Blood in the Snow

by Franco Marks

  He was shaken by an unusual noise which he could hear over the sound of the storm. The noise of a chain. The curse of Valdiluce, the ghost ship – Trogolo the Falcon with his noisy pendulum attached to his leg. He swirled above them, seeming to approach and then moving away like a voice. White Wolf looked up at the sky and lit the torch: a yellow flash, the hooked beak, the proud and haughty eyes, golden. The hawk brushed against him. He was frightening, his giant wings mastered the wind, seemed almost to divert it. A strange calm had formed beneath him, a vacuum that highlighted the noise of the chain.

  Another slap from his feathers, then the hawk disappeared into the fog. But it was as if he had pointed the way. Marzio recovered. With the conquest of the ground, yard after yard, when the two children seemed dead, the superhuman effort, the truncated bones, the snow beating on his face so hard that it hurt, trying to reach the track, he heard a melody, an andante tune, emerge inside him. This music came at the most difficult times – when he’d been lost as a child for three days and three nights in the snow, that melody had come. Brain music. For the first time, he murmured it aloud to challenge the wind that sounded like pounding drums in the forest, and began to hum. Always out of tune, at school the teacher had stopped him from singing in the choir because he was also out of time, but he didn’t care and he threw himself into it with all the breath that was still in his throat, singing along with the whistle of the storm.

  To make a table

  you need wood

  to make wood

  you need a tree

  to make a tree

  you need a seed

  to make a seed

  you need a fruit

  to make a fruit

  you need a flower

  you need a flower

  you need a flower

  to make a table

  you need a floo-o-wer.

  He felt something warm above him, a wave of something different. Trogolo the falcon seemed to be harpooning the sky with his yellow beak, repeatedly swooping close to his head, the chain hanging from his claw seeming to make music, clattering out the melody of the song. Marzio couldn’t help but be in tune now – the elements of nature were in tune with him. He freed himself of fear and fatigue and recovered his courage and strength. The song – martial in rhythm, tortured by the arms that pulled the sled, swollen by the muscles that faced the climb, torn from the wind that stole the words, accompanied by the sound of Trogolo – lit up the hearts of the two children. They stopped crying. In the forest where imagination becomes confused with reality and magic with mystery, the storm slowly faded and the hawk flew away towards the horizon, its cargo flashing silver. White Wolf found the track and got to the village. He managed to bring the two children to safety. A hero.

  17

  Marzio played chess with the fire. In the fireplace he had placed a large fir trunk with around it a series of chunks of wood of various sizes. In the dark, as the glowing embers flickered like a nocturnal city, he studied ways to keep the flames under control. He moved the pieces artfully, tried to satisfy the flame, anticipate its moves. He intertwined the twigs, crushed down the embers, inserted logs vertically, or others horizontally, and others still he shook with the tongs. The embers fell like shooting stars. In some way, Marzio projected the play of his mind onto the fireplace.

  Everything was quiet again. Despite his gloomy conjectures, the search for Piero and Paolo had had a happy ending. Mayor Tonioli was so happy that he’d wanted to give Marzio, the hero, an award, but Soprani had advised him against it. With a certain brusqueness.

  “Have we all gone mad? This is a secret, do you want to tell the whole world? That two children got lost in the fog and nearly died? Are you kidding? You, Mayor, who should have the good name of Valdiluce at heart.”

  In Marzio’s mind, on the other hand, every detail shone as brightly as the embers in the fireplace. He shifted about the pieces of wood and added dry twigs to examine the facts. With incredible strength, someone had pushed him off the cliff on Mount Sassone. Marzio was athletic and in peak physical condition, but the stranger had managed to hurl him off anyway. He could never have won against those steely muscles. A kind of giant. The bogeyman – as the twins had called whoever it was when they’d first been questioned – was real. But not for Soprani.

  “What bogeyman? That’s just the typical kind of thing children say to cover up a prank. Piero and Paolo wanted to have an adventure, they came out of the shelter in secret, they got lost in the fog, they lost their footing and they fell. And anyway, didn’t you, Inspector, a very skilled skier, fall in the same spot? Listen, Marzio, let’s not pile nonsense upon nonsense. Do you want to reach the conclusion that Valdiluce has got its own serial killer? Do you want to become our Sherlock Holmes? Come on, never mind all that, get your feet back on the ground. Or on the snow. If we carry on like this, we’ll all die of imagination.”

  It was true, though, that Marzio hadn’t provided Soprani with all the facts of the investigation, and had glossed over his fall into the chasm. He preferred to look into it all for himself.

  “It felt as though someone pushed me off, but what with the nausea, the fog and the ice, I fell, and then I actually did bang my head, so maybe my memories are a bit mixed up.”

  You always had to keep the powerful happy, even if Marzio was sure he had been pushed into the ravine. That someone might have problems with a police inspector and might try to hinder the investigation was almost natural, one of the risks of the job. But the version he told everyone was of an accident – White Wolf had slipped into the ravine while he’d been looking for the two children.

