he could hear the calluses rub against the stubble on his chin. For a moment he seemed embarrassed. Having to speak after a long period of silence and solitude in that wilderness must have required considerable effort.
“He told me to tell you to have a look around in the chestnut groves at Pratopiano.”
“Nothing else?”
The man, holding the cigarette, now no more than a length of ash which he gripped between his thumb and index finger, indicated he had nothing more to add. He took one last draw and tossed the stub under a stone.
“Say to the Woodsman I do need to see him,” Soneri told the man, as if he were one of his staff. The man did no more than briefly turn towards him, which Soneri took as a sign of assent.
“I will come back up to meet him. Will you be in these parts a bit longer?”
The man stretched out his arms tentatively. “That’ll depend on the weather,” he said. The commissario held up his hand in farewell and turned to go, but before he had taken a couple of steps, the man drew himself upright. “Go to Pratopiano right now. If you take the Malpasso path, you’ll be there today before it gets dark.”
There was a note of urgency in his voice, giving Soneri the feeling that he knew more than he was letting on. He looked at him for a few seconds, but decided there was no point in asking any more questions. The man moved off, springing nimbly over a cluster of rocks off which the rays of the midday sun seemed to be bouncing.
Soneri set off in the direction of Malpasso, trudging over stretches of stony ground behind peaks which crumbled away year after year at the onset of the winter freeze. Out of the wind in the valley, the heat of the sun was strong enough to make him believe that, after the days of mist, they were about to enjoy an Indian summer. Above, he saw a bright, clear sky with no more than traces of light clouds tossed about by the winds, and for a short time he felt at one with that sky, and as joyous and playful as a hawk swooping through the air. The solitariness — and the violence of the light — cleansed his mind of every thought, leaving it free to entertain only a primitive sense of belonging to those places.
As afternoon drew on, the light began to fail. The sun had passed its peak, its rays giving way to the rapidly falling November dusk. He passed below the summit of Monte Matto from which, on a bright winter day, it was possible to see the blue of the sea at La Spezia, and turned onto the steep path which snakes quickly down Malpasso. Half an hour later, he found himself in the woods, and calculating that there was no more than one and a half hours of light remaining, he quickened his step. He was still imbued with a sense of wellbeing and for the first time he realised he was free of all the petty annoyances of life in the police station. He reached the Macchiaferro stream which flowed over the path, and crossed it, jumping from rock to rock. He bent down and dipped his hand in the clear, ice-cold water purely to experience the sensation he had felt as a boy when, warm from his climbing and with the urgent desire to see and conquer the summits, he had wandered in those mountains.
At the end of Malpasso, he turned to take in the imposing bulk of Montelupo and the other peaks whose grey, rocky faces stood out against a sky which was growing darker by the minute. He could never be sure where the boundary lay between the hostile barrenness of the heights and the area where life flourished, even if it were only the timid life of the moss. The border was fluctuating, like the snows in late winter, or like that message passed on by the Woodsman at Badignana. From where he was, he could see the chestnut trees at Pratopiano, still given a gentle colouring by the last husks hanging on the branches. Everything was vague on the mountains, where a named place never had a precise location but drifted between dimensions traced out by the eye and the mind.
He was in the woods where the trees were already damp with the evening dew. As he stared around him, he wondered what he was supposed to find or look for in that place. He looked up at the sky and saw the swift dusk bringing to an end a day as short and as filled with light as a straw fire. He was startled to hear barking from somewhere below. From the edge of the path, he peered through the trees, which gave off the moist scents of dead leaves, but there was nothing to be seen. He heard a rustling in the bushes and someone summoned the dog with a precise, rhythmic whistle, clearly a recognised signal. It seemed the dog was coming up the slope, thrashing the undergrowth as it went, and his first thought was of Ghidini, but he could not see anyone. He continued his way down to Corticone, from where the path climbed from the west over Montelupo, and after a few minutes he was aware of following the sound of the barking but without having paid heed to the direction he was taking. When he realised he had lost his way, his nostrils were filled with a stench carried by a gust of wind. It was a stench he knew only too well from having many times in his career smelled it from locked apartments, from the boots of cars or from watery ditches littered with stones and rubble. He walked more quickly, and his nostrils dilated as he sniffed the air, like a setter. The growing strength of the smell guided him infallibly towards a point where the ground fell away to an almost inaccessible hollow where wild boar would shelter from the sun’s heat on a summer afternoon. The air seemed heavier and damper, as though thickened by a veil of tiny drops of water issuing from a nearby waterfall. He climbed cautiously down into that freezing enclosure, holding on to protruding branches. When he was almost at the bottom, he saw it. Between two boulders which had rolled off the mountain, lay a decomposing and slightly swollen corpse, its face half-hidden in the slime. It seemed the earth wished to claim it and deny it any further burial. Judging by the number of pawmarks around it, dogs and wild boar must have mauled it and tugged at its arms and legs.
