Lily’s was a meeting place for Alpine guides and mountain people who wanted a bit of peace and quiet. They served a Bauerntoast that satisfied you for days and the beer was always cold. In addition, nobody squawked into a cell phone or burst into raptures about how quaint this hole in the wall was.
Most of the customers were retired, but you mustn’t think of it as a kind of old people’s home. There were lots of young people there, too, even very young people, all united by mountain life. In short, Lily’s was a place where the locals could read the Dolomiten, have a few drinks, and curse in two languages without having to worry about offending the tourists.
I was a hit. My jokes about my countrymen made them split their sides. I learned to play Watten. I had them teach me the local dialokt. I bought rounds of beers as if it were water and did everything I could to gain the customers’ confidence. Above all, I was very discreet about my true intentions.
I was under no illusions, though. That bunch of mountain people were as pleasant to me as I was to them, but that didn’t mean we had become friends. I was nice, funny, maybe a bit odd, and lent a touch of color to their evenings, but nothing more.
I was a welcome guest, a bit more than a tourist, much less than a local, as Chief Krün had said.
These average Joes—their hands rarely had all ten fingers, either because they’d been lost in the course of some climb (as had happened to Werner) or because they had been mangled by the teeth of a chainsaw or sawn off with a chisel in order to avoid military service—accepted my presence only because of my connection with old Mair, and I was sure that some, if not all, of them reported back to him more or less everything we said to each other. But I was crafty. I had prepared a cover for myself. As Mike would have said: I had a plan.
After the first week spent talking about this and that and losing at cards, I happened to mention that I intended to build a wooden sled for my daughter. A Christmas present, I said. Was there anyone who could give me a few tips? I knew that many of them were skillful woodcarvers, and I assumed that it would be a way of getting into their good graces and diverting suspicion as much as possible.
It worked.
Two in particular threw themselves body and soul into the enterprise of turning me into an artisan: a friendly nonagenarian named Elmar and his inseparable drinking companion, a seventy-five-year-old with one leg missing (an accident in the woods: a chainsaw that had gone zag instead of zig) named Luis.
Elmar and Luis explained to me what kind of tools I would have to acquire, how to avoid being cheated by the assistants at the hardware store, and what type of wood to get for each part of the sled. We sketched various designs on napkins that I then left in my pockets and that ended up in the washing machine, a fact that made them laugh.
I was just a stupid city dweller, after all, wasn’t I?
Every now and again, with studied casualness, I would ask a few questions.
Elmar and Luis were more than happy to tell me stories that everyone in Lily’s Bar had already heard too many times.
I discovered what the books in the museum hadn’t had the courage to tell me.
Accidents. Deaths. Absurd deaths, sad deaths, pointless deaths, deaths from a hundred years ago. Deaths from centuries ago. And legends that started out making us laugh but always ended up very badly.
There was one in particular that struck me. It was about the mysterious people of Fanes, and both Elmar and Luis swore it was just a story.
The people of Fanes were an ancient tribe that, according to the legend, lived in peace and harmony. They didn’t start wars, and their kings dispensed justice intelligently. Everything went wonderfully until, all at once, they vanished without a trace. Overnight. Fanes was about ten kilometers north of the nature reserve, but Elmar and Luis said they were convinced that whatever had swept that ancient people away came from the Bletterbach. A bad place, Luis had called it. It was there that the blade of the chainsaw had gone zag.
That evening, I checked on Wikipedia what the odd couple in Lily’s had told me. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the two of them hadn’t been lying. The late Bronze Age population of Fanes had indeed disappeared as if by some conjuring trick. Now you see them, now you don’t.
Poof!
The most plausible hypothesis was that there had been an invasion by tribes from the south, maybe from the Veneto, who were more advanced and aggressive. But wars leave traces, and nothing had been found to bear witness to such an event. No skeletons, no arrowheads, no broken shields or mass graves. Just legends. Elmar and Luis had earned their Forst.
