Black Run (15 page)

“How long would it take you to get me Omar Borghetti's address?”

“Champoluc?”

“I don't know, but I think so.”

“I'll call you back in a minute. Uh, listen, D'Intino and Deruta aren't giving any signs of life. They aren't calling me back and they aren't answering their phones. What should I do?”

“Forget about them. Ignore them. Consider them missing in action.”

Rocco hung up. He put on his Colmar ski gloves. He looked at Italo. “With these fucking oversize gloves, you could slap somebody in the face, but nothing else.”

“Are those the same as the victim's gloves?”

“Same brand and more or less the same size.”

The sun was shining, and the steam rose from the roofs of the houses. A smell of good things to eat spread into the air. Everything was calm and quiet. Descending the iron steps that led down onto the main street, for a moment Rocco thought that it might not be so bad after all to live in a place like this. It was nice and peaceful. But it couldn't be the refuge for his old age. It had three fundamental defects: there was no sea, it was too cold, and it was in Italy.

“It's a pity, I was just starting to like you,” he said, addressing the town, but the phrase was overheard by Italo, who hadn't said a word the whole way.

“Me? What did I do wrong?”

“I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to the town.”

Italo said nothing.

They were heading to the car when Deruta's unmistakable voice made them turn around. “Dottore! Dottore!”

Deruta and D'Intino were right behind them, just fifty yards away. Their faces were blue with cold. D'Intino's teeth were chattering, and Deruta had swollen, purplish ears. At the sight of that pathetic vision of weariness and exhaustion, Rocco smiled, congratulating himself. The two policemen hurried forward, taking small steps, and the closer they got, the more Rocco noticed that their uniform shoes, trousers, and jackets were drenched.

“They look like a pair of vaudeville comedians, don't they?”

Italo laughed with a smirk.

“Wow, it's cold, isn't it?” said Deruta once he'd caught up to the deputy police chief.

“Not in my opinion,” replied Rocco, showing off his nice new gloves. “Well, then, D'Intino, you feeling better? I heard about your little fainting spell yesterday.”

“Yes, I feel better. They even put me on an IV drip.”

“Good for you. And how is the search coming along?”

D'Intino pulled out his notepad. “We're collecting all the names, just like you told us, and—” The notepad fell facedown on the snow. Its owner picked it up, but the snow was already washing away the ink, and soon the whole page would be illegible.

“D'Intino, what the fuck are you doing?”

The officer tried desperately to dry off the first page, but he succeeded only in smearing the stain of blue ink over the entire page. Rocco tore it out, crumpled it calmly into a ball, dropped it on the ground, and kicked out into the middle of the street. Then he looked at the two officers. “Back to work, you two. We're not here on vacation, have I made myself clear?”

“Certainly, Dottore. There's something you might be interested in.”

“Let's hear it.”

“At that hotel there”—he jerked his head in the direction of a sign reading
HOTEL BELVEDERE
on the side of a house, directly beneath a painting of a honeysuckle bush—“we found two people, a couple, who checked out in a big hurry the night of the murder. The day before yesterday.”

“Good. Did you get their names?”

“Yes.”

“Report them to Inspector Rispoli.”

Deruta looked down at the ground.

“What's the matter, Deruta?”

“What's the matter is that, really, Dottore. Rispoli has been on the force only two years. D'Intino and I have been on the force since 1992. It doesn't seem right to us that—”

Rocco interrupted him. “What is this, now you're arguing about orders? If I say Rispoli's in charge, Rispoli's in charge. Have I made myself clear?” And he turned on his heels and started walking to the car, followed by Pierron. Just then, the deputy police chief's cell phone rang. “Go ahead, Rispoli.”

“All right, then, Omar Borghetti's exact address is in Saint-Jacques, number two, Chemin de Resay. Before you ask, I looked up the map on the PC. I'll tell you how to get there.”

“Go ahead.”

“Head out straight along the road from Champoluc, go past Frachey, then at a certain point you come to a village. In fact, that's Saint-Jacques. There's a hotel there. That's where you turn onto the street in question. Borghetti's house is at number two.”

