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

by Valerio Varesi

  He was served with his caffelatte, with fresh bread which he dipped in the coffee, and home-made plum jam. Without any preliminaries, Sante asked, “Any news?”

  “The only news I have is neither good nor certain. I might know more by this evening,” the commissario said, thinking of the coming meeting in Badignana which he now contemplated with growing curiosity.

  Sante made no reply, but did not move. “That loan I was talking about,” he began with a stutter, before pulling himself together. “I mean, have they really run out of cash?”

  “It’s too early to say. The Rodolfis maintain they do have the money.”

  “So where is Paride?” Sante said, raising his voice and close to losing his temper. Soneri knew this was the question they all wanted answered, the question that embodied the fears of a village where they were all creditors.

  “Sante,” began the commissario, looking directly upon him so as to sound more convincing, “the truth is I do not know. I’m here on holiday. The carabinieri know a lot more about it. They’ve sent in that captain. He must be on the case by now, mustn’t he?”

  “Yes, but I have more confidence in you. I saw you growing up here when I was not much older myself.”

  Soneri stood up and put his arm round Sante’s shoulders. “You’ll see: it will all turn out fine. I’ll do what I can to find out more and of course I’ll keep you informed.”

  Sante bowed his head. He tried to look grateful, but managed only to be a picture of anxiety.

  When the commissario left the pensione he felt the force of the cold, biting wind as it swept along the valley. The freezing temperature was no longer confined to the higher ground, and even in the village the puddles had a thin covering of ice.

  To save time, he made for the Case Rufaldi. There was a woodland track that would be hard going, but it went directly up almost to the ridge before turning onto the Badignana plain. The Woodsman’s daughter had not given him a time for the meeting, or perhaps it had slipped his memory, but he would take no chances and be there early rather than risk missing out on the possibility of meeting her father.

  After the Pietra fork, he stopped in a sheltered spot out of the wind to get his breath. The sun and the blue skies gave the woods a different appearance. He searched for mushrooms away from the path, coming across a colony of russolas, which he carefully picked, and then inside a broken tree trunk he found a cluster of chanterelles. The mist of recent days had made the undergrowth fertile, but the frost would render it sterile again. He followed the track through the beech wood, where the rising sun was reflected off the copper of the autumnal leaves. From nowhere, a dog came running to him barking, and immediately he heard its owner, still invisible among the trees, whistle. The dog was a lagotto romagnolo with a white, curly coat.

  “It won’t touch you,” came a reassuring voice which sounded familiar to him. He turned to see Ghidini striding along a track beaten in the undergrowth by the wild boar.

  The dog trotted back to its master, sniffing among the leaves as he went. “Poor thing,” Ghidini said. “In this freezing weather, there are no scents for him to follow. We’ll have to move round to the sunny side of the hill and hope it thaws soon.”

  “With the ice the way it is, it’ll be a while before that happens here.”

  “I’m afraid so. I’ve come all this way for nothing so far. But I see you’ve been luckier,” he said, pointing to the commissario’s little bag of mushrooms.

  “They’re well hidden in places like this.”

  “It’s all luck. But don’t fool yourself. There are more eyes searching than you might think.”

  The commissario took a moment to puzzle over Ghidini’s meaning. He was not pleased at the prospect of having his company to where he was going. He leant against the trunk of a beech tree and lit a cigar.

  “That doesn’t do anything for your breathing. I’m a forty-a-day man myself, so I’m only too aware of it,” Ghidini said, taking a squashed packet of cigarettes from his pocket. “It’s like having a hole in your petrol tank.”

  “It’s O.K as long as you recognise your limits and don’t overdo it, as with everything else.”

  “Now the Rodolfis,” Ghidini said, giving Soneri the impression that this was where he had wanted to get to from the beginning. “I believe they really did overdo it.”

  “I don’t know, could be,” replied the commissario, trying to sound noncommittal.

