The Dark Valley: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 2)

by Valerio Varesi

  “There’s nothing we can do. We’d be better off going to bed,” Ghidini said.

  Rivara offered them all a drink, and they lined up at the bar like a detachment of soldiers, until their attention was diverted by the crackle of Delrio’s radio.

  “The ambulance? It’s already here in the piazza. The doctor? Of course he’s here. The one on stand-by duty.” The radio crackled once more. “Yes, we’re on full alert … You heard a voice? … Ah, you’re not sure? … Well, we’re ready in any case.”

  “They say they think they heard a voice, but it might have been the cry of a wild beast,” Delrio advised his companions.

  “There are some that sound almost human,” Rivara said.

  “Such as cats on heat,” Ghidini added.

  “You can never be sure of anything,” the commissario said.

  “It’s not like being in the city. Sometimes these mountains seem to have been put there just to confuse people,” Maini said.

  “It’s got nothing to do with the mountains, for God’s sake,” Soneri said.

  “It could have been Palmiro calling for his dog. He can’t have known it had long ago made its way home,” Maini said.

  “He was as fond of that dog as he was of his son,” Volpi said.

  “And the dog was more faithful,” Ghidini said.

  Soneri grew ever more uncomfortable listening to the conversation, laden as it was with allusions which escaped him. It was clear that there were layers of hidden meanings in the talk, confirmed by nods and little grins and winks. It was like a mime show put on for him, or like listening to a foreign language and it made him aware of a growing distance between himself and the people here with whom he would have liked to re-establish a fraternal cameraderie. He had deluded himself that he could easily re-enter the community, but now he felt as isolated as he felt in the questura, and as perhaps he always was.

  He noticed that the conversation had stopped and that Maini and the others were staring at him. The same silence as before fell over the group. The waiting became more and more oppressive. He lit a cigar, more to mask his embarrassment than from any genuine wish to smoke. That intolerable silence was broken by the sound of a car screeching to a halt in the piazza. The youths who had been there a short time previously came running into the bar.

  “Palmiro is home,” the driver announced.

  The tension evaporated in an instant. Rivara stepped forward. “Who found him?”

  “No-one. He made it on his own. He bumped into the carabinieri at the reservoir and asked them if they were looking for him. Apparently, he didn’t even want them to give him a lift back.”

  “Palmiro’s made of iron!” Volpi said.

  “They’ve made us waste all this time for nothing,” Delrio grumbled. He picked up his radio-phone and bellowed into it, “OK? … It’s all over? … Can we go now?”

  He stood there listening for some time, while the others spoke in whispers so as not to disturb him. When he shut down the connection, he found all eyes trained on him.

  “The fireworks did the trick. He says he saw them and was able to get his bearings, but he claims he would’ve found the road even without them.”

  “He must be nearly dead with exhaustion.”

  “I suppose so, but it’s pitch black up there and they’ve only just found him.”

  “Did he have his rifle?”

  “No, he was unarmed.”

  “Have they asked him how come he got lost?”

  Delrio stretched out his arms. “His story is that he wanted to go as far as the mountain pass to see if there were any mushrooms there, but the mist came down without warning.”

  “And that was all he had to say?” Volpi sounded sceptical.

  “He asked a couple of times about his dog, because it seems they were separated and he kept calling him.”

  “So that was the voice they heard.”

  “Sounds that way.”

  “The dog’s getting old. He doesn’t see too well now and doesn’t like walking long distances,” Ghidini said.

  “So his chief anxiety was his dog,” Delrio said.

  “That’s all he’s got left,” Rivara said.

  One of the young men who had arrived in the car went over to the bar, placed both elbows on it and leaned over towards the barman. “Why do you think a lorry would be stopped on the main road at this time of night?” He spoke loudly enough to ensure that everyone could hear him.

  “What lorry?” Rivara said.

  “A refrigerator lorry with a foreign number plate. The driver seemed to have lost his bearings in the mist, and asked us for directions to the salame factory.”

  “He must have been picking up a load but was running late.”

  “The driver wasn’t on his own. There were three of them, and we watched them go up to the factory.”

  “All three of them?” Rivara said.

  The boy nodded, with the faintest of conspiratorial smiles. “If you want my opinion, they were planning to pick up a delivery right away.”

  “They must be in a great hurry,” Ghidini sniggered.

  “They certainly were. And why should that be?” the boy wondered aloud.

  Nobody dared to utter a guess, and once more a silence fell. The young man said goodbye to the group and opened the door to go out, but he was stopped in his tracks by the sound of gunfire. Everyone followed him out onto the street.

  “Was that from Greppo?” Delrio said.

  “Couldn’t tell. Either Greppo or Campogrande,” Maini said.

  “This is happening too often,” Rivara said.

  “At least we can all agree on that,” Soneri said.

  The mayor emerged from the Comune and strode determinedly across the piazza. Delrio went to meet him. The two men stood talking in the mist, then the policeman turned back and went into the bar.

  “The mayor has told the carabinieri to go and see what they can find. This time the whole village heard the shot.”

  “It’s high time they showed some interest,” Volpi said.

