Think Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  He phoned Sustrico anyway, told him about the vehicle.

  ‘There should be a service pistol in the glovebox,’ he said, before he ended the call.

  They’d soon find out that there wasn’t.

  ‘Signor Marra! Signor Marra!’

  Rosanna’s eyes were wide with fright, her fist pressed to her mouth, as if to stop herself from crying.

  ‘Signor Marra, have you heard the news? They’ve killed a ranger!’

  He wasn’t sure what his secretary had said. A ranger, a stranger?

  He wasn’t sure how he had responded, either. Yes, he’d heard, or no, he hadn’t.

  He rushed into his office, closed the door, and reached for the cigarettes he kept in a drawer for visiting customers. He fumbled with the packet, fumbled with the lighter, managed to get one lit at last, took a puff, and started to cough.

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  He went to the window, opened it for a bit of air.

  He heard the put-put-put coming from the Perugia end of the valley this time, and he stood there watching, waiting until he saw what was making the noise.

  A tiny black dot in the sky, growing bigger every second.

  It travelled straight for a while, coming right at him, then suddenly it swerved away in a wide circle right over his head, sweeping out over the woods and the reserve, hovering for a bit at one point, then making another sweep, and then another sweep after that one.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  It was like the last time, six months before. There’d been helicopters circling over the mountains and forests for days when that park ranger had been shot, and a carabiniere who’d been double-dealing with the ’Ndrangheta had been arrested. He’d spent most of the time holed up in the office, listening to the racket overhead, praying for all he was worth that the cops would give it up and go home fast.

  It was the truffle reserve he was worried about, the land around it …

  He started mouthing silent prayers again.

  They had these gadgets now, infrared, or ultra-something, X-ray cameras, lasers, and that. They could spot all sorts of things from the air. Anything that was hotter or colder than it ought to be showed up in brilliant colour. They could tell where the grass had been recently cut, or the earth had been moved.

  The helicopter made another couple of circuits, then headed north again.

  He felt giddy, couldn’t stand up. Thank God, Simone and Ettore had things to attend to that morning. He wouldn’t have wanted his partners to see him in this state.

  He sat down at his desk and tried to light another cigarette.

  His hands were shaking with fright.

  ELEVEN

  Ranger Station, Mount Coscerno.

  Cangio filled a cardboard box with the clutter from Marzio’s desk.

  Then he turned to the metal filing cabinet.

  It looked more like an improvised kitchen than a piece of office equipment, the top littered with stuff for making coffee: a blue Gaz camp stove, a smoke-stained aluminium Moka, jars of coffee and sugar, a tin of powdered milk, some cups and spoons, and a packet of biscuits.

  The filing cabinet consisted of four sliding drawers: one for filed reports and orders, a drawer for him and one for Marzio. Marzio’s drawer contained a clean, folded shirt, a change of socks and nothing else; the drawer at the bottom was the only one that could be locked. It was where Marzio kept the service pistol when he wasn’t on duty. Marzio kept the key, too. It was probably in one of the pockets of his uniform.

  Cangio thought it over for a moment.

  Breaking and entering wasn’t his forte, but he had to open that drawer. The Beretta pistol might be safely tucked away in the drawer, not stolen from the glovebox of the Land Rover, as he had presumed.

  He took a metal paper clip from his own drawer, straightened it out, then formed a hook at one end. He got down on his knees and did some jiggling. The lock turned a bit, but still the drawer wouldn’t open. He tried again, then gave the drawer a sudden jab with the heel of his hand. The drawer slid out a bit on its rollers. Not all the way, but far enough for him to reach inside and feel around. The only thing that he found inside the drawer was a pale green file.

  There was no sign of the pistol.

  Whatever Marzio had been doing in the woods, he had gone out armed and ready for trouble.

  The file was government-issue, the sort they used for storing tourist information, statistics regarding wildlife, landslides, poaching, forest fires, and all the other things that could, and did, often happen in the woods and mountains, which put the public at risk.

  Why hadn’t Marzio kept it in the top drawer with the rest of the files?

