The Dark Valley: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 2) (6 page)

“That takes guts,” the commissario murmured.

“Palmiro never lacked guts. Once he’d made up his mind, no-one could shift him. He never allowed anything to stand in his way.”

“He could have let the cold on Montelupo do the job,” Soneri said, while images of the stolen coffin and the sound of shots in the woods played on his mind. Against his better judgement, curiosity was getting the upper hand and he began to put the various facts together. “What do you think made him do it?” he asked Sante.

Sante stopped pacing back and forth and stood still, his back turned to the commissario. He shrugged.

“You told me he was a decisive man, always sure of himself. Someone like that must have had a good reason for killing himself,” Soneri said.

Sante turned slowly towards him, embarrassment written clearly on his face. “Who can say? Problems with his business…” The worries welling up inside Sante prevented him from expressing himself more clearly.

“The salame factory was not going well?”

The only response was another awkward gesture, a clumsy wave as though in an attempt to grab hold of some notion that was proving as elusive as a troublesome fly.

“There are so many rumours in this village. Who really knows what was going on in the Rodolfi household? This place is buzzing with gossip. You can draw your own conclusion. I’ve got a hard enough job keeping on top of my own business.”

There was a tone of pain in the last words which Soneri sensed conveyed some deep, personal bitterness. For a few moments the two men stood facing each other in silence until
Ida called to her husband from the doorway of the dining room. She greeted the commissario, but without her customary warmth. He heard the couple exchange some words as they moved inside.

He went up to his room to change. As he came back out, his eyes fell on the basket with the “trumpets of death”. He opened it and stared long and hard at the dark mushrooms with their long stems and wide-brimmed caps, not unlike instruments played by the town band. They had the eerie appearance of creatures that come out at dusk in northern climes, or in the dank parts of graveyards. They seemed to bear with them evil tidings, and troubled him so much that he tossed them into a ditch.

It was already growing dark when he went into the village. He saw Maini walking in the piazza, but before he could catch up with him he heard his name called out. It was the mayor coming quickly out of the pharmacy as though he had been lying in wait for him.

“So now something has happened,” he began. “It’s not just gossip any more.”

“A suicide is a private deed. The most private of all,” Soneri said.

The mayor was taken aback by this response, leaving the commissario with the strong impression that he did not consider the deed at all private.

“It’s not an ordinary suicide. It couldn’t be if the man who kills himself is Palmiro Rodolfi.”

“In the face of death, we are all equal. As also in the face of despair.”

“We’ve got to understand what drove Palmiro to despair. In my view, it was because of his grandson,” the mayor said.

“His grandson?”

“He’s turning out to be a problem. He thinks of nothing
but big, flashy cars. He spends money like water and won’t do any work. And then lately…” The mayor lowered his voice to a whisper, as though he were in church. “It seems he has started taking drugs.”

The commissario thought of the third-generation decadence, corrupted by wealth from birth. “Who found him?”

“His daughter-in-law. She used to go up to his room every morning to check that everything was alright. She loved him like a father.”

“So where was his son?”

“It seems it was he who cut him down.”

“Seems?”

The mayor spread out his hands. “That’s what I’ve heard, but whether that’s exactly what happened…”

“Have the carabinieri questioned Paride?”

“The maresciallo told me that by the time he got there, Paride had already left. They’re looking for him, but there’s no sign of him yet. His wife says that he’s gone to their cabin in the woods, distraught.”

“Did anyone see him?”

“Apparently so, but I couldn’t tell you who.”

Soneri lit a cigar to give himself time to think. The mayor had the same vaguely embarrassed expression he had noted on Sante, but perhaps it was really fear. “So what can I do? I don’t get the impression that there’s anything to investigate, except why did he do it.”

“That’s the question everybody’s asking,” the mayor said.

“In other words, it’s a matter for priests or psychologists. Not my line at all.”

The mayor made no move. The fog continued to swirl behind him on the far side of the piazza.

“Perhaps you are better informed than I am,” Soneri said.