“
Grazie
, Rispoli. Look, I just ran into Laurel and Hardy here in Champoluc. They're fine. Alert their families.”

Caterina Rispoli laughed over the phone. And that sincere, crystalline laughter restored Rocco Schiavone's good mood.

With the heat cranked to high, Rocco and Italo left Champoluc and headed for the village of Frachey. The road ran up into the belly of the mountains, which loomed over the landscape and seemed ready to swallow them and their car at any moment. Rocco looked up at them in silence. The sensation they were giving him wasn't one he liked in the slightest. Boulders ready to fall and crush you. And it was almost an automatic reflex to have the usual perception of how tiny human beings are, the fragility of life, and that sort of thing. Luckily, Sebastiano's phone call arrived just in time to interrupt the deputy police chief's thoughts, as dark as they were pointless.

“Sebastiano! How's it hanging?”

“You were right, Rocco. They sent me a Ukrainian girl who made me want to howl at the moon.”

“You have fun?”

“Yes. And it didn't even cost that much. Where are you?”

“Up at Champoluc. I'm following up some trails.”

“Ski trails?” Sebastiano said, misunderstanding.

“Seriously, Sebastia', ski trails? Can you see me on a pair of skis? Listen, I still haven't talked to the uniform that we need.” He shot a furtive glance at Italo, who was keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the road. “But I'll take care of that later. We'll get together at the restaurant and make our plans.”

“That sounds great. I'm going to go get some lunch now, and in the afternoon I'll call that girl again.”

“Don't fall in love.”

“Rocco, the blow jobs she gives ought to be classified as UNESCO cultural treasures of mankind!”

Rocco smiled as he hung up. He'd have preferred to spend a nice quiet afternoon under the covers with some Ukrainian girl, or with Nora.

“Here we are,” said Italo.

The sign for Saint-Jacques snapped him back to his shitty duties as a cop.

“What a beautiful building!” Pierron exclaimed. “It's a
rascard
.”

“A what?”

“A
rascard
,” Italo explained. “They're characteristic houses you find around here, and also in France. In the old days, they had stalls for cattle and horses on the ground floor, and living quarters only upstairs. Now, of course—”

“The architects have taken over,” Rocco concluded. “Well, it's beautiful, all right.”

“But Omar's not here. What are we going to do?”

“You stay put here in the car.”

“What about you?”

“I'm not staying put. Do we have a screwdriver?”

Italo pulled open the glove compartment and pulled out a little red-handled screwdriver. He handed it to the deputy police chief.

“What do you need that for?”

“Italo, did your mother ever tell you that you ask too many questions?”

“No, she died when I was just a baby.”

“Then take it from me.”

Rocco opened the car door and got out.

He shot a look around. The houses and the street in the village of Saint-Jacques seemed deserted. He approached Omar's front door, which opened onto an alley shielded by a house under construction, the scaffoldings covered with snow, the cement mixer and bricks abandoned there by the masons at the end of fall.

The
rascard
was concealed from the street and prying eyes. The deputy police chief eyed the little front door. There was only one simple door lock. It wasn't reinforced. It was the kind of keyhole you'd find on a bathroom door.

They're certainly trusting folk up here
, he thought.

He approached the side window. It was a small, double-hung sash window, less common in Italy than elsewhere. The wood was old, and cracked in a couple of places. He tried to peer inside, but a filmy curtain blocked his view. What he wanted to know was the exact location of the sash lock. It was in the middle. He pulled on the lower sash slightly, creating a tiny gap between the two sashes, just enough to insert the tip of the screwdriver. He moved it two or three times quickly, until he heard a click. He pushed the screwdriver toward the exterior. Then he slowly pulled up the lower sash. The window opened. Rocco clambered over the sill and slipped into Omar Borghetti's house.

