Blood in the Snow

by Franco Marks

  The breeze smelled of incest. He felt like a child among grandmothers, aunts and mothers.

  “Have you ever been with a girl?”

  Marzio didn’t answer, partly because he would have to have said no. The women were warming up. Morena loosened her check shirt. Tearing open the metal buttons one by one, she bared her chest.

  “‘For the man who doesn’t have to try too hard’.”

  Marzio was submerged by the blueberry pickers. Giuseppa unbuckled his belt, Alda grabbed his trousers and Morena lowered them to his boots with the red laces. He found himself with his naked backside on blueberry twigs.

  “Poor little birdy, it’s scared.”

  “Let’s make it fly – let’s make this frightened little bird fly…”

  Morena tried to excite him, but the more she went on, the more he withdrew.

  “Come on, kid, get a move on.”

  Marzio knew that he had to do something – his male honour depended on it. All the women tried in turn, but there was no reaction. Morena called them off.

  “Marzio’s little bird isn’t going to fly.”

  The blueberry pickers thinned out and went back to work with a humming that sounded like a funeral dirge. Morena started singing a song, and they all joined in for the chorus.

  “Salsicciotti,

  salamini,

  col formaggio pecorin,

  tutti quanti nel panier,

  ma il finocchio,

  quello sì,

  che ci sta ben.

  Frin frun fron.”*

  His thoughts running free after having been chained to the molecules of the facts for days on end, trapped in mathematical formulas, following with a long, slow, inexorable mountain-man plod the whole territory of his investigation, the inspector detached himself from the ground like a balloon. Elisabetta lapped at the edge of his thoughts always, in the stratosphere of his imagination. He let the memories overwhelm him. Marzio had never had a woman like her. A radiant dream. His previous flings had been unemotional, lived more as a police inspector than as a man. He always planned every meeting.

  ‘Shall I take her clothes off first, kiss her, touch her breasts right away? Shall I caress her neck or her pubis? Shall I keep my socks on or not?’

  Bureaucratic procedures. And the atmosphere often didn’t warm up while they were taking place. He couldn’t make his imagination take flight, and the conclusion was barely noticeable, sometimes aborted and often unsatisfactory. A nightmare. But with Elisabetta he didn’t have to think, didn’t have to carry out any procedures – all he had to do was follow the contours of her body. Sniff the ridge of her snowy mountain.

  *Sausages and salamis, with pecorino cheese, all in the basket, but the fennel/queer is the best of all.

  8

  The autopsy confirmed many of the hypotheses and added some new facts.

  The deaths of Elisabetta, Flaminia, Stefania and Angela due to asphyxiation, the extremely high concentration of alcohol in their blood, the lack of any trace of violence except for the bruise on Elisabetta’s wrist. From the tests on Angela’s body, notable residual traces of Psicontral. The coroner said that when mixed with alcohol the drug could cause a state of extreme confusion, but also a ‘paradox effect’, considering the amount of Ginpin that she had ingested. The tests of her physical state, which showed use of psychotropics, alcohol and drugs, showed that it had been Angela who had vomited in the bathroom. Several clues pointed attention towards her, as Soprani had claimed.

  “It is clear that her addiction to antidepressants combined with the alcohol might have caused her to do all kinds of crazy things. In the video, she is the one who brings up the idea of collective suicide. The woman could have done something criminal – she might have actually gone through with what had sounded like drunken talk.”

  Marzio was respectful of his doubts, but Soprani was like a train travelling at full speed along a single track. He saw the station on the horizon. Predictably, there were plenty of Elisabetta’s prints in the kitchen. She was the one who had made dinner. The strange thing was that her prints were also on the gas stopcock. It was barely plausible that a person who wasn’t in their own home would have ventured to the methane meter.

  “Mr Soprani, why are Elisabetta’s prints on the gas tap and not Angela’s?”

  “Because Angela probably wore gloves. Only the guilty wear gloves. We need to investigate again to show which of the four women is the murderer, the one behind the collective suicide. But of course, Angela is the most likely suspect.”

