Think Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘But you came along, and stopped them.’

  Jerry Esposito couldn’t help sneering. Maybe it was second nature, Cangio thought.

  ‘They lost a few soldiers, but they haven’t abandoned the battlefield.’

  ‘And you think they’d risk it all again for your scalp?’

  ‘I was caught in the crossfire when General Corsini and the ’Ndrangheta started shooting. I’d guessed what was going on. I saw the signs …’

  ‘And now you’re seeing the same signals?’

  ‘You saw them yourself this morning. Marzio’s head was blown off with a shotgun,’ he reminded them.

  ‘And you conclude that the ’Ndrangheta killed him, thinking he was you?’ Lucia Grossi bit her lip. ‘It doesn’t say much for their intelligence, does it? I mean to say, the most formidable criminal organisation in Italy wipes out the wrong man?’

  ‘They don’t care if an innocent bystander walks into the line of fire.’

  ‘Let me propose a different scenario,’ the woman said, pushing a stray curl off her forehead. She rested her elbow on the desk and cupped her chin in her hand. ‘Your partner went out last night because he had something … particular in mind,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t register it in his logbook, leave a note, or tell anyone where he was going, without getting himself into trouble. But something went wrong. Perhaps he saw something that he wasn’t supposed to see, and then …’ She formed her hand into the shape of a pistol, pointed it at him. ‘Boom!’ she said, closing one eye and pulling an imaginary trigger.

  Cangio stared back at her, wondering whether it happened to everyone who wore a uniform and carried a gun. Where did their sensibility go? The woman had seen the headless body of Marzio that very morning, yet here she was acting out the part of whoever had killed him.

  ‘That’s quite a reconstruction, Captain Grossi,’ he said. ‘Leaving aside my own theory of the ’Ndrangheta infiltration in the park, what do you think Marzio saw that he wasn’t supposed to see?’

  She pursed her lips, then smiled at him. ‘Given that the victim was wearing his uniform and carrying a gun inside the boundaries of the national park, it might seem likely that he caught someone breaking the park rules. The witnesses who found the body mentioned poaching, but it might be something altogether different. Something less than … how can I put it?’

  While she was searching for the right word, Cangio thought again of the file he had left at the ranger station. What would these two have made of it?

  ‘Was he concerned … obsessed about anything?’ Jerry Esposito asked.

  ‘Devil worshippers, desecrated churches, whether Spoleto would win their next match.’

  Lucia Grossi’s mouth closed, the missing word for ever lost, while Jerry Esposito applauded slowly. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘All you had to do was think for a bit. Would you care to expand on what you’ve just said?’

  Cangio told them about San Pancrazio, the abandoned church in Poggiodomo. Satanism seemed to interest them more than organised crime, and all he wanted to do was get out of there.

  TWELVE

  The hardest part was still to come.

  He was going to have to speak with Marzio’s wife.

  Brigadiere Sustrico had been sent to Castel San Felice to break the news, Lucia Grossi had told him as he was leaving the carabinieri station in Spoleto. God knows what Sustrico had told Linda Diamante. If he was any judge of character, Cangio guessed that Sustrico would have been in and out of the house in five minutes flat, even though Marzio’s wife might be able to tell them something vital which would help the investigation.

  Loredana would have known how to handle the situation.

  She and Linda had been born in Valnerina, and they’d always got on well. But Lori was an hour’s drive away in Todi. He had phoned her, of course, told her the bad news, listened to her cry into the phone.

  ‘Do you want me to come home?’ she had said through her tears.

  He couldn’t tell her how much he wanted her to come back. Then again, if there was trouble in store, it was best if she was kept out of harm’s way.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ he had said. ‘I’ll let you know about the funeral, OK?’

  He drove out of Spoleto, took the Sant’ Anatolia tunnel, then turned into Valnerina and headed north.

