COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by Harper in 2015

Originally published in Italian as Pista nera in Italy by Sellerio Editore in 2013

Copyright © Antonio Manzini 2015

Antonio Manzini asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work.

Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar

Translation copyright © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Cover images © Anselm Schwietzke/EyeEm/Getty Images (trees);

Shutterstock.com (blizzard, figure, clouds)

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008119003

Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008119027

Version: 2016-01-04

DEDICATION

To my sister, Laura

EPIGRAPH

The mountain cannot frighten one who was born on it.

—FRIEDRICH SCHILLER

In this life

it’s not hard to die.

But to make life

is trickier by far.

—VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SATURDAY NIGHT

SUNDAY

MONDAY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

THURSDAY

The skiers had all gone home, and the sun, which had just winked out behind the craggy blue-gray peaks that were shredding a few scudding clouds, was still tinting the snow pink. The moon was waiting for darkness so it could light the whole valley until the next morning dawned.

The ski lifts were no longer running, and the lights were out in the chalets at higher elevations. The only sound was the low muttering engines of the snowcats running up and downhill, grooming the pistes that twisted around boulders and stands of trees down the mountain slopes.

The next day marked the beginning of the long weekend, when the ski resort of Champoluc would rapidly fill with out-of-towners eager to dig their skis into the snow. The runs had to be in perfect condition.

Amedeo Gunelli had been assigned the longest run. The Ostafa. Stretching almost a mile in length, and about sixty yards wide, this was Champoluc’s main piste, and it was used by ski instructors with their beginner students as well as expert skiers to experience freeriding. This was the slope that took the most work, and it had often lost its snow cover by lunchtime. In fact, there were plenty of bare patches, unsightly stretches of rocks and dirt, especially at center piste.

Amedeo had started from the top. He’d only been doing this job for three months now. It wasn’t hard. All you had to do was remember how to work the controls on this treaded monster and keep calm. That was the most important thing. Keep calm and take your time.

He had his earbuds in, with Ligabue’s greatest hits blasting on his iPod, and he’d fired up the joint that Luigi Bionaz, the head snowcat operator and his best friend, had given him. It was thanks to Luigi that he had this job and a thousand-euro paycheck every month. Perched next to him on the passenger seat were a flask of grappa and his walkie-talkie. Everything he needed for the hours of hard work ahead.

Amedeo pushed snow in from the sides, spreading it and smoothing it over the barest spots, chopping it with the tiller while the rakes flattened it till the surface was smooth as a pool table. Amedeo was good at his job, but he didn’t much like working alone like that. Folks seem to think that mountain people prefer the solitary life of a hermit. Nothing could be further from the truth. Or nothing could be further from the truth as Amedeo conceived it. He liked bright lights, loud noises, and lots of people talking all night long.

“Una vita da medianoooo,” he sang at the top of his lungs, to keep himself company. His voice reverberated off the Plexiglas windows as he focused on the snow, which was turning a pale blue in the moonlight. If he’d stopped to look up, he’d have glimpsed a breathtaking spectacle. High above, the sky was dark blue, like the ocean depths. By contrast, all along the mountain ridges it was orange. The last slanting rays of sunlight tinged the perennial glaciers purple and the underbellies of the clouds a metallic gray. Towering over everything were the dark flanks of the Alps. Amedeo took a slurp of grappa and glanced downhill. A nativity scene made up of roads, houses, and twinkling lights. A dreamlike vision for those who hadn’t been born and raised in those valleys. For him, a squalid and heartbreaking diorama.

“Certe notti la radio che passa Nil Jàng sembra avere capito chi seiiiii …” He sang along to the words of the song by Ligabue: “Certain nights when the radio plays Neil Young as if it knew who you really we-e-ere …”

He’d finished the first run, a wall. He turned the cat to head downhill toward the second section and found himself facing a stretch of black piste—a black-diamond run. Like in karate, the black classification meant the most challenging kind of run. It was frightening. An expanse of ice and snow with no end in sight.

Only guys who’d been doing this work for years and who could spin the snowcat around like a tricycle would even dare to venture down that steep, twisting track, full of switchback curves and sheer drops, that led down to the main run. Anyway, that was a stretch that didn’t require grooming. It was supposed to be left the way it was. It was too tight, for starters. If you took it wrong, the treads would lose their grip, and before you knew it the snowcat would flip over, pinning you under tons of metal and hot grease. The skiers could groom it themselves, gradually smoothing the track as they descended. Someone had to go up just once a month, with a plow blade, and that was only when things had been pushed as far as they could go and the icy mounds that had built up absolutely had to be flattened out. Otherwise, on those blocks and slabs of ice, cartilage and ligaments, ankles and knees snapped and sprained regularly and unpredictably.

The light on the walkie-talkie on the seat next to him blinked. Someone was calling him. Amedeo yanked out his earbuds and grabbed the device. “Amedeo here.”

The radio crackled, then the voice of his boss, Luigi, emerged through the static: “Amedeo, where are you?”

“I’m right in front of the wall at the top run.”

“That’s enough. Head downhill and do the section below, near town. I’ll take care of the top section.”

“Thanks, Luigi.”

“Listen,” Luigi added, “remember to take the shortcut down to town.”

“You mean the lane?”

“That’s right, the one that runs from Crest—that way you don’t have to cross the piste that Berardo’s cleaning. So take the shortcut, you got that?”

“Got it. Thanks!”

“Forget about ‘Thanks.’ Make sure you buy me a glass of white before dinner!”

Amedeo smiled. “That’s a promise!”

He stuck the earbuds back in, shifted into the lowest gear, and rumbled off the slope.

“Balliamo un fandango … ohhhh,” he went on singing. “We dance a fandango.” Again, Ligabue.

Overhead, heavy cloud cover suddenly filled the sky, blocking out the moon. That’s how it always works in the mountains: before you know it, the weather veers around as fast as the winds at high altitude. Amedeo knew that. The weather forecast for the weekend was ugly.

The snowcat’s powerful headlights lit up the slope and the dark mass of fir and larch trunks lining it. Through the black branches he could still see the lights of Champoluc below.

“Balliamo sul mondoooo ohh,” he sang. “We dance on the world.”

He’d have to drive past the ski school and the snowcat garage, then head downhill toward town, and from there work the slope uphill.

He flicked the scorched filter of the joint out the window. Just then, the headlights of another snowcat blinded him. He lifted one hand to shield his eyes. The cat climbing the hill pulled up level with him. It was Berardo, another driver.

“Hey, are you high? You blinded me!”

“Heh-heh …” Berardo snickered idiotically.

“Listen, Luigi’s taking care of the top. I’m heading down to do the bottom of the piste, near town.”

“Got it,” replied Berardo, whose nose was already bright red. “You want to get a glass of white at Mario and Michael’s tonight?”

“I’m supposed to treat Luigi, so I’ll be there anyway. I’m heading down to the end of the slope!” Amedeo shouted.

“Take the Crest lane—I’ve already finished the run up above!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take the shortcut! Later!”

Berardo went on his way. Amedeo, on the other hand, turned toward Crest, as ordered. Crest was a small cluster of mountain houses above the slopes. Nearly all the houses were uninhabited except for a hut and a couple of villas owned by people from Genoa who loved skiing more than they did their own city. From there, he’d go through the woods to the shortcut, which would take him eight hundred yards downhill. He’d give the end of the run a quick groom and then finally came the glass of white wine and cheerful conversation and laughter with the Englishmen who no doubt were already drunk. He went past the few lights on in the village, then left it behind him. The lane that the snowcats used was clear and distinct.

