The Dark Valley: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 2) (25 page)

“There’s no point in running away,” he said calmly. “I know where to find you. If you run home and tell your employer everything, you know what’ll happen? She’ll tell you
to disappear, and you’re out with no bonus and no salary.”

The man was plainly terrified at that prospect but something still prevented him from speaking. Dolly and the terrier were sitting facing each other, giving the impression of being keen to help along a conversation which had not quite taken off.

“Me time only for dogs,” he whined, his head bowed. “Search always Dolly who run away.”

Soneri shook his head at these implausible excuses. He could feel his temper rising and had to make an effort not to let it get the better of him. However, in that silence and in the faint light of the new moon, various thoughts milled about in his head before gelling into one insight which linked Dolly’s loud barking in the gorge before the meeting with Baldi and her familiarity with the path. Perhaps he should have allowed her to lead him on, for he now believed it would not have been a waste of time. And then there was the Philippino: he knew he was not there by chance.

As he mulled these matters over, he dropped his guard and relaxed. For a single second he looked up at the sky at the lights of an aeroplane flying low overhead, and in that second he lost control of the situation. With his clenched fist, the Philippino landed him a blow in the solar plexus and pushed him aside. The commissario stumbled off the path and slipped backwards, grabbing at branches to keep his balance and arousing the dogs who began barking wildly at this brawl. The Philippino took full advantage of the turmoil to free himself and run off down the road to Greppo. By the time Soneri struggled to his feet, the Philippino had a full twenty metres start on him, making it impossible to catch him. Soneri decided to let him go. The terrier went after him, while Dolly repressed her wish to do the same and watched them into the distance.

On another occasion, Soneri would in all probability have been furious with himself, but this time he remained calm. Putting pressure on that pathetic creature was not unduly important. His presence on this road at night time was more eloquent than any information he might have been willing to give, and his evident discomfort was confirmation enough of a hypothesis that was forming in Soneri’s mind. He walked back towards the village and when he bent to pass under a barrier of branches, he felt a stab of pain at the place where the Philippino had struck him. A quarter of an hour later, he came out on the main road, and became aware of the nails in Dolly’s paws clicking on the hard surface. It was only then he realised that she had been at his side all the time. He stopped and gave her a hug, thinking as he did so that a bond of affection had now been formed between him and the dog.

There was a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing outside the police station, while in the piazza itself the blue cars of the carabinieri were parked with their front wheels on the pavement. It looked like a meeting that had been called by the prefect, and reminded him of interminable, tedious afternoons in the questura. He ducked round the corner into the side streets with Dolly, who every so often raised her head and sniffed the air. Soneri had placed his hopes on such scents and on faint traces left by those who had recently been on Montelupo.

When he reached the
Scoiattolo,
all the lights had been switched off, even the sign outside. The place seemed dead, but he noticed a reddish light shining under a shutter on the ground floor. He put the key in the lock and went in, but the moment he switched on the light in the hall, a door opened and an elderly man made a timid appearance at the doorway.

“You must be the commissario?”

“Yes, Soneri,” he replied

“Ida sends her apologies, but she won’t be able to make your meals at this time,” he said, stretching out his hand. “I’m her brother, Fulvio.” The commissario shook his hand. “Anyway, you have your own keys, don’t you? You’re the only guest.”

There was something disobliging in his tone, as though he had been hoping that Soneri too would have left, allowing him to close everything down and have no further responsibility for the place. The commissario looked around at the greying walls, the unfashionable furniture, the curtains fading through over-washing, and it occurred to him that he would indeed be the last guest, the last to stay there and the last to pay a bill.

“I’ll not be staying long,” he said, without looking at Fulvio, who made no reply.

“And the dog?”

“She’ll be staying with me tonight.”

On hearing these words, the man turned away, shrugged and as he went back into his room, could be heard muttering, “Well, at this point…”

The commissario slept fitfully. Dolly too was aroused every now and again at something that she alone could hear. Around 5.00, Soneri awoke, thinking he had heard a loud noise outside. Dolly was extremely restless and this seemed confirmation that there was someone moving about. The commissario threw open the shutters and peered into the darkness of the yard, but there was nothing to be seen. In spite of that, shortly afterwards he heard the sound of a car engine being revved up, and wondered if someone had come to look for something in the environs of the hotel. Since Dolly was so troubled, he supposed it might have been her they had come looking for. After all, his own suspicions had made him bring her up to his room in the first place.