* * *
Halfway through November, two things happened.
First: Luis brought me a cake that tasted of nothing.
Second: the cake that tasted of nothing acquired a vague taste of blood.
The Cake that Tasted of B
It had been a quiet evening at Lily’s. Elmar had left early, because of his arthritis. Luis had been as sociable and talkative as ever. We had played Watten (I was improving, although I suspected that my victories were due more to my opponents’ good nature than to any real progress on my part) and drunk a couple of beers.
Outside, the snow was some twenty centimeters deep and the temperature was a couple of degrees below zero. No wind.
“Do you mind seeing me home, Amerikaner?” Luis said, indicating the void beneath his knee.
Luis didn’t need me to get home. Ice or no ice, he was a sensation on his crutches. No, he wanted to talk to me far from prying ears. And indeed, once we got to his front door, he offered me a little drink, just to warm myself up. I accepted with a mixture of curiosity and excitement.
Luis’s place was a mess, as might have been expected of a widower who had spent his life surrounded by woodcutters felling trees. But it was clean and I couldn’t help but appreciate the taste, old-fashioned as it might be, with which it was decorated. The correct term was “welcoming,” nine letters.
Judging from the framed photographs on the walls, Luis must have been happy there.
“Are these your children?”
“Marlene and Martin. She lives in Berlin, she’s an architect. Martin has a trucking business in Trento. They’re doing well. Marlene’s house is a kind of meeting point for artists, not my kind of people, but she’s happy. Martin is the same age as you. He has one son.”
He handed me an inviting-smelling glass of grappa.
“What’s his name?”
“Francesco. He’s three years old. They’ll be coming to see me at Christmas.”
“To your family, then,” I toasted.
“To the Bletterbach,” he replied.
I froze, my glass in mid-air. Luis grinned, clinked his glass against mine, and gulped down the contents without taking his eyes off me.
“Is that why you invited me here?”
Luis nodded. “Maybe you can deceive Elmar, who, thank God, manages to empty his bowels every morning at the crack of dawn and still has good eyesight, but who as far as his head goes . . . I don’t know if I’m making myself clear.”
My face had turned red. “Does Werner know?” I asked.
Luis shook his head. “If he does, it’s not thanks to me. But Elmar and I aren’t the only people who drink at Lily’s.”
I cursed mentally.
“Werner,” Luis continued, “is an influential, respected person. One of those people who don’t necessarily have to ask.”
“I . . .” I stammered.
“You don’t have to justify yourself, Amerikaner. Not to me anyway. To your father-in-law? Maybe. To your own conscience? Definitely. Unless you’re one of those individuals who don’t even know what a conscience is. But I don’t think you are. Are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
L for Liar.
Or almost.
“That’s what I thought. That’s why I invited you here. I want to give you a piece of advice.”
“What kind of advice?”
“People in Siebenhoch are
simple. We don’t want much, a hot meal in the evening, a job, a roof over our heads, and a few dozen grandchildren for our old age. We don’t like problems. We have enough headaches living in this area to go and look for others from outside.”
“And I’m from outside.”
“Almost,” Luis replied, echoing what Chief Krün had said. “Half and half.”
“I’m allowed a few beers at Lily’s, but not to stick my nose into matters that don’t concern me.”
“Don’t take it so hard, son. We’re not as prejudiced as all that. We’re good people. Almost all of us. I heard what happened to your wife at Alois’s store, and I think it was a disgrace. A real disgrace. But what do you expect from someone . . .”—he indicated the packet of Marlboros sticking out of the breast pocket of my shirt—“. . . who sells coffin nails even to little kids?”
“Thanks for the warning, Luis,” I said, after a long pause.
“Don’t be melodramatic. This is the warning: Werner is keeping an eye on you, and when Werner sniffs you out it’s best to be careful. But he likes you and he has a sense of justice. He’s not a bad person. When he moved to Cles, many of us felt down. We missed him. But his sense of justice isn’t my sense of justice. You know what my wife always said? That the best way to make a child’s mouth water is to forbid him to eat cake.”