“Ti brucerai, piccola stella senza cielo …” Hitting the high notes. “You’ll burn up, little star without a sky.”

He headed downhill, proceeding cautiously down the track, which was used only in the summer by off-road vehicles heading for the village of Crest. The headlights mounted on the snowcat’s roof lit the shortcut brightly. There was roughly zero likelihood of driving over the edge.

“Ti brucerai …”

No problem. The treads were gripping perfectly. The cabin was tilted to one side like a thrill ride, was the only thing. But even that was fun.

“Ti bruceraiiii.”

Then the tiller hit something hard and the snowcat bounced on its treads. Amedeo turned to see what the vehicle had hit. Must have been a rock or a patch of dirt. Out the rear windshield, the lights illuminated the churned-up snow on the lane.

But there was something wrong. He could see it immediately, right in the middle of the lane.

A dark stain stretching at least a couple of yards.

He braked hard.

He removed the earbuds, set the iPod aside, turned off the engine, and got out to check.

Silence.

His boots sank into the snow. In the middle of the lane was the dark patch.

“Christ, what the hell is that?”

He started walking. The closer he got, the more the stain in the middle of the shortcut changed color. At first it was black, but now it was purplish. The wind was whistling faintly through the needles of the fir trees, scattering down feathers in all directions.

Small, white, weightless feathers.

A chicken? Did I hit a chicken?! Amedeo muttered to himself.

He kept walking through the deep snow, sinking in five or six inches at every step. The down feathers covering the snow lifted into the air, spinning in tiny whirlwinds. By now the stain was brown.

What on earth did I hit? An animal?

How could he have missed it? With the cat’s seven halogen lamps? And anyway, the noise would have chased it away.

He’d almost walked right over it when he finally saw it for what it was: a stain of red blood, churned into the white blanket of snow. It was enormous, and unless he’d run over a whole henhouse, that was way too much blood to have come out of a single piece of poultry.

He steered clear of the stain and carefully edged around it till he got to the point where the red was brightest, almost shiny. He crouched down and looked carefully.

Then he saw.

He turned and took off at a run, but he didn’t make it to the woods. He vomited all over the Crest shortcut.

A cell phone going off at this time of night meant trouble, as sure as a certified letter from Equitalia, the Italian equivalent of the IRS. Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone, born in 1966, was flat on his back in his bed, eyeing the big toenail on his right foot. The nail had turned black, on account of the filing cabinet drawer that D’Intino had carelessly dropped on Schiavone’s foot while hysterically searching for a passport application. Dottor Schiavone hated Officer D’Intino. That very afternoon, after yet another idiotic move pulled by that cop, he’d sworn to himself and the entire citizenry of Aosta that he’d make sure he got that moron transferred to a godforsaken police station somewhere far from the sea, down at the opposite end of the Italian peninsula.

The deputy police chief reached out his hand and grabbed the Nokia that kept ringing and ringing. He took a look at the display. The caller number was police headquarters.

That rated an 8 on the scale of pains in the ass that ran from 1 to 10. Possibly a 9.

Rocco Schiavone had an entirely personal hierarchy up and down which he ranked the pains in the ass that life senselessly inflicted on him every day. The scale actually started at 6, which covered anything that had to do with keeping house: grocery shopping, plumbers, paying rent. The number 7 included malls, banks, medical clinics, and doctors in general, with a special bonus for dentists, and concluded with work dinners or family dinners, though all his living relatives, thank God, were down south in Rome. An 8 on the hierarchy began, first and foremost, with public speaking, followed by any and all bureaucratic procedures required for his job, going to the theater, and reporting to chiefs of police or investigating magistrates. At number 9 came tobacco shops that weren’t open when he needed a pack of cigarettes, cafés that didn’t carry Algida ice cream bars, running into anyone who wanted to talk and talk endlessly, and especially stakeouts with police officers who needed a bath.

Topping the hierarchy, the worst and the most dreaded, was a rating of 10. The top, the worst, the mother of all pains in the ass: the investigation he wasn’t expecting.

He hoisted himself to a sitting position on both elbows and pushed ANSWER.

“Now who’s busting my balls?” he barked.

“Dottore, this is Deruta.”

Special Agent Deruta. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds of useless body mass vying valiantly with D’Intino for the title of stupidest member of police headquarters staff.

“What do you want, Michele?” roared the deputy police chief.

“We have a problem. On the slopes at Champoluc.”

“And where do we have this problem?”

“At Champoluc.”

“And where is that?”

Rocco Schiavone had been shipped north to Aosta from the Cristoforo Colombo police station, in Rome, the previous September. Four months later, all he knew about the geography of the city of Aosta and its surrounding province was the locations of his apartment, police headquarters, the courthouse, and the local trattoria.

“Champoluc is in Val d’Ayas!” Deruta replied, in an almost scandalized tone of voice.

“What’s that supposed to mean? What’s Val d’Ayas?”

“Val d’Ayas, Dottore, is the valley above Verrès. Champoluc is the most famous village in that valley. People go there to ski.”

“Okay, fine, so what?”

“Well, a couple of hours ago someone found a corpse.”

A corpse.

Schiavone let the hand holding the cell phone flop onto the mattress and shut his eyes, cursing through his teeth. “A corpse …”

That was a 10 on the scale of pains in the ass. Definitely a 10. Possibly 10 with a bullet.

“Can you hear me, Dottore?” the telephone crackled.

Rocco raised the device back to his ear. He sighed. “Who’s coming with me?”

“Your choice. Me or Pierron.”

“Italo Pierron, every day for the rest of my life!” the deputy police chief responded promptly.

Deruta acknowledged the insult with a prolonged silence.

“Deruta? What, did you fall asleep?”

“No, I’m at your orders, Dottore.”

“Tell Pierron to come, and to bring the BMW.”

“Do you think the jeep might be better for high-mountain driving?”

“No. I like the BMW. It’s more comfortable, and it has better heating and a radio that works. The only people who take the jeep are those losers the forest rangers.”

“So should I tell Pierron to come get you at your apartment?”

“Yes. And tell him not to ring the bell.”

He dropped his phone on the bed and closed his eyes, laying his hand over them, palm down.

He heard the rustling whisper of Nora’s negligee. Then her weight on the mattress. Then her lips and warm breath in his ear. And finally her teeth, nibbling at his earlobe. At any other time, these were all things that would have aroused him, but right now Nora’s foreplay left him completely indifferent.

“What’s going on?” asked Nora in a faint voice.

“That was the office.”

“And?”

Rocco pulled himself up into a sitting position on the bed without even glancing at her. He slowly pulled on his socks.

“Can’t you talk?”

“I don’t feel like it. I’m working. Leave me alone.”

Nora nodded. She brushed aside a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes. “So you have to go out?”

Rocco finally turned and looked at her. “Well, what do you think I’m doing?”

There Nora lay, stretched out on the bed. Her arm, thrown over her head, revealed her perfectly hairless armpit. Her crimson satin negligee caressed her body, emphasizing with an interplay of light and shadow her generous curves. Her long, smooth dark hair framed her face, white as cream. Her black eyes looked like a pair of Apulian olives freshly plucked from the tree. Her lips were thin, but she knew just how to apply the right amount of lipstick to fill them out. Nora, a magnificent specimen of womanhood, just a year over forty.

