by Franco Marks
“You’re lucky to have a sister who’s always by your side, doing your washing, cooking for you. It’s better than having a wife. I bet she always makes nice things to eat. What’s her best dish?”
“Sweet polenta with ricotta cheese. She makes it a lot. It’s cheap and we like it. I even had it for breakfast this morning.”
Sweet polenta! That was what the smell was – chestnut flour boiled in water. A traditional dish that no one cooked any more. There wasn’t a menu in town that had sweet polenta on it, so Kristal and he hadn’t thought of it. It wasn’t the type of evidence you could bring up in court – breath couldn’t be collected in a small bottle – but for him it was a precise clue: a private, clear happening. Between White Wolf and Agostino.
“Do you like sweet polenta?”
Marzio, lost in his thoughts, seized the opportunity.
“I haven’t eaten it for years. I’d really like to try it again, though. My mother was the only one who could make it properly.”
“It’s easy to make.”
Marzio saw an opening. “I’d pay anything to eat it again.”
“You’d pay? How much?”
“I’d pay fifty euros.”
“Give it to me.”
Marzio took the note from his wallet and put it in the hands of the amazed but happy Agostino. “There you go.”
They entered the kitchen where Carlina was about to throw a handful of spaghetti into boiling water. Agostino’s sister was annoyed when she saw the inspector. She was about to speak, but Agostino stopped her.
“Let White Wolf try some of our sweet polenta with fresh ricotta.”
Carlina looked at him angrily, squeezed the spaghetti in her fist and then threw it into the fire. She did exactly what her brother had asked her to, becoming a silent, almost domestic woman. She hung the black pot full of boiling water from the chain of the fireplace over the lively fire and then threw in a few handfuls of sieved chestnut flour that looked like a light white rain. She began to stir the sweet polenta with the ladle. It was her destiny.
Strong and broad shouldered, she was the archetypal mountain woman. Used to suffering, to doing men’s work, to cutting the wood, loading the mules, living by the heat of the fireplace alone. Illuminated by the flames, Carlina’s face was beautiful, with delicate features. It was curious how different she looked from her brother. He was tall with brown eyes, she was blonde with blue eyes. In that cave where hundreds of jars were ready to be filled with her jam, salami and sausages dangled. It looked like a painting from the nineteenth century. The only thing missing were the cows and sheep. The silence was just as unreal.
Agostino was happy to have a guest and fifty euros in his pocket. He dusted off the table and prepared the chairs. Carlina emptied the sweet, boiling polenta directly onto the wooden surface. It took the shape of a loaf, and each used the thread to cut a slice the way people once had. They ate in silence. It was very good, Marzio cut himself more slices of it. Agostino looked at him happily, a broad smile that was disproportionate to his thin face. They were becoming friends.
“It’s tasty with sleepers too. If we find some tomorrow, I’ll let you try. As long as you pay.”
Agostino laughed loudly and his hands shook. They looked as though they were powered by some faulty machine that occasionally stalled. Carlina’s blue eyes seared him with their gaze – a gaze that looked almost bestial in the light of the fireplace.
23
It was like climbing the same ridge again and again.
You got to the top and a clue appeared down at the bottom. So you went back down and then came back up. Taking a different route every time. You had to start from scratch. The aroma of sweet polenta was from Agostino. The bogeyman. It was unlikely that anyone else had eaten the same thing. But it needed proving. Marzio reread all the interrogations. One by one. He probed every detail, but now the reading of the story took another turn, dominated by Agostino’s face.
