“What’s that?” the deputy police chief asked glumly.
“Haven’t you ever had it? It’s a bowl of melted fontina cheese with artichokes, olives, and little chunks of salami.”
Rocco stood up and pulled on a crewneck sweater. “Nice and digestible, I gather.”
“Am I going to see you tomorrow?”
“How the hell would I know, Nora! I don’t even know where I’m going to be tomorrow.”
He left the bedroom. Nora sighed and stood up. She caught up with him at the front door. She whispered: “I’ll be waiting for you.”
“What am I, a bus?” Rocco shot back. Then he smiled. “Nora, forgive me, this is just a bad night. You’re an incredibly beautiful woman. You’re unquestionably the top tourist attraction in the city of Aosta.”
“After the Roman arch.”
“I’m sick and tired of Roman rubble. But not of you.”
He kissed her hastily on the lips and pulled the door shut behind him.
Nora felt like laughing. That’s just how Rocco Schiavone was. Take him or leave him. She looked at the pendulum clock that hung by the front door. She still had plenty of time to call Sofia and go see a movie. Then maybe they could get a pizza together.
Rocco stepped out of the downstairs door, and an icy hand seized his throat.
“Fucking cold out here!”
He’d left the car a hundred yards from the front entrance. His feet, in the pair of Clarks desert boots he was wearing, had frozen immediately upon contact with the sidewalk, frosted with a white covering of goddamned snow. A cutting wind was blowing, and there was no one out on the streets. The first thing he did when he got into his Volvo was turn on the heat. He blew on his hands. A hundred yards was all the distance it took to freeze them solid. “Fucking cold out here!” he said again, obsessively, like a mantra, and the words, along with the condensation from his breath, flew up against the windshield, fogging it white. He started the diesel engine, punched the defrost button, and sat there staring at a metal streetlamp tossing in the wind. Grains of snow fell through the cone of light, sifting through the darkness like stardust.
“It’s snowing! I knew it!”
He put the car in reverse and drove out of Duvet.
When he parked outside his apartment building on Rue Piave, the BMW with Pierron behind the wheel was already there with the engine running. Rocco leaped into the car, which the officer had already heated to a toasty seventy-three degrees. An agreeable feeling of well-being enveloped him like a woolen blanket.
“Italo, I’m hoping you didn’t ring the buzzer to my apartment.”
Pierron put the car in gear. “I’m not an idiot, Commissario.”
“Good. But you have to lose this habit. The rank of commissario has been abolished.”
The windshield wipers were clearing snowflakes off the glass.
“If it’s snowing here, I can just imagine up at Champoluc,” said Pierron.
“Is it up high?”
“Five thousand feet.”
“That’s insane!” The greatest elevation Rocco Schiavone had ever attained in his life was 450 feet above sea level at Rome’s Monte Mario. That is, of course, if you left out the past four months in Aosta, at 1,895 feet above sea level. He couldn’t even imagine someone living at 5,000 feet above sea level. It made his head spin just to think about it.
“What do people do at five thousand feet above sea level?”
“They ski. They climb ice. In summer, they go hiking.”
“Just think.” The deputy police chief pulled a Chesterfield out of the policeman’s pack. “I prefer Camels.”
Italo smiled.
“Chesterfields taste of iron. Buy Camels, Italo.” He lit it and took a drag. “Not even stars in the sky,” he said, looking out the car window.
Pierron was focused on driving. He knew that he was about to be treated to a serenade of nostalgia for Rome. And sure enough.
“In Rome this time of year, it’s cold, but often there’s a north wind that clears away the clouds. And then the sun comes out. It’s sunny and cold. The city’s all red and orange, the sky is blue, and it’s great to stroll down those cobblestone streets. All the colors are brighter when the north wind blows. It’s like a rag taking the dust off an antique painting.”
Pierron looked up at the sky. He’d been to Rome once in his life, five years ago, and it smelled so bad that he’d thrown up for three days running.
