Think Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘The truffle season’ll soon be closing,’ Manlio said. ‘We’re putting some big ones aside for Christmas. Prices go soaring up then, see. They keep well in the freezer.’

  As he cleaned each truffle, Teo dropped it into a plastic bag.

  He nodded at Cangio, though he didn’t say a word.

  ‘I was wondering whether you might be able to help me,’ Cangio said.

  Manlio dropped his cigarette, and ground it out. ‘How’s that, then?’

  Cangio took a moment to gather his thoughts.

  ‘Marzio Diamante was working on something – an investigation, let’s call it. I don’t exactly know what it was about, because he didn’t tell me. But he left some notes behind which mention strange goings-on in the woods at night two years ago. Have you any idea what he might have been thinking of?’

  Manlio glanced at his brother. ‘Well, there’s strange, and there’s strange, ain’t that right, Teo?’ He turned back to Cangio. ‘You can find just about anything in the woods, if you look long and hard enough for it. There’s four-leafed clover, three-legged boars, two-legged thieves – them’s the poachers. What sort of “strange” was you thinking of?’

  ‘Marzio spoke to a number of people who’d reported seeing’ – he felt almost embarrassed as he put it into words – ‘elves and goblins … fairies, let’s say, wandering around in the dark and making a noise.’

  ‘There’s loads of fairies,’ Manlio said with a grin. ‘Quite a few whores n’all. But elves … that’s a tough one, that is.’ He turned to his brother. ‘Leave up on them for a bit, will ya! That bag’s about full to busting. You ever seen an elf, Teo? In the woods, like, when the lights go out?’

  Teo shook his head. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’d run a mile.’

  Cangio smiled, but only for a moment.

  Was that the point? Was that what those stories had been aiming at: making people run a mile in fright to keep them away from something they weren’t supposed to see? You wouldn’t tell anyone – most people wouldn’t – in case your wife or husband thought you were bonkers. The few people who had spoken to Marzio had been brave souls, indeed.

  ‘So, what does go on in the woods at night?’ Cangio insisted.

  ‘Your mate got murdered for a start,’ Manlio said. ‘We lock our doors, I’ll tell you that. The dog sleeps in the kitchen, safe behind bars. Worth a fortune, she is. We’ve lost … what is it, Teo, three dogs, in the last twenty years?’

  Teo nodded. ‘The last one was pupping, remember?’

  Manlio dropped down on one knee beside the dachshund, looking up at Cangio. ‘You know what a decent truffle hound’s worth? We wouldn’t sell her for … well, for nothing. We’ve turned down two thousand euro for a dog, we have. A bitch that’s carrying’s worth three times as much. The bastards steal them here, drive them up to France, then sell them there. Nasty things go on after dark around here, I can tell you. They’ll nick your dogs, your truffles, your tools, your car …’ He pointed at Teo and laughed. ‘They’d nick him, too, if he weren’t so friggin’ ugly!’

  ‘All this goes on in your truffle reserve?’

  ‘Not all the time, and not just on ours, but it happens.’

  ‘And that’s where Marzio’s body was found.’

  ‘No, no,’ Manlio corrected him. ‘He wasn’t found on our reserve. That bit of woods belongs to no one. It’s old common land, that. It’s nearer Marra’s reserve than it is to ours. Your mate was killed near Antonio Marra’s land. We only went in there because the dog ran off, and we chased after her.’

  ‘I know you’ve spoken to the carabinieri.’

  ‘Right bloody useful they are!’ Manlio snorted. ‘They seem to think we killed him!’

  ‘So, what do you think he was doing there?’

  ‘You were his partner,’ Manlio said. ‘What can you come up with?’

  ‘I wouldn’t even begin to guess.’

  Manlio Pastore rubbed his chin. ‘Whatever it was, he got his head blown off. That Marra’s jinxed, I tell you.’

  ‘Jinxed?’

  ‘Everything he touches turns to dust. Ain’t that right?’ he called to his brother. ‘Marra’s riding high now, but he won’t be up there for long, I betcha. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. Antonio Marra? I wouldn’t shake his hand for fear of catching the pox!’