  From forensics, the list of food that the four girls had eaten and the alcohol they had drunk in large quantities arrived on Marzio’s desk. Elaborate food in which Elisabetta’s expert hand could be seen, but it wouldn’t have been easy to prepare such a complicated fish soup in Valdiluce. In fact, the mash that had been found in the rubbish included a lot of ingredients: garlic, onion, tomatoes, bay leaf, wild fennel, pepper, coarse salt, oil, and various types of fish – monkfish, redfish, smooth-hound, mullet, sea gurnard – white wine, saffron and traces of Pastis Ricard, an aniseed flavoured liqueur.

  Marzio searched for these ingredients on the Internet and the recipe came up: it was bouillabaisse, a fish soup from Marseilles. Even if the fish had been frozen and bought from the Valdiluce supermarket, he identified two ingredients that it seemed impossible she had bought in the town: wild fennel and Pastis. Marzio summoned Kristal immediately. He smelled like chocolate.

  “Go and have a look around the bars and the wine shops in Valdiluce and see if there’s a bottle of Pastis Ricard for sale.”

  Kristal’s quiff, modelled on that of Stan Laurel, was dull and limp – almost a fringe that opened like a curtain on a gaunt face. The amount of work over the last few days had exhausted him. He had to write down the name of the liqueur on a piece of paper.

  “If you find it, please call me immediately. And go and see whether by chance anywhere’s got wild fennel, and whether they’ve got monkfish, mullet, redfish and smooth-hound among the frozen fish in the supermarket. Go right now.”

  Finally alone. Marzio arranged all the details of the investigation in the top part of his mind. It was a custom, then he let them roll downhill onto that unadorned plain, without emotional influence. Then he studied, excluded, catalogued. A procedure of analysis that he had performed a hundred times.

  White Wolf’s nose, even though reality led to other conclusions; the most obvious – that Angela, high on the cocktail of Psicontral and Ginpin, had carried out an atrocious suicide-murder – pushed him further. His visionary ability and detective instinct – these qualities made it difficult for him to accept such a straightforward answer. It was too easy.

  There were still important details unresolved: the bruise on Elisabetta’s wrist, the fact that there were only her fingerprints on the central gas stopcock in apartment twelve. The haematoma must have been caused between six thirty and eight, between when she had left Marzio’s house and when she had arrived at the Pino Rosso.

  “I’ll go on my own, I need to walk a bit. It relaxes me. Otherwise I’ll start crying and I won’t be able to leave you.”

  His house was about half a mile from the centre of Valdiluce, uphill along a road through the woods, twenty minutes on foot.

  Marzio went through the journey again in detail. Elisabetta had passed in front of the church, the cable car station and the clinic. The church was open for mass at the time, maybe Elisabetta had stopped to pray. Probably – she always made the sign of the cross before eating. There she had met Don Sergio, he’d come forward to tell them. An encounter that might have been a dangerous one. In the village it was said that he was a libertine, who, between one confession and the next, had made quite explicit overtures to a lot of women. But there had never been a formal complaint about him, only anonymous letters. Dr Lanzetti had expressed his theory.

  “Don Sergio’s spent so much time listening to confession and hearing about carnal sins that he’s obsessed with them. In a
small town, there isn’t much to do in the evenings, shut up in the house in front of the fireplace, and sex in all its forms is the only amusement.”

  It was agreed, however, that during confession, Don Sergio showed a certain morbid interest in going into the details of sins, especially those connected to the sexual sphere. He wanted to know the dynamics, the positions, the clothes, the duration. This made the more reserved and religious members of the congregation uncomfortable, and they preferred to confess to the priest in Vicosauro, while others came to Don Sergio to tease him by making up incredible stories. He had been suspended by the religious authorities for this shamelessness of his, and it was said that the bishop had given him the chance to satisfy his repressed needs in a particular place. After about a year he had returned, seemingly restored, to Valdiluce. It was impossible to exclude that he might have attacked Elisabetta, she might have reacted, escaped, the bruise on her arm caused as she freed herself from the priest’s grip.