Holding his nose and balancing as well as he could on the rocks so as not to contaminate any possible clues, the commissario made his way over to the body. He could make out only a few of the victim’s features, not the whole face, but clearly he had been a man who dressed with care and who had been equipped for an excursion on the mountain. His windcheater jacket had been ripped by animal teeth, and goose feathers, immobile in that windless hollow, lay scattered all around. Fangs had bitten into some parts of his legs, but there was no blood on the ground — a sure sign that the animals had only arrived on the scene a considerable time after death. When he completed his inspection of the body, Soneri regretted not being able to call on Nanetti, the head of his forensic squad. A metre away, behind a bush, he noted a dark patch where several animals had plainly clawed at the ground. He deduced that the patch was blood, and that after rolling down the slope the body had come to rest there. As he tried to remove the wallet from the hip pocket of the trousers he had a premonition, and when he opened it and saw the face of a woman and child, his fears were confirmed. The posters on San Martino had lied. Paride Rodolfi had not disappeared. He was there in the Pratopiano woods, dead, already swollen and rotting, like an ageing animal which had crawled into the darkness of its den to wait for its end.
The wallet was intact but there was no money in it, not even a coin. As the commissario studied the area around the body, darkness fell rapidly in the hollow. It would take an hour from there to the village, so he would not arrive before nightfall. He stood alone over the corpse, the fetid smell growing more and more offensive, and looked out at the dying light to the west. He felt the role of investigator thrust upon him once more, but he was determined to decline it, since he had no wish to deal with the troubles of a case as complex as this one threatened to be. He took out his mobile and called the carabiniere office. “Put me through to Maresciallo Crisafulli,” he said to the operator, realising with a certain dismay that he had assumed the tone of voice of the officer on duty.
Crisafulli came onto the line, speaking in weary tones. “What can I do for you, Commissario?”
“I’ve found the body of Paride Rodolfi.”
“Jesus!” Crisafulli said, before putting his hand over the mouthpiece to communicate with the people in the office. “And where is it?”
“In Pratopiano. Do you know the chestnut grove?”
The only response he received from the other end of the line was a groan. He remembered the advice given to him years before by an instructor in the police college: the most important thing is knowledge of the territory. In a place like that, everything now took place in the woods.
“You get there from the forest path to Boldara?” the maresciallo said.
“That’s right, but you’ll have to come by foot. It’ll take about an hour.”
“How are we going to manage in the dark?”
“I’ll do my best to give you directions, but get a move on. The smell is unbearable.”
“Alright. I’ll need to inform Captain Bovolenta and the magistrate, but the magistrate will no doubt come in his own time.”
Soneri moved some distance away to avoid the smell. There was a bitter, eerie chill at the bottom of the hollow, and in the silence it was impossible to miss the obscene swarming of insects as they fed on the corpse. He gave himself over to reflections on the fate of the human being who had been the richest man in the valley, a powerful industrialist whose word was law for politicians, financiers and bankers, categories of human being even more obscene than the insects buzzing in the dark. It was not the first time he had been affected by the presence of death, but it was the first time it had happened to him in the woods in his home town. There was more to it than pity. He felt inside himself a deep emptiness and an overwhelming bewilderment. Paride was dead, that gloriously