  Cangio recalled what the clerk of court had told him.

  ‘Wasn’t he in trouble with the law a while back?’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ Manlio said. ‘Fiddling the books, fiddling the weights and measures, fiddling his taxes. Fiddling … that’s Antonio Marra for you. That, and worse, if you ask me.’

  ‘What could be worse?’

  ‘Someone reckoned that he was … planting.’

  Manlio said the word as if it burnt his tongue.

  ‘Planting what?’ Cangio asked him.

  ‘The cops were all over the place,’ Manlio went on, ‘but nowt ever came of it.’

  ‘What was he growing?’ Cangio insisted. ‘Cannabis?’

  The brothers looked at one another, then shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders, like puppets being jerked by the same string.

  ‘Talking of mysteries,’ Manlio said, reaching for a jam jar on a shelf. ‘What do you make of these, then?’

  Cangio held the jar up to the light.

  It contained two small golden tubes.

  ‘Fag ends,’ Manlio said. ‘We found them on our land one morning. Not far from where your mate’s body was found, as a matter of fact, though this was ages back. We’d never seen nothing like them before. Nor since, for that matter.’

  Cangio examined the contents of the jar more closely.

  There was a faded blue symbol printed on the cigarette paper.

  ‘Can I borrow these?’ he asked.

  ‘You can have them,’ Manlio Pastore said. ‘I should have thrown them out a long time ago. I just put them away in the jar, then forgot about them.’

  ‘When did you find them?’

  Manlio screwed his face up, thinking. ‘What was it, Teo, two years back?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Teo Pastore.

  Around the time of Marzio’s strange sightings, Cangio thought.

  Teo Pastore let out a strangled laugh.

  ‘Maybe them’s the fags that elves smoke,’ he said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The office was lit by candles giving off more smoke than light.

  Marra stared across the Ouija board, fear gripping his chest like a tightening rope.

  Maria Gatti’s eyes rolled up and disappeared inside her skull. When she wasn’t playing the medium, those coal black eyes were her best feature. Now they looked like marbles made of dull white glass.

  Like a witch in a kids’ cartoon, he told himself, though it was no joking matter.

  He knew how seriously Maria took her spirits. It wasn’t just a question of turning over the tarot cards and telling him what they meant, or didn’t mean. Not tonight. Tonight, she was planning to ask someone for help. Some spirit of hers, she said.

  A special one.

  Maria said they had to go further. Another step on the road to enlightenment, that was what she had said. This spirit of hers could help him.

  He didn’t care who answered his questions. He only wanted to know what to do for the best. Had to know. He’d decided already more or less, but he wanted Maria and her spirit to tell him he was doing the right thing.

  He glanced down at the Ouija board.

  Maria had drawn it herself, and she was no artist. If he hadn’t known her, he might have laughed and told her to stop fucking about.

  She was mumbling over the symbols, one finger pressed down on a silver coin.

  Thank God they were alone in the building. Simone and Ettore were in Rome on business. There was no one else, just him and her.

  A shiver shook his shoulders. The spooky set-up, the pong of perfumed candle wax, the tight knot in his guts, the sight of Maria in a tran
ce – it was all beginning to get to him.

  ‘Any luck?’ he whispered.

  She didn’t answer straight away, and, when she did, it didn’t sound like her.

  ‘We are not alone,’ she said in a wheezy, high-pitched groan.

  The silver coin beneath her forefinger made a sudden jerk across the Ouija board.

  Slowly, she moved her head from side to side.

  ‘Touch my hand,’ she moaned. ‘Make contact.’

  He had to stop himself from pulling back. Maria’s hand was slick with sweat, her flesh as cold and lumpy as a frozen turkey’s. Is she scared, too, he wondered. Who could be more frightening, he asked himself, the dead souls Maria knew, or the …

  The silver coin slid away across the table, pulling his hand and Maria’s with it, dragging him forward in his seat. It moved one way, then back again, and finally it settled on top of a letter.

