Black Run

Pierron looked up at the sky. He’d been to Rome once in his life, five years ago, and it smelled so bad that he’d thrown up for three days running.

“And the pussy. You have no idea of the sheer quantity of pussy in Rome. I’m telling you, maybe only in Milan will you find anything comparable. You ever been to Milan?”

“No.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing. Go there. It’s a wonderful city. You just have to understand how it works.”

Pierron was a good listener. He was a mountain man, and he knew how to stay silent when silence was called for and how to speak when the time came to open his mouth. He was twenty-­seven, but you’d guess he was ten years older. He’d never left Val d’Aosta, aside from the three days in Rome and a week in Djerba, the island off Tunisia, with his ex-­girlfriend Veronica.

Italo liked Rocco Schiavone. He liked him because he wasn’t one to stand on ceremony, and because you could always learn something from a guy like him. Sooner or later he’d have to ask the deputy police chief—­though he insisted on using the old rank of commissario—­just what had happened in Rome. But their acquaintance was still too new, Italo sensed, and it was too early to delve into details. For the moment, he’d satisfied his curiosity by poking into documents and reports. Rocco Schiavone had solved a substantial number of cases—­murders, thefts, and frauds—­and had seemed to be well on his way to a brilliant and successful career. And then suddenly the shooting star that was Rocco Schiavone veered and fell, slamming to earth with a rapid and silent transfer to Val d’Aosta for disciplinary reasons. But just what the stain on Rocco Schiavone’s CV had been, that was something he never managed to find out. The police officers working at headquarters had talked it over among themselves. Caterina Rispoli argued that Schiavone had risen above his station. “I’ll bet you he stepped on somebody’s toes and that somebody had the power to have him shipped north; that kind of stuff happens all the time in Rome.” Deruta disagreed; he felt sure that someone as capable as Rocco Schiavone was an annoyance, especially if he lacked a political patron. D’Intino suspected sex was at the bottom of it. “I’ll bet he took somebody’s wife or girlfriend to bed and got caught.” Italo had a suspicion all his own, and he kept it to himself. His guess had been guided by Rocco Schiavone’s home address. Via Alessandro Poerio. High on the Janiculum Hill. Apartments up there ran to more than eight thousand euros a square meter, or a thousand dollars a square foot, as his cousin, who sold real estate in Gressoney, had told him. No one on a deputy police chief’s salary could afford an apartment in that part of town.

Rocco crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “What are you thinking about, Pierron?”

“Nothing, Dottore. About the road.”

And Rocco looked out in silence at the highway, pelleted by falling flakes of snow.

Looking up from the main street of Champoluc, he could see a patch of light in the middle of the woods. That was where the body had been found, and now it was lit by halogen floodlights. If he squinted, he could just make out the shadows of policemen and cat drivers working the scene. The news had spread with the speed of a high-­mountain wind. Everyone stood around at the base of the cableway, their noses tipped up toward the forest, midway up the slope, each asking the same question, which was unlikely to be answered anytime soon. The English tourists, drunk; the Italians with worried faces. The locals were snickering in their patois at the thought of the hordes of Milanese, Genovese, and Piedmontese who would find out tomorrow morning that the slopes were closed.

The BMW with Italo at the wheel pulled to a halt at the foot of the cableway. It had taken an hour and a half from Aosta.

Driving up that road, navigating the hairpin curves, Rocco Schiavone had observed the landscape. The black forests, the bursts of gravel vomited downhill from the rocky slopes like rivers of milk. At least one good thing, during that endless climb: around Brusson, the snow had stopped falling and the moon, riding free in the dark sky, reflected off the blanket of snow. It looked as if someone had scattered handfuls of tiny diamonds over the countryside.

Rocco got out of the car wrapped in his green loden overcoat and immediately felt the chill of the snow bite through the soles of his shoes.

“Commissario, it’s up there. They’re coming to get us with the cat now,” said Pierron, pointing out the headlights partially concealed by the trees halfway up the slope.

“The cat?” asked Rocco, his chattering teeth chopping his breath into little puffs as it fogged up in the cold air.

“That’s right, the tracked vehicle that works the slopes.”

Schiavone took a breath. What a fucked-­up place to come die in.

“Italo, explain something to me. How could it be that no one saw a dead body lying in the middle of the piste? I mean, weren’t there skiers on that run?”

