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

by Valerio Varesi

  Crisafulli wriggled uncomfortably in his seat, unconvinced but incapable of putting his doubts into words.

  Maini, Rivara and his son were all silent too, giving Soneri the unpleasant feeling of being under observation. The maresciallo rose to his feet, picked up his cap and stretched out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure,” he said, but there was no concealing his disappointment. “Drop by the police station some time.”

  The commissario watched him leave, marching out as though he were on a parade ground. He thought about how deeply feelings counted in an enquiry. The problem was that even if your feelings kept you focused, they were liable to evaporate under cross-questioning. As he saw Crisafulli disappear in the mists on the piazza, he imagined his state of mind. He himself had often been in that same condition of anxiety, expecting something dire to happen. It was like waiting for a sneeze that did not come, feeling a symptom without an illness or groping for a handhold before a fall.

  His stomach rumbled, causing him to jump to his feet. He looked over at the others and saw the bar in a new light, as if he had just awoken from a deep sleep. He remembered he had had only a light lunch of parmesan and prosciutto, and decided it was time to move on to the Scoiattolo.

  Half the dining area was sunk in darkness. Two men were immersed in an intense conversation at one of the few tables which had been laid. Sante had the same worried air as that morning and displayed the same awkward concern. After finishing off their dish of wild boar and polenta, the only other two diners left. Sante was now fluttering nervously around Soneri like a planet on an irregular orbit. Finally, he sat down opposite him, looked hard at him and asked, “What did you do with your mushrooms?”

  The commissario was taken aback by the question, particularly since it was spoken in a whisper, as though they were in a sacristy. “I threw them into a ditch,” he said lightly.

  He had the impression that Sante breathed a sigh of relief. “People believe that they’re a warning of evil times, and with this business over Palmiro … I’ve never believed all that nonsense myself, but you’re the first person who’s found ‘trumpets of death’ this year, and on the very day he put a rope round his neck.”

  “I never thought of you as superstitious. They’re just mushrooms like any others. And they’re very tasty,” Soneri sought to reassure him.

  “A lot of people here in the village pull them out of the ground the moment they see them. They say it brings good luck and wards off misfortune.”

  “Rubbish!”

  Sante stared at him, doubtful but desperate to be convinced. Soneri took out his cigars and offered one to Sante. They lit them from the same match, turning them slowly around the flame and then sitting in silence to savour the aroma. For the moment, no words were needed, but the silence soon became oppressive, and sitting face to face became embarrassing. If Sante chose to remain there, he must have a reason, but Soneri had no inkling of what he wanted to say. Once again, he was dealing with impressions, the very things which tormented Crisafulli. He was sure there was something Sante wanted to talk to him about, but he knew that if he asked him, he would immediately deny it, leaving the commissario, like Crisafulli, burdened by feelings but having no proof.

  The arrival of Ida from the kitchen put an end to the awkwardness.

  “Not much doing this evening,” Soneri said.

  “Everybody’s in such a rush. There’s not been much work for a few weeks now, but I’ve no idea why.”

  “A dead period.”

  “Well, who knows? There really never are dead periods, it just looks as though people have given up eating. There are even fewer lorry-drivers around. You would swear they’ve changed their routes.”

  “And this all happened only recently?”

  The two of them looked at each other in silence, until Ida took the initiative. “The problems started when word got out about the Rodolfis.”

  “What have they got to do with it?”

  “They’re very important here, for the economy especially.”

  Soneri nodded, while Ida looked at her husband with growing anxiety. She was clearly in a hurry, but to do what? Sante peered at her nervously, but something prevented him from speaking.

  “The money…” he began, but the words seemed to choke him. He blushed and his voice trailed off.

  His wife was obviously keen to take up the story, but she bit her tongue. Respect for deep-seated traditions meant that it had to be the husband who did the talking. Sante made one more attempt, but seemed to be restrained by the complexity of what he had to say as well as by some sort of shame. Finally, his wife burst out, “Come on, tell him the whole story.”

  Under pressure, the man started to mumble. “I’ve been trying to tell him ever since he arrived.”

  The commissario made a gesture to encourage him to go on.

  “It’s to do with money,” Sante said.

  Another gesture from Soneri, meaning to convey that he had guessed as much all along. “Money or sex,” was the endlessly repeated mantra of Nanetti, head of the forensic squad: that’s what it always came down to.

  “In this village, everyone knows everybody else, there’s trust…” Sante began again, following a delicate line of thought which was probably so intricate it could not be set out without some confusion.

  Ida gave her husband an angry look, and Soneri too found himself becoming impatient with this stopping and starting, but Sante still needed a long run up before he was able to leap forward.

  “We all trust them,” he said, picking his way with great care.

  “The fact is, we gave him some money,” Ida said, with an abruptness which sounded like a slap in the face.

  Her husband was grateful for her help. “Have you ever heard of ‘nursemaid’ money?” he asked, finally free of embarrassment.

  Soneri nodded. “A form of loan.”

  “That’s right,” Sante said, pointing with a finger as though the money were lying in front of them on the table.

