of the carabinieri were parked with their front wheels on the pavement. It looked like a meeting that had been called by the prefect, and reminded him of interminable, tedious afternoons in the questura. He ducked round the corner into the side streets with Dolly, who every so often raised her head and sniffed the air. Soneri had placed his hopes on such scents and on faint traces left by those who had recently been on Montelupo.
When he reached the Scoiattolo, all the lights had been switched off, even the sign outside. The place seemed dead, but he noticed a reddish light shining under a shutter on the ground floor. He put the key in the lock and went in, but the moment he switched on the light in the hall, a door opened and an elderly man made a timid appearance at the doorway.
“You must be the commissario?”
“Yes, Soneri,” he replied
“Ida sends her apologies, but she won’t be able to make your meals at this time,” he said, stretching out his hand. “I’m her brother, Fulvio.” The commissario shook his hand. “Anyway, you have your own keys, don’t you? You’re the only guest.”
There was something disobliging in his tone, as though he had been hoping that Soneri too would have left, allowing him to close everything down and have no further responsibility for the place. The commissario looked around at the greying walls, the unfashionable furniture, the curtains fading through over-washing, and it occurred to him that he would indeed be the last guest, the last to stay there and the last to pay a bill.
“I’ll not be staying long,” he said, without looking at Fulvio, who made no reply.
“And the dog?”
“She’ll be staying with me tonight.”
On hearing these words, the man turned away, shrugged and as he went back into his room, could be heard muttering, “Well, at this point…”
The commissario slept fitfully. Dolly too was aroused every now and again at something that she alone could hear. Around 5.00, Soneri awoke, thinking he had heard a loud noise outside. Dolly was extremely restless and this seemed confirmation that there was someone moving about. The commissario threw open the shutters and peered into the darkness of the yard, but there was nothing to be seen. In spite of that, shortly afterwards he heard the sound of a car engine being revved up, and wondered if someone had come to look for something in the environs of the hotel. Since Dolly was so troubled, he supposed it might have been her they had come looking for. After all, his own suspicions had made him bring her up to his room in the first place.
As he thought the matter over, the alarm clock told him it was almost six o’clock. He opened the shutters again and was greeted by a gust of brutally cold air. He got ready and made his way out past closed doors behind which he imagined unmade beds, empty cupboards and curtains colonised by bugs. In the dining room, the tablecloths had been removed and the seats turned upside down. What he had previously seen as a sign of familiarity now seemed to him an omen of decay. He closed the door behind him and moved off.
He breakfasted in the Rivara. The village seen through the window overlooking the piazza seemed as calm as on a Sunday morning. “They were working late,” the barman advised him, indicating the police station.
“Any idea if they came to any conclusions?”
Rivara shook his head. “None at all. Nobody knows anything. Crisafulli and the local lot haven’t been seen.”
It was at that moment that he heard the ignition being turned in the first truck as it set off for Montelupo. A line of vehicles, their headlights reflected on the thick layer of ground frost, drove past. The half-asleep carabinieri inside them were jolted at every bump in the road.
“They’re not giving up, are they? They haven’t had enough yet,” Rivara said.
The commissario looked attentively at all the trucks as they went by, but he did not see Bovolenta. “Have they fired him?” he thought aloud.
“It wouldn’t be a surprise. With all that’s been going on, they could well have accused him of sending them out to be picked off.”
Soneri drank his caffelatte while Dolly, sitting outside the window, looked on. Dawn was breaking, but light was struggling to break through the damp mist of the valley. He ordered bread, some slivers of parmesan and a hundred grams of culaccia. He fed the fat of the ham to Dolly, and set off for Greppo where the night before he had met the Philippino. As soon as he was away from the shelter of the piazza, he felt the full force of the freezing wind like a slap in the face. The cold had grown yet more intense, and was coming, like the sun, from the east. When he reached the plain, he stopped to get his breath back. The dry air gave him a parched throat. He saw the carabinieri line up above Boldara to advance through the woods, and he wondered about the criteria they were using for deployment in the God-forsaken donkey’s back that was Montelupo. They were being divided into two groups, perhaps with the plan of encircling the Woodsman. He heard the sound of other trucks on the mountainside and realised that reinforcements were arriving already.
He set off once more for Croce, with Dolly running ahead, darting in and out of the undergrowth. The commissario walked behind with a more measured pace, but as he proceeded he felt a growing sense of anxiety. When he heard shouts from lower down the valley, he understood the risks he was running. All it needed was one carabiniere to get him in his gun sights. He knew only too well that in those circumstances, they would not be required to take precautions. Montelupo was now a free-fire zone for the police forces, and there were simply no codes in place.
As he climbed higher, the sun lit up the mountain, increasing the chances that he would end up in some sniper’s sights. There was a new danger at every corner, so he kept in the shadows or took shelter in gulleys or thickets where it was still freezing and where the wild boar ran. He left the path, walking parallel to it through the trees. The morning was silent and the light strong, but there was tension in the air. He still had some way to go along a route which took him past the bright trunks of the beech trees before he finally arrived at an almost sheer wall of crumbling sandstone. Looking up, he could see the path twist and turn as it ran alongside a crag where no plants grew. There was a crevice in the cliff which narrowed into a chimney leading over the summit and down the opposite side. Only at that point did he realise he was next to the gorge where Dolly had attempted to entice him down to the bottom the previous day.
He looked for the dog as he crossed over the muddy surface solidified by the freezing frost. He was familiar with that type of swampy terrain where it was possible to walk only in winter. He remembered an occasion when a hunter had sunk in it up to his waist, and when he was pulled out, he left behind his boots and trousers. The freezing conditions had made everything hard. Small pieces of rock broke away from the cliff higher up, causing the sandstone below to crumble like dry bread. Dolly was seated at the foot of the slope in the last of the undergrowth which closed off the gorge. In front of her there were signs of something having been dragged through the mud before the freeze. Soneri bent over, and it was then he noticed the butt of a rifle sticking a few centimetres out of the ground.
It had been driven in, barrels down, like a biscuit ready to sink to the bottom in a glass of milk. The commissario looked up. About twenty metres up the slope from where he was standing, the path ran along the cliffside. He then understood: the rifle must have fallen from there and the barrels had sunk in the mud, but all this had taken place before the freeze, in the soft dampness of the season of mists.
He pulled at the gun, but it was impossible to move. It was as if it had been set in cement. He attempted to dig it out with stones, branches and with his bare hands, knowing that if he managed to crack the frozen surface, the weapon would come away easily. He worked at it for some time, heedless of everything else around him. Montelupo continued to be enveloped in a silence undisturbed by the cawing of crows, the tap-tap of woodpeckers or the strident screech of vultures. The woods and the skies were shrouded in lethargic stillness.
Finally with one energy-sapping tug, he pulled the rifle free. It was encased in a sleeve of grey mud, like a cocoon, and patiently he began to scrape the mud away with a piece of wood, cutting from the top down as though he were slicing ham. After a time, he was successful and this made it possible to make out the shape of the barrels and handle, but the time it had spent under the mud had probably compromised the trigger and firing mechanisms. He retraced his steps, trying to get out of that morass of solid mud, but only when he felt the springy crackle of beech leaves under his feet did he allow himself to think of what was to be done next. But at that moment the battle broke out with renewed violence, not far above the path.
The carabinieri opened fire first, followed immediately by the more sonorous sound of the Woodsman’s rifle as he returned fire from somewhere on the mountainside. Other weapons were discharged across a wide range, bullets whistled through the woods, criss-crossing each other and ending their flight with a bang as they exploded
