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

by Valerio Varesi

  He headed for Boldara then, with the first, faint morning light, turned onto the path to Malpasso. The ascent was gentle enough, but he was walking into a bitterly cold wind which whistled angrily around him and battered against the side of Montelupo which the sunlight had reached. Around the cabins, he saw figures making their way down, off the path, and he assumed these were the last of the herdsmen leaving before the snows blocked the passes, and taking advantage of the hours when the carabinieri were not likely to be patrolling the mountain. Twenty minutes further on, the dark, lonely outlines of the mountain bar appeared. Baldi had made a thorough job of closing the place down. The doors and windows were boarded up with wood covered by metal panels to prevent the snow knocking down the shutters, the roof was reinforced by wooden planks for protection against the north wind and the drainage channels had been dug deeper to prevent damage in the thaw.

  He walked round the bar, which appeared impregnable. To the west, he saw a bank of thick clouds, and although they were still far off, he was sure they would soon arrive overhead to bury Montelupo and all its stories. He stood for a while gazing at the summit against the shifting landscape of late autumn. He felt he was engaged in a farewell ceremony which had nothing to do with the seasons, but had everything to do with himself. It was the feeling he had already had with Sante and the people in the village, but now the experience was more violent, like a time of mourning.

  He was overwhelmed by a sense of deep foreboding, but recognised the need to make immediate contact with the Woodsman. He started calling out, yelling into the wind at the top of his voice. That too was an act of violence for a man accustomed to subdued tones or to the soundless words of his long debates with himself. He hoped the Woodsman would come out, to alleviate his solitude and hold back time a few seconds longer.

  He heard Dolly bark at the hut where the logs were stored. The door opened outwards and Soneri saw a powerfully built man bend under the frame of the door and then straighten up again. The Woodsman was even bigger than he had imagined. No-one could fail to be intimidated by that giant with the long beard, heavy step and hands like shovels. He held a rifle which looked like a toy next to his enormous body. Plainly distrustful, he stopped a few metres from the commissario.

  “I’m on my own,” Soneri said, raising his hands slightly.

  “I know,” Gualerzi replied in his baritone voice. “I’ve been watching you for the last half an hour coming up Malpasso.”

  Soneri glanced at the ammunition belt which Gualerzi was wearing round his waist and saw he had only a few cartridges left.

  “If you’ve been sent by that carabiniere officer, you can tell him he’s wasting his time,” the Woodsman said, in a tone of terrifying calmness. At that moment, the sun rose over the heights to the east of Montelupo and lit up the peak where the bar was. Gualerzi glanced at the light, while the freezing wind blew around him without causing him to shiver.

  “It wasn’t him who sent me. I’ve wanted to meet you for some time. It’s a personal matter.”

  For a second, the Woodsman showed some curiosity, but immediately repressed that feeling. “I never wait for anyone. Up here, nobody makes appointments. You might happen to bump into someone, that’s all.”

  “You waited for me this time.”

  “Today is different. The time has come –” he stopped abruptly.

  “The time for what?”

  The Woodsman waved vaguely towards the west, indicating the white clouds on the horizon which were growing ever more menacing. “It’s going to snow tonight, and that’ll make everything more difficult. For a few days, you’ll be able to walk about in the woods, and then not even there. The snow betrays you,” he said, ambiguously.

  It was clear he had lost the thread of his thought. The explanation had done nothing to calm him down.

  “How are things?” the commissario said, to relieve the tension.

  “There’s no escape for me. There isn’t for anyone. Sooner or later, it comes to us all. The doctor said it was the fault of the coal I’ve been breathing in ever since I was a child.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to get treatment?” the commissario suggested tentatively.

  “That makes no sense now,” the Woodsman said brusquely. “I’ve killed a carabiniere. I’d end up suffering in a police cell. It’s better to put up with the pain where I’ve always been. We all have the right to die in the place we were born, don’t we? My own earth on top of me and a chestnut tree where the sun rises in the morning as my gravestone.”

  “Palmiro Rodolfi too…” Soneri started to say, stopping in mid-sentence.

  The Woodsman shrugged. “They put him in a little hole in a cemetery wall, and closed it off with cement. I don’t want to end up like that. I want to draw my last breath in the fresh air and then give myself to the earth.”

  “We could come to an arrangement with the carabinieri,” Soneri said, thinking aloud.

  “I did not kill Palmiro’s son,” he growled, in a tone calculated to arouse fear. “He ruined me, but he did the same to lots of other people. If anything, I was bitter with Palmiro himself. He cheated and tricked me too often.”

  “Did you go looking for him recently? Did you want him to repay you?”

  “I hadn’t the money to get my wife looked after. She could have been saved, not me.”

  “So you shot at him.”

  The Woodsman glowered at the commissario, angered at what was turning into an interrogation, but he must have decided it did not matter any more. “Yes, I shot at him, and he shot at me. But it was misty, and Palmiro’s cunning.” There was a pause before he asked, “How did you know?”

  “Once you came close to getting me. Above Boldara. I was looking for mushrooms.”