  “And now you’re all worried about your money?”

  “We still have trust, but all these rumours…”

  “Did you give him a lot of money?”

  Sante looked up at his wife, furrowing his brow as though he had endured a stab of pain.

  “Yes, a lot,” he said, without specifying the amount. “And we weren’t the only ones,” he added, as though that were an excuse.

  “Who else?”

  “Many people, more than you could imagine. But there’s no point in you trying to draw up a list, because they’d never tell you.”

  “Why should they not?”

  “People never talk about their own affairs.”

  “But you have.”

  “You’re from these parts, even if you’ve no idea what life around here is like nowadays. Besides, we’re relatives, distant relatives, but still relatives.”

  The commissario nodded again, knowing he would never have been able to trace the contorted links between the families.

  “In spite of that, it’s not easy for me to talk. It’s that the very thought…”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Because I feel I’ve made a wretched mess of everything,” Sante burst out, with despair in his eyes.

  “You told me you still had trust. Have you lost it now?”

  “As long as Palmiro was there … He was the same as us. He spoke in dialect. But now …?”

  “And we can’t rest for thinking about how he died,” Ida broke in. “We would never ever have dreamed that a man like Palmiro would have hanged himself.”

  “That’s what they always say about suicides.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t know the man! He was as much a ladies’ man as when he was in his twenties. Some people would swear that he and his daughter-in-law…”

  “Shut up!” Sante tried to interrupt his wife. “What are you saying?”

  Ida stopped, but her expression was of out-and-out malice, and this was the most telling of judgments.
r />   “Who was it who asked you for the money, Palmiro or Paride?”

  “Paride keeps well away. It was Palmiro who came. It was his job to do the rounds. He’d kept in touch from the days when he started up the dairy business.”

  “What guarantees did he offer?”

  Sante gave another shrug. “I told you. It’s all to do with trust. We wrote the transactions and the dates down in a notebook and he added his scribble and that was that.”

  The commissario’s expression must have shown his concern, because he saw Sante bow his head. “You do know that a mark like that is not worth a thing?”

  Sante nodded.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Many years now,” Ida said, accompanying the words with a wave of the hand which was meant to say that it was a long established practice.

  “If it’s been going so well for all this time, what makes you so scared now?” the commissario said.

  Sante’s expression lightened for a moment, but his dark mood returned as he started speaking. “As I’ve explained, because of Palmiro’s death. Nobody thought … and that son of his who’s never here … the few times we’ve actually seen him he would speak in big words we couldn’t understand. He is used to discussions with bankers and financiers who handle money all day long. Many of them turned up at his villa and we were expected to bring them food we had made ourselves. We didn’t get on with them.”

  “I can understand the question of trust, but to lend money blindly like that…”

  Sante heaved a deep sigh and looked at his wife. It seemed that merely talking about it made him the more fearful of impending ruin.

  “Palmiro had a way of convincing us. He repeated always the same thing. If we grow, you grow, the whole village grows. Who could quarrel with that? After the war, the poverty here was terrible. He made us feel like traitors if we refused him.”

  “Tell him about the interest,” Ida hissed, without looking at her husband.

  Sante sighed once more. “Well, he paid more than the banks.”

  “Much more?”

  “It depends. You had to bargain with him as though you were buying a batch of cheese. If you seemed to hesitate, he would increase the rate he was offering, then he would do the sums in his head and tell you how much you would gain after five, ten or fifteen years. It was hard to resist.”

  “He was a right sly one in business,” Ida said, cutting the air with her hand.

  “Did you ever see any returns?”

  “If you insisted, Palmiro would settle up. It did happen a few times, but in the majority of cases, he wouldn’t let go. ‘If you give me the money for five years more, I’ll raise the rate by half a per cent,’ he would say. Then he would churn out numbers that made your head spin.”

  “So you’re saying that no-one withdrew their money?”

  “Virtually everyone round here can manage, so the money they gave him was money they were putting by for their children, or to keep themselves in comfort in old age, or just out of prudence. In this village, they’re great savers. They might live in hovels, but having some savings makes them feel more secure.”

  Soneri could hear his own father talk of his fears for some “tomorrow” when anything might happen. The peasants always feared hailstones, or drought, or an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. “I’m sure Paride will do the right thing,” were the only words the commissario could find to reassure his hosts.

  “Well, let us hope so,” Sante groaned, without conviction.

  Soneri rose to go to bed, but Sante’s almost imploring look detained him a minute longer. “What can I do?” he said.

  Sante murmured, “Nothing.”

  4

  Even before daybreak, the skies seemed to have shed their earlier heaviness. Soneri left the road between the houses, keeping Montelupo, still cloaked in a thick mist, directly ahead of him. He walked past the shuttered houses in Groppo and turned off to start his climb towards Croce, hoping to find some ceps in the more shaded areas which would be still damp with the dew falling from leafless trees. He came in sight of the chapel of the Madonna del Rosario, a place of pilgrimage in the month of May, and proceeded through the tangled vegetation which flourished in the clay of the lower valley and gave off the pungent scents of the wild. Before moving into the hornbeam woods, he stopped to get his breath. The last houses were now out of sight, and within the woods he felt himself both hunter and prey. When he looked up, he could make out wisps of mist clinging so closely to the peaks as to resemble smoke from a fire. Above the path, a sandstone balcony had crumbled under the pressure of the mountain streams and had slipped down into the valley, creating a deep scar in the woods.

