“Where are we going?” asked Luigi.
“Where we found Leone.”
“Got it,” he said and took a curve, clenching the usual dead cigarette butt between his teeth.
Rocco looked at Italo. “I’m going to need to talk to you later.”
Italo nodded, with a worried look in his eyes. “Did I fuck up?”
“No. The reason I need to talk to you is that I’ve noticed that you tend not to fuck up.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“You wouldn’t be able to follow me. Because you don’t know what I need to talk to you about.”
Luigi had taken an interest in the conversation between the two cops. “And now you’ve got me curious,” he said, shifting gears as he drove.
“What the fuck!” Rocco replied. “Just do your best not to turn this thing over and I’ll be happy.”
Luigi Bionaz burst out laughing, banging his hand down on the steering wheel. “You Romans are just too much fun!”
“You think?”
“Yes. You seem like rude, nasty people—instead here you are making jokes all day long.”
“If that’s how you see it,” said Rocco.
Someone had strung a white-and-red-striped tape around the whole area where the body had been found. There was a man bent over the snow, picking something up. He was wearing a white jumpsuit and overshoes. A woolen cap on his head kept off the cold.
Italo looked at him intently. “Is the forensics team still at work?”
“Yeah.”
The man in the white jumpsuit turned around. Rocco waved his hand, and from a distance the man nodded his head in response. Then he went back to searching for who knows what. Rocco and Italo went around the tape while Luigi waited by the snowcat, relighting the cigarette butt.
The deputy police chief went over to the exact spot where the body had been found. The snow was still stained with brown blood. He looked around. Before him, at the top of a small hill, was Crest, the village with six houses and a hut. The shortcut was clear and visible, running down toward them and continuing on past to the large piste that ran to town. On his right, trees. On his left, trees and an abandoned hovel. In the distance, the roof of a house. The chimney was emitting smoke.
“Down there, an old woman lives alone. She’s eighty,” Italo started up, as if he’d read Rocco’s thoughts. “We talked to her, but she’s half-deaf and it’s a miracle if she can remember her own name.”
“Why was Leone here?”
Rocco’s words vanished into the air, along with the puffs of his breath. “If he was heading to town along the big piste down there, why on earth would he have come up here?”
“Maybe he went down by way of Crest.”
“Did anyone see him?”
“No one. There are six guests staying at the hut, along with the waiter, the cook, and two young people who work there. No one saw him that night. And all the houses are abandoned.”
“To go to Crest, he’d have had to make a detour. So if he had gone, he would have had to have a reason. And he had no reason. So I say he came down from his house straight down along the main run. But I don’t understand why he was here, in the middle of the shortcut, far from the piste. It makes no sense.”
“No. It makes no sense. Unless someone carried him there.”
“But there are no signs of a body being dragged. Does that mean he was alive when they brought him?”
“And then they killed him there?”
Rocco looked down at the wide groomed section once again. The marks of the snowcat that had run over Leone’s corpse on Thursday night were unmistakable. He measured the distance with his eyes. “Between here and the big piste is about forty yards. It would be hard to drag someone through the fresh snow for forty yards. A footprint, at least one, ought to be there, no? It’s not like the guy fell out of the sky!”
Italo had nothing to say. Rocco nodded a couple of times. “He came up here of his own volition. There was someone up here that he knew. Someone who had called him or with whom he had an appointment, even. They smoked a cigarette together, and probably that person killed him. I don’t have any real doubts on this case.” He took a deep breath and felt the cold, clean air penetrate into his lungs. “All right, let’s go join Luigi. I’m going to go pay a little call on the ski school. You wait for me at the terminus of the cableway.”
He was walking toward the large structure that served as a garage for the tracked vehicles, at the far end of which, behind a glass door, stood the ski school. Women wrapped in fur coats sat waiting for their skiing children. They looked like turtles, each woman’s head almost entirely retracted into its furry carapace and their hands shoved into their pockets. They looked like they had fox terriers wrapped around their ankles. Rocco took a quick look behind him. He saw the station of the cableway that was transporting people up the mountain from the town. Italo had lit a cigarette and was enjoying a little sunshine. Above the station, set on a terrace that everyone was avoiding like the plague because of the icy cold, there was a bar. Concealed behind a flagpole that flew the Italian flag was the webcam. The deputy police chief waved at the lens, secretly hoping that at that moment the camera might have snapped the half-hourly weather photo, capturing him for posterity. Then he headed for the ski school.
One of the instructors was sprawled out on a lounge chair with a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans on his face and his arms behind his head. His face was dark from the sun. Rocco walked past him and went into the office. He was immediately knocked back on his feet by a whiff of stale vin brulé, or mulled wine. There were two instructors, a man and a woman. The man was in his mid-twenties, a good-looking, curly-haired athletic type. The woman was sitting behind the desk. As soon as she saw the deputy police chief, she stood up. She was considerably overweight.
“Buon giorno,” she said.
“Buon giorno,” Rocco replied.
“Did you want to schedule a lesson?” the tanned whale asked politely.
“No. I’m here for another reason.”