  Cangio turned it over, read what was written on the cover, and then had to read it again to be sure that he had read it correctly.

  Beneath the printed title, Ministero delle Politiche Agricole e Forestali – Corpo Forestale dello Stato, Marzio had added a note in large block capital letters.

  STRANGE SIGHTINGS IN THE PARK.

  The file was discoloured, as if corroded by contact with the metal cabinet. He felt grains of dust beneath his fingertips as he opened it, and wondered how long it had been lying there. There wasn’t much inside the file, just seven sheets of paper, two typed, the others written out in Marzio’s bold, distinctive hand.

  The first page was dated 02/06/2012, which made it more than two years old.

  A doctor with a troublesome prostate had been called out the night before by a patient who lived near Vallo di Nera. Along the way, the doctor had stopped the car to relieve himself. While urinating at the roadside, he had heard strange voices in the woods, speaking a language he had never heard before, then high-pitched squeals of laughter. ‘Dim lights were dancing through the trees,’ the doctor stated. His patient had told him later that other people living in the area had heard those sounds and seen those glimmering lights.

  The general opinion in Vallo di Nera was that the creatures were elves.

  Elves?

  As if witches and black magic weren’t enough!

  Weren’t elves supposed to live in England or Germany? Had they come over on holiday to sample the woods in Italy? The only elves that Cangio had ever seen were creatures dreamt up in Hollywood. Was that what happened? People went to see a fantasy film, and next thing they were seeing elves all over the place?

  At the bottom of the page, Marzio had noted that the doctor was a respected professional, a teetotaller who drank only mineral water on account of his delicate constitution, but he could offer no rational explanation for what the doctor might really have seen.

  There was a bit more detail in the next account that Marzio had recorded.

  A week or so later, a middle-aged tourist had crashed her car one night on the road outside Vallo di Nera, and died not long after in the hospital in Spoleto following a massive heart attack. Three tiny, curved figures had darted across the road in front of her, she managed to say. She had lost control of the car while trying not to hit them. Before she died, she had told her daughter that they looked like gnomes or goblins.

  ‘The first goblins ever sighted in Umbria,’ Marzio had written neatly at the foot of the page, though there was no indication whether he had taken the report seriously.

  Elves and goblins?

  He filled the Moka with water, spooned coffee into the filter, then lit the Gaz burner. While waiting for the coffee to percolate, he started on the biscuits as he began reading the next file. He hadn’t had time for breakfast after Sustrico phoned that morning.

  He finished off the packet, and hoped it would help him get through the rest of a day that promised to be troublesome. What had the female carabiniere captain said – something about seeing his face in the local newspapers? As if he was seeking attention. If that wasn’t trouble, he didn’t know what was. Those two weren’t going to listen if he tried to tell them what he thought had really happened, Lucia Grossi had already made that clear.

  And if they saw that file o
f Marzio’s …

  ‘Elves don’t blow people’s heads off with shotguns,’ he said out loud.

  He topped up his coffee cup, read the next case, and the one after that.

  They were all pretty much of a muchness, all recorded in the vicinity of Vallo di Nera, and all within the space of a month or so, more than two years earlier.

  Two poachers netting birds had heard ‘strange noises’ in the forest. A band of men hunting wild boar had let off shots when something moved in the bushes, then taken fright when a tiny man jumped out and screamed at them for firing on him, shouting words that might have been curses, though the hunters hadn’t understood a thing he had said. Then two more ‘little men’ had run out of the bushes and dragged the angry one away, the hunters added.

  He turned to the last sheet of paper.

  An old man riding a bicycle at night had been drawn off the road by three lights flashing on and off in the woods. Will-o’-the-wisps, he had called them. And when he had fallen off his bike, instead of a helping hand, he had received a smart slap on the cheek from Jack-o’-Lantern himself. There had been wild laughter as he abandoned his bike and made his escape.

  What had Marzio made of it?

  It all seemed so ridiculous. Cangio couldn’t believe that Marzio would take it seriously, and yet for more than a month he seemed to have done so. Then, at some point, the reports had stopped. Had he started collecting local tales and legends, only to tire of the subject, put the material away in a drawer and forget all about it? Cangio managed a smile. Had Marzio locked the file away for fear of looking like a fool?