  “In the mist, nobody goes out in the woods above Boldara, except him and me. There was a game we used to play with our catapults as boys. One hid, trying not to make any noise, and the other one fired his sling at him if he heard him. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

  “You were both so sure of yourselves that you didn’t stop to think someone else might be there?”

  “There are some places nobody goes when it’s misty. Nobody knows Montelupo well enough, not even Volpi, the gamekeeper.”

  “I was there.”

  The Woodsman turned away, looking at the mountain and at the reflection of the sun on the metal panels over the bar. “You used to go there with your father. You’ve obviously got a good memory,” he said.

  “You knew each other quite well. My father used to talk about you.”

  Gualerzi nodded. “A good man. A man of few words, but the right words.”

  Soneri was about to question him further, when the Woodsman turned the conversation back to the carabinieri. “If one of them got killed, the fault lies with the people who dispatched him. I tried to warn them off all day by firing in the air, but they kept coming forward, shooting like madmen. At Badignana, they came into the open on the stony ground, but they were still firing with their rifles. The bullet that got him was a ricochet. I didn’t aim at him, the way they were doing. If I’d wanted, I could have picked off ten of them.”

  A sudden noise from somewhere below the bar alerted him. Dolly too jumped to her feet. The Woodsman relaxed. “A deer,” he said.

  The commissario observed him carefully, trying to work out what he really wanted to say, but only ugly thoughts suggested themselves to him.

  “Tell the captain it was me that killed Palmiro’s son,” Gualerzi said, with wild, staring eyes but speaking with the authority of a man accustomed to giving orders. “And tell him too that the death of the carabiniere was his fault. Among these rocks, bullets have a will of their own. He should have respected me enough not to hunt me like a beast. When someone starts firing, he’s got to expect people to fire back. And remember, I’ve never taken orders from anyone, not even from Mussolini,” he declared, his voice rising in a menacing crescendo. Then, with a sinister inflection of his voice, he added, “A
nd I’m not going to start now.”

  A grim silence fell. The clouds were gathering overhead more quickly than expected. The Woodsman turned to look at them, with the expression of someone recognising a face. He breathed a deep sigh and under his overcoat his chest seemed to swell. Unexpectedly, he started talking again, with the calm flow of words of a man resigned to his fate. “In the last couple of years, Palmiro and I had nothing to lose. If he’d shot me or I’d shot him, we’d have been doing each other a favour. Dying in our own woods while running away like a wild boar, playing a children’s game … that would have been a good way to go. We were suffering from two different illnesses, both mortal. Mine was cancer and his was shame and ruination, and his was the worse disease. There was no escape and we both knew it.”

  “Palmiro could have run off with his daughter-in-law, as she wished.”

  “No. He wouldn’t have been able to live away from this land, Montelupo, his hunting ground, his dogs. He’d have died of a broken heart.”

  “Do you think that woman had anything to do with it?”

  “She hated her husband and went to bed with Palmiro, so you could say she had some interest in getting rid of Paride, but then Palmiro himself had no love for his son. He considered him a waster who would ruin the business. He used to say he’d built up everything by himself and he wasn’t going to let anyone destroy it. If Paride had been like his father, they’d have been at each other’s throats from the outset, but the son always went along with anything his father said, but then did what he liked. He moved money about as though it was a sack of beans, and Palmiro had no idea of what was going on. Paride always told him what he was doing, but latterly the old man realised his son had him by the balls.”

  “Did he speak about it when you met?”

  “Sometimes, before our relationship broke down completely.”

  “Did Paride come up to Montelupo as well?”

  “Occasionally, with that strange servant of his, but in the woods he was like a priest in a brothel.”

  “Was he afraid?”

  “Maybe. Young people now don’t know how to live in the woods. They spend too much time in their cars.”

  Soneri looked his watch: ten o’clock. The sun had heated the air and thawed the ice on the leaves a little. The summit dominated the whole valley that lay at the foot of Montelupo. The Woodsman scoured the area with expert, careful eyes.

  “They won’t come. The captain has given me his word.”

  The Woodsman gave him a surly look. “Even if they did…” he muttered.

  The commissario realised he had chosen that spot because it was the best outlook point. Anyone trying to sneak up on them would have been sighted when they were at least half an hour away.

  “What do you do when the mist comes down?” Soneri said, nodding in the direction of the valley.

  “I move to an out-of-the-way place in some section of the mountains, where only a dog could find me.”

  The commissario thought of Dolly and of the rifle he had pulled out of the mud. “When did you find Paride’s body?”

  “I think it was the day after, if everything went the way I think it did.”

  “The mist was very dense.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That whoever fired the shot was not seen by Paride.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Not at all,” the Woodsman said, trying to minimise what he had said and to get off the subject.

  Soneri realised he had made a false move. Gualerzi was keeping something back, something he preferred not to say. “Were you close by when the shots were fired?”