  Who could the bogeyman have been? A ski instructor? It would have been easy to find an outfit from the Valdiluce ski school, that didn’t mean much. Of course, the instructors were all strong and robust, young, physically powerful, and during the summer most of them worked as lumberjacks or builders. But his colleagues had interrogated them all without anything emerging. Marzio had interrogated Ada several times himself, with obsessive attention to detail. It was like seeing the same film several times: many hidden details were revealed and you noticed others even if they’d always been right in front of your eyes.

  “The day Piero and Paolo disappeared I bumped into Agostino at the gondola lift station. It must have been one o’clock. He was very pushy and he insisted on getting into the car with us. I was with the twins, and apart from anything else, he had a very big backpack on, as usual. Who knows what he had in it…”

  “Did he tell you where he wanted to go?”

  “Yes, he said he was going ski mountaineering. On Mount Verno.”

  “How was he dressed? Like a Valdiluce ski instructor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? A purple ski suit?”

  “Yes. He sat next to me, like always. You know he’s got a thing for me. We were squashed in.” Agostino had been trying to initiate a relationship with Ada for years, but she had always refused him. “He started courting me. For the first time in all the years I’ve known him, he was weird, he made an obscene gesture… In front of the twins.”

  “What gesture?”

  “An obscene one…”

  “Mime it.”

  With her constitutionally sad face, Ada put her hand on her crotch and squeezed it repeatedly.

  “I wouldn’t have expected that from him. He’s always been nice – he brought me a bunch of the first yellow buttercups of the year. Romantic and polite. So I got angry in front of the children. I shouted at him not to show his face again, that I wasn’t going to talk to him any more.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He kept bothering me. Honestly, he seemed like a different person. We got out of the gondola. He followed me, Piero and Paolo to the Sassone refuge, then he went into a corner. He stared at us angrily, like we’d done something mean to him.”

  “Could it have been him who pushed the children out of the shelter?”

  “From the state he was in when
I saw him, he could have done anything, even killed someone. He’d gone nasty. But he couldn’t have hurt the children.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was with me the whole time. He even followed me to the bathroom.”

  “What happened there?”

  “He waited.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “He didn’t move, because I would have heard the noise of his boots on the stone stairs.”

  “And then?”

  “‘I’ve told you a thousand times.”

  “Let’s make it a thousand and one.”

  “We went back up to the bar of the shelter. Agostino was behind me. I arrived at the bench where I’d left the children and they weren’t there any more.”

  “How much time passed while you went to the bathroom?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “We started searching the whole shelter for Pietro and Paolo.”

  “And where was Agostino?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “When did you next see him?”

  “There was no signal in the shelter so I went outside to call you, to raise the alarm. Agostino was putting on his skis. He heard me shouting ‘Hurry, Marzio. Please come right away’. He gave me a dirty look and then shot off down the slope. Not off towards Mount Verno as he’d told me, but straight downhill on the Sassone slope. Tucked over and going very fast, almost without swerving. I watched him until he disappeared behind the gully.”

  “But wasn’t it foggy?”

  “There was a moment when the wind opened it up, and then it came back thicker than before.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Two.”

  Of course, even if Agostino had disappeared into the woods, he could have stopped, turned back and gone through the fog to the summit, without being seen, waited for Marzio to arrive, ambushed him from the hillock, thrown himself down on him and pushed him down the ravine.

  A new possibility. But a difficult one. The timing didn’t work. Marzio quickly made some calculations. At two o’clock, the time of Ada’s call to Marzio, Agostino had gone off down the trail and disappeared after the gully, about a mile and a half, so even if he had stopped and climbed on foot, what with the slope and the fresh snow, it would have taken him at least an hour to return to the Sassone refuge. So he would have got there at three. Setting off from Valdiluce in his snowmobile at two o’clock, Marzio had taken no more than twenty minutes to reach the shelter. At twenty past two he was there. The attack had taken place shortly afterwards – his watch had stopped at two forty when he’d fallen. That was a certainty. So it couldn’t have been Agostino. He’d never have managed to arrive in time. Another puzzle. And why would Agostino, a simpleton with a frail, confused personality, have done all this to eliminate Marzio? Come up with such a well thought out plan… Impossible. But then who could the bogeyman who had thrown him into the ravine be?

  The obsessiveness of his profession didn’t allow him a break – he couldn’t live without asking questions. And even less without getting answers.

  Kristal listened to him with devotion.

  “Why did you never include Agostino among the suspects in Valdiluce?”

  “He wouldn’t hurt a fly. And anyway, he’s too odd. Thursday morning he came to the Bucaneve to check the situation and he stood out there in the atrium of the Bucaneve, in silence, in the sun, for two hours. I asked him if everything was alright. He didn’t answer me.”

  “Did he go into apartment twelve?”

  “Never. I was a good guard.”

  That was why the photosensitive lenses of Agostino’s sunglasses had been dark, then. He’d been out in the sun for at least two hours before returning home. When Marzio had gone there on his Vespa on Thursday, Agostino had hidden himself in the cellar and pretended to be chopping wood. Almost as though he felt guilty. A fragile personality, as ingenuous as a child. Telling a police inspector a lie after Kristal and dozens of policemen had seen him in front of the Bucaneve. It was a lost cause – his quirks didn’t lead to anything significant. It was like chasing the truth and the opposite of the truth at the same time. There was no point insisting. He should just leave him alone in his world.