He’d left on skis from the Sassone shelter at about two o’clock. Marzio had been attacked at around two forty, as the hands of the watch that had been broken by the fall down the slope had shown. To get back to the top on foot in the fresh snow from the point where he had disappeared from Ada’s sight, about a mile and a half, would have taken Agostino at least an hour. So he would have arrived at three. The timing didn’t fit. Only climbing back up within thirty-five minutes would have allowed him to attack Marzio. A snowmobile waiting for him halfway up the slope? With an accomplice? Too convoluted. No ski lifts handy to get back to the shelter. A helicopter? That was fantasy, especially because Agostino couldn’t have planned it all. He would have had to kidnap the twins and set in motion a complex and convoluted scheme: too many elements to organise, it wasn’t plausible. His plan must have been improvised. Made up off the cuff. From Ada’s phone call he had known that Marzio would arrive shortly thereafter. Forced by the mist to abandon his trip to Mount Verno, he had launched himself down the Sassone slope. In a tight tuck and with his mind clouded by hatred of Inspector Santoni, by jealousy, by his lost rationality, in the excitement of speed fused with pride he had suddenly stopped and had decided to walk through the fresh snow.
Instinctively, without thinking much, and with the angry intention of hunting Marzio – and if he happened to find him in some lonely place under the tips of his skis, under cover of the fog he would try to kill him, just as he probably had done. Otherwise he would return to Valdiluce and wait for another occasion. It was clear that Agostino Uberti wanted to eliminate Marzio, wanted to pull tight the noose around his throat. His feet resting on the desk, White Wolf scanned the wall of his office to check his thoughts.
His eyes passed over an object that seemed relevant, went back, and stared at the ski skins hanging from the wall. He had a flash of understanding. The molecules that had been travelling separately formed into a logical, multi coloured chain. The formula unravelled perfectly. Agostino could have got back in less than an hour by using skins and crampons under his skis. The gear would have made the journey uphill on the fresh snow much faster. That changed things. Marzio remembered what Ada had said.
“He was very pushy and he insisted on getting into the car with us… he had a very big backpack on, as usual… he said he was going ski mountaineering. On Mount Verno.”
At Agostino’s house, Marzio had noticed a lot of pairs of skis leaning against the back wall of the cellar. Some skins and crampons too. Ski mountaineering equipment. Which he had certainly brought with him in his backpack to face Mount Verno. So he hadn’t climbed back up to the Sassone shelter with his boots sinking into the fresh snow, as Marzio had imagined, but with the ski skins and crampons. It would have taken him half the time. Thirty-five minutes? Inspector Santoni had to try it for himself. There was still snow on Mount Sassone and the first part of the slope was skiable. He needed to find someone similar to Agostino in terms of strength and endurance. He thought of Giuseppe, the strongest of the ski instructors, who was also a mountain guide. A timed trial. With ski skins and crampons.
24
Agostino showed up at dawn with big black boots and the worn purple ski suit of a skiing instructor. He was agitated, and the scar on his forehead throbbed. With her weird prophecy, Olimpia had actually got it right about who the murderer was. Her words made perfect sense now, but at the time they had been obscure and vague.
“The reason for the killing came from the gash on the rock.”
The gash on the rock could have been the scar on Agostino’s head – was that where the decision that had made the bogeyman kill had come from?
His eyes were restless, darting about, never settling on Marzio. They were like the eyes of a lizard. They entered the beech forest near the Bucaneve. They shouted to one another over a distance of eighty metres, at first just to communicate their position in the wood to each other, but then Marzio tried to prod him with some questions.
“Do you remember the four girls, Agostino? Poor things! They died just a few met
res from here.”
After a silence as long as if he had been swallowed up by a blackberry bush, Agostino mumbled something incomprehensible. Without warning him, Marzio went over to Agostino and caught him bent over, looking at a group of sleeper mushrooms, fresh and taupe coloured.
“Why don’t you pick them?”
Agostino looked at him with trapped eyes. He brought down his stick on the mushrooms, smashing them into a thousand pieces.
“You’re not White Wolf,” he shouted, “you’re that police bastard!”
“I’m sorry… I was just thinking about it. Did you know that one of the girls was my girlfriend?”
“Those four were whores. Even your girlfriend was a whore.”
“Why do you say they were whores? They were good girls.”
“No they weren’t! They made me do dirty things. When they came back in the evening, they took me into their room…”
Agostino set off walking angrily and slipped into the woods, muttering. His words came to Marzio quietly, the syllables eaten by the wind, absorbed by the sound of some bird screaming. “They were drunk, they came in, singing, it was shameful, they took me into their room…” Another endless silence. Marzio heard a branch breaking and realised that Agostino had gone far away. He ran towards the noise. He didn’t want to lose him.
