by Marco Vichi
‘I’m sorry, Inspector, but perhaps you haven’t really understood what the tarot is,’ said the fortune-teller in a faint, hoarse voice.
‘Well, I thought I’d try …’
‘The cards can’t reveal a killer’s name; they can only tell what will happen to the person in front of me.’
‘Perhaps you could find out if I’ll succeed in capturing the culprit,’ said Bordelli, feeling sheepish with Piras looking on.
‘What must happen, will happen,’ the psychic murmured.
‘Exactly. So maybe—’
‘Please, Inspector,’ Amelia interrupted him in a weak voice.
‘As you wish, then. Sorry to disturb you.’
‘I can’t help you, believe me.’
‘Thanks just the same.’
Bordelli put the receiver down and leaned back in his chair. He briefly told Piras what Amelia had said. He felt relieved. Though he had yielded for a moment to the temptation, he really couldn’t see himself paying heed to the tarot’s prophecies.
‘Let’s hope something turns up at La Panca,’ he said, without believing it for a second. At that moment somebody knocked at the door. It was Rinaldi with the first results. The paths through the woods had been carefully checked. To get to Monte Scalari by car one had no choice but to go by way of La Panca. The other trails had large stones, deep holes and impassable, tortuous bends that even a jeep in wartime would have had trouble negotiating.
‘Anything else?’
‘Nothing else, Inspector,’ Rinaldi said dejectedly, as if it were his fault.
‘All right, you can go, thanks,’ the inspector said, even more disappointed than him. Rinaldi vaguely gestured a military salute and left in a hurry. Evening was falling, and the sound of torrential rain rose up from the street below.
‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ Bordelli asked, worrying an earlobe.
The following morning he left home before eight o’clock and headed for La Panca. He felt the need to go back there, although he was convinced there was no point in it. He couldn’t bear sitting behind his desk, staring at the wall, crushed by a feeling of powerlessness that had been weighing on him for days like a sense of guilt.
He stopped at Porta Romana to buy the Florentine daily, La Nazione:
LITTLE GIACOMO FOUND DEAD
RAPED AND STRANGLED
He tossed the newspaper on to the front seat and drove off, reviewing in his mind the reports of the policemen who had questioned the inhabitants of La Panca, Cintoia Alta and Monte Scalari. They were all more or less the same: nobody had seen anything unusual. There were, moreover, a number of inhabited houses on the hill, as well as an abbey, and the wooded area was often frequented by hunters and people foraging for mushrooms. It was normal to hear cars driving by at all hours; nobody paid any attention.
In short, they were getting nowhere. The only new information was from Diotivede, and for the moment it was useless.
He arrived at La Panca with his morale in tatters. As he went up the path in the car, he realised he’d finished all his cigarettes and half-cursed between clenched teeth. Crumpling the empty packet, he hurled it out of the window. After a few bends, he parked the Beetle in the same clearing as the day before. He opened the glove compartment, to check whether there wasn’t perhaps a spare cigarette in there, but all he found was a little box of Tabù-brand liquorice drops. Tapping the box with one finger, he let a few of the bitter drops roll into his mouth.
He put on his hiking boots and set out slowly towards the spot where the body had been found, knowing he was wasting his time. From the ground, still wet with rain, rose a sharp smell of putrefaction, as a breath of damp wind caressed his face. The silence of the woods was broken only by birdsong, the rustling of his footsteps and, now and then, a distant gunshot. The upper boughs of the trees stood out against a colourless sky, as the sun formed spots of light on the carpet of rotten leaves.
