in the office, but fetch up under an even more thuggish boss.” Angela gave him a hug, but Soneri remained impassive. “When I first met you, you never thought about the past. You were too caught up in your work.”
“Maybe that’s why the past weighs so heavily on me now. I feel the years grinding me down. Sometimes I think I’m without memory and I’ve wasted too much time on pointless things.”
“You’ll waste even more if you go on thinking that way. It’ll do you no good at all.”
“I regret everything I didn’t say, and all the time I could have spent with my father.”
Angela sighed but, guessing at what lay behind Soneri’s mood, she went on, “Never mind all these rumours. They’re nearly always malicious lies.”
This time it was Soneri who embraced her, with feeling, holding the cigar away from her. But as he was kissing her, Dolly’s wet nose rubbed against the hand at his side with the cigar between his fingers.
“Don’t tell me you’ve acquired a dog. You’re getting more and more like a maiden aunt.”
“It was she who acquired me. She was Paride’s dog.”
“It’s either her or me,” Angela said, in a tone of playful jealousy.
“I’m going to take her back to her owner tomorrow. It’ll be the second time.”
“She obviously adores you.”
“I’m not the right man for her. She’s already suffered one loss, and I don’t want to put her through another one.”
“Definitely not, but she ran away to be with you again.”
Soneri determined not to grow too fond of Dolly, but he could not help patting her gently.
“Anyway, Angela, tell me about the Rodolfis’ lawyer.”
“The situation is more serious than anyone realised.”
“Isn’t every situation?”
“Paride and his accountants have been getting away with false accounting for years. The balance sheets were just so much fluff. In some cases, they invented credit by fabricating phoney documents and then using them as collateral for more borrowings. The thing came unstuck when they couldn’t redeem a parcel of bonds that fell due. They won a little time by making out that there was a fund where they had assets stashed away, but when that turned out to be a fiction, the whole house of cards collapsed.”
“And nobody had a clue. Not even the banks,” Soneri said sarcastically
“They couldn’t care less. They’ve loaded the majority of the debts onto the savers by selling them junk bonds.”
“Who’s investigating this mess?”
“The guardia di finanza, but it’s hard to find the way through an accountancy labyrinth where legal and illegal operations overlap. There’s no telling how big the final black hole will be. Add to that the fact that before they threw in their hand, the directors shredded the archives and wiped the computer files.”
“Who are the accountants?”
“Friends of Paride from school days.”
“A village gang! And nobody could stop them in time?”
“It’s been going on for at least ten years. They thought they could cheat everybody ad infinitum. They believed they were omnipotent, but that’s often the way with these get-rich-quick people.”
The commissario bowed his head. Although they were by now frozen to the bone, they were still sitting on the wall alongside the street, watching the moon travel across the sky. Dolly was lying at their feet, looking up hopefully from time to time to see when the next caress was coming. They walked towards the village until they drew level with the Monicas’ barn, now reduced to a gigantic, smoking ember.
“An act of revenge,” Soneri said.
“Has it got something to do with the fraud?”
“It belongs to the Monicas.”
Angela gave a start. “The son is another one of Paride’s friends.”
“Feuds new and old are passed on. I’m sorry to say it’s an old custom.”
“Like setting fire to barns.”
“Sooner or later the past falls on top of you.”
“If anything’s going to fall on top of me, I want it to be you,” she said, snuggling close to him.
They returned to the Scoiattolo, where Angela smiled at the dull ornaments and plain furniture in a pensione where rustic bad taste was the order of the day. Soneri was hard put to it to convince her of the cleanliness of the bathroom and the sheets, and had to make three separate searches of the bedroom to get rid of spiders, beetles and other insects. He then ruined the effect by informing her that this was the season for bedbugs, awakening a fresh round of alarm. In spite of all this, he was secretly proud of how true he had remained to his country origins in comparison to Angela, who had perhaps never spent one entire day away from the city. Possibly on account of these apprehensions, she fell asleep holding him close and when he awoke in the morning the commissario had various aches and pains caused by that lengthy contact. His thoughts, however, were still where they were the night before.
“The fraud is clear enough,” he announced at breakfast. Sante served them in silence, seemingly intimidated by Angela’s presence. “But the murder of Paride is anything but clear. Neither is Palmiro’s suicide, although he had every reason to kill himself.”
“Revenge, the same as with the barn.”
“Perhaps, but we have to find out what manner of revenge.”
“You’ve always told me that human actions are prompted by very simple motivations: first money, then power or sex. It’s not hard to guess which one it is in this case, is it?”
“That’s what the carabinieri think too.”
“Who wouldn’t? But there’s some personal factor at work here. For you, I mean.”
“There always is, in any investigation. I’ve got to imagine myself into the mind of the murderer, and then the victim. It’s indispensable for me to get under their skin, to relive the state of mind of each one.”
“Have you managed that with Paride?”
“No. There was one sentence spoken by his wife. An unfortunate choice of words about my father.”
“What did she say?”
“That he had been to knock at their door, the same as everybody else.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“No, but it almost makes one an accomplice. Everybody knew and everybody exploited the situation for their own ends. In a certain sense, that’s the whole story.”
“But you knew nothing about it?”
“I was away at college in the city. My father never spoke about his work and I never asked anything about it. We didn’t have deep conversations, although we got on well, especially when we were out hunting or searching for mushrooms. Later the whole family moved to the city. As far as I knew, it was because my mother was unwell and had to be near a hospital. Now what I think is that something must have happened between my father and the Rodolfi family, but I have no idea what.”
“And that’s what’s been bubbling away inside you?”
“No, it’s more than that. I’m afraid Papa was in cahoots with that bunch of swindlers. Or maybe he was one of those who knew everything all along but found it convenient to keep his mouth shut, like the rest of them in this village. Don Bruno told me my father was on good terms with Palmiro. It’s one of those phrases that might mean everything or nothing.”
Angela gave him a look which was both affectionate and reflective. “An investigation for you is like a visit to a shrink.”
“I’ve got to do everything by myself,” were his final words as Angela got into her car.
They went their ways in opposite directions, Angela along the twisting road down the valley and Soneri towards the slopes of Montelupo. Just beyond Boldara, he ran into Volpi coming up from the Croce path, the one which crossed the red jasper rocks over to the west. He had a rifle slung around his neck, leaving his hands free. Soneri kept his eyes on him until they were face to face. He was wearing corduroy trousers with green, knee-high wellington boots.
“Found any poachers?” Soneri said.
“There’s no shortage of them. They’re not the problem. Hunting has started up again.”