  He knew Linda Diamante, of course, though not so well. He and Lori had made up a foursome with Marzio and his wife on a couple of occasions – a pizza, followed by a game of pool and a late-night beer at the hunters’ bar in Scheggino. The girls made quite a contrast: Lori, slim and stylish, but low-key in a sweater, jeans and cowboy boots, while Linda was dressed up to the nines, even to eat a pizza and watch her husband shoot billiard balls around a beaten-up pool table.

  He cruised around the bend and caught sight of Castel San Felice.

  Standing high on a spur of rock, it was one of many tiny forts strung out along the valley of the River Nera, a walled guard post looking out over an ancient trade route that ran three hundred kilometres from Rome to Ancona on the Adriatic coast. If you ignored the occasional cars and tractors, you could imagine driving around the next bend and ploughing into a legion of marching Roman soldiers.

  He parked outside the town gate, then walked up the hill and into the village.

  He had been to Marzio’s home before, but would have found it even if he hadn’t. There was just one street in Castel San Felice, fifty or sixty people living on either side of it, and the majority of them were related by blood or by marriage.

  An old woman in a light blue overall, a black scarf on her head, was hanging out sheets from a balcony. She saw him coming, stopped what she was doing and watched him walk up the narrow street between the tall houses facing one another.

  ‘Come for Marzio, have you?’ she said, letting out a sigh.

  He looked down at his ranger jacket, which he had slipped on before racing out of the house at dawn. Anyone wearing that uniform would be looking for Marzio, it stood to reason.

  ‘Number twenty-seven. It’s up at the end on the left.’

  Even before he rang the bell, he heard the sounds inside the house.

  Bad new travels far and fast, but just how much of it had Sustrico told them?

  A girl in her teens opened the door, her eyes red, her cheeks wet with tears, a tissue crushed in her fist. Cangio had no idea who she was, a niece or a neighbour maybe. ‘I work with Marzio,’ he said.

  The girl stepped back and let him in without a word.

  The rest of the family had gathered in the living room. And not just Marzio’s immediate family. There were twenty people. Perhaps more. Women sat on every chair and sofa, the men standing in a tight circle by an open door which looked out over the valley and the shimmering River Nera. Most of the men were smoking.

  Linda stood up as soon as he entered the room.

  ‘Seb …’ she murmured before her lower lip began to tremble.

  They each took three or four steps, then met in a tight hug.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

  Linda sobbed, murmuring words that he didn’t catch. He felt her shudder as her held her close. He had expected nothing less, but the reality was worse. At the same time, he knew that he had to say something. She would learn all the horrid details of Marzio’s death at the inquest.

  This was a time for comforting lies, not disquieting truths.

  ‘It happened fast,’ he said. ‘Marzio didn’t feel a thing.’

  It sounded hollow, sham, even as the words dripped off his tongue. And there was no way of knowing. How long had Marzio been staring into the barrel of the shotgun before it took his head off? What terror had he felt as he heard the trigger click? What was the last thing that had flashed through his mind? His wife, his daughters, his baby grandson …

  Next thing, he was sobbing so hard that it hurt.

  ‘It all seems so … so unreal,’ Linda said, patting him on the shoulder. He had come to comfort her, but it turned out she was comforting hi
m. ‘A policeman was here a while ago. From Spoleto, he said, a carabiniere. He … he told me what had happened.’

  Her hand pulled gently on his arm.

  ‘Come and sit with me,’ she said.

  Two seats flanked a narrow window, cushion-covered blocks of stone cut into the walls. The woods and mountains stretched away to the north, the River Nera flowing south, a veil of mist hanging low above the rich green meadows.

  The view seemed timeless, a sort of earthly paradise. Generations of people had sat where they were sitting, looking out at that view, but now the scene was spoiled for both of them.

  Marzio had been murdered in those woods, his head torn off by a shotgun.

  ‘What happened last night?’ he asked her.

