The postmaster nodded in fright. Then Rocco handed the man his card. “It’s all written down right here. And thanks for your help.” He took a couple of steps toward the glass door, seized the handle, but then stopped. He stood there as if a thought had suddenly crossed his mind. He turned around and looked at Peroni, who was standing forlorn with Rocco’s card in one hand while the other hand tenderly caressed his cheek. “Peroni. Not a word about this understanding of ours to a soul. If not, I’ll be back. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes.”
“Have a good day.”
To get up to the slopes, they had to take a six-seat cable car. It looked something like a pea pod attached to an enormous steel cable by a metal hook. Rocco and Pierron got into pea pod number 69, which shot off uphill at top speed, taking them straight up to an elevation of 6,500 feet. The man running the cableway had stared intently at Rocco’s clothing, so completely out of place, focusing on his Clarks desert boots for a good ten seconds at least, but then, locked up in his work and his mountain man’s tendency to remain silent, he had said nothing. He’d simply double-checked the closure of the double door and then turned to help the next passengers.
“Wait, are people skiing today?” asked Rocco, peering out of the Plexiglas windows.
“Only on the higher-up pistes. The one farther downhill, where we found Miccichè, is closed.”
The cabin was already brushing over the tips of the fir trees below. The forest, wrapped in a dense and impenetrable drizzly fog, seemed to have come out of a Celtic saga. Rocco looked down at the blanket of snow between the rocks and trees. There were pine needles, but especially tracks. Large and small.
“Birds, hares, ibexes, and chamoix,” said Italo Pierron, “all of them on the hunt for food.”
“Are there weasels too?”
“Sure. In the winter, they turn white. Why?”
“I was just wondering.”
“Yeah, weasels are clever. They camouflage themselves.”
“Really?” asked Rocco, staring into Italo Pierron’s eyes intensely until he blushed, unable to fathom his superior officer’s intentions. Rocco was studying him, that much was clear. But he couldn’t piece out the reason.
“It’s important to camouflage yourself, Italo. If you want to survive in a world of predators.”
Suddenly the sooty slush around them fell away, and a bright, blinding sun lit up the landscape. Rocco stood open-mouthed. They’d emerged from the clouds, as if in an airplane. Now the sky was blue, and all around the snowy alpine peaks surrounded them like a crown. They looked like so many islands jutting up from the grayish, foamy waters of a lake. Rocco squinted to see through the dazzling light. “So pretty,” he said spontaneously, “so pretty.”
“Right?” agreed Italo.
The snow, like an immense lava flow of whipped cream, covered the high plateaus, the cliffs, and the boulders. To look down on it like this, the snow didn’t even seem particularly cold. In fact, Rocco felt the urge to jump in and roll around in it for fifteen minutes. Even pick some up and eat it. It must be soft and sweet. It glittered with a thousand sharp-edged points of light, and if he stared too hard, he felt stabbing pain in his eyes and his head began to spin. The black slate roofs of the little huts and cottages were submerged in snow, and if it hadn’t been for the smoking chimney pots, it would have been impossible to see them at all. They lay buried in that sea of white, as absolutely clean and candid as so many flocks grazing happily, lazy and somnolent.
At last the cable car reached its destination. Rocco got out, pleased that he hadn’t felt even a hint of vertigo.
Outside the cableway station, the snow was deep, and the sun had melted it a little. Skiers dressed in a dizzying array of colors, so that they resembled a cluster of carnival masks, were sprawled out at the tables of a chalet bar, drinking in the day’s last rays of light, sipping foamy goblets of beer. Others headed down to the slopes with skis, snowshoes, and helmets thrown over their shoulders, walking like so many golems in large, noisy snowboots. Rocco was reminded of the damned souls in some Dantean circle of hell.
“Are you saying they pay for all this?” he asked Italo.
“Deputy Police Chief Schiavone,” said Pierron, unbelievably nailing Rocco’s correct rank, “have you ever tried skiing?”
“Never.”
