The Dark Valley: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 2) (11 page)

“My father is known as the Woodsman. Does that mean anything to you?”

That imposing physique was a giveaway. “What does he have to say to me?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t say much even to me, but since I go to the village every day, he asked me to act as go-between.”

“Did you shadow me?”

“I came out of my work and I saw you go into the
Olmo
. I waited in the garden and followed you.”

“You might have come in. At least you’d have been out of the cold.”

The woman shrugged. “If you lived in the Madoni, you wouldn’t complain of the cold. Every night you’d go to bed in freezing rooms with no heating, but my father would never consider moving from there. He wouldn’t even agree to making life easier with modern conveniences. We have a cooker but that’s all.”

As he looked at her, the commissario realised how primitively dressed she was. Apart from the outsize overcoat, her shoes were almost worn through and the mouse-coloured stockings would have been more suitable for a much older woman. He guessed she had been required to conform to the customs of an earlier time and saw her as one of life’s unfortunates, an object of ridicule among her peers.

“Where do you work?”

“At the Rodolfi plant,” she replied, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Nearly everybody works for the Rodolfis.”

“In an office?”

“I wish! No, in the salting and curing section.”

“Does your father want to talk to me about the crisis? Is
he worried about your job or about the possibility you won’t get paid?”

The woman’s face darkened and, after a few moments’ silence, she replied. “I told you I don’t know. I never know what my father wants.”

“They haven’t been paying your salaries for months now, isn’t that right?”

She shook her head in denial, but suddenly seemed to be in a hurry. “Papà will explain it all to you tomorrow. I’ve got to go now. I’m on my scooter and I’m afraid of being caught in the mists on the mountain.”

He made no effort to detain her, and she strode off, taking the long paces only someone brought up in the mountains and used to life in the woods could manage. His thoughts turned to Badignana, to the cabins, to the shepherds down from the mountains, to the cheeses eaten in the company of his often taciturn and distracted father who kept his eyes trained on the hills, gazing at the things he felt closest to. Soneri sensed in that gaze, expressive of everything and nothing, the deep relationship between those mountains and the men born in their shadows, a relationship he could never know, having never suffered sufficiently on those rocks.

As he made his way to the
Scoiattolo
, he felt himself once more caught up in a mystery which involved him more deeply than any official enquiry ever could have. He opened the door of the
pensione
, took his seat at a table to wait for Sante to serve him the minestrone which had the same smell as that from the houses which had so delighted him a short time previously. He broke his bread and mixed it in his soup, and when he had finished eating, he poured some wine into his bowl, as his father used to do.

He woke from a deep sleep to hear a shutter banging. While still half-asleep and almost dreaming, he had the impression the sound came from far off, but the noise was repeated several times until he was fully awake. It was dark and the digital alarm on his bedside table showed 6.10. He sat up on the side of the bed, and it slowly dawned on him what had caused the shutter to flap. During the night a wind had got up and had cleared the sky, sweeping away all trace of mist. He washed and started to dress. As soon as he heard Sante moving about, he went down for breakfast.

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 stretches 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.”