“You could be a little nicer about it, couldn’t you?”

“No,” Rocco replied. “I couldn’t. It’s late, I have to drive up into the mountains, I have to kiss the whole evening with you good-bye, and in a little while it’s probably going to start snowing, too!”

He stood up brusquely from the bed, went over to sit in an armchair, and put on his shoes: a pair of Clarks desert boots, the only type of footwear that Rocco Schiavone knew. Nora lay on the bed. She felt a little dumb, made up and dressed in satin. A table set for dinner, and no guests attending. She sat up. “What a shame. I made you raclette for dinner.”

“What’s that?” the deputy police chief asked glumly.

“Haven’t you ever had it? It’s a bowl of melted fontina cheese with artichokes, olives, and little chunks of salami.”

Rocco stood up and pulled on a crewneck sweater. “Nice and digestible, I gather.”

“Am I going to see you tomorrow?”

“How the hell would I know, Nora! I don’t even know where I’m going to be tomorrow.”

He left the bedroom. Nora sighed and stood up. She caught up with him at the front door. She whispered: “I’ll be waiting for you.”

“What am I, a bus?” Rocco shot back. Then he smiled. “Nora, forgive me, this is just a bad night. You’re an incredibly beautiful woman. You’re unquestionably the top tourist attraction in the city of Aosta.”

“After the Roman arch.”

“I’m sick and tired of Roman rubble. But not of you.”

He kissed her hastily on the lips and pulled the door shut behind him.

Nora felt like laughing. That’s just how Rocco Schiavone was. Take him or leave him. She looked at the pendulum clock that hung by the front door. She still had plenty of time to call Sofia and go see a movie. Then maybe they could get a pizza together.

Rocco stepped out of the downstairs door, and an icy hand seized his throat.

“Fucking cold out here!”

He’d left the car a hundred yards from the front entrance. His feet, in the pair of Clarks desert boots he was wearing, had frozen immediately upon contact with the sidewalk, frosted with a white covering of goddamned snow. A cutting wind was blowing, and there was no one out on the streets. The first thing he did when he got into his Volvo was turn on the heat. He blew on his hands. A hundred yards was all the distance it took to freeze them solid. “Fucking cold out here!” he said again, obsessively, like a mantra, and the words, along with the condensation from his breath, flew up against the windshield, fogging it white. He started the diesel engine, punched the defrost button, and sat there staring at a metal streetlamp tossing in the wind. Grains of snow fell through the cone of light, sifting through the darkness like stardust.

“It’s snowing! I knew it!”

He put the car in reverse and drove out of Duvet.

When he parked outside his apartment building on Rue Piave, the BMW with Pierron behind the wheel was already there with the engine running. Rocco leaped into the car, which the officer had already heated to a toasty seventy-three degrees. An agreeable feeling of well-being enveloped him like a woolen blanket.

“Italo, I’m hoping you didn’t ring the buzzer to my apartment.”

Pierron put the car in gear. “I’m not an idiot, Commissario.”

“Good. But you have to lose this habit. The rank of commissario has been abolished.”

The windshield wipers were clearing snowflakes off the glass.

“If it’s snowing here, I can just imagine up at Champoluc,” said Pierron.

“Is it up high?”

“Five thousand feet.”

“That’s insane!” The greatest elevation Rocco Schiavone had ever attained in his life was 450 feet above sea level at Rome’s Monte Mario. That is, of course, if you left out the past four months in Aosta, at 1,895 feet above sea level. He couldn’t even imagine someone living at 5,000 feet above sea level. It made his head spin just to think about it.

“What do people do at five thousand feet above sea level?”

“They ski. They climb ice. In summer, they go hiking.”

“Just think.” The deputy police chief pulled a Chesterfield out of the policeman’s pack. “I prefer Camels.”

Italo smiled.

“Chesterfields taste of iron. Buy Camels, Italo.” He lit it and took a drag. “Not even stars in the sky,” he said, looking out the car window.

Pierron was focused on driving. He knew that he was about to be treated to a serenade of nostalgia for Rome. And sure enough.

“In Rome this time of year, it’s cold, but often there’s a north wind that clears away the clouds. And then the sun comes out. It’s sunny and cold. The city’s all red and orange, the sky is blue, and it’s great to stroll down those cobblestone streets. All the colors are brighter when the north wind blows. It’s like a rag taking the dust off an antique painting.”

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?”

“I want to have a talk with the guy who found the corpse,” Rocco replied, and turned toward the cableway administrative offices. Italo followed him like a bloodhound.

The offices of Monterosa Ski were deserted at that time of night. Aside from a young woman in a skirt suit and a policeman dressed for skiing, both seated in the lobby. The fluorescent lights made their faces look worn. But while the policeman had the handsome tan of someone who spends hours on the slopes, the shapely young woman looked pale and exhausted. Slightly overweight, but not someone you’d kick out of bed, thought Rocco as soon as he saw her, coming in through the double glass doors with Pierron. The skiing policeman snapped to attention. At his feet was a small puddle of water, evidence that the snow clinging to his Nordica ski boots had melted. And an unmistakable sign that the officer had been sitting there for quite some time now.

“Officer De Marinis.”

Rocco looked him up and down. “So why aren’t you with your Neapolitan colleague, Caciuoppolo, guarding the scene of the murder?”

“I was here with Amedeo, the one who found the corpse,” the cop explained.

“What are you, a babysitter? Get your skis and go on up and lend a hand.”

“Right away, Dottore.”

With the loud clapping of ski boots on the floor, De Marinis left the building.

“Where is he?” Rocco asked the young woman.

“Come this way; Amedeo’s in there,” the clerk replied, pointing to a shut door behind her. “I brought him a cup of hot tea.”

“Good work … Margherita,” said Rocco, reading the name on the badge pinned to her lapel. “Good work. Could you bring a couple more for the two of us, please?”

The young woman nodded her head and left.

Amedeo was sitting in a Naugahyde chair. His eyes were puffy, and his hair was flattened to his head. He’d set his cap and gloves down on the table, and he was staring at the floor. Rocco and Italo grabbed two office chairs with wheels and sat down facing him. Finally Amedeo looked up. “Who are you?” he asked in a faint voice.

“Deputy Police Chief Schiavone. Do you feel up to answering a couple of questions?”

“Christ on a crutch. I still can’t believe it. I heard a crack and—”

Rocco stopped him with an upheld hand. “Do me a favor, Amedeo. Let’s take things one at a time. So, now, you work on the thingies, the … snowcats, right?”

“Yes, for the past few months. Luigi, my boss, got me the job. He’s a good friend of mine.”

“He’s the one who took us up, Dottore,” Italo added. Rocco nodded.

“I’d just finished doing the piste near the top. There was a wall and—”

“A wall?” Schiavone asked with a grimace.

“When the slope turns really steep, that’s what we call it. A wall. Or a black piste,” Italo offered, coming to his aid.

“Go on, Amedeo.”

“The wall is just too steep. You can’t take it. It’s dangerous, and narrow, and if you’re not super-skillful and experienced, it can end badly. Luckily my boss, Luigi, gave me a call and told me I could head down and finish the last part of the piste, where it comes into town.”

“And?”