“Then take it from me that if you tried even once, you’d understand. Just like a little while ago on the cableway. Did you see? Suddenly sun and sky and snow. The same thing on skis. The same sensation.”
But Rocco wasn’t listening anymore. He was comparing the snow on the ground with his shoes, so ill suited to the situation.
“Don’t worry, Dottore, we only have to walk about a hundred yards. Luigi is waiting for us.”
“Who’s Luigi?”
“The head snowcat operator. The one who took us up last night. Luigi Bionaz. He’s going to take us to Cuneaz. You see that valley down there?”
Rocco looked. Four hundred yards ahead, in the midst of runs busy with overjoyed skiers, there was a collection of snow-covered humps. “Yes, I see. What of it?”
“Cuneaz is down there, behind those rises in the slope. In the summer, you can walk it. But in the winter you’d need snowshoes.”
“You’d need what?”
“Snowshoes . . . those rackets on your feet. You know what I mean?”
“Ah. Like Umberto Nobile?”
“Who?”
“Forget about it, Italo. Let’s go see Luigi.”
Barely fifty feet outside the cableway station, there was an enormous rock-and-timber structure off to one side. This was the snowcat garage. In the distance, outside a glass door with the ski school logo, the instructors were loitering on wooden benches in the sun, all of them wearing red jackets and black pants. Italo raised one hand to catch someone’s attention. Rocco, on the other hand, looked down at his Clarks desert boots, which resembled two waterlogged sewer rats.
“Hey there!” shouted someone Rocco couldn’t really see because of the glare.
“Look, there’s Luigi. Let’s go,” said Italo, “he’s waiting for us.”
Walking laboriously through the deep snow, dressed in his loden green overcoat and gray corduroy trousers, under the inquisitive gazes of the skiers, Rocco finally made it to the door of the garage. Luigi Bionaz was there, waiting for them.
“Buon giorno, Commissario, don’t you remember me?”
The night before, Luigi’s face had been nothing but an indistinct mass beneath a heavy cap with earflaps. Now, in the light of day, Rocco was finally able to make out his features. The first thing Rocco noticed was his eyes, such a pale blue that they looked like those of a sled dog, a husky. High cheekbones, a strong jaw, and clean white teeth that seemed to be reflecting the surrounding snow. If Luigi Bionaz had been born in America, he could have become an action movie star. He had the face and he had the body—everything necessary to drive the women of half a hemisphere mad with desire.
“I heard. Leone. I’m so sorry. Was it an accident?” he asked as he rolled himself a cigarette.
Rocco didn’t say a word, and Luigi understood that this was not the time to ask any other questions. So he smiled and slapped his hand down twice on the seat of a 4x4 all-terrain vehicle. “No snowcat today. We’re going on this.”
It was a quad, a sort of four-wheeled motorcycle. Rocco had driven one many years before, on the dunes of Sharm el-Sheikh, in the famous motorcade through the desert. He’d overturned the quad and broken the phalanx bone of his wife’s middle finger.
“It’s faster,” Luigi added. “Theoretically, we aren’t allowed to take this thing onto the pistes.” He lit his cigarette, and the tip glowed red and dropped burning ashes onto the snow. “But you’re from the police, no? So who’s going to tell us what to do?”
“True. But you could have come all the way down and picked us up at the cableway terminal, no?” said Rocco. “My feet are drenched from walking up here!”
Luigi laughed merrily. “Dottore, you’re going to have to get some proper equipment for the mountains!” replied the head snowcat operator as he climbed onto the quad.
“So that I can look like a clown, the way they do?” and he pointed to the skiers with his nose. “Oh, give me a break.”
He got on behind Luigi. Pierron got on, too.
“Luigi, will this thing carry three people?”
Luigi ignored the deputy police chief’s question. He started the engine and, with a half smile and his cigarette clenched between his teeth, he revved it and took off.
The four studded tires got their teeth right into the snow and, leaving a huge spray of slush in the air behind them, shot the vehicle uphill toward the ski runs at a dizzying velocity. Rocco watched the vehicle narrowly miss skiers as needles of ice stung his face. The wheels drifted, then came back into alignment, only to veer suddenly as the vehicle slid across a sheet of ice. He could feel the quad wobble, career off to one side, roar, plunge into the snow, and then recover, only to lurch forward again in a terrifying plunge, worse than the pitching and yawing of a speedboat in an ocean squall.