He laughed.
I felt my heart start to do somersaults in my chest. “Whereas you want to give me the cake?”
Luis sat back in his armchair. He reached out his hand and from a low table took his pipe and tobacco. “This conversation never happened, understood?”
“Understood.”
“And stop drooling, Amerikaner. The cake I’m about to give you isn’t much to speak of. That’s why I’m going to tell you a couple of things that nobody at Lily’s will ever have the courage to tell you. Because the cake in question is a cake that tastes of nothing.”
“You mean empty?”
“Genau. Empty. Tasting of nothing. And although my wife brought up two wonderful children, I’m of the opinion that if you let a teenager taste the cake and the cake is disgusting, if nothing else he’ll stop wandering around the house like a dog in heat.”
I returned his smile.
“I think Werner told you what happened better than I ever could. He’s always been good with words. He was someone who could speak to politicians and beat them at their own game: bullshit. I on the other hand am just a woodcutter with one leg, the only book I’ve read is a collection of unfunny jokes, and if films don’t have a few explosions in them I fall asleep. But I can understand what people want. And you want what on television they call the ‘word on the street.’ Or am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.”
Luis dragged on his pipe. I heard the tobacco sizzle.
The smell was pleasant.
“Who was it?” he said craftily. “That’s the question it all revolves around. Who killed those poor kids? Officially, nobody. But in 1987 a guy was arrested, an ex-policeman from Venice who’d killed, at different times, three tourists in the Dolomites between Belluno and Friuli. He’d dismembered them with an axe. He said he was the victim of a judicial plot. He and his lawyer hinted at mental illness. At the trial, someone remembered the Bletterbach killings, so the police investigated and apparently there were some clues that placed this guy around here in April and May of ’85. But they were very vague clues and so, without proof or a confession . . .?”
“Nothing.”
“They accepted mental illness. He was crazy, not stupid.”
“Do you think it was him?”
Luis aimed his pipe at me as if it were a gun. “I’ll give you the cake, son. The rest is up to you.”
“Go on,” I encouraged him.
“Then there was the poachers angle. You see, you also fell into the trap of the lone killer. But what if it wasn’t only one person who committed that foul deed? After all, no evidence was ever found to suggest that.”
“Right,” I muttered. I’d overlooked the fact that Werner’s was just one version, not the objective truth. A beginner’s mistake, I reprimanded myself.
“Hunting is second nature around here. People hunt deer, mountain goats, ibex, pheasant, woodcock. Sometimes even grouse, and wolves when they were still around. If you go to the back room at Lily’s, there’s a stuffed lynx. The plaque says 1888, but in my opinion it’s much more recent, that’s why it isn’t on display.”
“Bad publicity?”
“Of course, but that’s not the point. Even today, not everyone in Siebenhoch has fully digested the idea of the nature reserve. Plus, you have to remember that in ’85 the reserve was just a typewritten request on the desk of some provincial official. There were hunters who followed the rules, but also quite a few poachers.”
“Why would they have killed those three?”
“Markus. Markus was the target. In ’85 he was sixteen, but he already knew his stuff. He was always hanging around Max, who was his role model, along with Kurt. He wanted to join the Forest Rangers. And Max, well, when Markus was around, you should have seen how he acted: chest out and boots all shiny.” Luis shook his head. “They were just two kids, but kids have enthusiasm. And enthusiasm makes the world go round. Markus was a big pain in the ass, and not only that, he was an environmentalist, the hard-headed kind. Whenever he heard about some illegal killing he’d go and spill the beans to Chief Hubner. Chief Hubner would fill in endless paperwork, nod, and thank him, all the while laughing at the kid. Before his heart attack, Chief Hubner had also been a hunter. Needless to say, all those statements ended up in the stove as soon as Markus left the office. So, that’s the second theory.”