He trudged on, breathing heavily, expecting at any moment to see a German pop out from behind a tree and start shooting at him. That had actually happened to him in the forests of the Abruzzi, as he made his way up the Italian peninsula, biting the tails of the retreating Nazis. Luckily he had not figured among the dead, and when he returned to camp he’d marked the eleventh notch on the butt of his machine gun. He didn’t yet know that in the coming months he would add another sixteen. He had never felt guilty about having killed; there wasn’t anything else he could have done in those moments. But they weren’t good memories. He remembered the distress of a comrade of his in the San Marco battalion who couldn’t forgive himself for pointlessly killing a Nazi. During a rather tempestuous firefight, he’d seen this hulking German running towards him and instinctively cut him down with a burst of fire. A moment later he realised he’d riddled with bullets a wounded man who was collapsing to the ground. He never gave himself a moment’s rest, as if he’d killed an innocent …
Bordelli recognised from a distance the hole in which the boy had been buried, and he gritted his teeth. Reaching the spot, he stopped in front of the loose earth, hands dangling at his sides. In his mind’s eye he could still see the small naked foot sticking out of the ground, the mud-smeared body, the worms writhing in the empty eye sockets. Not far away he heard a tree trunk creak in the wind, and at that moment it seemed the saddest sound on earth. He started walking around, looking at the ground, moving the leaves with his feet in the absurd hope of finding something. All he saw were the usual cartridges and a few shabby mushrooms. He was pointlessly wasting time, but what else could he do? Sit in his office warming his chair?
He moved away from the makeshift grave, walking in a spiral motion, in ever broader circles, examining every inch of earth carefully. In spite of everything, he still had hope. It was a senseless illusion, but it was all he had. He wasn’t asking for much, for Christ’s sake. Just a button would have been enough, or a cigarette butt, a spent match …
After half an hour of this, he stopped circling the grave and headed deeper into the woods. His hope had run out, and his search turned into a solitary walk. He wanted only to enjoy some silence undisturbed. He ambled along slowly, letting the beauty of the place fill his eyes. He didn’t even feel much like smoking. He felt good, there in the woods. It had taken Botta’s mushrooms to make him realise this. He had to come back to these hills more often. The best thing was letting his thoughts travel up unknown paths, or remain suspended in the air. Through the trees’ black trunks he saw a large hare race breathlessly away and disappear into a thicket. It was safe for now, but sooner or later a hunter would gun it down and it would end up as sauce for a pot of pappardelle.
He kept on walking, breathing deeply, lost in his memories. Every so often he heard a shot ring out in the valley. He went down a hillside and found himself back on the trail. He was almost certain that if he turned to the right, he would end up back at the car, and so he went in the opposite direction. His mud-caked boots reminded him of the long marches with the San Marco battalion, blisters burning the soles of his feet, sweat saturating his uniform. He could still almost hear the extravagant curses of Mosti, a giant from Massa as big as a wardrobe, who hated walking. Bordelli would remind him that if not for the war, he would still be rotting in jail, and the beast would only sneer.
He arrived in front of a small chapel that stood at the crossing of two trails. It must have been the fork mentioned by the hunter: to the left, Poggio alla Croce, to the right, Pian d’Albero. Bordelli went to the right and proceeded at a slow pace, his mind clouded by old memories. A light wind washed through the branches like an invisible sea, making the leaves fall and dragging a mollifying smell of death through the air. Here and there a secondary path broke off in another direction through the woods, disappearing amid the trees.
On the hillside opposite him he glimpsed an abandoned house through the vegetation, its shutters closed and the roof half caved in. One saw more and more such houses these days, here and there in the Chianti. A horror of
the rural life had driven the young people to the cities in search of a less laborious, more entertaining way of life. He couldn’t blame them, really; a peasant’s life was hard, miserable. But they soon discovered that the poor weren’t any better off in the cities. It was just a different sort of poverty, in some ways much more profound.
He found himself looking up at a slope of large, jagged rocks. The hunter was right. If you took the car up there, you would surely drop the oil pan. To the right the view opened up on to a broad valley, and he stopped to look. A bank of dark clouds was rising up over the gloomy horizon of hills, covering the entire vault of sky. He became entranced, watching a falcon flying in broad rings until, at last, it nosedived straight down and vanished.
Who knew how long it would take to get to Pian d’Albero? He knew the story of the Nazis who, one June day in ’44, had massacred partisans and defenceless civilians there, but he’d never seen the site of the slaughter. He followed the path for a little over a mile, then decided to turn back. He would go to Pian d’Albero another time.