“And the pussy. You have no idea of the sheer quantity of pussy in Rome. I’m telling you, maybe only in Milan will you find anything comparable. You ever been to Milan?”
“No.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing. Go there. It’s a wonderful city. You just have to understand how it works.”
Pierron was a good listener. He was a mountain man, and he knew how to stay silent when silence was called for and how to speak when the time came to open his mouth. He was twenty-seven, but you’d guess he was ten years older. He’d never left Val d’Aosta, aside from the three days in Rome and a week in Djerba, the island off Tunisia, with his ex-girlfriend Veronica.
Italo liked Rocco Schiavone. He liked him because he wasn’t one to stand on ceremony, and because you could always learn something from a guy like him. Sooner or later he’d have to ask the deputy police chief—though he insisted on using the old rank of commissario—just what had happened in Rome. But their acquaintance was still too new, Italo sensed, and it was too early to delve into details. For the moment, he’d satisfied his curiosity by poking into documents and reports. Rocco Schiavone had solved a substantial number of cases—murders, thefts, and frauds—and had seemed to be well on his way to a brilliant and successful career. And then suddenly the shooting star that was Rocco Schiavone veered and fell, slamming to earth with a rapid and silent transfer to Val d’Aosta for disciplinary reasons. But just what the stain on Rocco Schiavone’s CV had been, that was something he never managed to find out. The police officers working at headquarters had talked it over among themselves. Caterina Rispoli argued that Schiavone had risen above his station. “I’ll bet you he stepped on somebody’s toes and that somebody had the power to have him shipped north; that kind of stuff happens all the time in Rome.” Deruta disagreed; he felt sure that someone as capable as Rocco Schiavone was an annoyance, especially if he lacked a political patron. D’Intino suspected sex was at the bottom of it. “I’ll bet he took somebody’s wife or girlfriend to bed and got caught.” Italo had a suspicion all his own, and he kept it to himself. His guess had been guided by Rocco Schiavone’s home address. Via Alessandro Poerio. High on the Janiculum Hill. Apartments up there ran more than eight thousand euros a square meter, or a thousand dollars a square foot, as his cousin, who sold real estate in Gressoney, had told him. No one on a deputy police chief’s salary could afford an apartment in that part of town.
Rocco crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “What are you thinking about, Pierron?”
“Nothing, Dottore. About the road.”
And Rocco looked out in silence at the highway, pelleted by falling flakes of snow.
Looking up from the main street of Champoluc, he could see a patch of light in the middle of the woods. That was where the body had been found, and now it was lit by halogen floodlights. If he squinted, he could just make out the shadows of policemen and cat drivers working the scene. The news had spread with the speed of a high-mountain wind. Everyone stood around at the base of the cableway, their noses tipped up toward the forest, midway up the slope, each asking the same question, which was unlikely to be answered anytime soon. The English tourists, drunk; the Italians with worried faces. The locals were snickering in their patois at the thought of the hordes of Milanese, Genovese, and Piedmontese who would find out tomorrow morning that the slopes were closed.
The BMW with Italo at the wheel pulled to a halt at the foot of the cableway. It had taken an hour and a half from Aosta.
Driving up that road, navigating the hairp
in curves, Rocco Schiavone had observed the landscape. The black forests, the bursts of gravel vomited downhill from the rocky slopes like rivers of milk. At least one good thing, during that endless climb: around Brusson, the snow had stopped falling and the moon, riding free in the dark sky, reflected off the blanket of snow. It looked as if someone had scattered handfuls of tiny diamonds over the countryside.
Rocco got out of the car wrapped in his green loden overcoat and immediately felt the chill of the snow bite through the soles of his shoes.
“Commissario, it’s up there. They’re coming to get us with the cat now,” said Pierron, pointing out the headlights partially concealed by the trees halfway up the slope.
“The cat?” asked Rocco, his chattering teeth chopping his breath into little puffs as it fogged up in the cold air.
“That’s right, the tracked vehicle that works the slopes.”