“And so I headed back. It’s just that to go back down to town, we don’t drive over the runs we’ve just groomed. We take the shortcut, the Crest shortcut.”

“Do all of you use it?”

“Use what?”

“This Crest shortcut,” replied Rocco.

“When our shift is over, yes. Otherwise we’d ruin all the work we’ve done. I got done early, because basically I’m the one with the least experience. So you take the shortcut through Crest, which is that little village of just a few houses. From there, at the fountain, the shortcut runs through the woods and downhill.”

“And that’s where you ran over the corpse.”

Amedeo said nothing. He looked down.

“And then from the shortcut where do you go?” Rocco asked.

“You wind up in the middle of the piste that runs down to town. Which is the last one we do. And then our shift is over.”

“Understood. You go through one at a time, and the last one down grooms it so it’s ready for the next day’s skiing,” Rocco concluded. “So if it hadn’t been you, somebody else was bound to run over the corpse. You just had the bad luck to be first, Amedeo.”

“Yeah.”

“Fine. That’s all clear,” said Rocco, just as Margherita walked into the room with two small steaming plastic cups. Rocco took one. “Thanks for the tea, Margherita,” he said and gulped it down.

It tasted like dish soap. But at least it was hot. Margherita was about to leave when Rocco stopped her. “Tell me something, Margherita.”

The young woman turned around. “Certainly, Dottore.”

“How many people live in Champoluc?”

“Leaving out the tourists?”

“Just residents, I mean.”

“Not even four hundred.”

“Just one big family, right?”

“Right. We’re practically all related, really. For instance, me and Amedeo are cousins.”

Amedeo nodded in confirmation. Margherita, seeing that the deputy police chief had no other questions, left with a smile.

Rocco slapped the snowcat driver on the knee. This was the first time Italo had ever seen his boss make an affectionate gesture toward a stranger. Amedeo jerked in fright. “All right, then, Amedeo, now it’s time for you to head home. Get some sleep if you can. In fact, you want some advice? Get drunk—tie one on. And don’t ever think about it again. After all, it wasn’t your fault, was it?”

“No. That’s the truth. I was driving, then all of a sudden I heard this super-loud cracking sound and I slammed on the brakes. I didn’t know what it was. A root, or a rock. But when I got out, all that blood … I hadn’t seen the body at all!”

Rocco tilted his head slightly to one side, then reached one hand out toward the breast pocket of the young man’s windbreaker. He inserted two fingers and pulled out a pack of Rizla cigarette papers.

“You didn’t see it—unless you had smoked yourself blind,” Rocco said, sniffing the papers. “Grass. At least grass keeps your spirits up. How many joints did you smoke while you were up grooming the snow?”

“One,” Amedeo muttered with a groan.

“Plus you can throw in a couple of jiggers of grappa for good measure, and then that poor sucker might have been trying to cross the road and you would never have seen him, would you?”

“No, Dottore! No! I swear that I just didn’t see that person at all. The snowcat has seven spotlights bolted to its roof; if he’d been crossing in front of me, I’d definitely have seen him!”

Wide-eyed, Amedeo looked first at Rocco and then at Italo, in search of an understanding gaze. “When I got out, I thought I’d run over a chicken, or a turkey, even if there are no chickens or turkeys up here. But there were feathers and down everywhere, a sea of feathers.”

Rocco smiled faintly. “It could have been a down comforter from Ikea, no?”

“Believe me, Dottore. I didn’t see him!”

“How the fuck do you know it was a man?” Rocco snapped, and the sudden shift in mood frightened even Italo Pierron.

Amedeo seemed to shrink into his chair. “I don’t know. I just said that, for no reason.”

Rocco stared at the young man in silence for at least ten seconds. Amedeo was sweating. The fingers of his hands gripped the little table, shaking.

“Amedeo Gunelli, believe me, if I find out that he was out walking and you ran him over, it’ll be manslaughter at the very least. You’ll be looking at a nice long stretch in lockup, you know that?”

“When the deputy police chief says ‘lockup,’ he means prison,” Italo translated. Having spent the past four months listening to Rocco, he was starting to understand the way people talked in Rome.

Amedeo’s jaw dropped as if someone had just pulled a string.

“Remember one thing, Amedeo,” said Rocco as he got up from his chair. “The police can be your friend or your worst nightmare. That’s up to you.”

Outside, the wind slapped the two cops in the face with its icy palms. Italo trotted over to the deputy police chief. “Why did you say that to him? Do you think he ran him down?”

“I wish he had. The case would be closed. No, he’s not the one who did it. The snowcat up there has no dents or scrapes on the front section. If he’d hit him straight on, there would have been something. But there’s nothing.”

“Well?” asked Italo, who was baffled.

“You see, Italo, if you scare them, they’ll always be eager to help. He’s a good kid—he might turn out to be useful. It’s always better for them to be afraid of us, trust me.”

Italo nodded with conviction.

“But there is one thing we’ll need to keep in mind: even with those blindingly powerful spotlights, he didn’t see that poor guy’s body lying on the ground. That’s something we need to give some thought to.”

“A sign that the body was covered with snow?”

“Nice going, Italo. You’re starting to catch on.”

Rocco and Officer Pierron were about to get into the car when a dark blue Lancia Gamma screeched to a halt thirty feet away.

Rocco rolled his eyes. There was no mistaking it: dark blue Lancia equals attorney general’s office.

A man got out of the car, five foot six tops, bundled in a down coat that hung below his knees. He wore a fur hat that almost covered his eyes. He strode rapidly over to Rocco Schiavone, right hand extended. “Name is Baldi. Pleased to meet you.”

Rocco shook his hand. “Schiavone, deputy police chief of the mobile squad.”

“Well, can you tell me what we’re looking at here?”

Rocco looked him up and down. The man looked like a veteran of the Italian army in Russia, but he was the investigating magistrate on duty. “Are you the investigating magistrate?”

“No. I’m your grandmother. You bet your ass I’m the investigating magistrate.”

This is beginning well, thought Rocco.

Dottor Baldi seemed to have an even shorter fuse than Rocco did. He was on duty and now he too had landed this tremendous pain in the ass. In a way, it made Rocco happy—it meant he wasn’t the only one who’d been dragged out of a warm bed on a quiet night at home and sent rudely out into the snow at an elevation of five thousand feet above sea level.

“Well, there’s a corpse up there. A man. Between forty and fifty years old.”

“Who is it?”

“If I knew that, I would have told you first name and last.”

“No ID?”

“Nothing. We’re just guessing that it’s a man. I don’t know if I convey the idea.”

“No, you don’t convey it at all,” the magistrate replied. “Why don’t you stop beating about the bush. Get to the point. Dottor Schiavone: how can you tell that it’s a man? Describe clearly exactly what we’re dealing with, because I’m already pissed off.”

Schiavone cleared his throat. “Because the snowcat ran over him and churned him to bits with its tillers. You see, the head was crushed, with resulting expulsion of brain matter; from the thoracic cavity there was a generalized and random expulsion of shreds of lung particles and other visceral matter that even Fumagalli, our medical examiner, was hard put to identify. One hand lay thirty feet from the body, an arm was ripped loose, the legs were bent in a manner that defies nature roundly, and have, therefore, clearly been shattered in numerous places. The stomach has been twisted into an array of bloody coils and …”

“That’ll do!” shouted the magistrate. “What, is this your idea of fun?”

