anything to investigate, except why did he do it.”
“That’s the question everybody’s asking,” the mayor said.
“In other words, it’s a matter for priests or psychologists. Not my line at all.”
The mayor made no move. The fog continued to swirl behind him on the far side of the piazza.
“Perhaps you are better informed than I am,” Soneri said.
“No, no. I don’t know a thing,” the mayor said, but he spoke in the guilt-ridden tone of voice the commissario had heard countless times during interrogations in the questura. “All I am asking you to do is consult the maresciallo. I’m not asking you to make any commitments. A courtesy call, that’s all.”
“A soul in torment,” Maini said, indicating the mayor as he walked off, with his crumpled, outsize raincoat flapping around him.
“I don’t understand what he wants me to do,” the commissario said.
“Everybody in the village wants to understand.”
“Understand!” Soneri shook his head in bewilderment. “It seems to me you already know quite a lot. Maybe you’re all simply afraid,” he said, realising as he did so that he had made a distinction between himself and the rest. He had been aware of the limits of his relationship with them, but now it seemed like a barrier he could not cross. In some ways, he felt liberated from an ambiguity which had become increasingly cumbersome.
Maini pretended not to hear the commissario’s words, the common reaction of mountain people to complicated sentiments. Everything would take its course, but every word spoken could be translated into another element of distrust. “He killed himself like the shopkeeper, Capelli,” he said at last.
Soneri had heard about the case, but he could no longer remember the details. His amnesia reinforced his sense of being an outsider.
“He too hanged himself from a wooden beam,” Maini said.
“He was a ruined man,” the commissario said, grasping at some vague memory.
“It was the gambling. After the war he made some money, but it went to his head.”
“Did he and Palmiro know each other?”
“That’s the point. They were good friends.”
At that moment, the commissario’s mobile rang. “Angela, could you call me back in five minutes?”
The poor reception meant that he heard no more than a metallic murmur as he switched off his phone. Without either of them suggesting it, Maini and he moved into the Rivara bar. Rivara himself watched them take a seat, and joined in the conversation. “He took his own life in the same way as Capelli,” he said, and then, turning to the commissario as though to a casual stranger, he added, “you know who I mean, the owner of the cheese shop.”
Soneri felt the barrier between him and the villagers grow ever more impassable. “Even the letters they left say the same things,” Maini said.
“Nobody knows who was the first to read Capelli’s letter. Everyone knew he couldn’t read or write, and that made it child’s play for them to cheat him with the invoices,” the barman said.
“At that time the maresciallo said he believed that Capelli had had it prepared some time before he hanged himself, but there are others who think that it was his creditors who wrote it.”
“What does Palmiro’s letter say?” Soneri said.
Rivara stretched out his arms, then leant forward and lowered his voice. “One of my regulars who knows a police officer says it was pretty succinct. ‘Bury me up on Montelupo, under a juniper bush. That’s where I want to be.’ Not another word.”
“The same as Capelli, who wanted to be taken up to Montelupo, but his wife had him buried in the cemetery, partly because the Comune got involved, and partly because love of money was the only love that kept them together,” Maini said.
“Both men loved Montelupo. It was for them the whole world. They used to take their sheep to graze up there, up as far as the big house at Becco. The two of them and the guy known as the Woodsman.”
“Ah yes, the famous Woodsman. Now he’s the only survivor of that trio,” Maini said.
“Because he didn’t make any money. Money has been the downfall of so many people,” Rivara chimed in.
“Capelli, on the other hand…” Maini said, seemingly rummaging about in his memory, “Capelli started out collecting milk from the farms in his hand cart, then he became a producer of cheese and got other people to do the hard work while he drove about in a Fiat 1500, wearing a tie and selling whole cheeses in the city. It was a huge risk, but he pulled it off.”
“The fact is when you come into money all of a sudden, it can be the ruination of you. You think it’ll never stop coming,” Rivara said.
“It wasn’t gambling that did for him so much as the paperwork and his sheer incompetence at it,” Maini said. “He knew how much he could afford to lose and he stuck to that, but when they invited him to sign for things instead of paying in cash, he trusted them and they stripped the shirt off his back.”
“Downright ignorance is always at the root of it,” Rivara said. “Once upon a time they cheated you with phoney invoices, now it’s with promissory notes from the bank, shares and bonds, that kind of thing. They tell you to buy and you end up with drawers full of waste paper.”
“It’s the same old story, the same swindle over and over again,” Maini agreed.
“The fat cats devour the mice. Let’s not forget that Capelli in his day — ”
“Right after the war,” Maini nodded.
Rivara threw back his head. “That wasn’t the only time. He did a deal with the Fascists so no detachment of Blackshirts ever went without parmesan to sprinkle on their minestrone. In return, he was left in peace to work the black market, selling his goods to anybody and everybody.”
“And he made money hand over fist.”
“It was a dirty business, but it always is,” Maini said. “With money and the right friends, you can stuff justice.”
“What about the Woodsman?” Soneri said.
Rivara laughed. “He had no head for business, and still doesn’t. He’s at home among the trees with his axe and rifle. That’s how he came by the name. He has never moved away from the Madoni hills. He lives there on his own — in abandoned houses that are slowly falling apart. They’ll come down altogether one of these winters.”
“The original owners all moved away, to Turin, Milan or Parma,” Maini said.
“Now he’s as wild as the boar. The other two were as bad as he was, but their instinct was to go after money instead of wild animals. They made their fortunes, but then they hanged themselves.”
Soneri lit another cigar, while the other two stared at him as though he were performing a conjuring trick.
“Capelli was the sharpest of the three. He was already a rich man at thirty. In the retail market in Parma, he would shift cheese by the ton, all deals done in advance. He had a nose for the business, had the patience to wait for the right moment to buy and sell,” Maini said.
“In the last years,” Rivara said, “he never actually touched cheese. He had his flunkeys to see to that side of things. He stuck to his office, but when you move away from the world you know and handle nothing but paperwork, you’re done for.”
“That’s right,” Maini said. “It was all that form filling that finished him.”
Stefano, Rivara’s son, came in, nodded in their direction and sat apart, on his own. He had nothing to say, it seemed, but all of a sudden he jumped to his feet and exclaimed, “That lorry, the one that was apparently lost yesterday evening, it loaded up after all, and went off this morning in the direction of the autostrada.”
Rivara stopped wiping the bar and said, “He must have been held up by the weather, and no doubt had a deadline to meet.”
Stefano shook his head doubtfully. “What about the other two? Were they in a rush as well?”
Rivara and Maini looked at each other in puzzlement, but said nothing.
“This story of the lorries, it’s an odd business,” the commissario said, in an attempt to keep the discussion going, but no-one had any inclination to break the silence until Maini changed the subject. “How did you get on? Did you fill a basket?”
“I only got a few ‘trumpets of death’.”
“I don’t like them.”
