Cry Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  He lit a cigar and held the smoke in his mouth, blowing it out very slowly.

  ‘The man in the boot,’ he said. ‘Who was he?’

  Raniero shrugged. ‘A piece of shit.’

  Ettore emerged from the barn and waved his finger. ‘Nothing, Raniè,’ he said.

  ‘We can bury him in the woods,’ Corrado suggested.

  Raniero gave him a sharp look. ‘Animals would dig him up in no time.’

  Corrado crushed his fist tight, almost snapping the cigar in two. He couldn’t stand being told what to do by a punk who would have shit himself rather than open his mouth not so many years before.

  ‘There’s one thing, though,’ Ettore said, his eyes sparkling.

  ‘A can of petrol?’

  ‘Pigs, Raniero. Pigs.’

  Raniero sat up straight. ‘Will they do the job?’

  ‘We’ll need to give them a helping hand.’ Ettore’s blank eyes turned on Corrado. ‘What’s that dog you’ve got locked in the cage?’

  Corrado spat. ‘That ain’t no dog. It’s a wolf.’

  Raniero tapped his ankle with the tip of his shoe. ‘Keeping a zoo now, are you, Corrà?’

  ‘It’s just a cub,’ Corrado said. ‘I found it wandering on the mountainside a few months back. It was lost, maybe, or the pack had left it behind. They come round looking for food in winter.’

  He had brought the cub back, fed it, kept it in the cage, watched it grow. There was something about a wolf that Corrado liked. The fierce independence, the sparkling eyes that didn’t miss a thing. It would eat whatever he gave it, but it wasn’t tame and never would be. A bit like himself, he sometimes thought.

  ‘They’re fucking eating machines,’ Ettore said.

  ‘Pigs are greedier,’ Corrado shot back at him. He didn’t want them touching the wolf. ‘Pigs keep on eating till they burst. An’ there’s four of them.’

  Raniero clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘You’re the expert,’ he said after a bit.

  Ettore seemed to find the situation funny. ‘A wolf might come in handy one of these days, Raniero, eh?’

  Raniero gave a sigh. ‘That’s a thought … Come on, lads, there’s work to be done. Corrado, you give Ettore a hand.’

  Raniero didn’t make a move. He sat there smoking, Don Michele’s adjutant, waiting for Corrado Formisano to obey his orders, watching as Ettore opened the boot of the car.

  ‘Don’t you wanna see him?’ Ettore pulled away a plastic sheet, then threw back a strip of dirty rain coat. Half the man’s face was ghostly pale, as if it had been drained of blood. The other half looked like a block of mahogany, the side staved in, an eyeball hanging loose.

  They hadn’t shot him.

  Corrado felt the tension lift. They’d given him a whack with something heavy. Maybe Raniero wasn’t spinning him a line. When the time came, when Zì Luigi really did want someone shot, he’d send for Corrado, like he’d always done.

  ‘You ready?’ Ettore said.

  Corrado let out a sigh, then grabbed the dead man’s legs.

  Once they got the body inside the barn, Raniero came to watch. There was an old boiler suit and a pair of wellies that Ettore could wear, Raniero decided. Ettore didn’t ask any questions, never said a word. He did what Raniero told him to do, and seemed pleased at the thought of a bit of exercise.

  ‘Needs to get his hands dirty,’ Raniero said with a grin. ‘The way we all did.’

  It took less than an hour.

  Ettore cut the body into bits with the diesel chainsaw, then began to feed the pieces into the pigsty. ‘Those pigs must think it’s Christmas,’ Raniero said as he drained the last of the wine. ‘Listen up, Corrà, we can’t use pigs all the time. You’ll need to collect all the bones and burn them. A barrel of nitric acid should do it next time. Drill a small hole in that concrete feeding trough and all the muck’ll run off into the soil.’

  ‘Will there be others, then?’ Corrado asked him.

  Raniero blew out his lips. ‘Who can say?’ He clicked his tongue as if he’d just remembered something else. ‘There’s one other thing,’ he said, walking out of the barn towards the car, telling Ettore to finish up. He waited for Corrado, led him to the Mercedes and opened the rear door. A white pine box that looked a bit like a baby’s coffin was resting on the back seat.