Schiavone took a breath. What a fucked-up place to come die in.
“Italo, explain something to me. How could it be that no one saw a dead body lying in the middle of the piste? I mean, weren’t there skiers on that run?”
“No, Commissario,” Pierron said, then corrected himself. “Excuse me, Deputy Police Chief. They found him in the woods, right in the middle of a road they use as a shortcut. No one takes that road. Except for the snowcats.”
“Ah. Understood. But who would go bury a body way up there?”
“That’s what you’re going to have to find out,” Pierron concluded, with a naive smile.
The noise of a jackhammer filled the cold, crisp air. But it wasn’t a jackhammer at all. The snowcat had arrived. It stopped at the base of the cableway with the engine running, dense smoke pouring out the exhaust pipe.
“So that’s the cat, right?” asked Rocco. He’d seen that kind of thing only in movies or documentaries about Alaska.
“That’s right. And now it’s going to take us up, Commissario! Deputy Police Chief, I meant to say.”
“Listen, just do this—you’re not going to wrap your head around it no matter how hard you try. Call me whatever you want, I don’t give a damn anyway. Plus,” Rocco went on, looking at the treaded vehicle, “why do they call it a cat if it looks more like a tank?”
Italo Pierron limited himself to a shrug in response.
“Well, okay, let’s get aboard this cat. Come on!”
The deputy police chief looked down at his feet. His Clarks desert boots were dripping wet, the suede was drenched, and his feet were starting to get wet, too.
“Dottore, I told you to buy a pair of suitable shoes.”
“Pierron, stop busting my balls. I’m not putting on a pair of those cement mixers you people wear on your feet—not as long as I’m still breathing.”
They set off through snow piles and potholes created by the skiers’ power slides and oversteers. The snowcat, with the lights mounted on the roof, standing motionless in the middle of the snow, looked like a giant mechanical insect poised to seize its prey.
“Here, Dottore, step up on the tread and get in,” shouted the snowcat driver from inside the Plexiglas cabin.
Rocco obeyed. He took a seat inside the cabin, followed immediately by Pierron. The driver shut the door and pushed the gearshift forward.
Rocco caught a whiff of alcohol mixed with sweat.
“I’m Luigi Bionaz, and I’m in charge of the snowcats up here in Champoluc,” said the driver.
Rocco just looked at him. The guy had a couple of days’ whiskers, and his eyes were lit up with an alcoholic gleam. “Luigi, are you okay?”
“Why?”
“Because before I go anywhere in this contraption, I want to know if you’re drunk.”
Luigi looked at him, his eyes as big as the snowcat’s headlights. “Me?”
“I don’t give a damn if you drink or smoke hash. But the one thing I don’t want is to be killed in this thing up at an elevation of five thousand feet.”
“No, Dottore, everything’s fine. I only drink at night. The odor you smell is probably from some youngster who used the vehicle earlier this afternoon.”
“Of course it is,” said the deputy police chief skeptically. “Fine. Come on, let’s get going.”
The snowcat made its way up the steep ski slope. Illuminated by the headlights, Rocco saw a wall of snow straight ahead of him, and he couldn’t believe that that pachyderm could successfully climb such a nearly vertical incline.
“Hey, tell me something! We’re not about to go head over heels, are we?”
“Don’t worry about a thing, Dottore. These behemoths can climb slopes steeper than a forty percent grade.”
They took a curve and found themselves in the middle of the woods. The blade-like beam of the headlights lit up the soft blanket of snow and the black trunks of the trees that were suffocating the groomed run.
“How wide is this piste?”
“Fifty yards or so.”
“And on a normal day, how many people come through here?”
“That’s something we’ll have to ask at the head office. They know how many daily ski passes they sell. So we could get a count, but it might not be all that accurate.”
The deputy police chief nodded. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled out a pair of leather gloves, and put them on. The run was veering to the right. Pierron said nothing. He was looking up, as if searching for an answer among the branches of the larches and firs.