“No, Commissario,” Pierron said, then corrected himself. “Excuse me, Deputy Police Chief. They found him in the woods, right in the middle of a road they use as a shortcut. No one takes that road. Except for the snowcats.”

“Ah. Understood. But who would go bury a body way up there?”

“That’s what you’re going to have to find out,” Pierron concluded, with a naive smile.

The noise of a jackhammer filled the cold, crisp air. But it wasn’t a jackhammer at all. The snowcat had arrived. It stopped at the base of the cableway with the engine running, dense smoke pouring out the exhaust pipe.

“So that’s the cat, right?” asked Rocco. He’d seen that kind of thing only in movies or documentaries about Alaska.

“That’s right. And now it’s going to take us up, Commissario! Deputy Police Chief, I meant to say.”

“Listen, just do this—­you’re not going to wrap your head around it no matter how hard you try. Call me whatever you want, I don’t give a damn anyway. Plus,” Rocco went on, looking at the treaded vehicle, “why do they call it a cat if it looks more like a tank?”

Italo Pierron limited himself to a shrug in response.

“Well, okay, let’s get aboard this cat. Come on!”

The deputy police chief looked down at his feet. His Clarks desert boots were dripping wet, the suede was drenched, and his feet were starting to get wet, too.

“Dottore, I told you to buy a pair of suitable shoes.”

“Pierron, stop busting my balls. I’m not putting on a pair of those cement mixers you ­people wear on your feet—­not as long as I’m still breathing.”

They set off through snow piles and potholes created by the skiers’ power slides and oversteers. The snowcat, with the lights mounted on the roof, standing motionless in the middle of the snow, looked like a giant mechanical insect poised to seize its prey.

“Here, Dottore, step up on the tread and get in,” shouted the snowcat driver from inside the Plexiglas cabin.

Rocco obeyed. He took a seat inside the cabin, followed immediately by Pierron. The driver shut the door and pushed the gearshift forward.

Rocco caught a whiff of alcohol mixed with sweat.

“I’m Luigi Bionaz, and I’m in charge of the snowcats up here in Champoluc,” said the driver.

Rocco just looked at him. The guy had a ­couple of days’ whiskers, and his eyes were lit up with an alcoholic gleam. “Luigi, are you okay?”

“Why?”

“Because before I go anywhere in this contraption, I want to know if you’re drunk.”

Luigi looked at him, his eyes as big as the snowcat’s headlights. “Me?”

“I don’t give a damn if you drink or smoke hash. But the one thing I don’t want is to be killed in this thing up at an elevation of five thousand feet.”

“No, Dottore, everything’s fine. I only drink at night. The odor you smell is probably from some youngster who used the vehicle earlier this afternoon.”

“Of course it is,” said the deputy police chief skeptically. “Fine. Come on, let’s get going.”

The snowcat made its way up the steep ski slope. Illuminated by the headlights, Rocco saw a wall of snow straight ahead of him, and he couldn’t believe that that pachyderm could successfully climb such a nearly vertical incline.

“Hey, tell me something! We’re not about to go head over heels, are we?”

“Don’t worry about a thing, Dottore. These behemoths can climb slopes steeper than a forty percent grade.”

They took a curve and found themselves in the middle of the woods. The blade-­like beam of the headlights lit up the soft blanket of snow and the black trunks of the trees that were suffocating the groomed run.

“How wide is this piste?”

“Fifty yards or so.”

“And on a normal day, how many ­people come through here?”

“That’s something we’ll have to ask at the head office. They know how many daily ski passes they sell. So we could get a count, but it might not be all that accurate.”

The deputy police chief nodded. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled out a pair of leather gloves, and put them on. The run was veering to the right. Pierron said nothing. He was looking up, as if searching for an answer among the branches of the larches and firs.

They went on climbing, accompanied only by the engine’s roar. At last, in a broad clearing, they saw the beams of the floodlights arranged around the site where the body had been found.

The snowcat left the piste and cut through the woods. It bounced over a few tree roots and hummocks.

“Listen, who found the body?” asked Rocco.