Rocco smiled. “Sir, you requested a detailed description of what we have up there, and I’m just providing you with it.”

Maurizio Baldi nodded repeatedly, looking around him as if in search of a question to ask or an answer to give. “I’ll be at the courthouse. I’ll see you around. Let’s hope that this was an accidental death.”

“Let’s hope so, but I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have a sense about it. I haven’t had a lot of luck in a while now.”

“You’re telling me. The last thing I’m looking for is a murder case underfoot.”

“Ditto, exactly.”

The investigating magistrate glanced at the deputy police chief. “Can I give you a piece of advice?”

“Certainly.”

“If what you say is true and this is not an accident, you’ll have to work up here. Dressed the way you are, there’s a good chance you’ll develop frostbite, then gangrene, and we’ll have to amputate your hands and feet.”

Rocco nodded. “Thanks for the advice.”

The magistrate looked Rocco in the eye. “I know you, Dottor Schiavone. I know lots of things about you.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “So let me warn you: avoid pulling any of your bullshit.”

“I’ve never pulled any.”

“I happen to have different information.”

“We’ll see you on the banks of the River Don, Dottore.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

Without bothering to shake hands with the magistrate, Rocco went back to the car, where Pierron was waiting for him. Maurizio Baldi, on the other hand, walked to the base of the cableway. Still, under that fur hat, a faint smile had played briefly across his face.

“That’s Dottor Baldi, isn’t it?” asked Pierron. Rocco said nothing. He didn’t need to. “He’s half crazy, did you know that?” asked Italo as they got into the car.

“You feel like putting this thing in gear and getting me out of here, or do I have to call a taxi?”

Pierron obeyed immediately.

It’s forty-five minutes past midnight. A person can’t come home half-frozen at forty-five minutes past midnight. The minute I open the door I realize that I left the lights on. In the hall and in the bathroom. Forty-five minutes past midnight and I look down at my half-frozen feet. Shoes and socks aren’t worth keeping. It doesn’t matter; I have three other pairs of desert boots. My big toe is still black. That idiot D’Intino. I’ll have to get him transferred, get him transferred as soon as possible. It’s a question of my psychophysical equilibrium. If I’ve ever had such a thing.

I turn on the water. I slip my feet into it. It’s hot—boiling hot. Only it takes a good three minutes before I can even tell how hot it is. I run hot water over my ankles, between my toes, and even over my black toenail. At least that doesn’t hurt.

“Keep that up and you’ll get chilblains.”

I turn around.

It’s Marina. In her nightgown. I think I must have woken her up. If there’s one thing that annoys me (one thing? there are thousands), it’s when I wake up my wife. She sleeps like a rock, but she seems to have a sixth sense when she hears me up and about.

“Ciao, my love.”

She looks at me with her sleepy gray eyes. “You woke me up,” she says.

I know. “I know. Sorry.”

She leans on the doorjamb, arms folded across her chest. She’s ready to listen. She wants to know more. “We found a corpse in the middle of a ski run, buried in the snow. In Champoluc. A tremendous pain in the ass, my love.”

“Does that mean you’re going to be staying up there for a while?”

“Not on your life. It’s an hour’s drive. Let’s just hope it turns out to be a case of accidental death.”

Marina looks at me. I keep my feet submerged in the bidet, which smokes like a pot of spaghetti. “Sure, but tomorrow morning you’re buying yourself a pair of decent shoes. Otherwise, in a couple of days they’ll have to amputate your feet for gangrene.”

“The investigating magistrate said the same thing. Anyway, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s sensible shoes.”

“Have you eaten?”

“A piece of stale pizza on the way.”

Marina has vanished behind the door. She’s gone to bed. I dry my feet and go into the kitchen. I hate this furnished apartment. The kitchen is the only decent room in the apartment. I wish I could understand the way other people live. Most of their apartments and homes are furnished in a way that evokes pity, nothing else. Only in the kitchen do they spend vast sums, furnishing the place with electric appliances of all kinds: ovens, microwaves, and dishwashers like something out of the Starship Enterprise. Instead, in the living room, arte povera and paintings of clowns hanging on the walls.

It’s a mystery.

Every once in a while, I compare it with my home, in Rome. On the Janiculum Hill. I look out over the city, and on a windy day, when the air is clear, I can see St. Peter’s, Piazza Venezia, and the mountains in the distance. Furio suggested I should rent it out. Instead of leaving it empty. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t stand the idea of strangers walking over the parquet floors that Marina chose, or opening the drawers of the Indian credenzas that we bought years ago in Viterbo. To say nothing of the bathrooms. Strangers’ asses planted on my toilet, in my bath, strange faces admiring their reflections in my Mexican mirrors. It’s out of the question. I get myself a bottle of cool water. Otherwise I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a throat and tongue that resemble two pieces of sandpaper.

Marina is under the blankets. As always, she’s reading the dictionary.

“Isn’t it a little late for reading?”

“It’s the only way I can get to sleep.”

“What’s the new word for today?”

Marina has a little black notebook that she keeps in her lap with a pencil. She opens to her bookmark and reads. “Stitch—transitive verb: To sew or embroider something. It can also be used of one who sews with no particular enthusiasm.” She sets down her notebook.

The mattress is comfortable. It’s called memory foam. A material developed by NASA for astronauts in the sixties. It envelops you like a glove because it remembers the shape of your body. That’s what it says in the pamphlet that came with it.

“Could you say that I’m stitching in Aosta?” I ask Marina.

“No. You’re not a tailor. I’m the one who knows how to sew.”

The mattress is comfortable. But the bed is cold as ice. I wrap myself around Marina. Looking for a little heat. But her side is as cold as mine.

I close my eyes.

And I finally put an end to this shitty day.

FRIDAY

The telephone drilled through the silence that double-pane windows and the absence of traffic gave to Deputy Police Chief Schiavone’s apartment on Rue Piave. Rocco leaped like a hooked bass and opened his eyes wide. Despite the scream of the cell phone on his nightstand, he was still able to gather his thoughts: it was morning, he was at home, in his own bed after spending the night out in the snow. He wasn’t actually lying underneath Eva Mendes, and she wasn’t actually wearing nothing but a pair of dizzyingly high stiletto heels and dancing like a sinuous serpent, tossing her hair to and fro. That image was nothing but a cobweb that the telephone had scorched with its deranged shrieks.

“Who’s busting my balls at seven in the morning?”

“Me.”

“Me who?”

“Sebastiano!”

Rocco smiled as he ran one hand over his face. “Sebastiano! How you doing?”

“Fine, fine.” And now his friend’s croupy voice had become recognizable. “Sorry if I woke you up.”

“I haven’t heard from you in months!”

“Four months and ten days, but who’s counting?”

“How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine.”

“What are you up to?”

“I’m coming up north.”

Rocco shifted comfortably on the memory foam mattress. “You’re coming up? When?”

“Tomorrow night. I’ll be on the seven o’clock train from Turin. Are you going to be around?”

“Of course I will. I’ll meet you at the station.”

“Excellent. Will it be cold up there?”

“What can I tell you, Seba? Bone-chilling cold.”

“All right, then I’ll wear a down jacket.”

“And insulated shoes—take my word for it,” Rocco added.

“I don’t have those. What kind of shoes do you wear up there?”

“A pair of Clarks desert boots.”

“Are they insulated?”

