushed him down into the ravine. One on top of the other, the way they did for DNA analysis. They matched perfectly. Bang. Agostino Uberti was the mysterious man on the ridge. A dazed Marzio lingered for a long time in front of him. From a distance, his sister Carlina, who kept a suspicious eye on her brother, shouted to him. “Come on, Agostino, it’s nearly ready.”
“Coming!”