They went on climbing, accompanied only by the engine’s roar. At last, in a broad clearing, they saw the beams of the floodlights arranged around the site where the body had been found.
The snowcat left the piste and cut through the woods. It bounced over a few tree roots and hummocks.
“Listen, who found the body?” asked Rocco.
“Amedeo Gunelli.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“Sure, Commissario, he’s down at the cableway station, waiting. He hasn’t really recovered yet,” Luigi Bionaz replied as he braked the snowcat to a halt. At last, he switched off the engine.
The minute he set his shoes down on the snow, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone understood just how right his co-worker had been to recommend he wear heavy boots with insulated soles, the kind of shoes that Rocco called cement mixers. Because they really did resemble a pair of cement mixers. The chill gnawed at the soles of his feet, which were already tingling from the cold, and the feeling jangled his nerves from heels to brain. He heaved a breath. The air was even thinner than it had been at the bottom of the hill. The temperature was well below freezing. The cartilage in his ears was pulsating and his nose was already dripping. Inspector Caterina Rispoli approached him, light-footed.
“Deputy Police Chief.”
“Inspector.”
“Casella and I went up to secure the location.”
Rocco nodded. He looked at Inspector Rispoli’s face, which he could barely glimpse under the hat crammed down over her head. Her mascara and eyeliner were oozing down as if off a wax mask.
“Stay here, Inspector.” Then he turned around. Far below, he could see the lights of the village. To his right was the snowcat that Amedeo had been driving, still parked in the middle of the woods where that poor devil had abandoned it hours ago.
Walking through nearly knee-deep snow, Rocco drew closer to the monster. He examined the front of the vehicle. He ran his hand over it, sized it up carefully, as if he were thinking of buying the thing. Then he squatted down and looked under the tracks, covered with fresh snow. He nodded a couple of times and headed over to the place where the body had been found.
“What were you looking for, Dottore?” asked Italo, but the deputy police chief didn’t reply.
A policeman with a pair of skis thrown over his shoulders came toward them, striding easily, even though he was wearing ski boots with stiff, heavy hooks. “Commissario! I’m Officer Caciuoppolo!”
“Fuck, another native!”
The young man smiled. “I secured the crime scene.”
<
br /> “Good for you, Caciuoppolo. But tell me, where did you learn to ski?”
“At Roccaraso. My folks have a place there. Are you from Rome, Commissario?”
“Yep, Trastevere. What about you?”
“Vomero, Naples.”
“Excellent. Let’s go see what we have here.”
What did they have here? A half-frozen corpse under five or six inches of snow. To call it a corpse was a euphemism. It might have been one once. Now it was mess of flesh, nerves, and blood that had been pureed by the snowcat’s tillers. All around it, goose feathers. Everywhere. The deputy police chief wrapped his overcoat tighter. The wind, though it was light, penetrated beneath the lapel and caressed his neck, leaving a wake of hairs standing at attention like soldiers saluting a general. Rocco’s knee already hurt, the one he’d crushed when he was fifteen, playing the last match of the season with his team, Urbetevere Calcio. Bent over the dead body was Alberto Fumagalli, the medical examiner of Livorno, who was using a pen to poke at the hems of the poor man’s down jacket.
The deputy police chief went over without saying hello. In the past four months, since the day they’d first met, he’d never said hello to him yet. So why start now?
“What are all these feathers?” asked Rocco.
“The filling of the down jacket,” replied Alberto, bent over the corpse.
The poor man’s face was unrecognizable. One arm had been sheared off neatly, and his rib cage had popped open under the vehicle’s weight, spewing forth its contents.
“What a mess,” said Rocco in a low voice.
Fumagalli shook his head. “I’m going to have to do an autopsy in a proper facility. I’ll get a good look and let you know. Just by the sight of him . . . I don’t know! That thing crushed him. You can imagine the work it’ll take just to reassemble him! But right now, since I’m frozen and pissed off, I’m just going to head back down and get something hot to drink. Well, anyway, it’s a man—”
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