He walked along unhurriedly, savouring the moments of solitude. Passing the Cappella dei Boschi again, he continued down the path that led to La Panca. The wood’s animated silence relaxed him. It wasn’t like in wartime, when silence was full of deadly traps.
He trudged up a short incline paved with ancient flagstones, and past the bend, through the vegetation, caught a glimpse of a tall stone building. Almost certainly the abbey of Monte Scalari. As he continued on his way, the abbey disappeared behind the trees, and a hundred yards up the path he saw a shrine in pietra serena with an empty niche. With a flutter of wings, blackbirds flew out of some brambles, diving into the underbrush, chirping their alarm amid the shrubs.
He stopped in front of the shrine. To the left, a narrow, rocky trail descended steeply towards the bottom of the valley. How much misery must these woods have witnessed? Sculpted on the grey stone of the shrine, near the top, were the words: Omne Movet Urna Nomen Orat. Bordelli attempted to translate them, trying to unearth the Latin he’d learned at school. Every. Move. Urn. Name. Prays. What the devil was that supposed to mean? He gave up trying to understand and resumed walking. Moments later he found himself in front of the abbey, a vast construction suffering from the weight of the centuries. There were loophole windows here and there in the wall of pietra serena, and a small sort of tower rose up from the top of the wall, over the main entrance gate. He imagined great rooms peopled with ghosts, monumental fireplaces, frescoes with the stories of saints. In a flat open space to the side was a large Peugeot with its sides spattered with mud. Who knew who lived there, in such an isolated place? Whoever it was, Bordelli envied them. He would love to live in a sort of fortress like that, far from the city and his fellow men. Perhaps together with a beautiful, beloved woman, blonde or brunette, it didn’t matter …
Better to forget about dreams and keep his feet firmly on the ground. How many years had he been tossing about this idea of moving to the country? He need only make up his mind. It wasn’t long before he could start collecting his pension, and he wanted to spend his final years tending a vegetable garden and picking olives. It shouldn’t cost too much, an old abandoned house with a bit of land. If he sold his flat in San Frediano he could easily buy one and fix it up. Still walking, he whispered a promise to himself: after he found Giacomo Pellissari’s killers he would get on with looking for a house in the country.
Caught up in these thoughts, he started looking around at the land again, really wishing he could smoke a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something move, then turned round and managed just in time to see a head disappear over the top of the hill. Who the hell could it be? He quickened his pace and reached the top, heart thumping in his ears. He spotted a hunchbacked man moving hurriedly away through the trees, and started running after him, yelling at him to stop. At first the man sped up, as though trying to flee, but when the inspector yelled again, he stopped and turned round. When Bordelli caught up to him, he found an old man with a basket full of mushrooms, looking at him warily.
‘Police …’ the inspector mumbled, panting, hand on his chest. The man kept staring at him. He had a long, cavernous face, lined with deep wrinkles of toil, and towy hair.
‘Why didn’t you stop?’ Bordelli asked, knowing it was a stupid question. The old man shrugged feebly.
‘When hunting the mushroom, too much talking spells doom,’ the old man said in utter seriousness.5
‘I just wanted to ask if you have a cigarette.’
‘I don’t smoke. Can I go now?’
‘Of course, I’m sorry …’ Bordelli muttered. The old man turned and went on his way, disappearing through the trunks of the chestnut trees. A moment later it was as if he’d never existed.
The inspector returned to the trail, demoralised. In his mind he asked God or chance to let him find something, and he even made a vow: if he found something, even so much as a clothespin or button, he would smoke less. He precluded stopping altogether, lest he prove unable to keep his promise. But merely smoking less was a great challenge: the first week he would get down to ten, the following week down to five … He tossed these thoughts around in his head like a child, even if he felt a little ashamed of it …
He passed under the powerful branches of an enormous oak, whose trunk would have taken at least three men with arms extended to encircle. At its feet someone had built a tiny chapel of stone and brick, and he wondered, Why ever? Glancing inside, he spied a picture of the Virgin with seven swords thrust into her heart, painted by an unskilled hand. He continued down the path, and a short while later the Beetle suddenly appeared round a bend. His stroll through the woods was over. A useless stroll. Now he could smoke as much as he wished. He’d already slipped the key into the door, preparing to leave, when he suddenly changed his mind. Spurred on by one last illusion, he continued walking towards La Panca, like a castaway searching his desert island for signs of life for the hundredth time. In reality it was merely an excuse not to return just yet to the office, where he would have felt like a caged animal.