  She’d moved it, hadn’t she?

  He stretched his fingers along the back of her hand, pressed down on her finger. Maria’s fingernail touched the silver coin and something like an electric shock went through him. Before he could make any sense of it, the coin was off again, moving this way and that, pulling their hands as if it had got them tied by a leash. He tried to pull away, but he couldn’t. The silver coin kept darting left, then right, then back again, as if it didn’t know its way round the Ouija board.

  Maria groaned, said something. A letter, a number, then something else he didn’t catch. Then off they went, shooting around the board again too fast for him to take it all in.

  He looked up, and a word hissed out her lips like a dying breath.

  ‘Rage … ’ she said, as the silver coin settled at the centre of the board. She pulled her hand away and said in her own voice: ‘It’s so fucking angry, Antò.’

  Marra shifted in his chair. ‘This spirit of yours—’

  ‘It isn’t him,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know who this is. Or what it wants …’

  Maria opened her mouth to speak again, but no words came out, just a low, hollow, rumbling sound, and the surface of the Ouija board went misty, blurry, as if a cloud of fog had come between them.

  He hoped to Christ she was taking the mick. That’s what came of trusting his secrets to a nutcase. He should have known better. Maria Gatti was just a silly slag who looked and dressed like the weirdo she liked to think she was. The sooner it was over, the sooner she was out of the building, the better he would feel.

  If only the ghost would say something useful.

  There might be better ways of doing it, after all; easier ways he hadn’t thought of. Ways where the risks were less. Some good argument that would convince them to get off his back and leave him alone.

  ‘Ask him what I ought to do,’ he said.

  Maria’s hand came down hard on his fingertips, crushing them against the silver coin and the Ouija board. ‘This is different, Antò,’ she whispered, her eyes wide open, staring at him. ‘This one … he doesn’t want to help you.’

  ‘Doesn’t?’ he said. ‘Or can’t?’

  Maria didn’t rise to the challenge.

  Her eyes rolled up into her head again, and a nasty gurgling, hawking sound erupted deep down in her throat. There was no mist this time, but he felt a shiver go through him all the same.

  ‘What do you wish to say?’ she said, but not to him.

  She was speaking in that strange wheezy voice again. It cracked in the middle, as if she couldn’t manage to say long words, big sentences.

  The coin started moving of its own accord, darting from letter to letter, pausing just an instant before it headed to the next one. Antonio Marra felt dizzy, trying hard to concentrate but unable to take in each letter or make sense of how it was moving, confused by the rapidity of it all, the sudden stopping and starting.

  ‘M-A-K-E M-E W-H-O-L-E,’ Maria spelled out.

  ‘Make me whole? What the hell’s it on about?’

  ‘Ask him yourself,’ Maria groaned, pointing at the coin in the centre of the board.

  He didn’t want to touch the coin, but what choice did he have? As Maria’s finger pressed down on his, it was as if a race had started. The silver coin started zigging and zagging across the table, taking them with it, Maria hardly able to say a letter out loud before they went shooting off to the next one.

  ‘C-R- …’ Maria said, her voice getting weaker and weaker as they worked through the alphabet, gasping for breath as she pronounced the last two letters. ‘… T-H.’

  CRUEL DEATH.

  Which death was the spirit on about?

  ‘Who is it?’ he said, his heart pounding like a jackhammer, as if it might come bursting out of his chest. ‘Is it Marzio Diamante?’

  ‘It isn’t him,’ Maria said.

  He felt relieved for an instant, then panic swept over him. He wanted to get up and run, but his legs felt like two lead weights, his hands were trembling, he felt light-headed.

  If it wasn’t Marzio …

  ‘Get rid of him,’ he hissed. ‘Maybe yours won’t come while this one’s hanging round.’

  Were ghosts like people at a supermarket checkout, waiting their turn while the customer in front paid his bill?

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, and she sounded scared. ‘He won’t go away.’

  Marra wiped his damp left hand on his jacket.