  ‘A sign of our appreciation,’ Raniero said, handing it over.

  Who’s we? Corrado thought. He recognized the box. It was similar to the ones that Zì Luigi used to send him. But Raniero had said no guns. What the fuck was he playing at?

  Raniero led him back into the barn.

  ‘You’ll find an envelope inside the box,’ he said. ‘Next time you go to town, just drop it in the post, Corrà.’ Then he turned to Ettore. ‘You finished yet?’

  Ettore unzipped the boiler suit and dropped it on the floor beside the chainsaw. ‘All done,’ he said.

  Raniero walked to the far end of the barn, lit a cigarette and peered into the cage where the wolf was staring back at him from the farthest corner.

  ‘Fuck me!’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen a wolf close up before.’

  FIFTEEN

  The same day, a different mountain

  ‘Sip it slow, Brigadier, or you’ll just feel worse.’

  Brigadier Tonino Sustrico nodded gratefully and took another sip. Could anything be worse than what he had already seen that morning?

  The farmer, Roberto Casini, had run back to his cottage for a bottle of wine when he saw the carabiniere officer collapse in a heap. The wine burned like vinegar in Sustrico’s throat, but he felt a welcome tickle as it hit the lining of his stomach.

  ‘I brewed it myself,’ Casini was saying. ‘It goes down like a trout swimming with the stream. Have another drop, Brigadier.’

  Sustrico hadn’t eaten anything that morning, that was the problem. He’d just had a cup of black coffee before leaving the house, his shift due to start at seven. As commander of the local carabinieri barracks, he was used to having his breakfast served up on his desk at nine o’clock – a capuccino and a hot honey-filled croissant.

  But Roberto Casini had phoned before breakfast arrived.

  Casini was a farmer, he said. He lived in the village of San Bartolomeo sul Monte. He had found something, though he wouldn’t say exactly what it was at first, as if he thought the carabiniere might not be interested.

  ‘You might want to take a glance,’ he said vaguely, apologising almost, the way that mountain dwellers often did. ‘If you’ve got the time, that is.’

  ‘What have you found?’ Sustrico insisted.

  ‘A body,’ Casini said at last.

  Sustrico had driven up to San Bartolomeo sul Monte by the ‘scenic route’ as the tourist map called it, a narrow ungravelled road which wriggled its way up the top of the mountain like an earthworm. There was a breathtaking view of the valley on the left-hand side, picturesque medieval villages in rough stone clinging to craggy outcrops of rock, as if an artist had decided to put them there for the benefit of visitors.

  Sustrico usually enjoyed a drive in the national park, but Special Constable Eugenio Falsetti had been at the wheel that morning.

  A fast-track recruit in his mid-twenties, recently arrived from Milan, Falsetti had been seconded to the local force for three months to ‘widen his professional experience’. The kid was a dogsbody, that was the truth of it, filling in for one of the regular officers who was away on sick leave. Falsetti hadn’t been impressed by anything they’d seen – the amazing view, the dark green pines, the pretty villages – least of all, the human leg poking out of a crack in the rock at a place called Belvedere.

  Sustrico’s eyes had blanked the instant he saw it.

  ‘From the knee down,’ Roberto Casini had said, though ‘from the knee up’ was more correct. The skeletal leg was pointing straight up into the sky, like a flagpole flying bits of muscle and shreds of skin, as if some malign hand had pushed the body hard into the ground the way you might stub out
a cigarette in an ashtray.

  The thought of somebody doing that to you had made him black out.

  Sustrico had seen just three corpses in his working life. They’d all been battered about a bit, but that was standard when they’d all been involved in motor accidents.

  ‘You get used to it,’ Eugenio Falsetti was saying, standing over him as he came round, folding his arms like a veteran. ‘I threw up the second day on the job in Milan. A shoot-out in a Chinese sweatshop. Six dead. A real bloodbath, that was.’

  Twenty-two years of service, and Sustrico had fainted like a novice.

  As he questioned Roberto Casini, Sustrico was careful to keep his back to the scene. The leg sticking up in the air like a leafless tree had made a lasting impression on him, but it didn’t seem to bother the farmer. It didn’t bother Falsetti, either. He made himself useful on the phone, calling up the doctor, telling him where they were and what they were doing, telling him to get a move on.