“Poachers with a grudge?”
“Poachers whose wallets had been hit. Markus had got into the habit of ruining their nests.”
“Their nests?”
“Most poachers don’t make a living selling stag meat to restaurants. They make their money catching birds. Capturing chicks and setting traps for chaffinches and robins. You can make quite a bit that way.”
“And Markus destroyed their traps?”
“That’s right.”
“Was that a good enough motive for killing him?”
“It depends on your conscience. But listen to this: at the end of the seventies, I caught Elmar with a sack full of small birds. Jackdaws, a dunnock, and two white partridge chicks. He told me he knew a guy in Salorno who would buy the two partridge chicks for a whole lot of cash.”
“How much?”
“The following week, I went with him to a dealer in Trento to buy an ivory-colored Fiat Argenta.”
“That much?”
Luis shrugged. “It certainly wasn’t the two partridges that made him rich, but I’d say a good part of the budget came from the contents of that sack.”
“What else?”
“Don’t you hear the noise of your jaws chewing air, Salinger?”
“Maybe I like it.”
Luis sucked at his pipe pensively. “Evi’s father.”
“The traveling salesman from Verona?”
“Mauro Tognon. They said he’d gone mad and come back to Sienbenhoch. That he’d killed Evi to play a prank on his ex-wife.”
“A prank?”
Luis grinned. “He was a damned Walscher, wasn’t he?”
“That seems a bit—”
“Far-fetched? Racist? Both? Of course, like all the other stories. They’re local rumors, not the truth. Nobody knows the truth about the Bletterbach killing. Just theories.”
“Didn’t they investigate him?”
“They don’t even know what happened to the bastard. But that didn’t stop the rumors.” Luis drummed his arthritic fingers on the arm of his chair. “Then there’s the theory that it was a settling of scores.”
“Over what?”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs?” I said, surprised.
“Markus again.”
“He did drugs?”
&nbs
p; “It was ’85, he had an alcoholic mother, his sister was in Innsbruck, and he had to get up at five in the morning every day to go to school. In my opinion, he had every right to smoke a bit of that grass I even found once in my daughter Marlene’s drawer. He got a talking-to from Chief Hubner, and the matter ended there. But not the badmouthing. He was branded a—”
“And yet everyone says he was good boy,” I cut in.
“Everyone speaks well of everybody in Sienbenhoch,” Luis said, getting heated. “They speak well of Werner although they say it was out of cowardice that he moved to Cles, because he didn’t want to help poor Günther. They also speak well of poor Günther, except that when he started howling at the moon, they closed their eyes and ears. The only one who tried to help him was Max, who in the meantime had become Chief Krün, and everyone speaks well of him, right?”
“Max, too?”
“They said it was suspicious that he should go and see Evi and Kurt in Innsbruck, seven hours by train. They forget, though, that Max went to Innsbruck to accompany Markus who was a minor. They forget that minors couldn’t go across the border without being accompanied. Especially in those days. And if you point out that detail of the Cold War to them, the border guards, the searches of the passengers, what do they say? They change the subject! They say it was Verena, Max’s fiancée who’s now his wife, who killed those three poor kids out of jealousy. Even though that’s crazy, given that Verena is about one meter sixty tall and Kurt could have knocked her out with one hand tied behind his back. People talk, Salinger, that’s all they ever do. And the more they talk, the more hypocritical and inventive they become.”
“Inventive?”
“Oh, yes. Because I haven’t yet told you my favorite theory,” Luis said, his eyes glinting wickedly.
“What’s that?”
He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Monsters. Monsters that live under the Bletterbach, in the caves. The monsters that caused the collapse of the mine in ’23, flooding it and killing everyone who worked down there. The same monsters that wiped out the people of Fanes. Monsters in the belly of the mountain who every now and again, when it’s full moon, come back to the surface and tear everything they find to pieces.”
Beneath the Mountain Page 10