  As to that attempted murder, White Wolf, with his extraordinary sense of smell, had only one clue: the indelible memory of the bogeyman’s breath – a trace that could lead him to the criminal. It was a reckless idea.

  Among the things that could identify and implicate a murderer were fingerprints, genes, blood, evidence, but would a court ever accept a man’s breath as proof? How could you put breath in a sterile container, examine it and take it to court as evidence? Madness – but then, he too was born and bred in Valdiluce. He couldn’t escape the bizarre stars that governed life in the town.

  He decided to undertake some rather eccentric laboratory tests. To recreate the odour he had fixed in his mind before his fall into the precipice, he used his sense of smell to try and analyse the most common foods in Valdiluce. If he found out what the bogeyman had eaten on the day of the attack he might identify a new lead. It was worth a try.

  “Let’s start with the sausages. Eat them, Kristal, take your time, have a glass of red wine too, and then in an hour you come back to me and let me smell your breath.”

  It was the first time he’d ever seen Kristal looking excited. Despite being so skinny, Kristal loved eating, and doing it at the state’s expense and in working hours was a real treat. Fettuccine with porcini mushrooms, pecorino cheese with honey, wild boar salamì.

  “Kristal, I hope you won’t tell anyone about this unusual investigative procedure. It might sound like I’ve lost my mind, but I hope to prove to you that what we’re doing will bring us valuable results.”

  “Inspector, you can count on it… Today I’d like to try it with black pudding and puree, and in Val Turchina they have a specialty that’s pigeon cooked on a terracotta brick. It’s not common but it’s quite widespread locally – around there they eat it at least once a week.”

  Over those days, Marzio sniffed Kristal’s breath. He identified all the elements his assistant had eaten. But the smell that had remained in his head – vaguely sweet, of something cooked slowly, with a particular scent, and dominated by a single ingredient – he could not find. If he’d had Elisabetta with him, perhaps it would have been easier. She would have known what foods to make, excellent cook that she was. He saw her next to the stove in his house making her succulent dishes, illuminated by the fire, her mouth bright, welcoming both for a smile and for love. A calm, comfortable image. A wife at home. If she hadn’t disappeared, perhaps White Wolf would have found his lair for a future with her.

  Marzio was lost in his memories, and Kristal looked at him with admiration.

  “Here I am.”

  Kristal breathed out forcefully onto the nose of the inspector, who analysed his breath carefully.

  “Sauerkraut with würstel, seasoned with seed oil, juniper and smoked bacon, and Chianti.”

  “You always get it right, Inspector.”

  “Yes, but we’re miles off. Let’s try the desserts. We need to find the smell of sugar – but not so strong that it dominates. Amalgamated and perhaps diluted by some ingredient that’s compact, unique, with a narrow molecule.”

  “Strudel?”

  “Let’s try with strudel. You’re not going to get fat with all this stuff you’re eating, are you, Kristal?”

  They both smiled. That hadn’t happened for a long time. It was as if a ray of sun had struck the moss, damp and shady, under a century old fir tree. A glowing elf mark.

  18

  Despite pretending to himself that it was a mistake, a coincidental encounter that had happened by chance, Marzio had gone looking for it – he’d been planning the occasion for days. Of all the things that were about to be set on the chessboard, that one remained unresolved.

  A pungent tangle that the wind stirred in his mind nee
dled at him night and day: the sheet showing Don Sergio’s DNA and the plastic bag with the paternity test kit. He’d put them with the chopped wood, as if he’d planned for them too, to end up in the fire. But each time he had returned he had left those strange traces of Don Sergio between one chunk of wood and another, as though he didn’t want to destroy them. An illogical thread that kept him tied to the past.

  He re-opened the leaflet, now lightly perfumed with resin and ashes and so yellowed it looked like an ancient document; those incomprehensible marks, those vibrating lines set above numbers that looked like the succession of days in a calendar, could have been some ancient text of pharmacopoeia. DNA, one of the most important discoveries of the modern era, contained distant echoes. Marzio was guided by fate.

  He decided to do what, in his heart, he had always refused to. With not a little apprehension, because he hated medical tests. He carefully read the instructions for use that were inside the envelope.

  After washing your hands thoroughly, open the package, remove the swab and use it like a toothbrush, rubbing it vigorously over your gums and the inner surfaces of your cheeks for at least ten seconds. Take samples with both swabs. Once the operation is completed, put the swabs back inside the package from which they were taken. Finally, insert everything inside the larger envelope bearing the pre-printed address. After completing the parts of the form consenting to the test being performed, please send everything to our offices at Genomax, via Arcangelo Gabriele, Forzone.

  Marzio followed the instructions to the letter, carefully filling out all the parts of the form consenting to the paternity test, collected the sheet with Don Sergio’s DNA and inserted it into the envelope, signed the request to have it compared with his, then added the swabs where he had collected his saliva into a smaller envelope. He sealed the whole thing. He put it on the table. A series of actions as mechanical as if they had been carried out by a stranger. It was ready to be posted at any time.