The place was small, the walls lined with wood. On one wall was a bookshelf stuffed with novels. A table and four chairs, two armchairs upholstered with green velvet, a small television set. The small galley kitchen stood in a far corner. Just one bedroom, a bathroom, and, last of all, a floor-to-ceiling storage cabinet packed with ski equipment. Four hundred and fifty square feet, a cozy little hideout. A haven where a man could pull the plug and be alone, with no contact with the outside world.

Rocco had no idea of exactly what he was looking for. But he knew that rummaging through someone's possessions is a better way of finding out about them than having a nice conversation. Objects don't lie.

He started with the chest of drawers in the little living room.

The first interesting thing he found was photos. Not pictures of the ski slopes, as he might have expected. The beach. With palm trees. And the subjects were Omar Borghetti and Luisa Pec. On a lounge chair with a cocktail. Under a giant banana leaf. Her riding on his shoulders as he stood chest deep in cerulean water. The two of them, tanned, eating by candlelight and looking out at a breathtaking sunset. Again the two of them, in front of the glass pyramid of the Louvre. The two of them at a café in the Latin Quarter. Always and exclusively the two of them.

Clearly Omar Borghetti was obsessed. In addition to the passion that the man felt for Leone Miccichè's wife, the other thing that Rocco discovered, thanks to the beach photo, was Luisa Pec's body.

“Fuck!” the deputy police chief commented tersely.

Perfect.

Did it make sense to die for a woman like that? Maybe it did, he thought, answering his own question. It made sense to kill, too. Luisa Pec had torn out Omar's heart, shredded it, and dropped it into her pocket, and now he was hiding like a bear in its den, licking his wounds and remembering the skin, the buttocks, and the eyes of Luisa.

Love.

Love and Rocco had run into each other more than once along the way. There was a time when he would fall in love at the drop of a hat. His heart and his thoughts chased after his classmates in high school and at university, and then after the women he worked with. Mariadele, Alessandra, Lorenza, Myriam, and Finola. All it took was a lingering glance, a certain hairdo, an up-from-under look and Rocco Schiavone's heart started racing, surging in excitement, leaping into the air, only to collapse in misery on the ground. Then one day Marina showed up, and he married her. And there was a click, like the sound of a window lock snapping shut. At age thirty-five. Marina had pushed a button, and Rocco's heart from then on leaped up only at the sound of A.S. Roma fans roaring in the stadium on a Sunday. He was with his wife, he loved her, and there was no room for any other woman. That was it. Over. Done with. And it didn't bother him in the slightest. Sure, he looked at other women, but in the way you might admire a nice painting, or a landscape so beautiful it leaves you breathless. Marina was his port in the storm. He'd tied up and he no longer felt the slightest inclination to go sailing on the sea.

In Omar's bathroom, there was a succession of hand creams and face creams, scented with calendula, with brands such as Nivea and Leocrema. The attention that Omar gave to skin care clashed with the contraption he used to shave: a single-blade straight razor, an antique, the kind you'd see in an old gangster movie, where the barber is shaving Al Capone or a pair of bandits are fighting it out in an East Harlem alleyway. Bone handle, and a very sharp blade.

But Omar Borghetti's clothing and knickknacks were of no interest to Deputy Police Chief Schiavone. He wanted to take a step further. Discover a detail, a foolish banality that would open a world to him.

And it turned up.

Between two fat file folders full of papers and documents—including pension plans, receipts for utility payments, the deed to the house that Omar had purchased in 2008 for 280,000 euros—he found the floor plans for a building on a sheet of copy paper. It was a xerox of a document from the local land registry. Up top, the scale of the plan, 1:100. And the name of the village where it was located: Cuneaz.

It was an enormous house. There was no mistaking it for anything but what it was: the floor plans of the hut that Luisa and Leone had renovated together.

Why do you have this?
Rocco wondered, and answered his own question immediately, aloud. “The Sicilian beat you to the punch, with his timing and his cash, my friend,” and Omar had used the money he'd borrowed to purchase the little house where the deputy police chief, like a common burglar, was now lurking and rummaging, sticking his nose into the owner's past and present.

“You were in there for more than half an hour,” Italo Pierron said to the deputy police chief as he put the screwdriver back into the glove compartment.

“So?”