  “They’ve been good at blowing their own trumpets, but they’ve been a bit careless with other people’s money. Not that that requires any great skill.”

  “Did you lend them any money?”

  “Me? No. I’ve never had any. Which is why none of my kids was ever taken on at their factory. They all had to go into the city, but maybe they were better off in the end.”

  “Nobody has a bad word for the Rodolfis. Without them the village would have died long ago.”

  “The people here are a bunch of hypocrites. Pure selfinterest makes them keep their mouths shut, because they don’t want to stir up trouble for themselves. But now the chickens are coming home to roost. They’re beginning to see themselves for what they’ve always been: a flock of sheep about to get fleeced. Year after year, they’ve dutifully voted the way the Rodolfis told them to. Aimi, the mayor, is on the payroll. Paride summons him to Villa del Greppo and gives him his orders. That’s how they managed things when the villas in the new village were being built.”

  “You get the politicians you deserve,” Soneri said curtly. Ghidini’s tirade was beginning to get on his nerves.

  “Maybe so, but what can you do when a whole community seems to be living under a spell?”

  “Stand up to it. Make your voice heard in public. Just telling me about these things isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “How could I change people’s minds? The stakes are too high for most people,” Ghidini said, shaking his head.

  “Those are the rules of the game. You reach consensus by taking the stakes into account. I give you something and you give me something in return. Would you have voted for Aimi as mayor if the Rodolfis had taken on your sons?”

  Ghidini reflected for a moment and then he gave a bitter smile. “Who knows? Maybe you’re right and at the end of the day everyone is prepared to bend a little. I might have done so for the good of my sons, but I would never have changed my mind about the Rodolfis.”

  “The same as the rest,” Soneri said dryly.

  The dog started barking some way off in the woods. “Perhaps he’s found something interesting,” Ghidini said. Soneri took advantage of the distraction to continue on his way. Soon afterwards, he saw the sun emerge from behind the mountain top, and was afraid he was already late. At the Buca Nevosa fork, shortly before the turn for Badignana, he paused. He took a good look into the woods lower down, but decided he was being overcautious. If anyone had been spying on him, he would hardly have been able to miss him. Baldi was right: at a certain height, the mountain is no place for secrets. The plain with the shepherds’ cabins at the far end was much wider than he remembered. Standing there in the bright autumnal sun, he felt completely disorientated. The dazzling light shining down from the clear, blue sky made it unlikely that the Woodsman would bother waiting for him, since waiting meant losing the best hours of a day when the sun would set early. He was almost running as he passed the pens abandoned only recently by the sheep and cows. Their pungent odours hung in the air. He was out of breath when he arrived.

  He opened the doors onto rooms which still held the clammy heat of summer. He looked around to see if anyone was there in that small village occasionally populated by livestock and their shepherds, where now the chill was beginning to penetrate. He sat on a flat boulder and gazed at the mountain peaks behind which lay a different world of olive trees and holm oaks, trees whose presence announced the proximity of the sea. He re-lit his cigar and thought with irritation of the time he had wasted with Ghidini. As the sun melted the frost on the few st
retches of earth visible between the rocks, he heard some stones roll in his direction. Looking up towards the Ticchiano pass, he saw two men walking past at an unhurried pace which told him they had been on the road for hours. Judging by their dress, they must be Arabs. They walked on without looking in his direction, and only once they had passed the cabins did they turn, like two frightened dogs, to look back. They carried on and disappeared behind the side of the mountain. It was then he heard a man’s voice call out, a tired voice, little more than a mumble. He had been walking into the wind and had come up behind him without Soneri noticing, and now he stood there looking him calmly up and down. Soneri offered him a cigar but the other man refused with a shake of the head and took out tobacco and papers to roll his own cigarette.

  “Is the Woodsman anywhere around?”

  The man did not even look up from an inspection of his calloused hands, which seemed incapable of any refined work, and indicated that he had gone.

  “We had an appointment to meet here,” Soneri said.

