by Marco Vichi
Contents
Also by Marco Vichi
About the Author
About the Translator
Title Page
Copyright
Death in the Tuscan Hills
Acknowledgements
Notes
Also by Marco Vichi
Death in August
Death and the Olive Grove
Death in Sardinia
Death in Florence
About the author
Marco Vichi was born in Florence in 1957. The author of twelve novels and two collections of short stories, he has also edited crime anthologies, written screenplays, music lyrics and for radio, written for Italian newspapers and magazines, and collaborated on and directed various projects for humanitarian causes.
There are five novels and two short stories featuring Inspector Bordelli. Death in Florence (Morte a Firenze) won the Scerbanenco, Rieti, Camaiore and Azzeccagarbugli prizes in Italy. Marco Vichi lives in the Chianti region of Tuscany.
You can find out more at www.marcovichi.it.
About the translator
Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator. He is also the author of three books of poetry. He lives in France.
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Ugo Guanda Editore, S.p.A., Parma 2011
Translation copyright © Stephen Sartarelli 2016
The right of Marco Vichi to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 76123 8
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La Nazione, Monday, 20 February 1967
Page three
HILLS OF HORROR
SUICIDE IN THE WOODS
FLORENTINE BUTCHER, 44 YEARS OLD
SHOOTS SELF IN MOUTH AT CINTOIA ALTA
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER GRIEF-STRICKEN
Yesterday morning Livio Panerai, a butcher aged 44, killed himself by firing a shotgun into his mouth near the abbey of Monte Scalari. Shortly before 7 a.m., a hunter found the butcher’s lifeless body in the woods, still holding the double-barrel rifle. Signora Cesira Batacchi Panerai, the victim’s wife of nineteen years, had no explanation for her husband’s extreme act. He had left early that morning before dawn to go hunting in the hills of Cintoia, as had long been his custom on Sundays. Livio Panerai had no apparent causes for anguish in his day-to-day existence. A hard worker, always cheerful and beloved of his customers, he led a transparent life. The inhabitants of La Panca, the site of the tragedy, now speak of ‘hills of horror’. Not only was the area the scene of atrocious massacres by the Nazis at Pian d’Albero and nearby locations, but the horror hasn’t let up since. The suicide victim was found not far from the spot where the lifeless body of Giacomo Pellissari, the young kidnapping victim who had been raped and murdered, was discovered a few months earlier. Pellissari’s killer has never been apprehended.
The mortal remains of Livio Panerai have been transferred to the chapel of the hospital of …
Bordelli closed the newspaper and dropped it on to the table. He sat there without moving, staring into space, looking pensive. A dense cobweb hung from the ceiling, while beside it a huge, hairy spider waited for a victim to fall into its trap. The obsessive ticking of the clock on the wall was not enough to overcome the silence. Rather, it insinuated itself into one’s thoughts like a worm into an apple. Life was strange sometimes. It surprised you when you least expected it. So the butcher had killed himself. Only Bordelli and Piras knew what kind of animal Livio Panerai really was. An unreconstructed Fascist, a child rapist, a killer …
He stood up, sighing. Tearing page three out of La Nazione, he crumpled it up and squeezed it into a ball, then went and tossed it between the andirons. Other pages met the same end: articles on the aftermath of the flood, the incalculable damage to artworks, the despair of those who’d lost everything, the families still living in makeshift lodgings, not to mention the polemics, the accidents, the films playing in town, the day’s television listings, the Fiorentina football squad’s loss at home, adverts for alcoholic beverages and headache pills …
Over the balls of newspaper he placed a small bundle of dry sticks, some larger branches, a few old pine cones with scales open, and then he crowned the stack with two small logs of oak. Striking a match, he lit the paper at several different points, then went and sat down on one of the two brick benches on either side of the enormous fireplace, right under the great hood of blackened stones, where peasants used to sit during the cold winter months.
Outside it was already night. He’d been living in the old farmhouse for a little over a month, and lighting the fire had become a pleasant ritual. He’d finally done it, after thinking about it for years. He’d managed to sell his flat in town and buy a place in the country, in the commune of Impruneta. It was a big two-storey farmhouse a few kilometres from town along an unpaved road full of holes and rocks where nobody ever passed. A secluded, wild spot … Hic sunt leones.
The water was brought up from a well with an autoclave, and for heating he had a cast-iron stove upstairs and the fireplace on the ground floor. To get a telephone connection he had to wait about three weeks. But with each day that went by he became more convinced that he’d made the right choice. Now that he was no longer spending his days tracking down killers, he had plenty of time on his hands. He’d even bought many books and sometimes spent whole afternoons reading in the armchair by the fire. The city was more distant than the moon, even though in reality it was barely a fifteen-minute drive away. When he thought of Florence the same things always came to mind: the dense, dirty band of heating oil still clinging to the façades of the churches and palazzi, the mud stagnating in basements, the gutted shops and businesses that hadn’t reopened, the smell of car exhausts … But he also thought of the young people darting to and fro on their Vespas and Lambrettas and the girls who in summer wore miniskirts so short they left him in a daze.