  “Not very close. I was climbing up, using the Macchiaferro as a landmark. The shot was fired a bit lower down, but I couldn’t make out precisely from where. The mist always makes it more difficult. I ran down to the Croce path, but the silence was as profound as inside a well. I did hear a dog whine down at the foot of a gorge, but I couldn’t see anything. Next thing I heard was a round of shots discharged in the general direction of the mountain, pellets that fell like hail among the dry branches. I don’t know if he was aiming at the dog or if he’d heard me coming down, but it seemed the dog was the target because I heard him pounding over the leaves. Another shot rang out from somewhere else in the woods. If he’d been on higher ground, further away from the path, I’d have had no doubts about who it was, but there it could have been a poacher. What’s more, it was already dark and the mist was getting thicker and rising from below up towards the summit. Later I heard the trucks, and people and carabinieri bawling into that wall of mist which distorted their voices. There must have been a squad going over every track down to the valley. Then I heard them shouting for Palmiro and I guessed at what had occurred.”

  Soneri lowered his head, realising that his own guess had been correct. “The following day you found him and sent for me. You’d worked everything out in your mind.”

  “Two and two make four. Anyway, I expected it. Palmiro said he’d created the family fortune and it would go with him. He felt betrayed by his son, and when he watched his grandson growing up…” The Woodsman sighed deeply. “He’d nobody left. That woman, his daughter-in-law, she’d have dropped him the moment the money he’d accumulated had been squandered, which it would have been, as surely as the rock on these mountains crumbles in the frost. Years ago, I told him and Capelli they were deluding themselves with their passion for money. Even when they’d made themselves rich, they couldn’t relax. Palmiro came to the woods to search for that serenity his business affairs took away from him. He wasn’t happy, for the simple reason that wealth gives you too much to worry about. The stupidest thing of all is to imagine that it’s going to bring you happiness. Look at this village. When they were all poor, they could laugh. Now they’re stabbing each other in the back.” He spat to one side, and immediately afterwards his body was wracked by a dry, violent coughing fit. “I at least,” he went on when the coughing passed, “have been able to stay here and live the life I chose without taking orders from anyone. And that’s how I will end my days,” he declared.

  “Living as you choose is not worth another man’s life,” Soneri said, thinking of the dead carabiniere.

  “I didn’t go looking for them. They knew what I’m made of. Was I supposed to let myself be dragged down the valley, bound hand and foot like a beast? I wasn’t going to allow them to cage me up. I’d sooner be dead, and that’s why I defended myself,” he thundered. “I suppose you need a certain kind of courage to be untrue to yourself, and I lack that kind of courage. I’ve got courage of another kind, and if they’re going to take me, they’ll need to have more of it than I have. So far it hasn’t happened, and now…”

  The light was now shining with its mid-morning brightness and the day promised to be one of brief, intense radiance. The commissario screwed up his eyes as he looked at the sky, and saw that it was growing greyer and heavier towards the western horizon where it came down to touch the plain. “Sometimes it is more painful to renounce than to resist,” he said.

  The Woodsman nodded. “Your father had the strength to renounce, or to sacrifice himself, if you prefer to put it that way. He knew how to master himself, unlike me. He was able to tell you why he did what he did and there were times when he convinced even me. Sometimes I admired him, but at others I’d have happily punched him.”

  Images of his father swirled about in Soneri’s head. Contrary to what Gualerzi was now saying, he had always considered his father a resolute, strong-minded man, and found it difficult to cope with a description of him in different terms.

  “He was a man of few words, and in any case there are things you don’t tell your children.” The commissario was trying to defend his father, but in words addressed more to himself than to the Woodsman.

  “You don’t tell them, no,” the Woodsman agreed, as though talking to himself. “And he wasn’t a man to go boasting about anything.”

  “Wh
at should he have boasted about?”

  “Of having dedicated many years of his life to you,” Gualerzi replied dryly, almost with contempt.

  “Isn’t that what a father is supposed to do?” Soneri said. He knew there was something more behind his words, and fear gave his voice an awkward tone.

  “He wanted to get away from this village, to go to the city, but he had to take you into account. He preferred to stay with the Rodolfis, to hold on to a job he hated and to live in the family home where he didn’t have to pay rent. He hung on until you’d finished school. That takes guts. He buried himself before his time so you wouldn’t have to face the grim life he endured.”

  Soneri understood where his fear was coming from. From incomprehension and ingratitude. From taking everything for granted. Now he felt merely mean-minded, crushed by a sentence against which there was no appeal. He still regretted all the time he had not spent with his father. He knew it would have been hard to have discussed all the things the Woodsman was telling him, but he had not even made the effort. He cursed the profession which required him to investigate under orders the lives of people he did not even know, when he should have undertaken a more private enquiry, one in which he would have been simultaneously the investigator and the investigated, the policeman and the criminal, the victim and the killer. Only in that way could he have found relief from the sense of alienation he now felt.

  The Woodsman had another coughing fit, which took the commissario’s mind off these thoughts. “You’d better get on your way now. I want to be able to stare at the sun,” he said, in a sinister tone.

  Soneri stared at him and understood his intentions. His throat tightened, but the man was unshakeably determined his story would end the way the commissario most feared.