“Did he have his rifle?”
“No, he was unarmed.”
“Have they asked him how come he got lost?”
Delrio stretched out his arms. “His story is that he wanted to go as far as the mountain pass to see if there were any mushrooms there, but the mist came down without warning.”
“And that was all he had to say?” Volpi sounded sceptical.
“He asked a couple of times about his dog, because it seems they were separated and he kept calling him.”
“So that was the voice they heard.”
“Sounds that way.”
“The dog’s getting old. He doesn’t see too well now and doesn’t like walking long distances,” Ghidini said.
“So his chief anxiety was his dog,” Delrio said.
“That’s all he’s got left,” Rivara said.
One of the young men who had arrived in the car went over to the bar, placed both elbows on it and leaned over towards the barman. “Why do you think a lorry would be stopped on the main road at this time of night?” He spoke loudly enough to ensure that everyone could hear him.
“What lorry?” Rivara said.
“A refrigerator lorry with a foreign number plate. The driver seemed to have lost his bearings in the mist, and asked us for directions to the salame factory.”
“He must have been picking up a load but was running late.”
“The driver wasn’t on his own. There were three of them, and we watched them go up to the factory.”
“All three of them?” Rivara said.
The boy nodded, with the faintest of conspiratorial smiles. “If you want my opinion, they were planning to pick up a delivery right away.”
“They must be in a great hurry,” Ghidini sniggered.
“They certainly were. And why should that be?” the boy wondered aloud.
Nobody dared to utter a guess, and once more a silence fell. The young man said goodbye to the group and opened the door to go out, but he was stopped in his tracks by the sound of gunfire. Everyone followed him out onto the street.
“Was that from Greppo?” Delrio said.
“Couldn’t tell. Either Greppo or Campogrande,” Maini said.
“This is happening too often,” Rivara said.
“At least we can all agree on that,” Soneri said.
The mayor emerged from the Comune and strode determinedly across the piazza. Delrio went to meet him. The two men stood talking in the mist, then the policeman turned back and went into the bar.
“The mayor has told the carabinieri to go and see what they can find. This time the whole village heard the shot.”
“It’s high time they showed some interest,” Volpi said.
“For all the difference it’ll make! By the time they get there, whoever fired the shot will be long gone,” Ghidini said, shaking his head.
“In this mist, you could lose an army,” Rivara said.
“You never know. They’re already in the right area,” Delrio said.
Some twenty minutes later, the piazza was lit up by a flashing blue light which cut through the mist which was now even more treacherous. The carabiniere truck crossed the piazza and pulled up outside the Comune.
“Is that them on top of the job now?” Maini said.
No-one made a reply. Soneri was thinking only of the lorry parked on the main road and of the three people inside. He was keen to go and see whether or not it had gone to the salame factory, but once again his attention was diverted by Delrio’s radio. He drew close to overhear what was being said.
“It was Palmiro who fired the shot,” Delrio eventually relayed the news.
“Who at?” Rivara said.
“At the dog,” Delrio said, but obviously he himself did not attribute much importance to it. There was another thought niggling him.
“So he’s gone clean off his head,” Ghidini said. “He has always been extremely fond of that dog.”
“He told the carabinieri it was too old and the exertion had weakened its heart.”
“Ever the unscrupulous bastard,” Rivara said.
“If he was old… He would not have wanted him to suffer,” Delrio suggested.
“I think there’s more to it than that. He might have felt let down, if the dog had run off home leaving him on his own on Montelupo. There aren’t that many people he could count on,” Maini said.
“There wasn’t much anybody could do. By the time the carabinieri got there, he was already burying it,” Delrio said.
“All this trouble for nothing. Still, in the end everyone’s alive and back home safely — apart from Palmiro’s dog,” Rivara said.
“What about the lorry at the factory?” said one of the young men who had stayed on after his companions had left.
The only response was a collective shrug.
3
It was still dark when Soneri came down for breakfast. The night before when he got back, he found the table still set. Sante had saved some vegetable stew for him, and when the commissario saw it arrive with an overturned plate on top to keep it warm, memories came flooding back of his mother in her dressing gown, of trains running late and of a house immersed in silence with the family already in bed. He had hoped to find the same peace and stability in the valley in the Apennines where his forebears had lived season after season, enduring the snows of winter and heat of summer, clearing the juniper bushes from the land and hauling timber down from the woods.
“In middle age, everyone yearns to return to the place they left when they were young to make their way in the world,” Sante intoned.
For Sante, the world was the city. Anyone who moved away from the valley was a displaced person, and Soneri was coming round to this point of view. That was why he had come back, and now, as he stood looking through the windows of the Scoiattolo at the wooded slopes of Montelupo capped by woolly mist, he felt the tug of that mountain which had been the focus of so much attention in recent days. In a short while he would set off and clamber up its steep spine like a tiny, exploring parasite. He was intent on taking full advantage of the daylight hours and was only waiting for dawn to break. Sante had prepared a box with a few slices of bread, some shavings of parmesan and a few thin slices of prosciutto. He put the box in a shoulder bag and got on his way, aware that he was retracing the steps of his father, his grandfather and of who knows how many others.
The ascent up the path from the village left him out of breath, but he was soon enough at the reservoir. Patches of mist drifted around him and trailed off all the way down to the village. He took the Boldara path, walking for another half an hour through a tunnel of branches on a mattress of fallen leaves, not looking back until he came to an opening in the woods. The houses were far off now, in a deep crevice where it seemed that they had ended up after falling down the mountainside, like all the other things which had tumbled down from the heights. He left the path and ventured into the woods, struggling with the undergrowth and slipping on the leaves. He spent some time probing the trunks on slopes where the tree fellers had been active, but he found nothing to interest him. The ground still had marks of having been disturbed, so it was clear that someone had passed that way not long before. He followed the footprints of the roe deer and the tracks of the boar for almost two hours until, in the shadow of a trunk nestling into the mountainside, he discovered a colony of “horn of plenty” mushrooms. Dark coloured and with a tapering stalk, they had a sinister appearance, but they made good eating for someone who knew how they