  ‘Half an hour, Chief,’ Falsetti announced, and lit a cigarette.

  Sustrico didn’t like that ‘chief’. There was rank in it, but no respect.

  ‘Until the doctor arrives,’ Sustrico said, ‘we don’t touch anything.’

  ‘Standard,’ Falsetti said.

  Which left Roberto Casini. Sustrico wondered whether the farmer might be able to tell him anything useful. In particular, he wanted to hear Casini’s version of how he had stumbled across the body.

  ‘It was just … there, wasn’t it? Like it sprouted overnight. Didn’t you feel the shock down in town? Eleven o’clock last night? A minor earthquake, they said on the telly this morning. I lost some tiles off the roof. It must have split the rock, or shifted it sideways, and it pushed that leg up out of the crack. As anyone can see.’

  He kept pointing, but Sustrico was careful not to look again.

  ‘If you ask me, they killed the beggar, shoved him in, then filled the crack with muck and leaves. The head should be … just about there.’

  Casini seemed to be convinced that the body belonged to a murder victim.

  ‘Why push someone into a crevice?’

  Casini took another swig of wine. ‘It’s easier than digging,’ he said. ‘Then there’s the scavengers. The woods round here are full of boar. Wolves, too. They’d have a hard time getting at it, see. The juicier bits were deep inside the rock. Whoever put him there didn’t want him to be found.’

  Logical and possible, though an accident was still the most likely explanation.

  ‘Any idea who he might be?’ Sustrico asked.

  The farmer looked at him sharply. ‘The killer?’

  ‘The leg, the victim. Has anyone disappeared from the village in the past few months? They might have fallen into the hole by accident – left the house, went for a stroll and never came back.’

  Casini shook his head. ‘There’s eleven of us up here in winter, Brigadier. Thirty or forty in summer when tourists rent out the empty cottages. I’d know if anyone was missing. If you ask me, that poor sod’s been there for quite a bit.’

  Doctor Sordini arrived a short while afterwards.

  He confirmed what the farmer had said as soon as he saw the leg. ‘It didn’t happen yesterday,’ the doctor said. ‘It depends how well the rest of the body was covered up. The leg’s been stripped of flesh, probably exposed to air and insects. We won’t know about the rest until we see it.’

  The doctor was happy to sample the wine when the farmer offered him the bottle.

  ‘If I’m going to certify it,’ Sordini said to Sustrico, ‘you’ll need to pull it out.’

  As coroner, the doctor’s job was simply to verify the fact that a death had occurred.

  ‘Isn’t a skeletal leg enough?’

  ‘A leg is not a vital organ.’

  Casini offered to bring a pick and spade from his farm, but he didn’t offer to help them. That job fell to Sustrico and the special constable.

  ‘Which “vital” organ are we looking for?’ Falsetti asked the doctor with a snigger.

  Sordini glared at him. ‘Heart, lungs, kidneys …’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Casini chipped in. ‘The earthquake’s done the hard work. You just need to loosen the soil then pull him sideways out of the crack. I’ll bring another bottle of wine. It’s dry work, digging.’

  Tonino Sustrico told him not to bother, but after ten minutes shifting soil that had fallen in a heap at the foot of the rock face, and some more minutes pulling bones and bits of clothing from the crack – handing them to the doctor, who laid the pieces out on a plastic sheet – the two policemen wiped their brows and reached for the bottle.

  Doctor Sordini joined them. ‘The evidence won’t run away,’ he said. ‘I can safely assert that he … that it is a man. You can tell by the length of the thigh bone.’

  ‘The partisans buried their dead up here during the war,’ Casini was telling Falsetti, ‘but I’ve never come across a skeleton before …’

  As he was speaking, Falsetti pulled a skull out of the rock and held it up.

  There was a hole in the centre of the forehead the size of a plum.

  ‘You ever butchered a pig?’ Casini asked. ‘Shoot a bolt between its eyes, it doesn’t feel a thing.’ He pointed at the hole in the skull. ‘Point-blank range, see? It doesn’t mean he died straight off, though. Sometimes, those pigs just keep on squealing …’

  ‘It’s possible,’ the doctor said quickly, cutting him off. ‘With a head wound, it’s often hard to say how soon the victim died, though it’s usually instant. There’ll be forensic evidence in the soil, of course. And if he was killed here, the bullet will be in there somewhere, too. I think we must assume that he was murdered, Sustrico. We need to call in the experts to establish the crime scene and vacuum out the crevice.’

