Think Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  Sustrico accelerated with a skid on the loose gravel.

  Another Alfa 159 with Carabinieri written on the flank in white letters was blocking the road, its roof lights flashing on and off. Sustrico braked, got out of the car, and cupped his gloved hands to his mouth. ‘Pulenti!’ he shouted.

  A voice called back, telling him to wait by the car, and a couple of minutes later a bald, middle-aged carabiniere came tumbling out of the bushes without his cap.

  ‘Brigadiere!’ he said, not coming to attention, but touching his forehead with two joined fingers.

  ‘Report,’ Sustrico commanded.

  ‘We’ve got some witnesses, sir.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief!’ Sustrico breathed out like a locomotive letting off steam. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Two men and a dog, sir.’

  Antonio Marra was on his way to work when the action started.

  On the zigzag stretch of road between Sant’Anatolia and Vallo di Nera, a car with flashing roof lights came roaring up behind him, easing off just three or four metres short of his bumper, as he went into the sharp bend where the river horseshoed back on itself and the road was forced to do the same.

  ‘Fucking carabinieri!’ he cursed.

  Just the sight of the uniform or a patrol car would bring him out in a cold sweat. They’d already done him twice for speeding. That was the trouble with the Porsche. It attracted cops like flies to a dog turd.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

  He wanted to slow down, wanted to stop, but the carabinieri wouldn’t let him. They stayed right behind him, flashing their headlights and forcing him to up his speed. They’d be filming his car, noting the license plate, recording everything.

  Jesus, they were making him go faster!

  He came out of the bend, hit the straight and indicated right to show that he was going to stop, and what did they do? They went flying past, ignoring him totally. As he picked up speed again, he saw the Alfa, a kilometre ahead, signal right, then head off in the direction of Vallo di Nera.

  ‘Hope you die, bastards!’ he said out loud.

  As he turned into Marra Truffles, he wiped the sweat off his brow.

  Two men were waiting in the clearing, standing shoulder to shoulder like Siamese twins. One of them was smoking a cigarette. A tawny-coloured dachshund had made itself comfortable on a pile of leaves at their feet and seemed to be fast asleep.

  Cangio had seen them occasionally in the woods above Vallo di Nera, always together, and always with the same little sausage dog. Marzio Diamante, the senior ranger, had told him who they were, but he couldn’t recall their names.

  Both men were staring at something on the far side of the clearing.

  Cangio looked that way and saw a uniform and badge that he recognised – a crown, a golden eagle and the motto: Pro Natura Opus et Vigilantia. The corpse appeared to be sitting on the ground, arms by its sides, the palms face upwards, legs stretched out in front of the torso, the back propped up against a tree.

  Cangio’s stomach rolled.

  The head was missing—

  ‘Marzio?’ he managed to say.

  ‘Marzio Diamante,’ Sustrico confirmed.

  ‘Jesus holy Christ …’

  Cangio stared at the mess of blood on the shoulders and chest, the shredded fibres where the throat had been. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t look. He turned away: the severed head was peeping out of the undergrowth a metre away, both eyes wide open, the mouth a gaping—

  He gagged hard, clamping his hand to his mouth.

  ‘… point-blank range,’ Sustrico was saying. ‘Probably a sawn-off twelve-bore.’

  What had Marzio been doing there?

  ‘If you’re on patrol and you run into trouble,’ Marzio had always told him, ‘call me, the police and the carabinieri.’ That was the standard procedure, especially with poachers. Poachers were armed as a rule, which made them dangerous.

  Why hadn’t Marzio phoned?

  An answer leapt to mind straight off: poaching didn’t come into it.

  Sustrico’s voice sliced through his thoughts. He was talking to the witnesses.

  ‘What were you two doing here?’ Sustrico asked them.

  ‘It’s our job, brigadiere. We’re cavatori.’ One of the men held up a strange tool like a long walking stick with a two-pronged fork welded to the bottom end.

  ‘Cavatori?’ Sustrico echoed.

  ‘Diggers,’ Cangio explained. ‘Hunting for truffles.’