  If he had had sufficient strength in his legs, he would have already been at the mountain huts and perhaps even at the bar on Lake Santo which was not far from the peak, but first he wanted to reconnoitre the hillside and the watery gullies where the weak winter sun could not penetrate. He gripped the trunks of trees as he clambered down, trying to recall movements he had learned so many years earlier in outings with his father. The third time he fell, he saw them: a colony of “trumpets of death” seeming to intone a miserere in the shadow of an enormous oak.

  Sante’s words rang in his ears, but he refused to be put off. His principal concern was finding someone able to cook those mushrooms the right way. He left them where they were when he heard the sound of something crashing about in the undergrowth close at hand, knocking into the lower branches of the trees. He decided it must be a wild boar, sniffing the air and detecting his presence. Soneri stood stock still, listening, and then, straight in front of him, he saw a strip of land which gave the appearance of having been ploughed. He swept aside the leaves and uncovered a second family of “trumpets of death”, crushed into tiny pieces by blows from a club. Evidently there was someone who did believe they were omens of ill fortune. Shortly afterwards, he heard the brushwood breaking as the boar made off. Once he was sure the beast was well away, he returned to the path, from which it was now impossible to see down into the valley.

  A thick blanket of mist came down, turning the countryside grey. The huts could not be far off, but he was fearful of getting lost, and afraid too of those shots fired at some target, whatever that target was meant to be. At last he saw the outlines of the stone buildings, sheds for climbing equipment and summer dwellings in the mountaineering season when the passes echoed with the many languages used in that borderland between sea and plain. Inside one of them rubbish was scattered all around – empty cans, broken bottles, plastic bags and the remains of tinned food – but the ash in the fireplace and the crumpled bedclothes on the wooden bench were evidence of some recent presence.

  When he stepped back outside, the mist had lifted and this made him resolve to carry on. It was eleven o’clock, so he would have time to reach Lake Santo, see if the bar was open and make his way back, even if this meant another day without a single cep being picked. He quickened his pace along the mule path, coming out into the pure air of the clearing with the bar, high up the mountainside, beyond the point where the wood gave way to moss and stone. It was cold, and it occurred to Soneri that the first snows of winter could not be far off. This thought and the sight of the remote bar made him think of his father with that lurching gait of his, as if he were pushing himself forward by putting pressure on one leg, a habit which spoke of experience gained over a lifetime of grim, debilitating hardship.

  Even in the dying days of autumn, the bar was open. Baldi, the owner, was still behind the counter, not yet ready to close up for the season. He was short and sturdy, with white hair and moustache.

  The two men exchanged greetings, before Soneri said: “Are there still many hunters around?”

  “The season’s nearly over.”

  “What about the roe deer?”

  “Not much doing. They’ve got cleverer and go down the valley into the reserve.”

  “And the trout in the lake?”

  �
��They’re not biting any more. You would swear they feel winter coming on.”

  “Same as us. When do you shut up shop?”

  “Any day now. Or at the first snow fall – which is more or less the same thing.”

  “You think the snow’s nearly here?”

  “Feel the air. There’s frost every morning now.”

  Two shabbily dressed men came into the bar. One of them, in a heavy foreign accent, asked for two coffees and two grappas.

  “Nowadays we have to put up with all kinds of foreign wildlife,” Baldi said contemptuously, but speaking in dialect so that he would not be understood.

  “What do they do here?” Soneri said. “I saw that other people had been down at the huts.”

  “Everything and nothing. They come from Liguria and Tuscany with all kinds of stuff. I’ve even seen some of them struggling up here with suitcases.”

  “Are the carabinieri aware of this?”

  Baldi shrugged his shoulders. “Occasionally they come to make checks, but by the time they get here, everything seems to be in order. These people bury whatever they have in the woods.”

  “Who do they sell it to?”

  “Well, you hear so many stories. They pass it on to other people who take it to the cities. Some of it’s given to the kids in the village. They’re at it now too.”

  “Drugs? Around here?”

  Baldi gave another shrug. “Everything’s changed. They get bored. The winters are long, there’s nothing to occupy their minds, so they look for something different. If they’d ever known hunger, like this lot…” Baldi said, indicating the strangers with his chin.

  Soneri’s thoughts went back to his father, setting off for work with three pears and a crust of bread for his midday meal. He changed the subject. “Do you see the Woodsman from time to time?”

  “He hasn’t been here for a while. The woods are his world. Here, it’s too open for his tastes. When you reach a certain altitude, the mountain’s no good for keeping secrets. You can see everything that’s going on, even if there are very few people watching.”