The Dark Valley: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 2)

by Valerio Varesi

  “It’s not so easy. It seems everybody is caught up in it.”

  “But not you, and yet…”

  “Angela, it’s hard to remain indifferent when you’re faced with the ruin of people you’ve known, people who speak the same dialect.”

  “Tell the truth. It’s the idea you had of the place that’s ruined. That’s what’s so upsetting.”

  Soneri refrained from telling her about the doubts concerning his father planted in him by Manuela. He said nothing for a few moments, then said, “The mistake was to come back.”

  “Maybe it would be different if I were there.”

  “Maybe,” Soneri said. She had contacted him at the very moment when he was at his lowest ebb, and before he had the chance to change his mind, she grabbed at his half-invitation. “I’ll turn up one of these evenings.”

  “I should tell you that the Scoiattolo is a fairly basic sort of place. There are cabinets beside the beds and a San Martino over the headboard, and that’s the lot.”

  “I’ll do my best to carry out an exorcism.”

  “Try to speak to the Rodolfis’ lawyer.”

  “I’ll try, but he too seems to have disappeared.”

  The commissario switched off the phone and walked towards the piazza. From a distance he could distinguish the yellow outline of the carabiniere H.Q., where there seemed to be a great deal of movement. As he approached, he recognised the journalists hanging about waiting for someone to invite them in. In front of the Rivara, he ran into Maini.

  “It’s all coming to the boil, but it’s not quite at boiling point yet,” Soneri said.

  “There’s still some way to go. I doubt if they know where to start,” Maini said, nodding in the direction of the police station.

  “They can hardly interrogate the whole village.”

  “Where would you start?”

  The commissario shook his head. “I don’t know. Every single person is a potential suspect, and each one of them could have more than one motive. There are all kinds of hatreds, passions … I’d want to talk to those who know about the skeletons in the various cupboards.”

  “In fact they’ve been to see Don Bruno.”

  “Of course, the priest. They always know a great deal, priests, but I’m not sure he’s the most helpful starting point.”

  “They can’t even find a wall to bang their heads against.”

  “Who’s in charge of the interrogations?”

  “The new man. Bovolenta I think he’s called.”

  “There’s a unpleasant atmosphere about the place,” Soneri said, looking around at the stalls scattered across the piazza. “Do you think something’s going to explode before the day is out?”

  “Might do, but I wouldn’t put money on it.”

  Both men observed the village in the bright light of the autumn sun. The fine vapour rising from the dampness of the woods gave the countryside a mellow haziness, but it seemed as though a menacing rumble, the first sign of an impending storm, could be heard in the background.

  “Who has managed to save themselves from the disaster?” the commissario wondered. Maini failed to understand, so he went on, “I mean, who brought up the vehicles to empty the factory?”

  “Who do you think? The banks. Who else would have the power to get the place opened? It’s not likely to be a simple peasant or any one of those who bought the bonds. They tell me there’s not a single cotecchino left inside.”

  A siren blared out and seconds later a carabiniere car, travelling at high speed, raced across the piazza. Some people came from the same direction, walking in small groups as though after Mass. Delrio, in plain clothes, was among them.

  “The mayor has handed in his resignation,” he announced, with a hint of nervousness in his voice.

  “Was that him in the police car?”

  Delrio nodded. “He’s been receiving threats.”

  “Because of that rumour?” Maini said.

  Delrio nodded again, leaving Soneri once more with the disagreeable feeling of being an outsider which had haunted him since his arrival in the village. “What rumour?”

  “A bit of nonsense,” Maini said. “They say he has managed to get back the money he had lent the Rodolfis. There’s also a story that he’s had one of the flats in the new development assigned to him, but in his daughter’s name.”

  “Mere gossip,” Delrio said. “In this village, every passing rumour immediately becomes a gospel truth.”

  “It’s not only the mayor. There are others, some councillors, people in the same party as the mayor, who are supposed to have got their money out in time,” Maini said.

  “Aimi acted as a lightning conductor. They needed someone to blame, so they chose him as being a public figure. Nowadays, anyone in politics is automatically considered a thief,” Delrio said.

  “The real thieves are the bankers. Right up till yesterday, they were telling us the Rodolfis were in great shape, and they carried on selling bonds with a promise that it was good deal.”

  “People have piles of them this high,” Delrio said, holding his hand about a metre off the ground. “Cartloads of waste paper.”

  “Are we supposed to believe it’s pure chance they’re closed today?” Maini said. “This morning there was a queue of people demanding their money back. Some of them still believe they’re going to get it.”

  “I’d like to see any of them having the courage to show their faces in public now,” Delrio said.

  “Oh, they’ll show their faces alright, only they won’t open their mouths,” Soneri said, lighting another cigar.

  The other two remained silent, contemplating the truth in Soneri’s words. “I suppose that’s right,” Maini said. “The majority will say nothing – out of a sense of shame. They’ll prefer to face their ruin in silence rather than protest and let everyone know they’ve been duped.”

  The image of Sante, with all that repressed venom and resentful silence broken only by occasional snarls, sprang into Soneri’s mind. He feared that years later the accumulated hatred would, like some toxic liquid corroding its container bit by bit, break out as an illness.