“Amedeo Gunelli.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Sure, Commissario, he’s down at the cableway station, waiting. He hasn’t really recovered yet,” Luigi Bionaz replied as he braked the snowcat to a halt. At last, he switched off the engine. The minute he set his shoes down on the snow, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone understood just how right his co-­worker had been to recommend he wear heavy boots with insulated soles, the kind of shoes that Rocco called cement mixers. Because they really did resemble a pair of cement mixers. The chill gnawed at the soles of his feet, which were already tingling from the cold, and the feeling jangled his nerves from heels to brain. He heaved a breath. The air was even thinner than it had been at the bottom of the hill. The temperature was well below freezing. The cartilage in his ears was pulsating and his nose was already dripping. Inspector Caterina Rispoli approached him, light-­footed.

“Deputy Police Chief.”

“Inspector.”

“Casella and I went up to secure the location.”

Rocco nodded. He looked at Inspector Rispoli’s face, which he could barely glimpse under the hat crammed down over her head. Her mascara and eyeliner were oozing down as if off a wax mask.

“Stay here, Inspector.” Then he turned around. Far below, he could see the lights of the village. To his right was the snowcat that Amedeo had been driving, still parked in the middle of the woods where that poor devil had abandoned it hours ago.

Walking through nearly knee-­deep snow, Rocco drew closer to the monster. He examined the front of the vehicle. He ran his hand over it, sized it up carefully, as if he were thinking of buying the thing. Then he squatted down and looked under the tracks, covered with fresh snow. He nodded a ­couple of times and headed over to the place where the body had been found.

“What were you looking for, Dottore?” asked Italo, but the deputy police chief didn’t reply.

A policeman with a pair of skis thrown over his shoulders came toward them, striding easily, even though he was wearing ski boots with stiff, heavy hooks. “Commissario! I’m Officer Caciuoppolo!”

“Fuck, another native!”

The young man smiled. “I secured the crime scene.”

“Good for you, Caciuoppolo. But tell me, where did you learn to ski?”

“At Roccaraso. My folks have a place there. Are you from Rome, Commissario?”

“Yep, Trastevere. What about you?”

“Vomero, Naples.”

“Excellent. Let’s go see what we have here.”

What did they have here? A half-­frozen corpse under five or six inches of snow. To call it a corpse was a euphemism. It might have been one once. Now it was a mess of flesh, nerves, and blood that had been pureed by the snowcat’s tillers. All around it, goose feathers. Everywhere. The deputy police chief wrapped his overcoat tighter. The wind, though it was light, penetrated beneath the lapel and caressed his neck, leaving a wake of hairs standing at attention like soldiers saluting a general. Rocco’s knee already hurt, the one he’d crushed when he was fifteen, playing the last match of the season with his team, Urbetevere Calcio. Bent over the dead body was Alberto Fumagalli, the medical examiner of Livorno, who was using a pen to poke at the hems of the poor man’s down jacket.

The deputy police chief went over without saying hello. In the past four months, since the day they’d first met, he’d never said hello to him yet. So why start now?

“What are all these feathers?” asked Rocco.

“The filling of the down jacket,” replied Alberto, bent over the corpse.

The poor man’s face was unrecognizable. One arm had been sheared off neatly, and his rib cage had popped open under the vehicle’s weight, spewing forth its contents.

“What a mess,” said Rocco in a low voice.

Fumagalli shook his head. “I’m going to have to do an autopsy in a proper facility. I’ll get a good look and let you know. Just by the sight of him … I don’t know! That thing crushed him. You can imagine the work it’ll take just to reassemble him! But right now, since I’m frozen and pissed off, I’m just going to head back down and get something hot to drink. Well, anyway, it’s a man—­”

“I’d gotten that far myself.”

Alberto glared at Rocco. “Would you let me finish? It’s a man, around forty. His watch says seven thirty. That’s when I think that tank must have run over him.”

“I’m with you.”

“He has no ID. He’s wounded, all cut up. Still, you know something, Schiavone?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Fumagalli.”

“There’s blood everywhere.”

“Maybe even too much blood. So?” asked Rocco.

“You see? Blood with all its components, water and cells, already freezes at zero degrees Celsius. But just to be safe, in the lab we keep it at minus four degrees centigrade. But the thing that should give you pause is the fact that up here, we’re at zero degrees, understood? Zero degrees centigrade. But this blood is still nice and liquid, I’d say. Which tells me that he hasn’t been dead long.”