  Linda frowned, then clasped her hands together to stop them shaking. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘He didn’t have a lot to say over dinner, but that’s not unusual. Marzio likes his food. And then he said he was going out.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Ten o’clock. No, hang on,’ she said, pressing her fingers to her forehead. ‘Rita had rung. She rings up every night before she puts Matteo to bed so he can give his grandad a kiss. Half past nine, say. After that, well … it’s all a blank. I fell asleep in front of the TV, then I went to bed. Didn’t he call you, Seb?’

  ‘Why would he have called me?’

  ‘I thought he was going out on patrol,’ she said, raising her eyes, looking at him. ‘He must have called you, that’s what I thought. He trusted you, Seb. And if he was going into the woods at night …’

  Cangio felt embarrassed. Marzio hadn’t trusted him at all, hadn’t told him what he was doing, hadn’t confided his suspicions, though clearly something had been going on in the park and he had paid for it with his life.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Cangio said. ‘No one phoned apart from his daughter, and then he went out without saying where he was going?’

  Linda nodded. ‘He took his torch from the drawer over there, gave me a kiss, and then he went …’

  Her voice quavered, and she started sobbing.

  ‘He’s … he’s been out quite a few nights recently.’ Linda reached out and took hold of his hand. ‘He’s not like you, Seb. You and your wolves! You don’t know how pleased he was when you turned up. He likes his bed too much for working nights. So when you offered to do the late shift …’

  She stopped in mid-sentence.

  ‘He did say something odd before he went out, though.’

  Linda let go of his hand, and turned towards the room, staring at the chest of drawers. She might have been seeing her husband again. The women were praying together now, saying the rosary in a group. The voices died away, all eyes on Linda, as if they thought she might want to join in. When she didn’t move, the voices picked up the prayer again.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Something about “the same old story”, something like that.’

  ‘What was he talking about?’

  Linda shrugged her shoulders, looked back at him. ‘I wish I’d asked him, but I didn’t. I was watching the telly, while he was mumbling on to himself.’

  Linda looked into his eyes, wringing her hands. Then she managed a thin smile. ‘He was afraid of ghosts. Did you know that, Seb? That’s why he didn’t like the night shift. That’s why I was so convinced he’d gone out with you. If not with you …’ She shook her head, looked down at her hands. ‘The Valnerina’s full of ghosts and saints, but Marzio … Well, I think he believed those tales. If people talk, he said, there’s always a bit of truth in it somewhere. Another time he said, there’s never smoke without a fire.’

  They sat in silence for a minute, then Linda touched his hand again.

  She stared at him, her eyes bright with tears.

  ‘Do you think he had a fancy woman, Seb?’

  THIRTEEN

  Simone and Ettore were standing by the perimeter fence, gazing through the mesh.

  They were with a man who wore a Customs & Excise uniform when he was on duty, but now he was wearing black jeans and a brown leather bomber jacket.

  Simone offered him a cigarette. ‘All done and dusted, then?’

  The man took the cigarette and nodded thanks before he lowered his head to meet the lighter. ‘I checked your stuff through the customs shed last night.’ He pointed to a yellow Boeing 757 cargo jet that was standing on the tarmac, having landed just a few minutes before. ‘She’ll be flying out at eleven o’clock.’

  Ettore checked his watch. ‘And now it’s half past nine.’

  ‘They’ll start loading her up soon. Flight times are always ETAs for freight. It depends how much or how little there is at each scheduled stop. There’s not much going out of Umbria these days, a lot less coming in. The locals blame the crisis, of course, but what the fuck have they got to export?’

  ‘They’ve got our fucking truffles,’ Ettore said.

  The other man laughed. ‘Marra Truffles. Sounds good. How many deliveries are you planning?’

  ‘One a week for starters,’ Simone said, ‘then see how it goes from there.’

  ‘Those planes can carry up to ninety thousand kilos, though the runway here’s too short for that much weight. This one started out in Palermo, stopped off in Naples, then on to Rome Ciampino. After Perugia, they’ll be flying on to Dusseldorf, then Nijmegen in Holland. By the time she gets to London, they’ll be at least half full. Not that there’s a problem with the runways in London.’