  There was no reply. The man seemed engrossed in the task of lighting his cigarette, shielding the match from the wind. Soneri waited until he completed the task. “He’s on his own up here,” he said, looking hard at the stranger.

  The only reply was another gesture, which possibly indicated a vague coming and going.

  “Does the Woodsman often pass this way?”

  The other man, gazing along the line of rocks on the horizon, nodded through the smoke of his cigarette.

  “Where will he be now?”

  The only reply he received was yet another nod in the direction the two strangers had taken shortly before, but this time it was accompanied by a few words. “Over by Lake Palo.”

  “So I could find him there,” Soneri said, unsure whether that was a question or a statement.

  The man smiled, gave him a condescending look, then shook his head to dissuade him.

  “I know my way round here,” the commissario said, somewhat piqued.

  “Nobody can keep up with the Woodsman,” he whispered. He ran his hand over his face and Soneri thought he could hear the calluses rub against the stubble on his chin. For a moment he seemed embarrassed. Having to speak after a long period of silence and solitude in that wilderness must have required considerable effort.

  “He told me to tell you to have a look around in the chestnut groves at Pratopiano.”

  “Nothing else?”

  The man, holding the cigarette, now no more than a length of ash which he gripped between his thumb and index finger, indicated he had nothing more to add. He took one last draw and tossed the stub under a stone.

  “Say to the Woodsman I do need to see him,” Soneri told the man, as if he were one of his staff. The man did no more than briefly turn towards him, which Soneri took as a sign of assent.

  “I will come back up to meet him. Will you be in these parts a bit longer?”

  The man stretched out his arms tentatively. “That’ll depend on the weather,” he said. The commissario held up his hand in farewell and turned to go, but before he had taken a couple of steps, the man drew himself upright. “Go to Pratopiano right now. If you take the Malpasso path, you’ll be there today before it gets dark.”

  There was a note of urgency in his voice, giving Soneri the feeling that he knew more than he was letting on. He looked at him for a few seconds, but decided there was no point in asking any more questions. The man moved off, springing nimbly over a cluster of rocks off which the rays of the midday sun seemed to be bouncing.

  Soneri set off in the direction of Malpasso, trudging over stretches of stony ground behind peaks which crumbled away year after year at the onset of the winter freeze. Out of the wind in the valley, the heat of the sun was strong enough to make him believe that, after the days of mist, they were about to enjoy an Indian summer. Above, he saw a bright, clear sky with no more than traces of light clouds tossed about by the winds, and for a short time he felt at one with that sky, and as joyous and playful as a hawk swooping through the air. The solitariness – and the violence of the light – cleansed his mind of every thought, leaving it free to entertain only a primitive sense of belonging to those places.

  As afternoon drew on, the light began to fail. The sun had passed its peak, its rays giving way to the rapidly falling November dusk. He passed below the summit of Monte Matto from which, on a bright winter day, it was possible to see the blue of the sea at La Spezia, and turned onto the steep path which snakes quickly down Malpasso. Half an hour later, he found himself in the woods, and calculating that there was no more than one and a half hours of light remaining, he quickened his step. He was still imbued with a sense of wellbeing and for the first time he realised he was free of all the petty annoyances of life in the police station. He reached the Macchiaferro stream which flowed over the path, and crossed it, jumping from rock to rock. He bent down and dipped his hand in the clear, ice-cold water purely to experience the sensation he had felt as a boy when, warm from his climbing and with the urgent desire to see and conquer the summits, he had wandered in those mountains.

  At the end of Malpasso, he turned to take in the imposing bulk of Montelupo and the other peaks whose grey, rocky faces stood out against a sky which was growing darker by the minute. He could never be sure where the boundary lay between the hostile barrenness of the heights and the area where life flourished, even if it were only the timid life of the moss. The border was fluctuating, like the snows in late winter, or like that message passed on by the Woodsman at Badignana. From where he was, he could see the chestnut trees at Pratopiano, still given a gentle colouring by the last husks hanging on the branches. Everything was vague on the mountains, where a named place never had a precise location but drifted between dimensions traced out by the eye and the mind.