The deputy police chief nodded in silence. He’d found himself staring at the corpse’s left hand. Big. Gnarled. It reminded him of his father’s hands, damaged by years and years of inks and acid solvents in the printing plant where he worked. The dead man’s left hand was missing three fingers. The right hand lay about thirty feet away from the remains of the still unidentified body.

“I’ve seen hedgehogs on the highway in better shape than that!” said Schiavone, and a billowing cloud of condensation emerged, fat and compact, from his mouth. Then he finally turned to look at the area that the officers had secured.

It was a mess.

Aside from the deep tracks cut by the snowcat, there were footprints everywhere. Thirty feet away, at the edge of the woods, there was even an officer taking a piss on a tree. He had his back turned, so Rocco couldn’t tell who it was.

“Hey!” he yelled.

The guy turned around. It was Domenico Casella.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Rocco shouted at him.

“Taking a piss, Dottore!”

“Nice work, Casella. Just think how happy the guys from forensics are going to be!”

Fumagalli shot a glare at Casella, and at Caciuoppolo, who was standing with his skis over one shoulder at a nice safe distance so he wouldn’t have to look at the mangled remains. “You’re all just a herd of pathetic cocksuckers!” the Livornese doctor grumbled.

“I gotta say. Didn’t they teach you guys anything?”

Casella zipped up his pants and walked over to the deputy police chief. “No, it’s just that I couldn’t hold it any longer. Plus, Dottore, we don’t have any proof they even killed him here, right?”

“Ah, we have our own homegrown Sherlock Holmes! Fuck off, Casella. Get the hell away from here and stick close to the snowcat, where you can’t screw things up. Down there, by Inspector Rispoli. Move! Did you touch anything else?”

“No.”

“Good. Get over there, don’t move, and try to stay out of trouble.” Then Rocco spread his arms wide in exasperation. “You want to know something, Alberto?”

“What?”

“Oh, you’re going to hear from the Aosta forensics team before long, once they find fingerprints from our men, and urine, and pubic hair, and head hair. Once you guys are through with the place, even if the killer took a dump on the ground, they wouldn’t be able to find an uncompromised piece of evidence. Thanks to imbeciles like Casella … and you, too, Caciuoppolo! You say that you secured the crime scene, and then what?”

Caciuoppolo dropped his head.

“Look what you’ve done! Here are your footprints all around the corpse, on the road, everywhere! Holy Mary, mother of God! A guy could just give up and go home after this!”

His shoes were sopping wet. The cold was increasing exponentially as the minutes crept by. Fumagalli’s zero degrees Celsius was just a fond memory by now, and the wind continued to torment him, even under his warm woolen undershirt. Rocco wished he were at least four hundred miles away from here, ideally in the Gusto Osteria, on Via della Frezza, “Da Antonio,” just a stone’s throw from the Lungotevere, eating fritto misto and beef tartare, washed down with a bottle of Verdicchio di Matelica.

“Do you think he could have been a skier?” asked Officer Pierron, to break the tension; up till then, Pierron had been keeping a safe distance from the corpse.

Rocco looked at him with all the contempt he’d been accumulating in four months of exile from Rome. “Italo, he’s wearing boots! Have you ever seen anyone go skiing in a pair of rubber-­soled calfskin boots?”

“No, I couldn’t see them from here. Sorry!” Italo replied, hunching his head down between his shoulders.

“Well, then, instead of spouting bullshit, take two steps forward and look for yourself! Do your job!”

“I’d have to decline that offer, Commissario!”

A wave of depression swept over Rocco. He looked the medical examiner in the eyes. “These are what they give me, and these are all I have to take with me when I work a case. Okay, Alberto, thanks. Give me a call the minute you have something. Let’s just hope he died of a heart attack, fell down, and got covered up with snow.”

“Sure, let’s hope,” said Alberto.

Rocco shot one last glance at the corpse. “Give my regards to the forensics squad.” And he turned to go.

But something struck him, like an insect when you’re riding fast on a moped with no windshield. He spun around again.

“Alberto, you’re a man of the world. Would you say this guy was wearing technical gear?”

Alberto made a face. “Well, his pants were padded. His windbreaker was the right stuff, no question: North Face Polar. Couldn’t have been cheap. I bought one just like it for my daughter. Only in red.”

“So?”