  ‘What time will that be?’ Simone asked.

  ‘She’s scheduled to land at four thirty in the morning. The sleepy hour, we call it. We’re all pissed off and dying to go home by that time.’

  Simone Candelora stamped his foot on the fag end. ‘No problems anticipated, then?’

  ‘None at all,’ the man replied, taking a final drag before he flicked his cigarette away. ‘The guy in London C&E’s been well paid.’

  ‘A waste of money,’ Ettore said. ‘It’s only a trial run.’

  They watched a blue forklift truck drive out of the customs shed towards the plane, carrying the first of what was to be a weekly consignment of containers on the Dusseldorf–London run. The container wasn’t large, but it wasn’t small, either. Just right for two thousand jars of truffle paste stacked in fifty large boxes.

  ‘It looks good,’ Simone said, admiring the big white letters on a Ferrari-red background.

  MARRA TRUFFLES – the world’s finest!

  ‘We should have brought Marra,’ Ettore agreed, ‘let him know how serious we are.’

  When the container was safely aboard, Simone handed the customs man an envelope and they shook hands. As he walked away, Simone turned on Ettore. ‘Why’d you tell him it was just a dummy run? We want him on board right from the fucking start. We want him shitting bricks in case anything goes wrong. If it does go bollocks, he’ll be the first in the firing line.’

  ‘Nothing can go wrong,’ Ettore said.

  ‘Make sure it doesn’t,’ Simone warned him. ‘Don Michele’s got a lot riding on this, and don’t you forget it. No more false moves, OK? There are too many coppers buzzing around as it is.’

  FOURTEEN

  Cangio stood alone outside the church.

  He wasn’t superstitious, but he was from Calabria. They had a saying back home: First in, next out. If you were the first to arrive at a funeral, the next one would probably be yours. It was better to be safe than to tempt fate.

  Besides, fate had not been treating him kindly.

  The newspapers seemed to be taking the rumours of Satanism seriously, while he had spent the last two days trying to track down witnesses who proved almost as hard to find as the elves and goblins they claimed they had seen. One had a Swedish name and a telephone number with a Stockholm prefix. Cangio had tried to contact the man a number of times, but no one had ever picked up the phone.

  A hill walker from Turin had said he didn’t remember the incident. When Cangio read him back a part of the
statement he had made to Marzio, the man denied angrily that he had ever said anything of the sort.

  The doctor who had stopped to urinate beside the road had died of prostate cancer.

  Cangio had managed to speak with his widow on the phone, but the woman had no idea what he was talking about. Her husband had never mentioned seeing anything out in the woods, she said.

  Then he had struck lucky.

  One of the poachers who had been setting nets for birds turned out to be the owner of a shop selling fishing gear and bait near the Marmore Falls on the River Nera. Cangio had driven down there to speak with him in person, to ask him to verify what he had seen.

  It had been like asking a grown man if he still believed in Father Christmas.

  ‘You know how it is,’ the man had said. ‘The forest at night. It’s deceiving, isn’t it? You think you’ve seen a bear, it turns out to be a bush, and nothing else. We were pretty jumpy. I mean to say, we could have got into trouble. What did we really see? God knows … Nothing looks the way it really is at night. It could have been anything. We’d had a few drinks as well. Still,’ he had admitted, ‘I stand by what I told that ranger Diamante. We did see something, and we did hear noises, but what it was … well now, that’s anyone’s guess.’

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  The village of Caso lay further down the mountain. From this height the tip of a steeple was the only thing visible. Mount Coscerno reared up massively on the other side of the valley. Cangio and Marzio had been planning to put up fences in the area over the next few days. Wild boar were feasting off the local crops. There’d probably be nothing left to save by the time a replacement ranger turned up.

  A car pulled into the pine-lined avenue. A big black Mercedes, bringing two official mourners, Alberto Bruni, the director general of the Sibillines National Park, and Mario Simonetti, the executive park ranger.

  Cangio’s heart sank down to his boots.