  A few minutes later, when he found Sante standing beside his table, Soneri looked at him more closely than usual. Sante noticed this.

  “My face is a mess. I haven’t slept for a week,” Sante said.

  Soneri was tempted to say that his health should always come first, but he desisted.

  “Ida cooked the russolas you picked. She’s got plenty of time on her hands.”

  It was only then that Soneri realised that the dining room was empty. He felt uncomfortable in that large room full of tables with no guests. Only half the lights were on, and the semi-darkness of the environment made it resemble an establishment in a seaside resort at the end of the holiday season, as the first storms were brewing.

  After the savarin di riso, the mushrooms were brought in. Their taste was familiar and reawakened memories of his mother’s cooking. A wave of emotion seemed to swell up from his stomach, carrying him back to a place he had no wish to recall for fear of falling into a displeasing state of melancholy. Those flavours reunited him, mouthful by mouthful, by methods beyond the reach of reason, with the past. Help came in the substantial form of Sante, who sat down on the chair opposite him.

  “I expected a revolt, but there’s actually less disturbance than on public holidays,” Soneri said.

  “What good has it done those who’ve got themselves all worked up? It only draws attention to the fact that they’ve been screwed. At least I want to avoid that. And anyway, they’re all away.”

  “Who’s away?”

  “The directors of the company. All close friends of Paride. A gang of thieves.”

  “Until a short while ago, no-one would say a word against them,” Soneri said.

  Sante shrugged and Soneri noticed the exhaustion written on his pallid face. “I always heard the Rodolfis spoken of in reverential tones. Never a word of criticism, even when there
were good grounds. It seemed there was nobody like them,” Soneri said.

  “Money puts a glitter on even the ugliest things. They’ve always been bandits.” Sante spoke angrily, with a break in his voice, as though he were holding back a howl of pain. “There’s no other way if you really want to make a lot of money, is there?”

  The commissario was inclined to agree, but said nothing.

  “Bandits! And we all knew it all along. The number one was Palmiro himself. In the days of Fascism, he earned himself stacks of money by working on the black market. He used to go down from the mountains to La Spezia and buy up salt, fish, sugar and coffee which he then sold here at exorbitant prices. He knew the mountain paths like the back of his hand, so there no chance of him ever getting caught.”

  “It’s still going on, but it’s the Arabs now and it’s not salt they’re selling,” Soneri said.

  “Do you think I don’t know? It’s the same old story, with the difference that in the old days everybody knew who was coming and going on Montelupo with their black-market goods, while now there’s no telling who’s crawling about. Nobody knows, not even those who are squatting in the mountain huts or in the old drying rooms … well, maybe one person knows, the Woodsman.”

  “A childhood friend of Palmiro’s.”

  “But he never dabbled in the black market. He never speculated on hunger, he never bought stolen pigs to make prosciutto, he never fed them on rubbish. After the war, you could get away with anything.”

  “I’m sure that’s all true,” Soneri said, becoming irritated. “But the fact remains that you all gave him your money. If he was really the bandit you now say he was…”

  Sante sighed deeply, his great paunch bumping into the table. “We got along in business matters. He’d keep his bargain, as long as he was sure there was something in it for him.”

  “And that something was that he could fleece the lot of you.”

  “No, no. At the beginning, he needed to expand, to extend his salame factory, and then he wanted to pull it down and build a new one on the present site, because the old one in the village was no longer big enough. The banks would only give him so much, because most of his dealings were under the counter, and so the turnover was not impressive. That’s why he turned to the people in the village.”

  “And you all opened your wallets. If he’d asked for your wife, you’d have handed her over as well.”

  Sante grimaced, but did not demur. He clearly had other thoughts in his mind. “In the early stages, he didn’t go to every house because some people had hardly enough to buy themselves white bread. He only dealt with those who had managed to put something aside, and in exchange he promised to see their children alright. Sometimes, he arranged for them to study free with the priests in the city, but then when conditions in the village improved, he widened his circle. He got them to hand over anything they’d hidden under the bed, but he also took them on at the factory and guaranteed them a fixed wage. It was a perfect set-up.”

  This account worried Soneri. Could his father have been caught up in this web? Manuela’s words continued to nag at him, but Sante’s voice dragged him back to the present.

  “You see, Palmiro was one of us. We spoke in dialect. He’d a good head for business, but he also knew how to rear pigs and produce high quality prosciutto. We knew what he was made of, but we could never work out what Paride was about. We had to address him as Dottore. He’d been to university and considered himself a cut above us all. He did favours for politicians, and they repaid him in kind. The money was manipulated in ways we couldn’t understand,” Sante lamented. “Our money.”

  The issue, as far as Soneri was concerned, was of a different order. He was not even sure how to define it. Honour? Principles? The integrity of the image of his father? A multitude of thoughts revolved in his mind, and they left him convinced he could no longer remain inactive in the story unfolding in the village. It seemed to him he had uncovered an old debt, and had no choice but to repay it.