“If it’s to get information, go right ahead and ask.”
The young man, in his mid-twenties, was about to move off, but Rocco stopped him with a gesture. “No, hold on, please. I’d like you to stay, too. You could be useful. In fact, as long as he’s here, why don’t you go get your co-worker from outside.” The young man knit his brow. Rocco smiled at him. “Deputy Police Chief Schiavone, mobile squad of Aosta. Police. Compris?”
The young man nodded rapidly and went to summon his co-worker, who came in, immediately bringing with him from outdoors the cocky attitude of someone who’s not afraid of anyone or anything. “What’s this about?” he asked. “What happened Thursday night?”
“Bravo. You’re good. You should come work for us,” Rocco said, shutting him down. Then he stood face-to-face with the three instructors and stared hard at them for ten seconds or so. Ten seconds that to those three wizards of the ski slopes must have seemed like an eternity. The woman was the one who broke the metaphorical ice. “What can we do for you?”
“What time do you close?”
“Four in the afternoon. The lessons last an hour, and at 4:45 they close the slopes and the cableways, so the last slot to schedule a lesson is at 3:30.”
“Who locks up?”
“That depends. We take turns.”
“Who locked up Thursday?” Schiavone asked.
“Day before yesterday, I locked up,” replied the twenty-five-year-old.
“At four forty-five?” asked the deputy police chief.
“Yes, more or less. Actually, a little earlier than that, because when I left, the cableway was on its last run.”
Rocco took a quick look around. He looked at the poster of that season’s full team of instructors. There were at least twenty people there. All of them smiling. “Is the person who locks up at night the same person who opens up the next morning?”
“Yes. It’s always the same person,” said the young man. “In fact,
yesterday, Friday, I opened up.”
“And how did you find the office door?”
“Locked. Why?”
Rocco pointed to the group photo. “Who else out of this crowd would have the keys to the place?”
“The one whose shift it is to lock up and Omar, who runs the school.”
“Omar Borghetti, right?”
The arrogant ski instructor took off his mirrored Ray-Bans. He was cross-eyed. It was all Rocco could do not to break out laughing right in his face. “Do you know him?” asked the instructor.
“I’ve heard about him. Where is he?”
“He’s teaching a group.”
Rocco turned his gaze to the younger instructor. “After you locked up, what did you do?”
“I put on my skis and I went down the mountain.”
“On the piste, or did you take the Crest shortcut?”
“Are you crazy, Dottore? On the piste! On that shortcut, with all the rocks it has, I’d ruin my surface and my edges. When my workday is done, I take my own skis to go home, not the ones they give me here.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing. I went home. Took a shower, smoked a cigarette, went out for dinner. When I left the pub at ten, I ran into all that mess.”
“So we can say that from four thirty to seven you were at home. Is there anyone who can verify the fact?”
The young man looked at the policeman with some embarrassment and looked down just as the big woman raised her hand. The cross-eyed instructor burst out laughing.
“What are you laughing at?” Rocco barked at him.
“Sorry, it’s just that this is a new one on me.” Then he looked over at his co-workers. “How long has this been going on?”
“What the fuck do you care? Mind your own damned business,” said the big woman, who had turned redder than her team jersey.
“Can you call this Omar Borghetti for me?” Rocco interrupted.
“Sorry, Dottore, he’s with a group of Swedish skiers at Gressoney, which is on the far side of the valley. He won’t be back for at least a couple of hours.”
Rocco shook his head. “My bad luck, eh? As soon as he returns to base, tell him to get in touch with police headquarters in Aosta. I need to talk to him. You all be well.” He gave them a half smile, then looked at the curly-haired young man. “So long, Ahab.” And, leaving the kid to mull over that strange farewell, Schiavone left the three instructors.
As soon as he got off the cable car that had taken him and Italo back into town, Rocco pulled out his cell phone. “Inspector Rispoli, this is Schiavone.” The clear-timbred voice of the police functionary rang out from Rocco’s cell phone: “Right here, Dottore . . .”
“How long would it take you to get me Omar Borghetti’s address?”
“Champoluc?”
“I don’t know, but I think so.”
“I’ll call you back in a minute. Uh, listen, D’Intino and Deruta aren’t giving any signs of life. They aren’t calling me back and they aren’t answering their phones. What should I do?”
“Forget about them. Ignore them. Consider them missing in action.”
Rocco hung up. He put on his Colmar ski gloves. He looked at Italo. “With these fucking oversize gloves, you could slap somebody in the face, but nothing else.”
“Are those the same as the victim’s gloves?”
“Same brand and more or less the same size.”
The sun was shining, and the steam rose from the roofs of the houses. A smell of good things to eat spread into the air. Everything was calm and quiet. Descending the iron steps that led down onto the main street, for a moment Rocco thought that it might not be so bad after all to live in a place like this. It was nice and peaceful. But it couldn’t be the refuge for his old age. It had three fundamental defects: there was no sea, it was too cold, and it was in Italy.
“It’s a pity, I was just starting to like you,” he said, addressing the town, but the phrase was overheard by Italo, who hadn’t said a word the whole way.