  And yet …

  There was something in the tales, however, apart from the mystery of what was described, that made them seem credible. The recurring theme for starters. Three elves, three lights, three curved figures. Each witness reported the same thing, or at least something similar. And there was Vallo di Nera, too. The small town had been mentioned in at least four of the reports. But then, suddenly, the reports had stopped on 09/07/2012. There’d been no more sightings in two years, none that Marzio had bothered to make a note of, anyway.

  He put the file back in the bottom drawer and closed it.

  If Lucia Grossi thought the ’Ndrangheta was a fairy tale, what would she make of Marzio’s hobgoblins?

  He picked up Marzio’s effects and headed for town.

  Cangio looked around the office.

  It had changed a lot since the last time he’d been there.

  A crucifix was hanging on the wall behind Sustrico’s chair, along with a large framed photo of the new pope. Between the phone and the computer stood a plastic bottle in the form of the Virgin Mary wearing a blue plastic crown. Holy Water from Lourdes, the label said. Next to the bottle was a bronze bust of Padre Pio, a plaster figurine of the Sacred Heart on the other side.

  Was Sustrico warding off evil spirits these days?

  He had never considered it from the brigadiere’s point of view. Sustrico’s life had been turned upside down by what had happened six months before. How did a carabinieri brigadiere address a once-mighty carabinieri general who was under arrest for corruption and disgracing the uniform that they both wore?

  Lucia Grossi was sitting behind Sustrico’s desk, a slimline laptop in front of her, typing up Cangio’s statement as he made it. Captain Geremia ‘Jerry’ Esposito sat beside her on a wooden chair, checking his partner’s spelling. Sustrico had evidently handed over his office and made himself scarce. Cangio imagined the brigadiere, sitting somewhere with a mug of coffee and a smoke, glad to leave a difficult investigation to the two young, fast-track RCS officers.

  They’d been going through the material that Cangio had brought down from the ranger station. It didn’t amount to much. There was Marzio’s logbook, his address book, a time sheet which recorded when he had been on duty over the last month, framed photos of his wife and their two grown-up daughters, plus a larger one of little Matteo when he was just a few days old. Matteo was Marzio’s only grandchild. At least, thought Cangio, the only one that Marzio was ever going to see.

  That thought had stuck in his throat as he was carrying the box out to his car.

  The service Land Rover had been found and impounded. They were dusting it down for fingerprints, taking DNA swabs, Jerry Esposito told him, so Cangio would be obliged to use his own transport for the next few days.

  ‘Did you find the Beretta?’ he asked. ‘He always keeps it in the glovebox.’

  No gun had been found in the Land Rover.

  ‘Model?’

  ‘It’s an old M9.’

  ‘So,’ Esposito concluded, ‘the killer’s got a pistol now, as well.’

  Cangio didn’t say a word about the file he had chosen not to bring along.

  He didn’t want to make a laughing stock of Marzio, or set the carabinieri on a time-consuming investigation that would take them nowhere. The file was old, probably irrelevant.

  An ’Ndrangheta killer had nothing in common with the characters in fairy tales.

  Even these two were bound to see it eventually.

  ‘How come you do all the late shifts?’ Lucia Grossi asked him, flicking through the pages of Marzio’s logbook.

  ‘Marzio was a family man. I’m a nightbird.’

  Jerry Esposito pounced. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I like being out at night.’ Cangio said. ‘I spend the late shift watching wolves.’

  ‘Watching wolves?’ Esposito echoed.

  ‘I’m working on a pamphlet, describing the wolf population in the national park. For visitors, you know?’

  ‘There’s nothing here for the last three days,’ Lucia Grossi said, holding up Marzio’s logbook as if it were a prize piece of evidence at a trial.

  ‘We tend to write a summary report at the end of each week. My log’s in the same state. As a rule, I write it up on a Sunday—’

  ‘It sounds most sloppy,’ Jerry Esposito cut in.