  Taking advantage of a moment’s silence, he looked across to the door which opened onto the courtyard on the Montelupo side and saw the mountain bathed in the bright, early-afternoon light. He felt the need to get out of the semi-darkness of the room he was in. Sante was standing in front of him, cowed and stooped, like an old chestnut tree weighed down by rainfall. Soneri sprang to his feet, but Sante remained immobile, shackled to a vision of his own ruin. As the commissario made to go out, Sante’s voice called him back. “I denied myself so much to save that money. I gave up on living. They’ve taken away part of my life. It’s worse than if they’d sent me to jail.”

  Soneri stopped in his tracks, struck by those words, and then said the first and most obvious thing that came into his head. “You have your job and your health. These are the most important things.”

  Only when walking in the sun did he think seriously about the rancour that was devouring Sante. That man was imploding day by day, at the same pace as the village which was now seething with silent hatred and stoking up a dying flame, as people do with the smouldering embers and ashes in which on autumn evenings they bake potatoes.

  He crossed the piazza, still deserted after lunch, and climbed towards the church with one thought buzzing in his head. He went into the graveyard and saw elderly widows moving about among the tombs. Some were busy dusting off greying, sepia photographs and attending to the adjacent space waiting for them in the cemetery wall. He walked alongside those walls, noting familiar faces, each linked to him by some childhood memory. There they were now, side by side, still images from an uneven montage of some B-movie. He came to his parents’ tomb. His mother smiled at him from one of the few photographs ever taken of her, but when he turned to the photograph of his father he received what felt like an electric shock. He had seen that image hundreds of times before, but his attention was drawn to a detail to which he had never previously given any importance, but which now left him transfixed. The gates in the background were the same as those to the Rodolfi establishment, and the piece of surrounding wall that could be glimpsed was the employees’ entrance.

  He had never before wondered where that photograph had been taken, but now he knew. The discovery was sufficient to bring back the doubt that his father too had gone to the Rodolfis for help, as Manuela had insinuated. He felt more implicated than ever in the case. As his mood grew darker, he saw Don Bruno coming out of the chapel, covered in dust, dressed in layman’s clothes without even the Roman collar. He was kicking ahead of him some dried flowers which had become detached from old bouquets.

  “I’ve even got to do the tidying up. There’s not one single woman in the whole village who’s prepared to give a hand. Not even part time.”

  “They’ve all turned anti-clerical, have they?” Soneri joked.

  The priest was not amused. “They’re all indifferent, which is even worse. Once there was a belief among them that they could make up for aridity of spirit by doing some service for the church, but now they can’t even be bothered with that.”

  “Priests used to awaken consciences.”

  “In fact, we were accused of the opposite. Anyway, it is not like that any more. You can say anything you want. They’ll listen silently and won’t be ruffled in any way. That’s the worst of it. They prefer to isolate themselves in the smallness of their own minds, wasting away in the pettiness of a few, utterly insignificant things. They haven’t even reacted to all that’s been going on. I’d rather have the anti-clericals back, the communists that I would debate with. At the very least you had the impression of hearts beating. But now I am left with a handful of old folk who come to Mass out of habit, or else with a nest of vipers who genuflect before the altar but who would cheerfully murder their husbands the minute they get home. And don’t even talk to me about young people! To get the rest of my flock interested, I’d need to be a car salesman or a banker.”

  “Bankers are not everybody’s favourite at the moment,” the commissario said.


  “Oh, wait a while and it’ll pass. Money is all they think about nowadays. And here am I devoted to the care of souls.” The priest gave a bitter laugh before adding with an onrush of pride, “But I’m not giving up. They’ll all come back to join the flock, I’ve no doubt about it. This catastrophe is the first sign that the things of this world will pass away and that sooner or later every human being has to settle his accounts with his Maker. His real accounts, I mean. Take Palmiro Rodolfi. He only cared about power, but at the end, all of a sudden, he realised it was all in vain. He settled his accounts alright, but the outcome was terrible.”

  “The outcome is always terrible, for everybody.”

  “That’s not true. It’s true only if you believe you can settle everything in this world.”

  “Were you getting the chapel ready for Palmiro?” Soneri asked.

  The priest looked him straight in the eyes and nodded.

  “But he committed suicide.”

  “God’s mercy is infinite. We will pray for him too. I happen to believe that his final act implies repentance, do you not agree?”

  “Perhaps. He no longer had the strength to show himself to those he had betrayed, but neither did he have the strength to show himself to God and beg forgiveness. This might mean he did not recognise him.”

  Don Bruno paused in silence for a moment, then said, “We’ll never know what went on, but the Almighty Father does.”

  The commissario reflected that this was true of his own father as well. Perhaps he would never know what went on between him and the Rodolfis.

  “I heard you came to look for mushrooms.” This time it was the priest who changed the subject. “Your father shared that passion.”

  “So did you,” Soneri said.

  “Once upon a time, yes, but now my legs have let me down.”

  The priest was short but had heavy bones. Only the metal-framed glasses undermined the image of a man of the mountains and woodlands. He was bow-legged, like a jockey, but the bend was due to the weight of his body.