As he thought the matter over, the alarm clock told him it was almost six o’clock. He opened the shutters again and was greeted by a gust of brutally cold air. He got ready and made his way out past closed doors behind which he imagined unmade beds, empty cupboards and curtains colonised by bugs. In the dining room, the tablecloths had been removed and the seats turned upside down. What he had previously seen as a sign of familiarity now seemed to him an omen of decay. He closed the door behind him and moved off.

He breakfasted in the
Rivara.
The village seen through the window overlooking the piazza seemed as calm as on a Sunday morning. “They were working late,” the barman advised him, indicating the police station.

“Any idea if they came to any conclusions?”

Rivara shook his head. “None at all. Nobody knows anything. Crisafulli and the local lot haven’t been seen.”

It was at that moment that he heard the ignition being turned in the first truck as it set off for Montelupo. A line of vehicles, their headlights reflected on the thick layer of ground frost, drove past. The half-asleep carabinieri inside them were jolted at every bump in the road.

“They’re not giving up, are they? They haven’t had enough yet,” Rivara said.

The commissario looked attentively at all the trucks as they went by, but he did not see Bovolenta. “Have they fired him?” he thought aloud.

“It wouldn’t be a surprise. With all that’s been going on, they could well have accused him of sending them out to be picked off.”

Soneri drank his
caffelatte
while Dolly, sitting outside the window, looked on. Dawn was breaking, but light was struggling to break through the damp mist of the valley. He ordered bread, some slivers of parmesan and a hundred grams
of
culaccia.
He fed the fat of the ham to Dolly, and set off for Greppo where the night before he had met the Philippino. As soon as he was away from the shelter of the piazza, he felt the full force of the freezing wind like a slap in the face. The cold had grown yet more intense, and was coming, like the sun, from the east. When he reached the plain, he stopped to get his breath back. The dry air gave him a parched throat. He saw the carabinieri line up above Boldara to advance through the woods, and he wondered about the criteria they were using for deployment in the God-forsaken donkey’s back that was Montelupo. They were being divided into two groups, perhaps with the plan of encircling the Woodsman. He heard the sound of other trucks on the mountainside and realised that reinforcements were arriving already.

He set off once more for Croce, with Dolly running ahead, darting in and out of the undergrowth. The commissario walked behind with a more measured pace, but as he proceeded he felt a growing sense of anxiety. When he heard shouts from lower down the valley, he understood the risks he was running. All it needed was one carabiniere to get him in his gun sights. He knew only too well that in those circumstances, they would not be required to take precautions. Montelupo was now a free-fire zone for the police forces, and there were simply no codes in place.

As he climbed higher, the sun lit up the mountain, increasing the chances that he would end up in some sniper’s sights. There was a new danger at every corner, so he kept in the shadows or took shelter in gulleys or thickets where it was still freezing and where the wild boar ran. He left the path, walking parallel to it through the trees. The morning was silent and the light strong, but there was tension in the air. He still had some way to go along a route which took him past the bright trunks of the beech trees before he
finally arrived at an almost sheer wall of crumbling sandstone. Looking up, he could see the path twist and turn as it ran alongside a crag where no plants grew. There was a crevice in the cliff which narrowed into a chimney leading over the summit and down the opposite side. Only at that point did he realise he was next to the gorge where Dolly had attempted to entice him down to the bottom the previous day.

He looked for the dog as he crossed over the muddy surface solidified by the freezing frost. He was familiar with that type of swampy terrain where it was possible to walk only in winter. He remembered an occasion when a hunter had sunk in it up to his waist, and when he was pulled out, he left behind his boots and trousers. The freezing conditions had made everything hard. Small pieces of rock broke away from the cliff higher up, causing the sandstone below to crumble like dry bread. Dolly was seated at the foot of the slope in the last of the undergrowth which closed off the gorge. In front of her there were signs of something having been dragged through the mud before the freeze. Soneri bent over, and it was then he noticed the butt of a rifle sticking a few centimetres out of the ground.