  “For all the difference it’ll make! By the time they get there, whoever fired the shot will be long gone,” Ghidini said, shaking his head.

  “In this mist, you could lose an army,” Rivara said.

  “You never know. They’re already in the right area,” Delrio said.

  Some twenty minutes later, the piazza was lit up by a flashing blue light which cut through the mist which was now even more treacherous. The carabiniere truck crossed the piazza and pulled up outside the Comune.

  “Is that them on top of the job now?” Maini said.

  No-one made a reply. Soneri was thinking only of the lorry parked on the main road and of the three people inside. He was keen to go and see whether or not it had gone to the salame factory, but once again his attention was diverted by Delrio’s radio. He drew close to overhear what was being said.

  “It was Palmiro who fired the shot,” Delrio eventually relayed the news.

  “Who at?” Rivara said.

  “At the dog,” Delrio said, but obviously he himself did not attribute much importance to it. There was another thought niggling him.

  “So he’s gone clean off his head,” Ghidini said. “He has always been extremely fond of that dog.”

  “He told the carabinieri it was too old and the exertion had weakened its heart.”

  “Ever the unscrupulous bastard,” Rivara said.

  “If he was old … He would not have wanted him to suffer,” Delrio suggested.

  “I think there’s more to it than that. He might have felt let down, if the dog had run off home leaving him on his own on Montelupo. There aren’t that many people he could count on,” Maini said.

  “There wasn’t much anybody could do. By the time the carabinieri got there, he was already burying it,” Delrio said.

  “All this trouble for nothing. Still, in the end everyone’s alive and back home safely – apart from Palmiro’s dog,” Rivara said.

 
“What about the lorry at the factory?” said one of the young men who had stayed on after his companions had left.

  The only response was a collective shrug.

  3

  It was still dark when Soneri came down for breakfast. The night before when he got back, he found the table still set. Sante had saved some vegetable stew for him, and when the commissario saw it arrive with an overturned plate on top to keep it warm, memories came flooding back of his mother in her dressing gown, of trains running late and of a house immersed in silence with the family already in bed. He had hoped to find the same peace and stability in the valley in the Apennines where his forebears had lived season after season, enduring the snows of winter and heat of summer, clearing the juniper bushes from the land and hauling timber down from the woods.

  “In middle age, everyone yearns to return to the place they left when they were young to make their way in the world,” Sante intoned.

  For Sante, the world was the city. Anyone who moved away from the valley was a displaced person, and Soneri was coming round to this point of view. That was why he had come back, and now, as he stood looking through the windows of the Scoiattolo at the wooded slopes of Montelupo capped by woolly mist, he felt the tug of that mountain which had been the focus of so much attention in recent days. In a short while he would set off and clamber up its steep spine like a tiny, exploring parasite. He was intent on taking full advantage of the daylight hours and was only waiting for dawn to break. Sante had prepared a box with a few slices of bread, some shavings of parmesan and a few thin slices of prosciutto. He put the box in a shoulder bag and got on his way, aware that he was retracing the steps of his father, his grandfather and of who knows how many others.

  The ascent up the path from the village left him out of breath, but he was soon enough at the reservoir. Patches of mist drifted around him and trailed off all the way down to the village. He took the Boldara path, walking for another half an hour through a tunnel of branches on a mattress of fallen leaves, not looking back until he came to an opening in the woods. The houses were far off now, in a deep crevice where it seemed that they had ended up after falling down the mountainside, like all the other things which had tumbled down from the heights. He left the path and ventured into the woods, struggling with the undergrowth and slipping on the leaves. He spent some time probing the trunks on slopes where the tree fellers had been active, but he found nothing to interest him. The ground still had marks of having been disturbed, so it was clear that someone had passed that way not long before. He followed the footprints of the roe deer and the tracks of the boar for almost two hours until, in the shadow of a trunk nestling into the mountainside, he discovered a colony of “horn of plenty” mushrooms. Dark coloured and with a tapering stalk, they had a sinister appearance, but they made good eating for someone who knew how they required to be cooked.

  All of a sudden, the light faded and the wood was shrouded in a dense mist. Soneri decided it was time to make his way back, but as he did so he became aware of the faint squelch of footsteps sinking into the damp leaves behind him. From time to time, the snap of a broken branch could be heard, seemingly from someone picking his way over dead wood in the shade of the beech trees. Soneri continued on his way, choosing carefully where to put his feet so as not to make the least inroad into the profound silence which seemed to amplify the slightest sound. He walked gingerly through a copse of oak trees, where the dry leaves still hanging on the branches made the surroundings even more gloomy. Somewhere lower down, he heard a sharp noise, the quick, alarmed movement of a prey that knew it was being hunted. He thought he made out the outline of a human being, barely glimpsed through the foliage. Perhaps someone had only just realised how close Soneri was and was vanishing into the mist, leaving no more than a tantalising shadow.