  Falsetti hooked a biro through one of the eye-sockets and deposited the skull with the rest of the remains on the plastic sheet. They stood there like mourners at a wake, looking down at the body draped in decaying rags, hair still clinging to the skull, flaps of blackened skin like polished leather, rubbery-looking gristle which held the joints together. The back of the skull was missing but there were plenty of teeth, some loose, some still attached to the jaw. Falsetti showed an unhealthy interest in a dark flap of skin attached to the shoulder bone. ‘There’s a mark of some sort, though I can’t make it out. You’d need to blow it up on a computer screen.’

  ‘Is there anything that might identify him?’ Sustrico said to Falsetti. ‘Labels, bills, a driving licence?’

  Falsetti was down on one knee next to the plastic sheet the farmer had provided. He looked up at Sustrico, then at the doctor and let out a groan. It was obvious who was going to have to do the dirty work.

  ‘See if there’s anything in his pockets,’ Sustrico told him.

  Falsetti pulled a face, but he went through the pockets of what remained of a jacket and trousers.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Have another look inside that crack in the rock.’

  Falsetti glared at him. ‘If the Regional Crime Squad …’

  ‘Take a look!’ Sustrico snapped. The sod was playing the know-all now, just because his commanding officer had fainted. ‘That’s an order.’

  Falsetti leaned against the rock, moved his hand around inside, then said: ‘What’s this, then?’ This turned out to be a rusty Moretti beer bottle top. ‘If we’re going to identify him, the pathologist’s going to have to work some magic in the examining room,’ he said, wiping the dirt from his hands, then rubbing his hands on his trousers.

  ‘What do you think, Doctor?’

  Doctor Sordini stroked his chin and looked perplexed. ‘There isn’t much to work on. Dental records might help, if they exist. I mean to say, if we don’t know who he is, we don’t who his dentist might be.’

  He seemed to offer little hope of ever identifying the dead man.

  ‘Let’s wait for the Regional Crime Squad,’ Sustrico said, putting an end to the discussion. T
he thing that worried him most was the thought that he would end up with an unsolved case on his desk – a dead man, an unidentified killer.

  ‘Falsetti, make the call. Use the car radio. It’ll be recorded automatically.’

  Falsetti opened his mouth to protest, then raised his arms in surrender. As he walked towards the farm and the car, he stopped and lit a cigarette. He didn’t seem to be in a great hurry.

  ‘Which hole did he crawl out of?’ Sordini asked.

  Sustrico smiled. ‘He’s a self-righteous little bugger, isn’t he? A temporary placement. Thank God he won’t be here forever.’

  The doctor nodded. ‘After what he’s seen today, he may ask to go home earlier.’

  Sustrico didn’t bother to correct him. ‘He’s from Milan. A graduate trainee. Came down here expecting a holiday in the country, I imagine. He didn’t think he’d have to get a bit of dirt on his hands. That’ll teach him!’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting it either,’ the doctor complained. ‘I haven’t been called to a murder scene in the last ten years. A husband who blasted his wife with a twelve-bore shotgun. A hideous spectacle, but nothing like this. A murderer is almost unheard of in Umbria, I’d say.’ He picked up the bottle of rosé. ‘Another drop, Sustrico? I hate to think of having to spend the rest of the week sorting through the bones. Thank God for the RCS!’

  When the ambulance and the Regional Crime Squad arrived, the bottle was empty.

  It wasn’t such a bad wine, Tonino Sustrico decided.

  Doctor Sordini had already ordered a dozen bottles from Roberto Casini.

  SIXTEEN

  A week later, near Perugia

  General Corsini pressed a button and the glass panel slid down. ‘Ease up, Gianfranco,’ he said to his driver. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  The driver let the Alfa cruise down to fifty on the crowded motorway. Cars and lorries started piling up behind them. No one was going to race past a dark blue saloon car with Carabinieri written on the flank in large white capital letters.

  Corsini raised the glass panel.