It had been driven in, barrels down, like a biscuit ready to sink to the bottom in a glass of milk. The commissario looked up. About twenty metres up the slope from where he was standing, the path ran along the cliffside. He then understood: the rifle must have fallen from there and the barrels had sunk in the mud, but all this had taken place before the freeze, in the soft dampness of the season of mists.

He pulled at the gun, but it was impossible to move. It was as if it had been set in cement. He attempted to dig it out with stones, branches and with his bare hands, knowing that if he managed to crack the frozen surface, the weapon would come away easily. He worked at it for some time, heedless
of everything else around him. Montelupo continued to be enveloped in a silence undisturbed by the cawing of crows, the tap-tap of woodpeckers or the strident screech of vultures. The woods and the skies were shrouded in lethargic stillness.

Finally with one energy-sapping tug, he pulled the rifle free. It was encased in a sleeve of grey mud, like a cocoon, and patiently he began to scrape the mud away with a piece of wood, cutting from the top down as though he were slicing ham. After a time, he was successful and this made it possible to make out the shape of the barrels and handle, but the time it had spent under the mud had probably compromised the trigger and firing mechanisms. He retraced his steps, trying to get out of that morass of solid mud, but only when he felt the springy crackle of beech leaves under his feet did he allow himself to think of what was to be done next. But at that moment the battle broke out with renewed violence, not far above the path.

The carabinieri opened fire first, followed immediately by the more sonorous sound of the Woodsman’s rifle as he returned fire from somewhere on the mountainside. Other weapons were discharged across a wide range, bullets whistled through the woods, criss-crossing each other and ending their flight with a bang as they exploded into wood or with a dull thud as they hit the ground. The commissario crouched down behind a beech tree whose roots had pushed through the soil to create a kind of rampart. The air carried the smell of gunshot towards him, while broken branches fell like rain onto the rotting wood beneath the trees. Soneri felt real fear when he heard the carabinieri running towards the pathway, but once they approached the foot of the gorge, a shot from the Woodsman exploded before them, throwing earth and leaves from the undergrowth up into the air. He was firing in the hope of bouncing his shot off a stone, knowing that if
he struck a rock, the ricochet was certain to bring someone down. The carabinieri halted and then doubled back into the thick woods. Soneri took advantage of the pause to drag himself and Dolly along the gulley, and to dive behind the cement columns under a little bridge over a path in the woods. Dolly was reluctant to follow him but Soneri grabbed her by the collar and hauled her in.

They stayed in there, huddled against each other. Every so often Dolly would turn to him, giving the idea that she was obeying although she did not understand. The commissario for his part was besieged by images from long ago. He felt again like a boy in a cabin, as he recalled the resentful solitude of his teenage years as well as various stories told to him by his father. He seemed to hear his voice as he recounted the events of July ’44, the S.S. round-ups, the three days spent hiding in a hole in the ground and the return to the light of day to find a landscape of death and fire. It was a miracle they had not killed him, and it was a miracle for Soneri that he had been born and was there.

He shook his head at that thought and Dolly, who took the gesture as an invitation, licked his hand. He was surprised at these mysterious associations which carried him back to relive episodes from the past, but these were all swept aside a few moments later by the heavy marching steps of the carabinieri. They were moving at a steady pace towards the spot from which the Woodsman had been firing. He heard the radios crackling and one voice communicating the direction they were to take. He assumed they were trying to surround the Woodsman, forcing him to higher ground where there was less shelter and less space for manoeuvre. From the sound of their footsteps, he calculated that there must be about fifteen of them. He had been hiding to avoid being shot by mistake, but even if he was now at liberty to come out and give himself
up, he put his hand into Dolly’s collar to keep her calm, and stayed where he was. He had no wish to expose himself to the carabinieri as he crawled out of his hole like a beetle. In there, he felt like a real man of the mountains, or like an animal in its den. He was different from those untrained, frightened and shivering policemen.