“No, no. I don’t know a thing,” the mayor said, but he spoke
in the guilt-ridden tone of voice the commissario had heard countless times during interrogations in the questura. “All I am asking you to do is consult the maresciallo. I’m not asking you to make any commitments. A courtesy call, that’s all.”

“A soul in torment,” Maini said, indicating the mayor as he walked off, with his crumpled, outsize raincoat flapping around him.

“I don’t understand what he wants me to do,” the commissario said.

“Everybody in the village wants to understand.”

“Understand!” Soneri shook his head in bewilderment. “It seems to me you already know quite a lot. Maybe you’re all simply afraid,” he said, realising as he did so that he had made a distinction between himself and the rest. He had been aware of the limits of his relationship with them, but now it seemed like a barrier he could not cross. In some ways, he felt liberated from an ambiguity which had become increasingly cumbersome.

Maini pretended not to hear the commissario’s words, the common reaction of mountain people to complicated sentiments. Everything would take its course, but every word spoken could be translated into another element of distrust. “He killed himself like the shopkeeper, Capelli,” he said at last.

Soneri had heard about the case, but he could no longer remember the details. His amnesia reinforced his sense of being an outsider.

“He too hanged himself from a wooden beam,” Maini said.

“He was a ruined man,” the commissario said, grasping at some vague memory.

“It was the gambling. After the war he made some money, but it went to his head.”

“Did he and Palmiro know each other?”

“That’s the point. They were good friends.”

At that moment, the commissario’s mobile rang. “Angela, could you call me back in five minutes?”

The poor reception meant that he heard no more than a metallic murmur as he switched off his phone. Without either of them suggesting it, Maini and he moved into the
Rivara
bar. Rivara himself watched them take a seat, and joined in the conversation. “He took his own life in the same way as Capelli,” he said, and then, turning to the commissario as though to a casual stranger, he added, “you know who I mean, the owner of the cheese shop.”

Soneri felt the barrier between him and the villagers grow ever more impassable. “Even the letters they left say the same things,” Maini said.

“Nobody knows who was the first to read Capelli’s letter. Everyone knew he couldn’t read or write, and that made it child’s play for them to cheat him with the invoices,” the barman said.

“At that time the maresciallo said he believed that Capelli had had it prepared some time before he hanged himself, but there are others who think that it was his creditors who wrote it.”

“What does Palmiro’s letter say?” Soneri said.

Rivara stretched out his arms, then leant forward and lowered his voice. “One of my regulars who knows a police officer says it was pretty succinct. ‘Bury me up on Montelupo, under a juniper bush. That’s where I want to be.’ Not another word.”

“The same as Capelli, who wanted to be taken up to Montelupo, but his wife had him buried in the cemetery, partly because the Comune got involved, and partly because love of money was the only love that kept them together,” Maini said.

“Both men loved Montelupo. It was for them the whole world. They used to take their sheep to graze up there, up as
far as the big house at Becco. The two of them and the guy known as the Woodsman.”

“Ah yes, the famous Woodsman. Now he’s the only survivor of that trio,” Maini said.

“Because he didn’t make any money. Money has been the downfall of so many people,” Rivara chimed in.

“Capelli, on the other hand…” Maini said, seemingly rummaging about in his memory, “Capelli started out collecting milk from the farms in his hand cart, then he became a producer of cheese and got other people to do the hard work while he drove about in a Fiat 1500, wearing a tie and selling whole cheeses in the city. It was a huge risk, but he pulled it off.”

“The fact is when you come into money all of a sudden, it can be the ruination of you. You think it’ll never stop coming,” Rivara said.

“It wasn’t gambling that did for him so much as the paperwork and his sheer incompetence at it,” Maini said. “He knew how much he could afford to lose and he stuck to that, but when they invited him to sign for things instead of paying in cash, he trusted them and they stripped the shirt off his back.”

“Downright ignorance is always at the root of it,” Rivara said. “Once upon a time they cheated you with phoney invoices, now it’s with promissory notes from the bank, shares and bonds, that kind of thing. They tell you to buy and you end up with drawers full of waste paper.”