  ‘Names?’ Sustrico snapped.

  ‘Pastore, brigadiere. Manlio, that’s me, and that’s my brother, Teo.’

  ‘Whose land is this?’ Sustrico asked him.

  ‘It’s … well, it ain’t no one’s really, brigadiere. Our reserve starts over there,’ he said, pointing to a line of trees that were marked with big red crosses. ‘This bit here … well, it’s abandoned, like.’

  ‘So,’ Sustrico said, ‘what were you doing on it?’

  Manlio Pastore looked at his brother, sniffed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘We was following the dog.’

  Sustrico stared hard at him. ‘Following the dog? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The dog came charging into this patch here, and we came charging after.’

  ‘In the middle of the night?’ Sustrico challenged him.

  ‘We start work an hour before dawn, brigadiere. That’s the law, and the hound’s nose is sharpest then. The later you leave it, the trickier it gets. The smell of smoke and people cooking breakfast starts drifting up from the valley – it ruins everything.’

  Manlio Pastore dropped down on one knee and ran his hand along the lean flank of the dachshund. ‘She’s a good ’un,’ he said. ‘We’d already picked half a dozen scorzoni when we heard the shot.’

  ‘Tuber melanosporum Vitt,’ his brother added, in case they didn’t know what a scorzone was. ‘Black truffle, the winter and spring variety.’

  ‘You heard a shot, and so you came to look …?’ Sustrico let the question hang.

  Manlio Pastore stood up. ‘Not right away,’ he said. ‘Someone shooting guns off in the dark? Too much of a risk, ain’t it? Me an’ Teo hung back, kept out of sight. It was the dog that did it. We gave them half an hour, or more. As soon as we let her off the leash, she ran up here.’

  The only witnesses in the area hadn’t seen a thing. Or so they claimed.

  ‘She smelled the blood,’ said Teo. ‘Got a good nose on her, she has.’

  ‘When we saw the body, I called one-one-three on my mobile.’

  ‘It was five fifty-three when you spoke with me,’ said Sustrico. ‘Then you waited here until the squad car arrived. Did you hear anyone, or see anything?’

  Manlio Pastore shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Like what, brigadiere? I told you, didn’t I? We heard the gunshot, but we didn’t come running. Another cavatore got his throat slit out Preci way a few years back. Someone was stealing truffles on his patch, his wife said at the inquest. Whoever the fucker was, they … well, you lot never caught him, did you?’

  He looked steadily from Sustrico to Cangio, from carabiniere to park ranger, then back again, as if they were responsible for the murder of a truffle hunter and the failure to catch the person who had killed him.

  Cangio looked towards the body, and felt his stomach heave again.

  The light was brighter now, the headless corpse even more obscene than it had seemed before. The body had settled back against a big oak tree. The trunk was splattered with blood; fragments of white bone were sticking out of the bark.

  ‘Might he have stumbled on someone poaching on your reserve?’ Sustrico asked, nodding over towards the corpse.

  The two men exchanged a look.

  ‘Looks like it, don’t it?’ Manlio Pastore said.

  ‘One thing, though,’ his brother, Teo, added. ‘There ain’t a single hole—’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Sustrico cut in.

  ‘If they
was stealing truffles, they didn’t find one. Then again, the ranger might have copped them before they started—’

  ‘Pulenti!’ Sustrico called sharply to one of his juniors, showing everyone who was in charge. ‘Take their names, addresses, phone numbers. That’s all we can do until the RCS get here.’

  ‘The what?’ Manlio Pastore asked him.

  ‘The Regional Crime Squad,’ Sustrico said, and turned to the other carabiniere. ‘Carosio, go back up to the road and stand beside the patrol car. We don’t want them getting lost in the woods, do we?’

  Carosio looked at his wristwatch. ‘They’ll be stuck in the rush-hour traffic coming out of Perugia, brigadiere.’

  ‘Just do as you’re told,’ Sustrico ordered him. ‘The sooner they get here the sooner we can get back to work.’

  Special constable Pulenti talked with the Pastore brothers, taking notes, while Cangio waited with Sustrico, fighting hard to control his anger.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me straight away that he was dead?’