  A sin of the imagination, Marzio knew, but inside himself he went beyond the common sense of decency – he used it to sift through all the possibilities, even the most unimaginable.

  A conviction, a suspicion… but from Don Sergio you could expect that and a lot more. Considering, however, that the mass began at six and ended at seven, Elisabetta couldn’t have encountered the priest alone. So: she had sat in for part of the mass, and then set off towards Valdiluce. Otherwise, considering that she had arrived at the Pino Rosso at eight, she had perhaps stayed for the end of the ceremony and then spoken to the priest and he had convinced her to linger in the church. Perhaps the priest had unleashed all of his perversity on her, starting with the prying questions and then giving her some vulgar come-on, she had reacted, the wrist with the haematoma.

  As was clearly visible in the video, Elisabetta had entered the bar looking dishevelled and visibly upset. Had she escaped from an attempt to attack her? But the words she had spoken stopped Marzio in his tracks.

  “Give me a drink, girls, I really need one.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Terrible, fucking terrible, I can’t stand any more of it.”

  If there’d been an attempt at assault, Elisabetta would have told her friends about it and called Marzio.

  White Wolf should have more respect for poor Don Sergio, even though these were just private ruminations. But he’d never liked that priest. Something else might have happened. Imagining that she hadn’t stopped at the church, Elisabetta would have passed the closed cable car station and the clinic. Marzio picked up the phone and called Dr Lanzetti.

  “Excuse me, doctor – where were you on Saturday, between six thirty and eight?”

  “Am I being investigated for something?”

  “No, of course not! I want to know if you saw a person going past the clinic around that time.”

  “At six I got an urgent call from the wife of Mario, the street sweeper: he’d fainted, so I took him to hospital in Vicosauro by ambulance. I got back at nine.”

  “How’s Mario?”

  “He’s fine now.”

  Perhaps Elisabetta had just fallen – slipped on that thin layer of ice that forms on the road when the temperature drops. She’d lost her balance and had banged her wrist in the groin of a forked branch, which had caused the same effect as a hand gripping it tightly.

  Keep painting the canvas and picking it apart. And a new detail was added to the scene each time.

  He had overlooked one detail, trivial and significant: the petrol station. At about four hundred metres from the square, along Elisabetta’s route, there was Paride, the petrol pump attendant known locally as ‘The Customs’. He would surely have closed at seven, giving him time to bump into her.

  Kristal suddenly opened the door.

  “No one in the whole town knows what Pastis Ricard is. Do you know it, Inspector? Have you ever drunk it?”

  “No, never. I read on the Internet that it tastes of aniseed. It’s like sambuca. What about the fish and the wild fennel?”

  “As for the fish, there were only monkfish and mullet, they’ve never had smooth-hound or sea gurnard in the frozen food department of Rosetta’s supermarket, nor in the other grocery shops.”

  “And the wild fennel?”

  “It’s never been on sale, either fresh, powdered or frozen, in Valdiluce. Rosetta says she’s only seen it once in her life when she went on holiday down south.”

  Since it was impossible that Elisabetta could have found all the ingredients of the bouillabaisse in the village, either she had brought them with her from Vissone – though after a week they would surely have gone bad, or… Inspector Santoni couldn’t work it out.

  9

  Marzio set his Vespa in motion. He revved it up, and white smoke emerged from the exhaust. The popping of the engine set the rhythm for his thoughts. The air was starting to feel like February again – cold, even during the day. Perhaps the snow was coming. When a single, compact feeling of cleanliness took over, as though the atmosphere had been filtered of dust, smog, soggy thoughts, drowsiness and cosmic horrors, it meant that nature was doing the laundry. First gear, second, third – the Vespa flew on bravely. It seemed as though the cold breeze had given it more energy.

  Elisabetta had loved the old scooter too.

  “Will you let me ride it?”

  Marzio had managed to say a ‘yes’ that had been harder than the one he would have said at the altar. “But very carefully. Have you ever ridden a Vespa before?”