“No. Which is why I’m telling you to wear a pair of insulated shoes. My feet are like a couple of ice cubes.”

“Then why don’t you get yourself a pair?”

“I can’t stand the things.”

“Well, you do what you like. I’m going to swing by Decathlon and get a pair. So—see you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow.”

And Sebastiano hung up the phone.

Rocco dropped his cell phone on his down jacket. If Sebastiano Cecchetti, known to his friends as Seba, was coming to Aosta, then matters were becoming distinctly interesting.

When Rocco walked into police headquarters at 8:15 a.m., Special Agent Michele Deruta walked up to him immediately. He was moving his tiny feet as fast as his two-hundred-plus pounds allowed him, and he was panting like an old steam locomotive. His chin was sweaty and his thinning white hair, combed specially to conceal his bald spot, was glittering, oiled by who-knows-what pomade.

“Dottore?”

Rocco stopped suddenly in the middle of the hallway. “Your face and hair are damp. Why damp, Deruta? Did you stick your face into a barrel of oil?”

Deruta pulled out his handkerchief and tried to dry himself off. “I wouldn’t know, Dottore.”

“But still, you’re damp. Do you take a shower in the morning?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But you don’t dry off.”

“No, it’s just that before coming to work, I help my wife at her bakery.”

Officer Deruta, getting close to retirement age, started talking about his wife’s bakery just outside of town, the work in the predawn hours, the yeast and the flour. Rocco Schiavone paid no attention to a word he said. He just watched his damp, loose lips, his hair streaked with white, and his bovine, bulging eyes.

“What’s surprising,” said the deputy police chief, interrupting his special agent’s monologue, “is not that you work at your wife’s bakery, Deruta. It’s that you have a wife at all—that’s what’s truly extraordinary.”

Deruta fell silent. It wasn’t as if he expected special praise for his daily sacrifice of working a double job, but a kind word, something like “You’re wearing yourself out, Deruta. What a good man you are,” or, “If only there were more people like you.” Instead he got nothing. A scornful lack of consideration was all his superior officer could offer him.

“Aside from your double shift, is there anything important you need to tell me?” asked the deputy police chief.

“The chief of police has already called three times this morning. He needs to speak to the press.”

“So?”

“First he wants to hear from you.”

Rocco nodded and turned away, leaving Deruta there; still, the officer chased after him on his dainty feet. To watch the heft of his 225 pounds bounce along on his size 7½ men’s shoes, you’d expect him to roll headlong across the floor at any moment. “The chief of police isn’t in town, Dottore. There’s no point in you going up to see him. You’ll have to call him.”

Rocco stopped and turned to look at Officer Deruta. “I see. Well, now, listen to me and listen good. Two things. First of all, start getting some exercise and put yourself on a diet. Second: later on, I’ve got an important job for you.” He furrowed his brow and looked Deruta in the eye. “Very important. Can I rely on you? Do you feel up to it?”

Deruta’s eyes opened wide and became even bigger than usual. “Certainly, Dottore!” he said, and flashed him a bright, thirty-two-tooth smile. Actually, a twenty-four-tooth smile, because there were several gaps. “Certainly, Dottor Schiavone. You can trust me blindly!”

“Why don’t you find yourself a dentist!”

“You think?” asked Deruta, covering his mouth with one hand. “Do you know how much they cost? On my salary?”

“Tell your wife to give you the money.”

“That money goes to my daughter, who’s studying in Perugia to be a veterinarian.”

“Ah. I get it. You’re training your own family doctor. Good thinking!” and he finally walked into his office, slamming the door behind him and blocking out the baffled face of the officer, who stood there, still chewing over what the deputy police chief had meant by his last comment.

In his long-ago high school days, Rocco had read that some philosopher, possibly Hegel, had described the newspaper as “the realist’s morning prayer.” But his version of the realist’s morning prayer was to roll a fat joint to put his mind at peace with the world and the fact that he’d been forced to live all this distance from Rome for the past four months. And the knowledge that there was no way to get back there.

Not that he had anything against Aosta. Quite the opposite. It was a lovely city, and the people were all nice and polite. But it wouldn’t have been any different if they’d stationed him in Salerno, or Mantua, or Venice. The end result would be the same. It wasn’t a matter of the destination. What he missed above all was his native city, his existential stomping grounds, his home base.

He pulled the key out from under the framed photograph of Marina on his desk and pulled open the top drawer on the right. Inside sat a wooden box with a dozen handsome fatties, all ready to go. He lit one and, as he twisted the key shut in the drawer lock, took a long, generous drag that went straight to his lungs.

Funny how this small everyday gesture helped to soothe his brain. With the third puff, he gained a sense of lucidity and started planning out his day.

First thing: call the chief of police.

Then the hospital.

And then Nora.

He laid the half-smoked joint down in his ashtray. He was just reaching out for the receiver when the phone started to ring.

“Pronto, sì?”

“Corsi speaking!”

It was the police chief.

“Ah, Dottore, I was just about to call you.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“But this time it’s the truth.”

“Then you’re saying all the other times you were lying to me?”

“Sure.”

“All right, Schiavone, go ahead.”

“We still don’t know a thing. Neither who he was nor how he died.”

“So what am I supposed to tell those guys?”

It wasn’t that the chief of police had forgotten the word. It was just that he never named the city’s crew of print journalists. He always called them “those guys.” As if he weren’t willing to soil his lips with the common noun. He hated them. As far as he was concerned, they were a life form just one step up from the amoeba, the one flat note in the symphony orchestra of creation. That was how he felt about the print journalists. “Those other guys,” television reporters—he didn’t even consider them to be living entities.

That hatred was rooted deep in his personal history. It had been almost eighteen years since his wife left him for an editorialist at La Stampa, and since then Corsi had been waging a senseless crusade against every member of the guild, irrespective of race, religion, or political creed.

“Dottore, that’s what we know. If they would be patient—if the gentlemen of the press would be so good as to patiently await the developments of the investigation … Otherwise, unfortunately, I have nothing to add.”

“Those guys won’t wait. They’re lying in wait, eager to bite me in the ass.”

“That’s what you think, Chief. The press around here loves you,” Rocco said seriously.

“What makes you say that?”

“I hear what people say. They respect you. They need you.”

There was a pause. The police chief was mulling over what his underling had just told him. And Rocco smiled, delighted to go on tangling the threads of the relationship between his boss and “those guys.”

“Cut the bullshit. I know those guys. Listen here, Schiavone, would you rule out categorically the possibility that last night’s death might have been accidental?”

“With my luck? Yeah, I’d rule it out.”

Andrea Corsi took a deep breath. “When are you going to give me more comforting information?”

“In, let’s say, forty-eight hours?”

“Let’s say twenty-four!”

“Okay, we make it thirty-six and not another word on the subject.”

“Schiavone, what do you think this is, the flea market at Porta Portese? If I give you twenty-four hours, you have twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll call you this time tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll believe it when my team Sampdoria wins the national championship.”

“If I haven’t called you back in twenty-four hours, then I swear I’ll get you free tickets for the Genoa–Sampdoria match.”

“I’m the police chief. I don’t need your free tickets.”

And he hung up the phone.