  Sustrico ignored the question. ‘When did you last see him?’ he asked.

  ‘Yesterday at lunchtime.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘The same as always,’ Cangio said.

  ‘Would you care to explain that?’

  Two more carabinieri came bursting out from the bushes.

  ‘Here comes trouble,’ Sustrico muttered as he approached them.

  The newcomers were immaculately turned out, wearing peaked caps encrusted with gold braid and silver laurels. Cangio had been expecting senior officers. What he hadn’t expected was that one of them would be female.

  Women were rare specimens in the armed military police force. Senior female officers were the rarest breed of all. From beneath her cap, a few stiff black curls escaped the bun at the nape of the woman’s neck.

  The man by contrast was short and skinny, as if he had enlisted in the hope that a uniform might add some lustre to his appearance.

  Cangio watched as Sustrico nodded towards the Pastore brothers, then glanced in his direction, speaking all the while to the two senior officers. They were both far younger than Sustrico, not much older than himself. Would the brigadiere tell them what he was doing there, Cangio wondered. After all, he wasn’t a witness or a relative of the dead man.

  He was the one whose body should have been slumped against that tree.

  The woman broke away, leaving her colleague with Sustrico.

  ‘So, you’re the partner of the victim,’ she said, her lipstick a shade too bright. She didn’t wait for confirmation. ‘You’ll need to come down to the station in Spoleto for questioning.’ She pursed her lips at him, but not in a smile. ‘We will be handling the investigation, under the local magistrate’s direction, of course. Does your partner’ – she blew out a sigh – ‘sorry. Did he have a desk, a locker, time sheets, that sort of thing?’

  ‘We keep logbooks.’

  ‘Good,’ she snapped. ‘Bring those with you. Yours, too. Files, phonebooks, diary, anything he may have left at work. We’ll expect to see you in’ – she turned her wrist and stabbed a glance at her watch, ‘two hours, max. We shouldn’t be here very long once the magistrate, pathologist and forensics team arrive. Please don’t keep us waiting. Understood?’

  She stared at him for some moments.

  ‘I know who you are,’ she said. ‘Sebastiano Cangio, right? The park ranger who unmasked a corrupt general of the carabinieri and beat a fearsome mafia clan singlehanded.’ She pushed a straggling curl back under her cap. ‘Do you know who blasted your partner?’

  Not killed, or murdered. Blasted.

  Was she as tough as she was trying to sound?

  ‘The same people who tried to kill me,’ he said. ‘The ’Ndrangheta.’

  She had a tough smile, too, and she turned it on him.

  ‘That’s one hell of a word. ’Ndrangheta. The newspapers love the sound of it, but I doubt they’ll be using it on this occasion. The ‘Ndrangheta?’ She paused, challenging him. ‘They’ll be keeping a low profile after their unlucky run-in with you, Ranger Cangio.’ She touched the peak of her cap. ‘I’ll see you in town. If you’re late, you’ll be hearing squad car sirens.’

  Sustrico had mentioned trouble coming when the RCS had arrived.

  Most of it seemed to be heading for him.

  TEN

  Simone Candelora was driving.

  He glanced in the rear-view mirror and lifted his foot off the accelerator. ‘Shit! Another one! And you’re chucking fag ends out of the car. Do we want to go to jail for starting a forest fire? Use the frigging ashtray!’

  The carabinieri squad car was too close for comfort, hugging the back bumper as they cruised around a blind bend, but the driver didn’t seem to be interested in them. He was looking for an opportunity to overtake.

  ‘That’s the second one in three minutes,’ Simone said, as the car went whizzing past, accelerating hard. ‘Two of them in uniform, the one in the back seat wearing a suit or something. What do you reckon? Magistrate? Doctor?’

  ‘Who cares,’ Ettore said, as the squad car disappeared up the road.

  Simone glanced at him. There was just no handling Ettore, no telling him. ‘You ought to start fucking caring, Ettò! The cops’ll be swarming all over the—’

  ‘What was I supposed to fucking do?’ Ettore shot back at him.