  He was in the woods where the trees were already damp with the evening dew. As he stared around him, he wondered what he was supposed to find or look for in that place. He looked up at the sky and saw the swift dusk bringing to an end a day as short and as filled with light as a straw fire. He was startled to hear barking from somewhere below. From the edge of the path, he peered through the trees, which gave off the moist scents of dead leaves, but there was nothing to be seen. He heard a rustling in the bushes and someone summoned the dog with a precise, rhythmic whistle, clearly a recognised signal. It seemed the dog was coming up the slope, thrashing the undergrowth as it went, and his first thought was of Ghidini, but he could not see anyone. He continued his way down to Corticone, from where the path climbed from the west over Montelupo, and after a few minutes he was aware of following the sound of the barking but without having paid heed to the direction he was taking. When he realised he had lost his way, his nostrils were filled with a stench carried by a gust of wind. It was a stench he knew only too well from having many times in his career smelled it from locked apartments, from the boots of cars or from watery ditches littered with stones and rubble. He walked more quickly, and his nostrils dilated as he sniffed the air, like a setter. The growing strength of the smell guided him infallibly towards a point where the ground fell away to an almost inaccessible hollow where wild boar would shelter from the sun’s heat on a summer afternoon. The air seemed heavier and damper, as though thickened by a veil of tiny drops of water issuing from a nearby waterfall. He climbed cautiously down into that freezing enclosure, holding on to protruding branches. When he was almost at the bottom, he saw it. Between two boulders which had rolled off the mountain, lay a decomposing and slightly swollen corpse, its face half-hidden in the slime. It seemed the earth wished to claim it and deny it any further burial. Judging by the number of pawmarks around it, dogs and wild boar must have mauled it and tugged at its arms and legs.

  Holding his nose and balancing as well as he could on the rocks so as not to contaminate any possible clues, the commissario made his way over to the body. He could make out only a few of the victim’s features, not the whole face, but clearly he had been a man w
ho dressed with care and who had been equipped for an excursion on the mountain. His windcheater jacket had been ripped by animal teeth, and goose feathers, immobile in that windless hollow, lay scattered all around. Fangs had bitten into some parts of his legs, but there was no blood on the ground – a sure sign that the animals had only arrived on the scene a considerable time after death. When he completed his inspection of the body, Soneri regretted not being able to call on Nanetti, the head of his forensic squad. A metre away, behind a bush, he noted a dark patch where several animals had plainly clawed at the ground. He deduced that the patch was blood, and that after rolling down the slope the body had come to rest there. As he tried to remove the wallet from the hip pocket of the trousers he had a premonition, and when he opened it and saw the face of a woman and child, his fears were confirmed. The posters on San Martino had lied. Paride Rodolfi had not disappeared. He was there in the Pratopiano woods, dead, already swollen and rotting, like an ageing animal which had crawled into the darkness of its den to wait for its end.

  The wallet was intact but there was no money in it, not even a coin. As the commissario studied the area around the body, darkness fell rapidly in the hollow. It would take an hour from there to the village, so he would not arrive before nightfall. He stood alone over the corpse, the fetid smell growing more and more offensive, and looked out at the dying light to the west. He felt the role of investigator thrust upon him once more, but he was determined to decline it, since he had no wish to deal with the troubles of a case as complex as this one threatened to be. He took out his mobile and called the carabiniere office. “Put me through to Maresciallo Crisafulli,” he said to the operator, realising with a certain dismay that he had assumed the tone of voice of the officer on duty.

  Crisafulli came onto the line, speaking in weary tones. “What can I do for you, Commissario?”

  “I’ve found the body of Paride Rodolfi.”

  “Jesus!” Crisafulli said, before putting his hand over the mouthpiece to communicate with the people in the office. “And where is it?”