“Me? What did I do wrong?”
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the town.”
Italo said nothing.
They were heading to the car when Deruta’s unmistakable voice made them turn around. “Dottore! Dottore!”
Deruta and D’Intino were right behind them, just fifty yards away. Their faces were blue with cold. D’Intino’s teeth were chattering, and Deruta had swollen, purplish ears. At the sight of that pathetic vision of weariness and exhaustion, Rocco smiled, congratulating himself. The two policemen hurried forward, taking small steps, and the closer they got, the more Rocco noticed that their uniform shoes, trousers, and jackets were drenched.
“They look like a pair of vaudeville comedians, don’t they?”
Italo laughed with a smirk.
“Wow, it’s cold, isn’t it?” said Deruta once he’d caught up to the deputy police chief.
“Not in my opinion,” replied Rocco, showing off his nice new gloves. “Well, then, D’Intino, you feeling better? I heard about your little fainting spell yesterday.”
“Yes, I feel better. They even put me on an IV drip.”
“Good for you. And how is the search coming along?”
D’Intino pulled out his notepad. “We’re collecting all the names, just like you told us, and—” The notepad fell facedown on the snow. Its owner picked it up, but the snow was already washing away the ink, and soon the whole page would be illegible.
“D’Intino, what the fuck are you doing?”
The officer tried desperately to dry off the first page, but he succeeded only in smearing the stain of blue ink over the entire page. Rocco tore it out, crumpled it calmly into a ball, dropped it on the ground, and kicked out into the middle of the street. Then he looked at the two officers. “Back to work, you two. We’re not here on vacation, have I made myself clear?”
“Certainly, Dottore. There’s something you might be interested in.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“At that hotel there”—he jerked his head in the direction of a sign reading HOTEL BELVEDERE on the side of a house, directly beneath a painting of a honeysuckle bush—“we found two people, a couple, who checked out in a big hurry the night of the murder. The day before yesterday.”
“Good. Did you get their names?”
“Yes.”
“Report them to Inspector Rispoli.”
Deruta looked down at the ground.
“What’s the matter, Deruta?”
“What’s the matter is that, really, Dottore. Rispoli has been on the force only two years. D’Intino and I have been on the force since 1992. It doesn’t seem right to us that—”
Rocco interrupted him. “What is this, now you’re arguing about orders? If I say Rispoli’s in charge, Rispoli’s in charge. Have I made myself clear?” And he turned on his heels and started walking to the car, followed by Pierron. Just then, the deputy police chief’s cell phone rang. “Go ahead, Rispoli.”
“All right, then, Omar Borghetti’s exact address is in Saint-Jacques, number two, Chemin de Resay. Before you ask, I looked up the map on the PC. I’ll tell you how to get there.”
“Go ahead.”
“Head out straight along the road from Champoluc, go past Frachey, then at a certain point you come to a village. In fact, that’s Saint-Jacques. There’s a hotel there. That’s where you turn onto the street in question. Borghetti’s house is at number two.”
“Grazie, Rispoli. Look, I just ran into Laurel and Hardy here in Champoluc. They’re fine. Alert their families.”
Caterina Rispoli laughed over the phone. And that sincere, crystalline laughter restored Rocco Schiavone’s good mood.
With the heat cranked to high, Rocco and Italo left Champoluc and headed for the village of Frachey. The road ran up into the belly of the mountains, which loomed over the landscape and seemed ready to swallow them and their car at any moment. Rocco looked up at them in silence. The sensation th
ey were giving him wasn’t one he liked in the slightest. Boulders ready to fall and crush you. And it was almost an automatic reflex to have the usual perception of how tiny human beings are, the fragility of life, and that sort of thing. Luckily, Sebastiano’s phone call arrived just in time to interrupt the deputy police chief’s thoughts, as dark as they were pointless.
“Sebastiano! How’s it hanging?”
“You were right, Rocco. They sent me a Ukrainian girl who made me want to howl at the moon.”
“You have fun?”
“Yes. And it didn’t even cost that much. Where are you?”
“Up at Champoluc. I’m following up some trails.”
“Ski trails?” Sebastiano said, misunderstanding.
“Seriously, Sebastia’, ski trails? Can you see me on a pair of skis? Listen, I still haven’t talked to the uniform that we need.” He shot a furtive glance at Italo, who was keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the road. “But I’ll take care of that later. We’ll get together at the restaurant and make our plans.”
“That sounds great. I’m going to go get some lunch now, and in the afternoon I’ll call that girl again.”
“Don’t fall in love.”
“Rocco, the blow jobs she gives ought to be classified as UNESCO cultural treasures of mankind!”
Rocco smiled as he hung up. He’d have preferred to spend a nice quiet afternoon under the covers with some Ukrainian girl, or with Nora.
“Here we are,” said Italo.
The sign for Saint-Jacques snapped him back to his shitty duties as a cop.
“What a beautiful building!” Pierron exclaimed. “It’s a rascard.”
“A what?”
Black Run Page 12