  There was no arguing with him, either.

  ‘Just watch those bloody fag ends. We need to be at the airport and get this business sorted out. Production’s up and running, now for the transportation.’

  Ettore lit another cigarette. ‘You reckon choosing Marra was a good idea?’

  Simone Candelora breathed in loudly through his nose. ‘We’re married to him, Ettò. Divorce is out of the question now. We need the sucker.’

  ‘There’s something about him, don’t know what it is exactly. He’s nervy, know what I mean? Got no fucking backbone. I wouldn’t want him speaking to the carabinieri while we’re away.’

  ‘Why would they waste time on him?’ Simone said. ‘They’ve got bigger things to think about this morning. Fuck me!’ he said, as another squad car went flying by. ‘We just move over and give them room.’

  ‘Fucking rubbish, those Alfas they use. Sloppy suspension.’

  ‘The driver even saluted. Did you see that?’

  ‘They’ve got a lousy day in front of them,’ Ettore said.

  At the Treponti turn-off, they headed left for Foligno and the regional airport outside Assisi.

  No one offered him a lift.

  He was going to have to walk back to where he’d left the Fiat 500.

  It was a couple of kilometres to the Vallo di Nera turn-off. Still cold, still dark, tall trees and dense woods pressing in on one side, the sheer cliff blocking out the sun on the other side where the road had been hacked out of the rock. Then something flashed in the darkness among the trees.

  He stopped dead, waiting to see if it would flash again.

  When nothing happened, he ducked his head and peered through the trees.

  The light blinked on again for an instant.

  A narrow track led into the forest, tyre treads clearly visible in the damp ground. Though overgrown, it seemed to have been used often enough.

  He listened for a moment, then he stepped onto the path and ventured into the woods. Trees hung overhead, blocking out the light. Bushes pressed in closely on both sides, swishing as they caught on his clothes. There were scuffs and footprints in the damp mould, some leading in, others coming out. He hadn’t taken more than twenty paces before he pulled aside a leafy branch, and there was the rear end of Marzio’s Land Rover.

  Had sunlight flashed off one of the wing mirrors?

  The Land Rover had obviously been hidden, but not that well. Of course, it all depended on why you were hiding it, and more to the point, who had hidden it: Marzio, or whoever had killed him?

&
nbsp; The carabinieri hadn’t spotted the vehicle, which wasn’t surprising. Sustrico and his men were out of their depth in the forest. He wondered whether he ought to tramp back through the woods and tell them about it.

  Before he did anything, he decided to check the interior, the glovebox in particular.

  He stretched out his hand to open the door, then stopped himself from touching it.

  There might be fingerprints.

  That’s what the carabinieri would be looking for.

  Then again, the Land Rover was full of fingerprints, his and Marzio’s. He slipped his hand inside his sleeve, reached in through the open window, prised up the interior door handle and swung the door open.

  The vehicle was ancient, rusty; the door let out a tired groan.

  The car keys were missing from the ignition.

  Had Marzio taken them with him?

  Still covering his hand with his sleeve, he pressed the glovebox button and wrenched it open. Marzio had kept an old Beretta M9 in there. Cangio was still unlicensed, a probationer for another year yet, but Marzio was entitled to carry a pistol and use it in performance of his duties. Given the sort of work they did, it seemed faintly ludicrous, and they had sometimes joked about it.

  Would you pull a gun on a tourist or a grey squirrel?

  But Marzio never went out on patrol without his pistol.

  Apart from an empty Coca-Cola can, the glovebox was empty.

  Had they killed Marzio, then taken the gun away from him?

  He walked back along the path to the road. He was filled with anger and resentment.

  They had shot the wrong man.

  ‘The ’Ndrangheta, you mean?’ he imagined Captain Grossi saying.

  He couldn’t face the idea of confronting her again just yet. He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, intending to call Sustrico and tell him where to find the Land Rover. While he searched for Sustrico’s number, he heard a noise in the air above him. Then he spotted the big, black helicopter, coming closer, circling overhead.

  Captain Grossi might be a pain, but she was evidently good at her job.