“It cost more than four hundred euros.”

Rocco bent over the half-­frozen corpse again. “No gloves. I wonder why.”

Alberto Fumagalli spread his arms in bafflement. The deputy police chief stood back up. “Let’s think this one over. Let’s think on it.”

“Well, Commissario,” chimed in Caciuoppolo, who had been leaning on his ski poles and listening, “maybe he’s someone who lives in one of the huts up in Crest. You see? Just two hundred yards from here.”

Rocco looked at the little cluster of houses hidden in the snow.

“Ah. There are ­people who live up there?”

“Yes.”

“In the middle of nowhere? Huh …”

“If you love the mountains, that’s the place for you, right?”

Rocco Schiavone grimaced in disapproval. “Maybe so, Caciuoppolo, maybe so. Nice work.”

“Grazie.”

“But he also could have died somewhere else and been carried up here. No?”

Caciuoppolo stood lost in thought.

“Even though …” Rocco added, “… that means they put the down jacket on him afterward. Because a person’s hardly likely to die indoors wearing a down jacket. Or else—­why not? Maybe he was about to go out, and then he died? Or else he went to see someone, only had time to get his gloves off, and then died?” Rocco looked at Caciuoppolo without seeing him. “Or else no one killed him at all, he just died on his own, and I’m standing here spouting bullshit. No, Caciuoppolo?”

“Commissa’, if you say so.”

“Thanks, Officer. We’ll look into this, too. In any case, I don’t know if you read the memos that circulate, if you keep up with these things, but they’ve abolished the rank of commissario in the police force. Now we’re called deputy police chief. But I’m just keeping you informed. I really couldn’t give a damn, personally!”

“Yes sir.”

“Caciuoppolo, why would someone born in Naples, with Capri, Ischia, and Procida just a half-­hour ferry ride away, along with Positano and the Amalfi Coast—­why would you come up here to freeze your ass off?”

Caciuoppolo looked at him and flashed a southern smile, with all his gleaming white teeth accounted for. “Commissa’—­excuse me, Deputy Police Chief, sir. What’s that old expression? There’s one thing that pulls a cart stronger than a team of oxen, and that’s …”

“Understood.” Rocco looked up at the black sky, where racing clouds covered and uncovered the stars. “And you met her up here in the mountains?”

“No. In Aosta. She has an ice cream shop.”

“An ice cream shop? In Aosta?”

“Sure. You know, they have summer up here, too.”

“I wouldn’t know that yet. I got here in late September.”

“Trust me, Dotto’. It’ll come, it’ll come! And it’s beautiful, too.”

Rocco Schiavone started walking toward the snowcat, which was waiting to take him back to town. By now his feet were like two frozen flounder fillets.

When the snowcat let Schiavone and Pierron out at the base of the cableway, the crowd of rubberneckers was smaller, thanks to the leverage of the snow and the cold. Only the Brits were still there, a small knot of ­people singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at the top of their lungs. The deputy police chief looked at them. Red-­faced, eyes half shut from the beer they’d swilled.

Suddenly he couldn’t take it anymore.

He still remembered May 30, 1984, like it was yesterday. Conti and Graziani kicking the ball at random while Liverpool beat Rome and took home their fourth European Cup.

“Pierron, tell them to shut up!” he shouted. “There’s a corpse up there—­a little respect, for fuck’s sake!”

Pierron walked over to talk to the Brits. They very civilly begged pardon, shook hands, and fell silent. Rocco only felt worse. First of all because now he was pissed off, and a nice rowdy brawl would have been just the thing. And second because Pierron spoke English. Schiavone barely knew how to say “Imagine all the ­people,” a phrase that was unlikely to be particularly useful, either in Italy or in far-­off Albion.

“Do you speak English, Italo?” he asked him.

“Well, you know, Dottore …” replied the officer in an apologetic tone of voice, “in the valleys here, we all speak French, and they do a good job of teaching English in the schools. The thing is, we live on tourism. See, the schools in Val d’Aosta are first-­rate. We learn languages, banking, and we’re pretty much in the vanguard when it comes to—­”

“Pierron!” the deputy police chief broke in. “When you ­people were living in caves and scratching your fleas, in Rome we were already decadent faggots!” and he hastened over to the waiting car.

Pierron shook his head. “What are we going to do, head back to town?”