  ‘Ask him what he wants …’

  The silver coin shot across the table, dragging his finger with it, pulling him left and right, this way and that way, as Maria made out the words. Then the coin shot back to the centre of the board, and let go of his finger. It might sound stupid, but that was how it felt. One instant, he was fixed there, like a pin to a magnet, the next, the magnet had released him.

  ‘Blood,’ she said. ‘It wants your blood.’ Her voice was back to normal now, though there was a tremor in it. She sat there staring at him over the Ouija board.

  ‘Did you … see it, Antonio?’

  Noises in the room that he had never noticed before – the water pipes, the woodworm in his desk, the rattle of a glass pane in the wind blowing down from the mountains – sounded so loud and so threatening, he wanted to plug his ears and shut them out.

  ‘Did you?’ he shot back.

  She looked down at the Ouija board, refusing to meet his eyes.

  ‘What was it, Maria? Tell me!’

  She shook her head, didn’t speak at once. ‘I … don’t … know …’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he shouted, losing it.

  Maria placed her hand on his. It felt like the hand of a statue – heavy, cold and lifeless. Pearls of sweat broke out on her brow and covered her forehead. She gasped for breath.

  ‘It had no head,’ she said. ‘No arms, no legs. Just a blood-soaked torso.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  The phone call came at ten o’clock that morning.

  Normally, something like that would happen at night, which meant having to deal with an irate farmer over the phone when you couldn’t do a thing to help him. If the farmer phoned at the crack of dawn instead, you had to handle the anger of a man who’d seen the damage and counted the dead, while you tried to tell him why it had happened, and stop him from trying to do anything about it.

  ‘Last night?’ Cangio asked. ‘What time?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ the man said calmly. ‘I wasn’t here.’

  It was hard for Cangio to keep the surprise out of his voice. ‘You left them alone on the mountainside at night?’

  ‘No, no,’ the man said. ‘I left my man and five watchdogs.’

  Cangio would have liked to know more, but the farmer came to the point straight away. ‘Can you come over now?’ he said. ‘I need you to file your report with the local police before I can put in my insurance claim.’

  It took him twenty minutes to drive down from the ranger station near the summit of Monte Coscerno to Sant’Anatolia di Narco, then turn right on the Valnerina road and follow the river north towards the spot
where Marzio Diamante’s body had been found in the woods above Vallo di Nera.

  It was the second time he had been called to the area in the last week. And yet, there was clearly no connection between what had happened last night and the fact that Marzio had been murdered there not long before. The farmer had arranged to meet him at the iron bridge that spanned the River Nera. As Cangio turned off the main road, he saw a man on the far side of the bridge, a wooden staff in one hand, a black cigar in the other.

  He pulled the car over onto the grass verge, and got out. ‘Signor Tulli?’

  The man held out his hand. ‘Tommaso Tulli.’

  ‘Sebastiano Cangio.’

  Tulli held onto his hand with a strong grip, and didn’t let go immediately. ‘The ranger who likes wolves? I’ve heard about you,’ he said.

  ‘Good things, I hope?’

  Tulli took the cigar from his lips and crushed it beneath his boot. ‘They sounded OK yesterday,’ he said. ‘Today, I’m not so sure.’

  He turned away on a path that followed the curving meander of the River Nera through lush green meadows. The rippling chalk stream was renowned for its transparency and for its rainbow trout.

  ‘This is my land,’ Tulli told him, waving his hand across the landscape, taking in everything from the river on the right to where the woods began on the slope of the hill which would soon become Mount Bacugno. It seemed indecent to own such a vast tract of such immense beauty. ‘The damned police have been trouncing all over it for the last few days, but even they couldn’t have guessed that this was going to happen.’

  They passed a weeping willow which trailed in the trout stream, and the scene came into view, the green meadow littered with pale white corpses which were spattered with blood. A full scale massacre, thirty carcases, or maybe more. Dead sheep, throats gouged, stomachs ripped open. From an ethologist’s point of view, there was a lot to admire in what he saw. It was the lethal efficiency of the attack that was so remarkable. So much damage, so efficient and remorseless.

  It had probably been done in ten minutes, or less.