“It’s the same old story, the same swindle over and over again,” Maini agreed.

“The fat cats devour the mice. Let’s not forget that Capelli in his day –”

“Right after the war,” Maini nodded.

Rivara threw back his head. “That wasn’t the only time. He
did a deal with the Fascists so no detachment of Blackshirts ever went without parmesan to sprinkle on their minestrone. In return, he was left in peace to work the black market, selling his goods to anybody and everybody.”

“And he made money hand over fist.”

“It was a dirty business, but it always is,” Maini said. “With money and the right friends, you can stuff justice.”

“What about the Woodsman?” Soneri said.

Rivara laughed. “He had no head for business, and still doesn’t. He’s at home among the trees with his axe and rifle. That’s how he came by the name. He has never moved away from the Madoni hills. He lives there on his own – in abandoned houses that are slowly falling apart. They’ll come down altogether one of these winters.”

“The original owners all moved away, to Turin, Milan or Parma,” Maini said.

“Now he’s as wild as the boar. The other two were as bad as he was, but their instinct was to go after money instead of wild animals. They made their fortunes, but then they hanged themselves.”

Soneri lit another cigar, while the other two stared at him as though he were performing a conjuring trick.

“Capelli was the sharpest of the three. He was already a rich man at thirty. In the retail market in Parma, he would shift cheese by the ton, all deals done in advance. He had a nose for the business, had the patience to wait for the right moment to buy and sell,” Maini said.

“In the last years,” Rivara said, “he never actually touched cheese. He had his flunkeys to see to that side of things. He stuck to his office, but when you move away from the world you know and handle nothing but paperwork, you’re done for.”

“That’s right,” Maini said. “It was all that form filling that finished him.”

Stefano, Rivara’s son, came in, nodded in their direction and sat apart, on his own. He had nothing to say, it seemed, but all of a sudden he jumped to his feet and exclaimed, “That lorry, the one that was apparently lost yesterday evening, it loaded up after all, and went off this morning in the direction of the autostrada.”

Rivara stopped wiping the bar and said, “He must have been held up by the weather, and no doubt had a deadline to meet.”

Stefano shook his head doubtfully. “What about the other two? Were they in a rush as well?”

Rivara and Maini looked at each other in puzzlement, but said nothing.

“This story of the lorries, it’s an odd business,” the commissario said, in an attempt to keep the discussion going, but no-one had any inclination to break the silence until Maini changed the subject. “How did you get on? Did you fill a basket?”

“I only got a few ‘trumpets of death’.”

“I don’t like them.”

“Mushrooms in general or ‘trumpets of death’ specifically?”

“Neither.”

“I can understand why, with a name like that. But they’re very good,” the commissario said.

“Things that grow in dark places, in the shadows,” Maini said.

“Somebody must like them, considering the trouble I had to find any at all.”

Maini shrugged. He had nothing else to say.

The mobile rang, relieving the embarrassed silence which had fallen over the group.

“I’ve waited a quarter of an hour.” Angela sounded annoyed.

“We were talking about Palmiro.”

“Again? Were you not supposed to be out looking for mushrooms?”

“He’s hanged himself.”

Angela did not speak for a few seconds. “I would never have expected that. It does not seem in his nature.”

“Nobody expected it. It’s a very odd business, and I can’t make head nor tail of it.”

“Well, if you don’t understand it, and you’re from there…”

“I
used to be
from here,” the commissario corrected her. “So much has changed, it’s as if I’d never lived here.”

“It must be terrible to feel like an outsider in the place you come from. What about the people you know, your friends?”

A sudden, deep unease and a sense of utter futility so overwhelmed Soneri that he found himself lost for words. Angela’s questions led him to reflect on the distrust he aroused among those he still considered his own townsfolk, and on the gulf that now existed between him and them. It was as though all those years of friendship and companionship had been snuffed out, even if their common interest in the affairs of the Rodolfi family could briefly disguise that unpleasant feeling of alienation.