He strayed repeatedly off the track, penetrating the forest through the trees, scanning the sea of leaves carefully. Cartridges, nothing but cartridges. Here and there an indistinct bootprint, or confused tyre tracks in the dirt. Signs that were, in any case, totally useless. There certainly was no lack of people trudging through these woods.
After a gentle uphill climb, he came out on to a broad plateau with very tall pines. He stayed for a few minutes to look around, charmed by the stillness, then decided that it was time to return. He was heading back to the car with his tail between his legs when he heard a sort of peeping sound. He stopped and tried to figure out where it was coming from. It must have been behind the brambles that lined the path. When he tried to look behind them, his clothes got all tangled in the thorns, but he managed to see a very small black and white animal toddling unsteadily through the ferns, sounding like a little bird. For a second he thought it was a baby magpie that had fallen from the nest, though it wasn’t the right season … A moment later he saw that it was a tiny kitten, all wet and spattered with mud. It was mewing desperately. Perhaps it had woken up too soon after the last suckling and had strayed from its refuge before Mamma had returned. He stood there looking at the little ball of fur, which kept peeping, staggering on its tiny legs. He wondered what to do. In the end he circled round the brambles and went towards the kitten, after checking to make sure the mother wasn’t somewhere nearby. He almost ended up trampling on the carcasses of three other kittens of about the same size as their surviving sibling. They were whole, as if they’d starved to death. And it hadn’t been long, at first glance. A day at the most.
As he was about to bend down and pick up the kitten, he spotted a piece of paper a little farther away, folded in two, sticking out from under the leaves. He went excitedly to get it, as if it were a gold nugget. It was a telephone bill, half faded and sodden with rain. Though it wasn’t
easy, he could make out the address: Panerai Butcher Shop / Livio Panerai / Viale dei Mille 11r / Florence. The payment deadline dated from seven days earlier. Bordelli bit his lip. Viale dei Mille was very close to the area where the little boy was last seen. Was it only a coincidence? He had to remain calm. That piece of paper didn’t mean anything. It was only a bill that had been lost in the wood; he shouldn’t give it too much importance … But hope had already seized hold of him. He felt like a lovelorn youth, consumed by desire, who mistakes a simple glance for a promise of love.
He put the bill in his pocket and returned to the kitten, which wouldn’t stop squealing. The moment he picked it up, it stopped, and then nearly fell asleep in his warm hand.
Going back to the car, he wiped the kitten with a handkerchief. He crumpled up La Nazione, turning it into a sort of bed, then laid the tiny animal in it. He hadn’t yet started the car up when the cat started mewling again, but not as desperately as before. It sounded much calmer. It was he, Bordelli, who felt restless. Turning the car around, he headed back towards La Panca, checking every second to make sure the kitten hadn’t fallen on to the floor.
‘Briciola!’ Rosa cried out as soon as she saw the kitten.
‘You’ve already found a name?’ asked Bordelli, handing her the tiny animal.
‘Can’t you see she’s got a little face just like Briciola?’6
‘Maybe it’s a boy.’
‘You know even less about cats than you do about women … You’re a girlie kitten, aren’t you, Briciola?’ Rosa said to it, holding it in her hands and rubbing her nose on its little head.
‘It’s women who don’t understand men,’ Bordelli grumbled, following Rosa into the kitchen.
‘Poor thing, it has a bad eye.’
‘It may have been a thorn; I found her in the middle of some brambles.’
‘Look who’s here, Gideon!’ said Rosa, putting the kitten down in front of the big white tomcat. Gideon sniffed the intruder for a few seconds, looking perplexed. He walked around the little thing, which could barely stand up, then with a fairly benign blow of the paw made it roll on the floor.