When stuffing boxes and suitcases while moving out, he’d found a great many things he hadn’t seen for years and had even forgotten he owned. Bundles of family photos, old letters, two pistols from the war, daggers from the San Marco Battalion still covered with blood, Nazi decorations stripped off the uniforms of the dead … He’d even found the piece of torpedo shrapnel, with bits of dry algae tangled in the crinkled metal, which had grazed his temple when he was stationed on a submarine. He’d put this in the drawer in his bedside table so he wouldn’t lose it again.
Lighting his fifth cigarette of the day, he started watching the flames as they devoured the paper, sticks, cones and branches before enveloping the logs in reddish-golden tongues. Every so often the fire popped and a swarm of sparks rose in the air and vanished into the darkness of the hood.
He liked getting up every morning to find his bread and La Nazione hanging under the porch roof in a p
lastic bag. This was normal practice in the countryside. You had only to arrange it with the baker, who was so kind as to include the newspaper with the bread. The paper was indispensable for lighting the fire.
The treccone1 came by once a week, but now instead of a bicycle he had a Fiat 500 Giardinetta with a boot full of every sort of thing imaginable. He didn’t always succeed in selling or trading something, but he knew how to repair umbrellas and shutters that didn’t close properly, how to sharpen knives and fodder-cutters, and he was always glad to accept a glass of wine and exchange a few words, bringing the latest news from house to house, perhaps embellishing things as he pleased.
Bordelli had done well to buy the house. Included in the price was a hectare of untilled land with a hundred or so neglected olive trees. It was in a magnificent location, all in the sun and none in the shade, as the local peasants said. The view stretched far into the background of a Leonardo painting. Rows of cypresses, vines, olive trees, expanses of red earth, soft hills with crests covered with black woods that turned violet at sunset, as in certain nineteenth-century landscapes.
And to think that in the end he still had several million lire2 left over. After the flood, apartments from the third floor up had increased greatly in value. Whereas nobody wanted to live in the country any more. Country life was a horror. And not only for the children of peasants, who were fleeing to the city chasing a dream that led them on like a beautiful prostitute. Even the proprietors wanted to rid themselves of all those now worthless buildings before they went completely to ruin. They were in a hurry to sell them and didn’t fuss much over the price. The owner who had sold him his house, a man of about sixty who looked like he’d never worked a day in his life, hadn’t even bothered to remove his own things. He’d left everything there, large antique armoires, cherrywood chests, cast-iron beds, terracotta stoves, a kneading-trough that smelled of wood and flour, tables, chairs, inlaid cupboards, and even two small, chipped panels of religious subjects, painted in oils in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Nothing of great value, mind, but still quite pleasant to look at. He’d hung them in his bedroom, and at night, before turning out the lights, he would sometimes sit there studying them for a few minutes, trying to work out from which master the naïf painter had drawn his inspiration.
At night the silence was absolute, broken every so often by the call of some animal or the dull thudding of a herd of wild boar cantering through the olive trees, or the shifting of the logs in the fire downstairs. He’d loved the house from the moment he first saw it, the way he did sometimes with a woman he saw passing by on the street. He felt good inside those skewed walls, on those half-warped clay tiles. After living in a flat for so many years, he now enjoyed ascending a staircase or having to take a short walk to go into the kitchen or his bedroom. It was as if he felt younger in the country, except when he saw himself in the mirror.
Through a small door on the ground floor one entered the most rustic part of the house: a proper cellar with brick vaults, and a stall that still stank of animals, with old rabbit cages cobbled together by some peasant. There was even an old olive press with a big granite wheel and a pole to hitch to a donkey. Nowadays he stacked his firewood on it. Who knew, perhaps one day he would put those rooms in order and the house would get even bigger. He could live there with a woman and not see her during the day. He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. Whenever he thought of a woman he thought of Eleonora …
He heard the sound of an approaching car in the distance and looked at the clock on the wall. Half past seven. Punctual as ever, he thought. He tossed his cigarette butt into the fire, got up calmly and put a pot of water on the largest burner. He peered out of the kitchen window. A rusted lamp embedded in the outside wall scarcely illuminated the threshing floor, while the tops of the cypresses swayed in the wind in the darkened distance. The car pulled up in front of the house, the headlights went off, and a car door slammed. A shadow came up to the door, and Bordelli went to open it.
‘Good evening, Inspector.’
‘I’m not an inspector any more, Piras.’
