And the birds.’
‘Why did they do it?’
‘Probably because we found the girl. We warned her family, when we took her back to them, not to say anything. But someone called the papers, and it was all over the front pages. You know, “Joyous Liberation”, complete, with pictures of her with her mother, eating her first dish of pasta in two months. They must have read about it and figured we were looking for them, getting dose. So they killed him.’
‘Why not just let him go?’ Then, because it had not been said, Brunetti asked, ‘How old was he?’
‘Twelve.’ There followed a long pause, then Ambrogiani answered the first question. ‘Letting him go would be bad business. It would let other people know that if we got close enough, there might be a chance for them. By killing him, they made the message clear: we mean business, and if you don’t pay, we kill.’
Ambrogiani opened the bottle of wine and poured some into the plastic cups. They each ate a sandwich, then, because there was nothing else to do, another. During all of this, Brunetti had kept himself from looking at his watch, knowing that it would be later, the longer he waited. Unable to resist, he looked. Noon. The hours stretched ahead. He rolled down the window, looked over at the mountains for a long time. When he glanced back, Ambrogiani was asleep, head canted to the left, resting against the window. Brunetti watched the traffic going down and coming up the steep gradient. All of the cars looked pretty much the same to him, different only in colour and, if they were moving slowly enough, in number plate.
After an hour, the traffic began to taper off, everyone had stopped to eat. Soon after he noticed this, he heard the sharp exhalation of air from the brakes of a truck and looked up to see a large truck with a red stripe along the side pass down the hill.
He poked Ambrogiani in the arm. The Carabiniere was instantly awake, his hand turning the key. He pulled onto the road and followed the truck. About two kilometres from where they had been parked, the truck signalled and then turned off to the right, disappearing down a narrow dirt-covered road. They drove past, continuing down the hill, but Brunetti saw Ambrogiani reach out to the dashboard and push the button that moved the mileometer back to zero. After he had gone a full kilometre, he pulled off the road and cut the engine.
‘What was the number plate?’
‘Vicenza,’ Brunetti said and pulled out his notebook to write the numbers down while they were still fresh in his memory. ‘What do you think?’
‘We stay here until the truck passes us on the way down or we wait half an hour and go back.’
After half an hour, the truck had not passed the place where they were parked, so Ambrogiani drove back up towards the road the truck had turned into. They passed it and he pulled off to the right a bit beyond it, angling the car in between two cement road markers.
Ambrogiani got out and went around to the boot of the car. He opened it and reached in. Slipped in next to the tyre was a large calibre pistol, which he pushed into the waistband of his trousers. ‘You have one?’ he asked.
Brunetti shook his head. ‘I didn’t bring it today.’
‘I’ve got another one in here. Want it?’
Brunetti shook his head again.
Ambrogiani slammed the boot closed and together they walked across the road and onto the dirt path that led off towards the mountains.
Trucks had worn a double groove into the dirt of the path; with the first heavy rain, the dirt would turn to mud, and the road would be impassable to vehicles the size of the truck they had seen turn into it. After a few hundred metres, the path widened minimally and curved to run alongside a stream that had to be coming down from the lake. Soon the path branched off to the left, leaving the stream and now following a long line of trees. Ahead, the path took another sharp turn to the left and up a sharp incline, where it seemed to come to an end. With no warning, Ambrogiani stepped behind one of the trees and pulled Brunetti after him. With a single motion, the Carabiniere reached inside his jacket and pulled out his gun with one hand and, with the other, gave Brunetti a brutal push in the centre of his back that sent him spinning away, completely off-balance.
Brunetti flailed at the air with his arms, unable to stop his forward motion. For an instant, he hung between motion and collapse, but then the ground sloped away under him and he knew he was going to fall. As he did, he turned his head and saw Ambrogiani coming directly after him, gun in hand. His heart contracted in sudden terror. He had trusted this man, never stopping to think that the person at the American base who had learned about Foster’s curiosity and who had learned about Doctor Peters’ affair with him could just as easily be an Italian as an American. And he had even offered Brunetti a gun.
He crashed forward onto the ground, stunned, wind knocked from him. He tried to push himself to his knees, he thought of Paola, and he was conscious of the blaze of sunlight all around him. Ambrogiani crashed to the ground beside him, threw an arm over his back, and pushed him back down to the ground. ‘Stay down. Keep your head down,’ he said into Brunetti’s ear, lying beside him, arm across his back.
Brunetti lay on the earth, digging his hands into the grass beneath him, eyes closed, conscious only of the weight of Ambrogiani’s arm and of the sweat that covered his entire body. Through the torrent of his pulse, he heard the sound of a truck coming towards them from what had seemed the end of the road. As he listened, its motor drummed past them then grew dimmer as it made its way back towards the main road. When it was gone, Ambrogiani pushed himself heavily to his knees and started to brush off his doming. ‘Sorry,’ he said, smiling down at Brunetti and extending his hand. ‘I just did it, didn’t have time to think. You all right?’
Brunetti took his hand, pulled himself up, and stood beside the other man, knees trembling uncontrollably. ‘Sure, fine,’ he said, and bent to swipe the worst of the dust off his trousers. His underclothing stuck to his body, glued there by the sudden wave of animal terror that had overcome him.
Ambrogiani turned and went back towards the path, either in complete ignorance of Brunetti’s fear or in an exquisite gesture of feigned ignorance. Brunetti finished dusting himself off, took a few deep breaths, and followed Ambrogiani down the path to where it started to rise. It did not end but, instead, twisted suddenly to the right and stopped abruptly at the edge of a small bluff. Together, the two men walked up to the edge and looked down over it. Below them spread an area about half the size of a soccer field, most of it covered with creeping vines that could easily have grown up that same summer. The end nearest them, spreading out from the rise of land they stood on, contained about a hundred metal barrels that must once have contained kerosene. Mixed in with them were large black plastic bags, industrial strength, sealed closed at one end. At some point, a bulldozer must have been used, for the barrels at the far end disappeared under a heap of vine-covered earth that had been piled over them. There was no telling how far back the covered barrels extended, no hope of counting them.