“What a pain in the ass!” shouted Rocco, stretching his aching arms. He was looking at a mountain of work, work, work. That’s the way life was up here in Aosta. Serious folks, serious city, inhabited by serious people who work hard and mind their own business. And if they got high, at the very most it was with a round of grolle, local multi-spouted mugs of grappa and coffee, passed around communally. The days of Rome were over, a city where dope was processed as if on an assembly line. The days of decent opportunities, lucky breaks—those days were over. How much longer would he be forced to languish in this purgatory? He lived in the richest city in Italy, with a per capita income to rival Luxembourg’s, but after four months he had nothing to show for it. Then he thought about Sebastiano. Who would be coming up north tomorrow. And if Sebastiano was willing to take a plane all the way to Turin and then a train, in the middle of winter, there must be a reason, and a very good one.

That thought electrified him to the point that he found himself on his feet, rubbing his hands together. Only when his hand was on the door handle did he remember the joint with a homemade filter sitting in his ashtray. He went back, slipped it into his pocket, and finally left his office.

The streets were deserted. The cloudy gray sky promised more snow to come, and the black lava rock mountains seemed ready to swallow the landscape all around them. Italo Pierron drove, eyes on the road, while Rocco was on his cell phone.

“And yet it’s not that hard, D’Intino! Listen to me carefully.” Rocco spoke slowly and clearly, as if he were addressing a none-too-bright child. “Find out whether, in the city or province of Aosta, especially in Val d’Ayas, there have been any missing-person reports, people who didn’t come home, you see what I mean? Not just since yesterday; let’s say in the past month.” Rocco rolled his eyes. Then, with infinite patience, he repeated the concept: “D’Intino, listen: for the past month. Is that clear? Over and out.”

He punched the OFF button and looked at Italo, whose eyes were glued to the road ahead. “Tell me, is D’Intino playing with me or is he really that dumb?”

Italo smiled.

“Where’s he from?”

“He’s Abruzzese. From the province of Chieti.”

“Doesn’t he have any pull down there? No connections? Couldn’t he go back down there and stop busting our balls?”

“I don’t know, Dottore.”

“Everyone in Italy has a connection. I had to wind up with the one brain-damaged mental defective who doesn’t even have a relative or friend who can pull some strings for him.”

They left the car in a parking space at the hospital, even though a security guard had told them not to because that was the chief physician’s spot. Schiavone did nothing more than pull out his badge and shut up the zealous functionary of the Health Ministry.

They walked downstairs and past the laboratories until they finally reached the double glass doors where Fumagalli worked. The morgue.

“Dottor Schiavone?” asked Italo in a faint voice.

“What is it?”

“Do you mind if I wait here for you?”

“No. You come on in with me and enjoy the show. Didn’t you choose to be a policeman?”

“Actually, no, I didn’t. But it’s a long story.” He dropped his head and followed his boss.

There was no need to take off his coat, because the autopsy room was more or less the same temperature as outside. Under Fumagalli’s lab coat Schiavone could see a turtleneck sweater. He wore latex gloves and a sort of green apron spattered with brown splotches. “And to think I complain about my shitty job!” Rocco said to him.

As usual, Fumagalli didn’t bother to say hello, limiting himself to waving his hand in the two policemen’s direction and leading them to the second room, which was a small waiting room. There the doctor gave both policemen a surgical mask, plastic shoe covers, and a strange paper smock.

“All right, the two of you come with me.”

In the middle of the room was a nice big autopsy table, and on top of the table lay the corpse, mercifully covered with a white cloth.

In the room you could hear a faucet drip, along with the continuous hum of the recycling air vents, which were spreading a mixture of ferocious stenches as they circulated the air in the morgue. Disinfectant, rust, rotten meat, hard-boiled eggs. Italo Pierron felt as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus, bent over and clapped his hands to his mouth, then hurried away to lose the breakfast that had just come surging up his esophagus.

“All right, now that we’re alone,” said Rocco with a smile, “have you had a chance to work on him?”

“I’ve tried to reassemble all the pieces. I’ve done easier jigsaw puzzles,” the doctor replied, and uncovered the corpse.

“Fuck!” came out of the deputy police chief’s mouth, clear and loud and straight from the heart.

There was no body. There was just a series of shredded pieces of flesh, more or less reassembled to form an object that only remotely resembled anything human.

“How can you work with this?”

Fumagalli cleaned his lenses. “Nice and slow. Like doing art restoration.”

“Sure, but those guys are fixing a masterpiece, and it’s a pleasure to look at.”

“This is a masterpiece too,” said Fumagalli. “It’s God’s handiwork, or didn’t you know?”

In the deputy police chief’s head, the suspicion that lengthy and involuntary interactions with human corpses had finally undermined the Livornese physician’s mental equilibrium finally became a certainty.

“Can I smoke in here?” asked Rocco, slipping his hand into his pocket.

“Of course. You want me to get you a whiskey, or maybe something a little lighter? Shall I put on some lounge music? Would you like that? All right, let’s get to work.”

The medical examiner pointed to a point on the corpse’s right pectoral: “He has a tattoo.”

Some writing and signs that Rocco couldn’t decipher. “What’s it say?”

“Maa vidvishhaavahai,” said Alberto. “Luckily, I was able to read it.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s a Hindu mantra. It means roughly: ‘May no obstacle arise between us.’ ”

“And how do you know that?”

Alberto smiled behind his thick-lensed glasses. “I’m a guy who knows how to find out things.”

The dead man’s face was crushed. Out of the red-and-black mush, which reminded Rocco of a painting by a major Italian artist whose name he couldn’t quite recall, jutted teeth, bits of lips, yellowish filaments.

“This is the first strange thing,” Alberto began, lifting a piece of handkerchief that must once have been a bandanna.

“Indeed, how very strange,” said Rocco, “a piece of handkerchief. Never seen anything like it.”

“All right, let’s cut out the cheap irony, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay. But you started it when you brought up the whiskey and the lounge music.”

“So the dead man has this red handkerchief in his trachea.”

“In his what?” asked Rocco.

“In his trachea.”

“Is there any way that the snowcat shoved it in when it ran over his face?” Rocco hypothesized.

“No. It was crumpled up. And when I unfolded it, look at the treat I found inside.” Alberto Fumagalli pulled out a sort of metal cup in which a slimy purple thing lay, with what appeared to be two little mints beside it.

“What’s that? A piece of rotten eggplant?”

“The tongue.”

“Oh, Jesus fucking—”

“And there were a couple of teeth to go with it. You see? They look like two Tic Tacs.” The doctor continued, “The snowcat crushed the poor man’s head, and the pressure pushed in this piece of handkerchief. It was in his mouth.”

“It made him swallow it?”

“Or else he swallowed it himself.”

“Sure, but if he swallowed it, then he was still alive!”

“Maybe so, Rocco. Maybe so.” Alberto took a deep breath. “So then I expressed the hypostases.”

“Translation, please.”

Fumagalli rolled his eyes in annoyance.

“Why are you getting pissed off? I studied law, not medicine! As if I were to ask you to define usucaption.”

“Usucaption is a Latin term for ‘acquisitive prescription,’ in which ownership of property can be gained through continuous possession thereof, beyond a specified period of time—”

“Enough!” Rocco interrupted him. “Let’s get back to these hypotheses.”

“Hypostases,” Alberto corrected him. “Now then, hypostases form when the heart stops beating. Blood pressure drops, and the blood flows by gravity to the lowest areas of the corpse. And since the body was lying in a supine position … there, you see?” Fumagalli gently lifted the poor wretch’s torso. There was a squeaking sound, as if he’d dragged a jellyfish across the floor. “You see these reddish-purple spots?”