  Soneri followed the course of the Macchiaferro stream until he emerged into an area of hornbeam and chestnut, ripe for the autumnal pruning. His mind was still filled with the image of that figure, little more than a shadow distorted by the dampness, which had made a momentary appearance before being swallowed up by the mist. As he turned onto the Boldara road, he recalled what he had been told about Albanians and others who supposedly moved about the mountainside. People spoke of them as a menace, in terms which made them the modern equivalent of the ancient fear of wild animals, lightning and hailstones. He took a rest at the reservoir and in the failing afternoon light sat down to enjoy his parmesan. He was taken aback when he realised how meagre were the fruits of his day’s labour, no more than a few mushrooms, all of the “horn of plenty” variety, maybe a couple of ounces in total which would be reduced to half that when cooked.

  Once he had eaten the cheese, he turned to the prosciutto. His flask contained a quarter litre of the Barbera which Sante had commended. He gazed up at Montelupo, which resembled an enormous, sweating beast, and thought back to the periods of rest permitted by his father during the hunting season when, seated on a rock or on a tree trunk, they partook of a frugal meal together. Everything was different now, except for Montelupo with its rocky outgrowth. His gaze shifted from mountain to mountain, each one well known to him, until his inspection came to a stop lower down, on the road leading to Villa del Greppo. An ambulance was making its way slowly along the road, and Soneri was reminded of Rivara’s words: either it was going slowly because it had no-one on board or because the person on board was beyond help. Two cars followed close behind, and there appeared to be an unusual level of activity around the villa itself. Soneri took a sip of his wine and decided to go straight home, following the slope of the hill. Tiredness overcame him the moment he reached the plain, but by then he was only a stone’s throw from the Scoiattolo, where Sante was pacing up and down on the courtyard, scarcely noticing his return. When he did see him, he looked at him with a distracted air. The commissario returned the gaze, but Sante continued staring straight ahead, like a blind man.

  “All I have to show for a morning’s work is about a quarter kilo of ‘horns of plenty’.”

  “Is that what you call them? Do you know the names we use round here for that mushroom? ‘The black chanterelle’, or even ‘the trumpet of death’. That’s a better name after what has happened to Palmiro.”

  “What has happened to him? Has he gone missing again?”

  “This time it’s for good. This morning they found him hanging from a wooden beam in his loggia.”

  The commissario made no reply. He felt an instinctive need to reason, to put this news into some sort of context but he resisted it. “Do you think it was suicide, or is there more to it?”

  Sante’s grimace indicated that he did not know. “They say he hammered a huge nail into the wood, tied a rope round it and hanged himself. They found the hammer on the windowsill. He had contrived his own gallows.”

  “That takes guts,” the commissario murmured.

  “Palmiro never lacked guts. Once he’d made up his mind, no-one could shift him. He never allowed anything to stand in his way.”

  “He could have let the cold on Montelupo do the job,” Soneri said, while images of the stolen coffin and the sound of shots in the woods played on his mind. Against his better judgement, curiosity was getting the upper hand and he began to put the various facts together. “What do you think made him do it?” he asked Sante.

  Sante stopped pacing back and forth and stood still, his back turned to the commissario. He shrugged.

  “You told me he was a decisive man, always sure of himself. Someone like that must have had a good reason for killing himself,” Soneri said.

  Sante turned slowly towards him, embarrassment written clearly on his face. “Who can say? Problems with his business…” The worries welling up inside Sante prevented him from expressing himself more clearly.

  “The salame factory was not going well?”

  The only response was another awkward gesture, a clumsy wave as though in an attempt to grab hold of some notion that was proving as elusive as a troublesom
e fly.

  “There are so many rumours in this village. Who really knows what was going on in the Rodolfi household? This place is buzzing with gossip. You can draw your own conclusion. I’ve got a hard enough job keeping on top of my own business.”

  There was a tone of pain in the last words which Soneri sensed conveyed some deep, personal bitterness. For a few moments the two men stood facing each other in silence until Ida called to her husband from the doorway of the dining room. She greeted the commissario, but without her customary warmth. He heard the couple exchange some words as they moved inside.

  He went up to his room to change. As he came back out, his eyes fell on the basket with the “trumpets of death”. He opened it and stared long and hard at the dark mushrooms with their long stems and wide-brimmed caps, not unlike instruments played by the town band. They had the eerie appearance of creatures that come out at dusk in northern climes, or in the dank parts of graveyards. They seemed to bear with them evil tidings, and troubled him so much that he tossed them into a ditch.

  It was already growing dark when he went into the village. He saw Maini walking in the piazza, but before he could catch up with him he heard his name called out. It was the mayor coming quickly out of the pharmacy as though he had been lying in wait for him.

  “So now something has happened,” he began. “It’s not just gossip any more.”

  “A suicide is a private deed. The most private of all,” Soneri said.

  The mayor was taken aback by this response, leaving the commissario with the strong impression that he did not consider the deed at all private.

  “It’s not an ordinary suicide. It couldn’t be if the man who kills himself is Palmiro Rodolfi.”

  “In the face of death, we are all equal. As also in the face of despair.”

  “We’ve got to understand what drove Palmiro to despair. In my view, it was because of his grandson,” the mayor said.

  “His grandson?”

  “He’s turning out to be a problem. He thinks of nothing but big, flashy cars. He spends money like water and won’t do any work. And then lately…” The mayor lowered his voice to a whisper, as though he were in church. “It seems he has started taking drugs.”