Two minutes of breathtaking speed and they were at Cuneaz.
Rocco got off, brushing the snow off his overcoat. Then he looked at Luigi, who still had the cigarette dangling from his lips. “On the way back, I’m driving!” he said, pointing a finger at his chest.
“Why?” Luigi asked innocently. “Were you scared?”
“Scared? Of what? This is incredibly cool!”
Pierron felt quite differently about it. He merely shook his head in disapproval.
Cuneaz was a perfect little mountain village, with the small central piazza, the houses, the firewood cut and stacked neatly outside the homes. There were three huts. The finest was definitely the Belle Cuneaz, property of the unfortunate Leone Miccichè. It was closed. Luigi knocked on the door. Not thirty seconds had gone by before Luisa Pec’s sad face appeared in the glass window of the door, right behind the Visa and PagoBancomat credit card decals. Those were essential, because they allowed Rocco to keep his feet securely planted on the ground; otherwise, what with the lack of oxygen, the snowy dreamscape, the silence, the smoking chimney pots, and the wooden houses with their mysterious words written in gothic characters, he could easily have given in to the belief that he had fallen into a story by the Brothers Grimm.
Luisa welcomed Rocco and Pierron in and directed them to two Chesterfield settees.
“Now I’ll get you a little something to drink. It’ll warm you up, and it tastes good, too,” she said without a hint of a smile, as if she were reciting memorized lines.
The hut, as they called it up here, looked as if it had come straight out of an interior design magazine. The light pine boiserie on the walls, the stone floors interspersed with a time-burnished salvaged parquet, the vintage woodstove with the andirons. The lights, diffuse and warm. The stripped wooden tables and the excellent paintings on the walls, of late-nineteenth-century mountain landscapes. The bar was an antique Venetian apothecary’s counter, with shelves for bottles made from the traditional straw drying racks used in those valleys. Everything, from large to small, clearly stated: This renovation was hugely expensive!
And the result was spectacular.
The mistress of the house returned with a bottle of juniper berry grappa and two glasses. “But is it true that the police never drink when they’re on duty?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rocco said as he poured himself a glass of the liquor. Pierron, on the other hand, turned down the offer.
Luigi had lingered, standing, by the window, like a faithful servant. He was rolling a second cigarette and was running his tongue down the edge to seal it. Rocco looked at him. “Listen, Luigi, do you mind taking a walk? We have some things to talk about that are strictly between us.”
Luigi drank the grappa down with a jolt and left the chalet, striding briskly.
“This place is fantastic,” said Rocco, taking in the great room at a glance.
“Thanks,” Luisa replied. “Upstairs there are six bedrooms, and the restaurant’s through that door. I’ll show it to you later—it’s a nice dining room, especially because it has a plate-glass window that directly overlooks the valley.”
“It’s enormous,” Rocco noted. “A person would hardly think that up in the mountains . . .”
“This used to be the school. Until the war. Then the people abandoned Cuneaz, they moved down to Champoluc, and then . . .”
“Did you buy it?”
“Me? No,” Luisa replied with a smile. “It belonged to my grandparents. Let’s just say that it was a hovel; they used it as a stall. Hold on.” She got up, went to the facing wall, pulled down a black-and-white photograph that was hanging there, and brought it back to the deputy police chief. “You see? That’s how it was before we did the work.”
Rocco looked at the picture. A broken-down stone-and-timber hovel, vomiting straw out of the unglazed windows.
“Well, it’s unrecognizable. I can’t imagine how much money you spent.”
Luisa grimaced. “Don’t even mention it. Anyway, it was around four hundred thousand.”
The deputy police chief whistled like a teakettle.
