the officers, together with the precise orders issued by Bovolenta could be quite distinctly heard.
“Better make a break for it before they catch up with us,” Ghidini said, calling his dog to his side.
Soneri and Baldi moved off without another word, moving swiftly over the open spaces. They stopped further down when they were within sight of the road and completely out of breath. Silence had fallen again, making it impossible to say exactly how the manhunt was going. They heard an isolated cry, followed by others in response, and calculated that the carabinieri had swung round to the east to make the ascent to Badignana from that side.
“I told you so,” Baldi said. “He’s leading them up there.”
“The Woodsman is a beast. He’s leading them into a trap,” Ghidini said.
Soneri ran over in his mind the path up to the crags. On the upper slopes the mountain became more forbidding and provided less cover metre by metre. “He must be well ahead of them, or he’s going to be an easy target on the final stretch.”
Baldi shook his head. “Relax, Gualerzi will have everything worked out. He’s not going to provide them with target practice.”
The commissario tried to imagine where the Woodsman would want to make a stand, and remembered how he and his brother had held a detachment of Nazis at bay with their one Sten gun. The Woodsman was now in the same situation, making his last stand in defence of the last piece of the mountain he considered his own.
As they spread out over a wider expanse, the shouts from the carabinieri became more isolated. Everything seemed calmer. The sun was up causing the ice to melt and giving a glitter to the tufts of frosty grass.
“I’d like to go and see what’s going on,” Ghidini said. “It’ll be alright as long as you keep your distance, maybe from the Malpasso path.”
“I’m not going back up there. The spectacle won’t exactly be edifying,” Baldi said.
“From Campogrande it should be possible to see how it all unfolds,” Soneri said.
Baldi appeared hesitant, but at the same time he was evidently curious to see what would happen. “I might go with you as far as Campogrande.”
“It’s the only place where you’d get a proper view,” Ghidini said.
They set off back up the slope, but this time they had the impression of being the hunters. The carabinieri seemed to be following the Woodsman at the same distance as before, but they were also producing some kind of unrecognisable background noise. At Campogrande, the three men ran into Volpi who was looking through his binoculars. He was not distracted by their approach, and did not take his eyes off the rocks.
“Do you see anything?” Baldi said
“He’s taking them to Badignana,” the gamekeeper replied in his clipped tones, not turning round.
“That’s not a good sign.”
“No, it’s not,” Volpi agreed. “They still think they’re dealing with an ordinary fugitive from justice. They just don’t realise…”
They all understood. “Did you see him make his way up?” Ghidini said.
Volpi shook his head. “I think he followed the course of the stream, against the current.”
“You mean he climbed up the Macchiaferro?” Baldi said.
“He must have done. He might well have a cache of ammunition hidden somewhere in the cabins. He got there first, and so he’s had time to collect it. All he has to do now is wait for the carabinieri.”
They got confirmation soon afterwards that this was so. A volley of shots rang out from the Badignana ridge aimed down into the lower valley. The beech trees seemed to shake.
“That’s Gualerzi! That’s his Beretta,” Volpi said.
Immediately afterwards, all hell broke loose. The carabinieri pointed their weapons upwards, more to cover their advance than in any organised attempt to hit their enemy. They had not expected to find themselves under fire in a clearing with no shelter apart from a few shrubs and stacks of brushwood. Angry orders were yelled out and Soneri imagined they came from Bovolenta, enraged at having fallen into a trap. Then once more the baritone boom of the Woodsman’s rifle thundered along the mountainside.
“Oh, shit!” Volpi screamed, his eyes glued to his binoculars. “He’s got one of them.”
The carabinieri returned fire, shooting wildly, while at Badignana a cloud of white smoke rose up.
“They’re bringing the wounded man down,” Volpi informed them. “He looks like a broken mannequin. All the rest are keeping them covered.”
Soneri became aware he was sweating with tension. He had tried to warn Bovolenta, and was appalled at the stupidity of his pushing on to the point where the two sides were shooting at each other, but time after time he had found himself obliged to give way in the face of irrationality.
It was easy to make out the shots fired by the Woodsman, since they had a darker and deeper tone. “What kind of bullet is he using?” Volpi wondered aloud, still looking through his binoculars. “They make huge holes in the ground where they land.”
“Imagine what they would do if they hit a carabiniere.”
“The carabinieri are moving back, into the undergrowth,” Volpi said.
Meantime, they continued blasting away at the Badignana ridge. The cloud of dust which had formed above the rocks where the Woodsman was hidden was becoming even more impressive, but after a time the shooting stopped.
“They’ve reached the woods,” Volpi said, putting down the binoculars. “The show is over — for the time being…”
“I’m going down,” Baldi said, setting off for Greppo. Ghidini and Soneri followed him, but Volpi stayed where he was. “Some of the carabinieri will be in the village in about an hour. If they’ve got a wounded colleague, they’ll have to hurry.”
When they got to Greppo, there was a great deal of activity in the piazza. There were three ambulances, the same pack of journalists and a detachment of men from the Special Forensic unit bustling about shouting instructions. As they carried on down, the sun’s light faded until it took on the colour of a zabaione. They reached the piazza ten minutes later, just in time to hear the police trucks manoeuvre along the winding road from the reservoir. Shortly afterwards, the trucks roared into the village and pulled up at the kerb under the lampposts. A helicopter hovered overhead, and as it came in to land on the piazza, everyone moved over to one side, pushed by the force of the wind from the propeller. A stretcher bearing a police officer in a tattered, blood-covered uniform was carried off the tailgate of one of the vehicles. Two other carabinieri, supported on both sides by colleagues, were helped into the ambulances.
The helicopter took off, blowing up dust. Soneri went over to the Rivara, where the few people who had been watching this scene were standing.
“One of them is done for,” Maini told him. “The Woodsman got him on the chest. It went through him as if he was a piece of paper.”
“What about the other two?”
“Not too serious. One got some lumps of rock in the face and the other was hit by a bullet ricocheting off the stones on the ground.”
“It was pure hell up there,” Soneri said, lighting a cigar. “That captain is mad.”
“He hasn’t understood what he’s up against.”
The commissario felt drained. His watch told him it was half-past two, and he had not yet had any lunch. He went into the Rivara and ordered a sandwich with prosciutto, as though he were back in his office.
“You can eat here if you want, now that Sante is…” Rivara suggested.
He had not thought of it. He would need to find alternative accommodation. “Perhaps this evening. Anyway, I’m not going to be staying much longer.” He was addressing the words more to himself than to the barman.
“As far as I am concerned, you can stay as long as you like,” Rivara said, offering Dolly some slices of fat from the prosciutto. “Nobody wants fat any more.”
“ Prosciutto without fat is like an egg with no yoke,” Soneri said, while his attention was distracted by Bovolenta’s drawn face at the window of the car turning into the police station
“That’s it for today. They’ve got enough problems to be going on with,” Rivara said.
Soneri’s mind was on the document he had discussed with Don Bruno. With all that had been going on, he would need to put off the time when he could seek clarification. He gulped down a glass of Malvasia, and went out to watch the shadow of Montelupo lengthen in the setting sun. He dialled Angela’s number. “The Woodsman has