  ‘Until this happened,’ Cangio told him, ‘the only recent drama we’ve had was me being shot by a member of the ’Ndrangheta—’

  ‘That’s history,’ Lucia Grossi reminded him sharply. ‘It’s this week we’re interested in. What has Marzio Diamante been doing this week?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Cangio admitted. It sounded evasive, even to his own ears. ‘Still, two rangers, one shot, one dead …’

  ‘How would you describe your professional relationship with the deceased,’ Lucia Grossi asked him, sounding like a prosecutor in a courtroom.

  ‘We were friends, colleagues …’

  ‘Friends and colleagues sometimes argue.’

  ‘Marzio never argued with anyone in his life,’ Cangio said emphatically, though he had no way of knowing whether what he said was true. He hadn’t known Marzio Diamante eight months before, and Marzio wasn’t exactly an open book.

  ‘So what was he doing on his own in the woods?’

  At night, and carrying a pistol, Cangio added mentally.

  ‘Wasn’t there a note on his desk?’ she continued. ‘A phone number where he could be contacted?’

  ‘His mobile phone wasn’t in the office.’

  ‘It wasn’t found on the body, either. Would he go into the woods without his phone?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Cangio admitted.

  ‘If there was an emergency, he’d have called you, surely?’

  There was a hint of suspicion in the way she tagged on ‘surely?’ And yet, it renewed the doubts in his own mind, too. Why hadn’t Marzio called to tell him what was going on? Had it been something private? Something personal?

  ‘There was no emergency,’ Cangio insisted. ‘He would have let me know.’

  ‘What other reason could there be, Cangio? You have an idea, I bet.’

  ‘I can’t help you on that point,’ he said.

  Lucia Grossi held his gaze for some moments, then dropped her eyes to the keyboard and started typing again.

  Esposito pointed something out on the scre
en. ‘A comma’s missing,’ he said. Then he turned to Cangio. ‘Let’s get this straight. Marzio Diamante was doing something you didn’t know about. Did he often act on his own initiative?’

  Cangio shook his head. ‘Not really.’

  What would they say if he told them he’d been watched by the ’Ndrangheta, and that Marzio had probably walked into a trap that was intended for him?

  ‘As I said before, Marzio avoided the night shift. He wasn’t keen to go out on his own after dark.’

  ‘And what do you make of that?’

  ‘Something unusual happened that made him behave in an unusual way.’

  ‘Stop being evasive,’ Lucia Grossi snapped.

  ‘Someone got it wrong last night,’ Cangio said.

  ‘Who got what wrong?’

  ‘If Marzio took a call that was meant for me, and went to check …’

  ‘Without telling you,’ Esposito added on, while Grossi wrote it all down.

  Cangio nodded. ‘They killed him by mistake. That’s my take on it.’

  ‘They?’ Jerry Esposito frowned.

  ‘The ’Ndrangheta.’

  ‘He told me the same thing this morning,’ Lucia Grossi said quietly, as if she and Jerry Esposito were alone in the room. ‘He seems to think his partner caught what was coming his way. They saw a uniform, and …’

  Esposito let out a shrill whistle, his mouth twisted in a sarcastic grin. ‘Seb Cangio vs. the Rest of the World, eh? Ten minutes of fame, then the spotlights go out.’ He sat back, stretched his arms, let out a sigh. ‘I could understand some hot-headed carabiniere taking a shot …’

  For a moment he was tempted to damn the consequences and walk out of there. Instead, he said. ‘That’s a grave accusation you’re making, Captain Esposito. Would anyone in the carabinieri want me dead?’

  ‘General Corsini, perhaps? I don’t imagine he’s too pleased—’

  Lucia Grossi intervened. ‘OK, cool it,’ she said. ‘Let’s take a look at your theory, Cangio. Why would the ’Ndrangheta want to eliminate you?’

  Cangio was silent for some moments. ‘They were moving into Umbria. The region was being rebuilt after an earthquake, as you know. There was big money involved, and they wanted to cash in on the emergency. Umbria’s off the beaten track, the local police know nothing about large-scale organised crime. They must have thought it would be easy …’