  “No.”

  Marzio paled. He spent a lot of time with his arms around her trying to explain the gears, the brakes, how to balance your weight when you went round a bend, how to put your feet on the ground to avoid falls. It was as though he was teaching her how to ski. Elisabetta was apprehensive – she knew how much her Marzio cared about that Vespa and the emotion accentuated her fragrance of freshly baked bread. For someone who loved nature as much as he did, that scent was the most intoxicating of all – it made him lose his head. Elisabetta set off on the Vespa, a little bird on her first flight. She crouched over the gravel road like an acrobat, as though she were walking a wire suspended in the sky and only managing to keep her balance by challenging gravity. Now that he thought back, in that moment she had been so sincere, so wonderful. Marzio had never seen any sign of gloom, of the slightest discouragement, or even a moment of sadness, pass across her face. Her eyes were as clear as the tramontana wind. She had a clarity that was rare in a person, but above all impossible in a woman who would soon commit suicide. When Elisabetta returned safe and sound – and just as importantly, with the Vespa intact – Marzio spent a long time kissing her. She emanated tranquillity, a woman at peace with herself. He rummaged about in her jeans, found her wet sex, her yellow panties coloured the meadow like buttercups, the light took possession of her body. They undressed and made love among the blueberry seedlings, the yellow leaves of the beech trees sticking to their skin.

  The memory of Elisabetta died on the handlebars of the Vespa. Fourth gear, second, first. White Wolf had arrived at the petrol station. Waiting for him was Paride, the petrol pump attendant, nicknamed ‘The Customs’ because everyone who passed had to declare something to him, tell him about something that had happened in town, describe some goings on. He expected, almost demanded, it. Paride collected confidences. Some of them he kept for himself and would never reveal even under torture, while others he would pass on, fanning the flames with gossip. Marzio had received many anonymous letters about him: Paride’s worse than a radio station… He tells made-up stories and talks nonsense about non-existent affairs… People think he tells the truth but he’s just a loudmouth who likes causing problems… He wants watching, he shouldn’t be trusted… And he’s a dirty peeping tom who spies on couples who are at it in their cars.

  Paride wore the same cap in winter and in summer. He used it for wiping his hands on and it was so dirty that you couldn’t tell what colour it had originally been. Inside the pocket of his ov
eralls he kept the takings, taking out the wad of bills and blithely waving it around every time he gave someone their change.

  “You should be more careful or sooner or later I’ll be investigating the robbery of a petrol station in Valdiluce.”

  When Paride’s face grew attentive and he stopped messing around by the Vespa or humming a fragment of opera, and stood still and looked you in the face, he had something to say. Marzio knew him perfectly: you had to tickle him to get him to open that mouth: he had to spit out the mint he was sucking to hide the smell of Ginpin.

  “So what have you got to say about the crime?”

  Paride looked at Marzio with stubborn eyes and a smug expression.

  “White Wolf, this story is so serious that I shouldn’t talk about it. It’s white hot.”

  “Were you open on Saturday?”

  “Like always.”

  “Did you see anyone walking alone towards Valdiluce between six thirty and eight?”

  “Yes – Agostino, as usual. He passed a few times.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to know myself. Sometimes he even walks past here ten times in the same day. He goes past with that hysterical way of walking he’s got. Up and down like a chairlift. Nobody knows what goes on in his head.”

  “And how many times did he walk past the other night?”

  “I don’t even notice any more – maybe three times.”

  “Did you notice anything strange about him?”

  “No. He was normal like always. In the sense of a normal weirdo.”

  “Did a woman go past?”

  “A young blonde girl, good looking?”

  “Exactly.”

  Paride looked at him for a long time with that smug expression still on his face.

  “Your lover?”

  Marzio couldn’t stand people intruding into his private life, but he knew he mustn’t allow himself to be provoked or let himself be drawn in by Paride’s tactics: one bit of gossip led to another, then another, and so on into infinity. No digression from the path.