They were barely visible. They looked like very faint bruises.

“Yes,” said Rocco.

“When the heart stops pumping, then what happens? The blood follows its most natural path, that is, wherever the force of gravity tends to pull it. Are you with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“Good. The body was lying supine, and therefore the blood flowed to the back. Yesterday when I got there, they were just starting to form.”

“Which means what?”

“These things form three or four hours after death. That means this poor sucker died more or less three hours before I got there. So I got there at about ten, and he died between six and seven. More likely seven than six, I’d say.”

“He didn’t die. He was killed between six and seven.”

“If you want to be exact. That’s right.”

Rocco Schiavone went on staring at those mangled remains. “Also in an attempt to be exact, could you tell me how someone killed him?”

“I’ll have to take a look at the internal organs. To rule out poisoning or suffocation. That’ll take me a little while. Come with me.” The doctor moved away from the autopsy table. But Rocco stood there a little longer, staring at the mass of flesh and blood that had once been a man’s face. “The more I look at it, the more I’m reminded of a painting by an artist—doesn’t it remind you of that painter? The one who used to make black burn marks on a red background and who—”

“Burri,” Alberto replied as he pulled open a drawer in a cabinet next to the door. “I was reminded of him myself.”

“Burri, that’s right. Exactly.” Rocco caught up with the doctor. “No, it’s just that if a person tries to remember a thing and he can’t quite get it, he might wind up killing a bunch of neurons. Burri. What’s that?” he asked the medical examiner, who was holding out another plastic bag.

“In here is the rest of the handkerchief. It was hanging out of his mouth.”

“Did the snowcat cut it? Weird. That seems pretty odd to me.”

“My job is to analyze corpses. Yours is to understand how they got that way.”

Rocco pulled away from the wall and grabbed the door handle.

“Wait! There’s one last thing that will interest you.” The doctor picked up two plastic bags. One contained a glove. The other held a pack of cigarettes. “Now, then. These were found in the inside pocket of the down jacket. An empty pack of Marlboro Lights, and this glove. Black. A ski glove. Colmar brand.”

“Ah. Okay, good. We’ve found one glove. What about the other?”

“No idea.”

“You know something, Alberto? This is a pain in the ass, number ten on the scale, summa cum laude.”

“Which means?”

“The mother of all pains in the ass!”

Cursing under his breath, Rocco walked through the door and left the doctor with his patients.

Italo was outside the hospital smoking a cigarette. Rocco walked past him. “You’re so damned helpful, Italo.”

The officer flicked away his cigarette butt and followed the deputy police chief. “It was because of the taste in my mouth.”

“Fine, but now that you’re sure to have the breath of a cesspool, do me a favor and don’t talk in the car.”

“I’ve got chewing gum.”

“Well, chew it,” Rocco ordered him as he got into the car.

They hadn’t gone fifty yards before Rocco’s cell phone started ringing.

“Who is it?”

“Dottore, it’s me, Officer D’Intino.”

“To what do I owe the honor?” asked Rocco, lighting yet another of Italo’s Chesterfields.

“Did you call me ‘your honor’?” D’Intino replied, in confusion.

Rocco sighed and, with endless patience, replied, “No, D’Intino, I didn’t. It’s just a figure of speech. What can I do for you?”

“Ah, yes, I didn’t think so. Well, I called you to say …” And with that the line went dead.

“Hello? D’Intino, hello?”

Static and sighs from the other end of the line.

“Officer D’Intino, hello?”

“Yes? I’m listening, Dottore!”

“You’re listening, my ass! What is it? Why did you call me?”

“Ah yes, in fact. I was looking, as you ordered me, to see if there were any missing-person reports, people who fail to come home, in other words, that kind of thing.”

“And?”

“There was no need. Just a little while ago, Luisa came into the police station.”

Rocco, struggling to control himself, held in the curse of all curses he was about to utter. “Officer! Who is Luisa?” he shouted.

“Luisa Pec. She says that her husband never came home last night. Or this morning, for that matter.”

“So where is this Pec?”

“Who even knows where he is, Dotto’? Luisa says the man’s disappeared!”

“Where’s Luisa Pec! Not her husband!” shouted Rocco at the top of his lungs. Italo was barely able to stifle his laughter.

“Ah … she’s here … Hold on, should I put her on?”

“What are you talking about? Put who on, D’Intino?” Rocco stared at Italo. “I’m going to kill him. I swear to all the saints in heaven, I’m going to kill him. Listen to me, Officer D’Intino, are you there?”

“Yes, Dottore!”

“All right.” Rocco took two quick breaths and tried to calm down. “Now do me a favor and tell Signora Luisa Pec to wait for me in the police station, and tell her we’ll be there soon. Is that all clear?”

“Yes, Dottore. Certainly. You’ll be here any minute. Now, if I can stop looking for missing persons, then I can start organizing the files in the personnel office, because today Officer Malta is sick, so I could—”

“No. Go on looking. We don’t know for sure that this Luisa Pec is the right person, do we?”

“True. You have a point, Commissario.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself, D’Intino!”

“Yes sir.”

Rocco hung up. He looked at Italo. “Her husband hasn’t come home and first thing, people assume the worst. For all we know, the guy’s holed up with some chippie.”

Italo nodded as he accelerated toward the police station. “Dottore, listen, if you want I can have a word with D’Intino and tell him not to call you anymore.”

“Let it be. He wouldn’t understand. He’s my nemesis. You know, when you’ve done a few things that are just so-so? There’s such a thing as divine justice. And I’m paying it. D’Intino is just a tool that God Almighty is using to punish me. A man’s got to accept his fate!”

“But why? What did you ever do?”

Rocco crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray and looked at Italo. “One or two things you already know. You’ve been looking through the papers.”

Italo gulped.

“The most normal thing in the world. I’d have done the same thing. Let’s just say that it was best for me to make myself scarce down in Rome. Decisions from on high.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t see. But let it suffice.”

Luisa’s eyes were the first thing he noticed. Big baby blues. Along with the oval face and copper blond hair that made her vaguely resemble an Italian-English actress.

“Greta Scacchi,” Rocco whispered to officer Pierron as he approached Luisa, who was sitting waiting on a bench.

“Huh?” asked Italo.

“She looks like Greta Scacchi. The actress. You know the one?”

“No.”

The deputy police chief extended his hand to the woman, who had risen to her feet and was holding out hers.

“Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone.”

“Luisa Pec.”

The woman’s hand was hard and callused, in sharp contrast with the softness of her face and the curves of her body. On her cheeks, a faint blush made her look hale and healthy.

“Please follow me to my office, Signora Pec.”

Luisa and Rocco walked off down the hallway. “So last night your husband didn’t come home?”

“No. He didn’t come home last night.”

“Prego, take a seat,” and Rocco opened the door.

He immediately noticed a whiff of cannabis and hurried to throw open the window. He gestured to Luisa Pec, who took a seat in front of the desk. Now Rocco could take a closer look at her. Her eyes were dull, marked by circles as deep as trenches. Luisa was the very picture of anxiety, but she still managed to be pretty.

Rocco sat down in his high-backed leather chair. “Tell me all about it,” he said, and placed both elbows on his desk.

“Last night my husband didn’t come home.”

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