‘A leopard can’t change its spots …’ said the young policeman, shuddering with cold as he entered the house. A year and a half had passed since the shoot-out that had shattered his legs, and by now he walked almost normally. He had a strange air about him that evening, as if he wanted to know something badly and was having trouble holding himself back. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of cigarettes, but said nothing.
‘Cold?’ asked Bordelli.
‘It’s freezing out here, but it’s a bit warmer in town.’
‘Make yourself at home … Penne in tomato sauce all right with you?’
‘Anything’s fine with me,’ said the Sardinian, sitting down inside the fireplace. He opened his hands and held them close to the fire. By now he knew that the former inspector didn’t want any help in the kitchen. Ever since Bordelli’s move they had talked often on the telephone, and he’d gone out to see him two or three times, always staying for dinner. Every time, he’d asked him how a human being could live in such isolation. He himself was born and raised in the country, but now he couldn’t do without the chaos of the city.
‘A glass of wine?’ Bordelli asked, opening a can of tomatoes. The Sardinian nodded assent. Bordelli filled two glasses and brought one to Piras. It was a blood-red wine he bought by the demijohn from a local peasant. He would put it into flasks himself, pouring a few drops of oil on top to keep the air out.
They sat there in silence. The sound of the fire was relaxing. Bordelli started sauteeing some finely chopped onion in olive oil, let it sizzle for a spell and then poured the tomatoes on top of it.
‘Have a pleasant day down at the station?’
‘No murders, at least.’
‘That’s something …’
‘And how was your day, Inspector?’
‘I’m not an inspector any more …’
‘It’s okay, nobody can hear us,’ said Piras. Bordelli dumped the pasta into the boiling water and, after stirring it for thirty seconds or so, took his glass and went and sat down in the fireplace opposite his young Sardinian friend. He was still waiting for him to blurt out the question that was burning his tongue. It was anybody’s guess whether he would ask it directly or take a roundabout approach. In the distance a dog was barking wildly, and every so often they could hear the cry of an owl that must have been perched on the roof.
‘How’s your beautiful Sicilian girl?’ Bordelli asked after a long pause.
‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Why don’t you bring her here with you some evening?’
‘She’s working on her thesis. She studies all day long and then goes to bed with the chickens,’ Piras said with a smile of resignation.
‘That girl knows what she wants.’
‘I can’t imagine her as a lawyer.’
‘Are you kidding? People will be falling all over themselves to have her defend them,’ said Bordelli.
Silence again. Piras was staring at the fire, every so often sipping his wine. His eternally serious face, which was a little like an ancient nuraghic stone, might mislead anyone who didn’t know him. On the outside he might seem like a melancholy, gloomy lad, but he wasn’t. He was actually light hearted, in his way, and when he wanted to he could joke around and have fun. But you couldn’t tell, to look at him.
Bordelli finished his glass and got up to put another log on the fire. He went and tasted the pasta: it needed another two or three minutes. He’d set the table in grand fashion. White tablecloth, fine china plates and bowls, crystal tulip glasses, his grandmother’s cutlery, clean napkins, a flask of wine, water, bread, oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, Parmesan cheese and grater … All laid out in order. That, too, was a new and pleasant habit of his, whether he was alone or in company. When he still lived at San Frediano in Florence, on the rare occasions he ate at home he would sit on the couch with his plate on his lap. He would never again make such mistakes
. Rosa, his friend and stand-in mum, would always say: Eating is like making love; you have to do it right. And to think it was a retired prostitute who said this.
He drained the pasta, served it in the bowls, and poured the hot tomato sauce over it. They sat down at the table, pleasantly famished. A smidgen of fresh oil, and plenty of Parmesan. They also added a bit of ground hot pepper. At his first forkful, Piras lightly raised his eyebrows in appreciation. Bordelli refilled their wine glasses.
‘Your folks are doing all right?’
‘Everything’s fine.’
‘What’s your father been up to?’
‘I spoke with him yesterday. He sends you his best.’
‘One of these days I’ll give him a ring,’ said Bordelli. He and Gavino, Piras’s father, had been comrades in the San Marco Battalion in the last year of the war. Gavino had returned to his village less one arm and gone back to the peasant’s life.
‘He said he might come to the mainland this spring to see me,’ said Piras.
‘Oh, good. So I’ll finally get to meet your mum.’
‘She definitely won’t be coming.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s never left Bonarcado in her life; the mere idea of it frightens her.’
‘Try to persuade her …’
‘It’d be easier to get a brick to change its mind.’
‘But are all you Sardinians like that?’
‘Everyone is the way he is,’ said Piras, cutting things short.
‘Well, if Gavino wants to, he can come and stay here with me. I’ve got loads of room.’
‘Thanks, I’ll tell him that. But I don’t think he’ll really come … He’s been saying that for years …’