“Agostinooo.” He called him several times until Agostino suddenly replied in a stentorian voice from a few steps behind him, surprising Marzio.
“What do you want from me?”
Under the shadows of the beech trees he instilled fear. He was aggressive, as though he were about to explode. He held out his stick at Marzio to shoot him.
“Whores, just city whores.”
“What happened that night?”
“The biggest whore undressed and showed me her tits, she made me touch them.”
Agostino was like a toy with flat batteries which suddenly snapped into movement. He looked like an animal fleeing from a predator. Marzio raced after him, traversing paths, cobwebs, streams, woods, and rocks. They arrived at the top of a mountain, beneath which stretched a vast panorama. They sat on the rocks. The crows flew around, black as their thoughts. Marzio decided that there was no more time.
“Agostino Uberti, it was you who put the underwear inside the boiler’s flue pipe, you waited for the carbon monoxide to fill the apartment and knock them unconscious and then, after putting on rubber gloves, you entered apartment twelve with the pass key, you turned on the gas knobs in the kitchen, the central stopcock, you switched off the boiler which was backing up because of the blockage, you went out and closed the door; did you do all this to make it look like Elisabetta, Flaminia, Angela and Stefania had committed suicide?”
Marzio wanted to back him into a corner, leave his brain no room to breathe. Only in that way could he hope to know the truth. Now, when he repeated the theorem aloud, it sounded so certain, a textbook procedure, every detail in place, no mistakes. The molecular chain arranged. Agostino had no escape.
“So was it you?”
Agostino gave him a cowardly look, then said in a quiet voice.
“No, not me. But I saw it on television.”
“What fucking television?”
“The one in the Bucaneve.”
Exasperated, Marzio shook him by the collar of his ski suit. “Listen Agostino, talk – where the hell is this television?”
“In the cupboard next to apartment twelve. I saw them naked lots of times on the screen.” He gave a diabolical smile.
Marzio’s words were disconnected from one another, as though he were a foreigner, and each syllable vibrated with tension. “Take me to see the television.”
No one had ever talked for long with Agostino. People appreciated his silences without wondering what was simmering in his brain. Now that he was finally talking, it was clear that he was a dangerous psychopath. The night of the murder Agostino had accompanied the four girls to the Bucaneve. It had been a moment of complete madness – they’d drunkenly started messing about with him and playing with him, and he’d got excited. But what the hell could this television he was on about be?
Getting back down was much more complicated than the climb up: Agostino seemed completely dazed: he stumbled, and sometimes Marzio had to support him. They entered the Bucaneve with the keys that Agostino always kept with him. For a moment, Marzio was overcome with emotion. He seemed to see Elisabetta’s hair intertwined with the heavy, dusty curtain at the entrance. Agostino took him to the small cupboard next to apartment twelve. He turned on the dim light. Among the brooms, rags, a Vileda mop, a sink and his red rubber gloves, Agostino said in a confidential voice, “This is my television.”
He pointed to the wall of the cupboard.
“I can’t see anything.”
“You policemen are always stupid. At least a hundred detectives searched it and none of them found anything.”
“I’m stupid too, if you don’t tell me where it is.”
“Above the sink.”
Marzio reached over to the wall, touched it, felt the presence of a sticky material. He sniffed it – it was like fresh plaster. He cleaned it with a wet towel and found a small hole that opened perfectly onto the room of the four girls. He put his eye to it.
“I can’t see anything.”
“I’ll put the lights on in the room so you can see.”
Agostino seemed enthusiastic about showing Marzio his toy. He turned on the light. Everything came to life – the projector had begun to show the film. Inspector Santoni looked around the crime scene as if he really were watching a screen. It was like looking inside a coffin, an Etruscan tomb. No one would ever be able to wash away the mark of death from apartment twelve of the Bucaneve. That rudimentary hole, made with a screwdriver and gradually widened, actually did work like a TV camera focused on the room. Smiling, Agostino approached the hole on the other side. He peered in like a child playing. The close up of his face, with the scar resembling a road that led to nowhere, told the story of his madness. He gesticulated, pointed to himself, and waved.