“Look, before you ask, I’ll tell you myself. Anyway, everyone in town already knows. It was Leone’s money. It’s all due to him that the place looks the way it does.” Her chin began to quiver, her epiglottis emitted a rattle, and a fountain of tears poured out of Luisa Pec’s pretty blue eyes. Italo immediately lunged forward and offered her a handkerchief.
“Sorry . . . forgive me.”
“No, we owe you the apology. Unfortunately, this is the horrible work I do. I’m worse than a vulture. Oh, well . . .” and, with a smile, Rocco tossed back his glass of juniper berry grappa.
It was good. It slid like a caress down to his stomach and his icy feet.
“Luisa, I have to ask you something. Did Leone ever have problems with, let’s say, people from down south?”
Luisa sniffed, dried her tears, and handed the handkerchief back to Pierron. “What do you mean, ‘problems’?”
“Did he or his family, as far as you know, ever have any unclear dealings with Sicily? I’m talking about organized crime.”
Luisa Pec turned red. Her eyes opened wide. “Ma . . . Mafia?”
“You can call it that.”
“Leone? No, oh my God, no. His family makes wine. They’ve been in the wine business for a hundred years. A solid company. You see? That’s theirs,” she said, turning slightly to point to a wine rack full of bottles with a distinctive label. “Nice people. Never fought with them once.”
“Are you certain? Did he ever seem worried about anything? Ever get any mysterious phone calls?”
“No. I swear he didn’t.” Then a shadow passed over Luisa Pec’s face. Rocco knew how to read nuances, to say nothing of things marked with a highlighter. “What is it, Luisa?”
“A few days ago he talked on the phone to Mimmo . . . Domenico, his older brother. They argued. But I don’t know what it was about; maybe it wasn’t anything serious.”
“Maybe not.”
“But you can ask him yourself. They’re coming up for the funeral.”
“I know. In fact, they ought to be here already. It was a pleasure to see you again.”
“I’m here if you need me. Don’t you want to see the restaurant?”
“No. Too many beautiful things, one after another, can really do a number on your self-esteem,” Rocco replied with a smile and stood up. Pierron followed suit and gripped Luisa Pec’s hand.
“Buck up” was the only thing Italo said.
“Buck up?” the deputy police chief asked Italo as soon as they left the Belle Cuneaz. “Seriously? How do you come up with these things, Italo?”
“Poor thing. She was so upset, she seemed—”
“Whatever she seemed to you, you can keep it, think about it, swallow it, and take it home with you. Buck up. Would yo
u do me a favor! Come on, Luigi, let’s get this hunk of metal and take it back down the hill.”
“So you’re going to drive?” said the head snowcat operator, a dead cigarette butt in his mouth.
“You bet.”
A minute and forty-five seconds later, the quad driven by Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone braked to a halt in front of the snowcat garage.
“This thing is amazing.”
“When we hit the bump at the end of the piste, I’m pretty sure my feet went higher than my head,” said Italo Pierron, brushing snow off his down jacket.
“Because you lack confidence.”
“Well, see you around?” said Luigi as he headed off.
“See you around.”
Italo and Rocco were heading for the cableway station when a voice shouted out: “Dottore! Dottor Schiavone!”
Rocco turned around. From the little knot of ski instructors lounging on the benches he saw Caciuoppolo’s uniform emerge—Caciuoppolo, the skiing Neapolitan. He was waving one hand in the air to get his attention and smiling with his gleaming white teeth. He hurried up in his ski boots, his skis thrown over his shoulder. The deputy police chief walked toward him, both hands in his pockets—after the motorcycle ride at 6,500 feet above sea level, they felt like two blocks of ice.
“Caciuoppolo!” he shouted back, and a billowing puff of dense steam emerged from his mouth. “Why aren’t you with the forensics team?”
“Dottore!” The young man raised one hand to his forehead in a rough approximation of a military salute. “They weren’t crazy about my presence. It seems that we made a huge mess on the location.” Officer Caciuoppolo’s smile vanished, and his face turned sad, in spite of the burnt-sienna suntan. “Commissa’, I need to speak to you.”
“What about?”
“Not here.”
“Then where?”
“Were you heading back down to the village?”
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