“Can you see me, White Wolf?”
“Yes.”
“The hole is hidden from this side because it corresponds to the nail holding up the painting. Only I know.”
Agostino kept talking freely – it was as if he had turned on a tap. He vomited up nonsense and shouted as he described that evening. Perhaps after that long period of silence, a superhuman effort for someone with his mental health issues, he had finally melted, coming out into the open to speak of his epic undertakings. Marzio followed the thread of his reasoning. Sequence by sequence. The dynamics of the murder were clearly arranged, as though captured in the vignettes of a balladeer, colourful and sharp. Every step, every moment.
Agostino had masturbated while spying on Elisabetta, Flaminia, Angela and Stefania through that hole. A week of dirty thoughts, of continuous emotions, had definitely turned Agostino’s mind upside down.
With the maniacal perfection of a killer, with the instinct of someone accustomed to trafficking with perversion, he was excited by those half naked girls who played at teasing him. The Cagi underpants wet with sperm were a sign of his loneliness. Instinctively, he had decided to put them into the boiler’s flue pipe, to get rid of the liquid trace of his unhappiness, but also to take revenge on the four girls who had repeatedly teased and upset him. A textbook case: compulsive masturbation. Sexual murder.
Agostino had designed a perfect crime. Perhaps it had been the girls themselves who had given him the idea when they’d come back to the Bucaneve. With their loud talk about suicide. First step: block the flue pipe of the old gas boiler for the heating with the sperm covered Cagi underpants, a way of hiding his guilt. Then watch the private agony of the four women.
Certainly Elisabetta, who was cleaning the kitchen sink, would have noticed that the air was unbreathable and checked the knobs in the kitchen, but found them closed. And then, more and more intoxicated by the fumes that came fro
m the boiler, she went to see if the central gas stopcock was open, leaving her fingerprints on it. She had closed it. Then she had fallen into bed, just in time to faint, leaving the work of cleaning half finished. That was why there were fragments of spinach in the sink and the toilet was dirty with vomit. The gas leaking from the boiler obstructed by the Cagi underpants, balled up so that no one had ever found them, had begun its deadly work.
Having made sure for himself through the hole in the wall that the four anaesthetised girls had settled in bed, Agostino had entered the apartment. By now the fumes were having an effect. Wearing gloves he had turned off the boiler so as not to create suspicion. He had opened the central gas stopcock that Elisabetta had turned off, then had opened all the knobs on the cooker. The deadly mixture had begun to spread through the apartment. Knocked out by the carbon monoxide fumes from the obstructed boiler but still alive, Flaminia, Elisabetta, Angela and Stefania had been murdered by the cooking gas. At that point, Agostino had left the room and had locked the door. After staging the suicide and waiting long enough for the women to die, he had raised the alarm to Marzio.
“Inspector, there’s been a gas leak, something terrible has happened! Hurry!”
A perfect crime. The truth was heavy enough to crush both of them. As painful as a wound that would never heal – on one side, the gash on the head of a madman, and on the other the misery of a policeman. The whole thing could end there, thought Marzio. Say goodbye, flush the chain and carry on living as before, happy ever after. Nothing would bring the four girls back to life. But it only lasted a moment, and then he submitted to his policeman’s character and decided to arrest Agostino.
Agostino’s confession was complicated. Marzio listened to his explanation, the unfinished phrases, the sighed or interrupted words, as though they had left the paper and were flying through the sky. Chaos. A puzzle that Marzio patiently rebuilt, word after word, laid out in order in the detective’s notebook. But he still couldn’t identify the role of Don Sergio. Now that he was dead, all he was left with was the ‘weirdo’. Too little to know the truth. At least for the moment. Had unspeakable events taken place in that cupboard? Had Don Sergio participated in Agostino’s erotic ‘viewings’? Had they been together on the night of the murder? So many questions that would remain buried in mystery, but which Marzio decided to ask anyway, zealous policeman that he was. Imagining what the answers would be.