Black Run (16 page)

“I was just wondering if you found anything interesting.”

“Plenty. I'm hungry. Let's find a decent place to eat, and we can talk over lunch.”

Italo started the engine and put the car into first gear. “Did you close the window good and tight behind you?”

Rocco looked at him. “He'll never know we were even inside.”

“We
were?
”

An ironic smile played across Rocco's face. “Okay, I was. Why? Don't you like working with me?”

“I love it. I just wish I could do more, though.”

“If I'm going to let you do more, though, I'd have to trust you.”

“Rocco, you already trust me.”

The deputy police chief's smile broadened further. “You're a sly fox, Italo.”

“Never as sly as you, Rocco. We're on a first-name basis, right?”

“You just called me Rocco. But at headquarters we're going to stick with rank and surname, or just ‘sir,' okay?”

“Got it. So what are we going to do, subpoena this Omar Borghetti?”

“Well, he already knows he's been invited to come in for a little talk. Let's let him sweat for a while.”

They found a place near Frachey, in a hotel by the promising name of Le Charmant Petit Hotel. The hotel's restaurant was inviting, and the smells that came from the kitchen seemed to fulfill the promises offered by the name. The place was covered with antique wood—walls, floors, and ceilings—and a fire was crackling in the fireplace. Enormous windows overlooked the forests and the snowy park. Rocco munched a breadstick as he and Italo listened to Carlo, a young man with a beard and a candid open face that had a Mediterranean, almost Arabic, beauty.

“For starters, we have a risotto al Barolo that's out of this world. Otherwise—”

“Halt!” Rocco said. “You had me at ‘Barolo.' I'll have that.”

“Me, too,” said Italo.

“Wine?”

“I like Le Crete. Do you have any?”

“Certainly. Shall we decide on the entrées later?”

“Sure. Carlo, would you satisfy a curiosity of mine? Are you friends with Caciuoppolo?”

“Who?” asked the young man with a smile.

“He's a colleague of ours; he works on the slopes.”

“Ah, yes, I know him. He's from Vomero. I'm from Caserta, so we're practically neighbors. You're here because of the horrible discovery up at Crest, right?”

“Yeah,” Rocco replied.

“Are you going to catch the son of a bitch who murdered Leone?”

“We're doing our best.”

Italo broke into the conversation. “What are people saying in town?”

Carlo leaned forward, his knuckles on the tabletop. “Everybody has something to say. Some people suspect that Leone stepped on someone's toes down in Sicily. Others think he'd run up too many debts and couldn't make the payments.”

Rocco liked the young man. He had a wide-awake, intelligent face. “What's your take on it, Carlo?” he asked him.

“I've got nothing. I didn't know him well enough. Or anything about his business. But the idea that it was someone from down south looks like bullshit to me. If they kill you for a vendetta or because you've broken the ground rules, they might arrange for the body to be found in the center of the city, or else they make sure it vanishes once and for all. Leaving it up there makes no sense.”

“Bravo
, Carlo. That's right.
”

“But someone hated him,” added Italo.

“Look,” Carlo said, taking a deep breath, “there's just one thing that Leone had that everyone here in Champoluc wished they had.”

“The hut up in Cuneaz?” Rocco ventured.

“No. Luisa Pec. You've seen her, haven't you?”

“I'll say I have,” Italo replied.

“If you'll excuse me, I'd better get into the kitchen, or I'll be serving you that risotto for dinner.”

And he took his leave of the two policemen, vanishing behind the saloon doors.

Italo lowered his head and leaned forward toward the deputy police chief to make sure he wasn't overheard by the three couples seated at the tables around them. “Rocco, I can't really afford to eat in a place like this.”

“Italo, don't worry, you're my guest. What the fuck, if I can't buy you lunch, then what were we even put on this planet to do?”

Italo shrugged his shoulders slightly. “That's right. And why were we put on this planet if at age twenty-seven I have to keep living at home with my father to save on rent and bills, and if I have to count my pennies before going out to the movies and to eat a pizza . . .”

“Sure.” Rocco bit off half a breadstick. “You're talented, Italo. Your career prospects in the police force aren't exactly blindingly bright.”

“I know that. And I'll tell you something more. My prospects in general aren't all that bright. But if I find something better, I'd be glad to leave the police.”

Italo wasn't opening the door a crack, Rocco realized. He'd just thrown it wide-open. Rocco charged through without wasting any more time. “There's something we can do to improve our lives on this planet a little. You interested?”

“What is it?”

“It's something illegal.”

Italo picked up a breadstick and bit into it. “How illegal?”

“Very, very illegal.”

“Steal something?”

“From the thieves.”

“I'm in!” he said, and took another bite of the breadstick. “So I'm the uniform you were talking about with your friend on the phone, right?”

“Exactly. Do you want to know the details?”

“Maybe we'll get to those later. Just tell me now: what would be involved? No shooting, right?”

“No. It's marijuana. A lot of it.”

“We're going to bust someone?”

“Exactly, Italo. But not all the weed we confiscate is going to be turned over to the law.”

“How much is in it for me?”

“Thirty-five hundred.”

“Done deal!”

Just at that moment, an intense aroma announced the arrival of the two risottos al Barolo. Italo and Rocco turned toward the kitchen door. Carlo was walking toward them with an enormous steaming pewter platter and a smile on his lips. He set the risotto down on the table. He served the two men as plumes of aromatic steam rose from the rice. In a religious silence, the policemen looked down at the reddish grains and sniffed at the paradisiacal scents that wafted across the dining room. Carlo didn't say a word. He finished serving, made a slight and amused bow, and walked away from the table. Rocco picked up a fork. He put a mouthful of the risotto into his mouth. He closed his eyes. After Luisa Pec and the perennial glaciers, that risotto would be the third thing from Champoluc that the deputy police chief would carry with him for the rest of his life.

It wasn't until he was sipping a juniper berry grappa and chatting amiably with Carlo and Italo that Rocco suddenly remembered that Magistrate Baldi had summoned him to his office at three thirty.

The face of the magistrate waiting impatiently at his desk had appeared before him with all the violence of a sledgehammer to the forehead.

Italo had driven recklessly, slicing across the opposite lane as he slalomed through the switchback curves and downshifting like a madman. Rocco ordered him to slow down. Not because he was afraid of a crash but because of the very real risk that his portion of risotto al Barolo might wind up splattered on the floor mat, a horrible waste of a masterpiece for a summons from a judge.

They got there half an hour late.

But Baldi wasn't in his office.

Rocco sat at the magistrate's desk, looking out the window at the flat, gray sky. The picture in the silver frame was still there, off to one side on the desktop, facedown. He leaned forward. He turned it over and looked at it. It was a photograph of a woman in her early forties. Curly hair, a gleaming Colgate smile.

The judge's ex-wife wasn't bad-looking at all, at least judging from the framed head shot. Maybe not a woman you'd turn around to stare at in the street, but she wasn't bad. The breakup must have been recent. Because a photo turned facedown on the desk was only the first step on the path to a definitive divorce. A photo turned facedown meant that the judge still had hopes of repairing his marriage. Normally, the next step was to put the picture in the top drawer, a sign that things are getting worse, and then last of all, the photo in the trash—the end, the tombstone marking the burial plot. Rocco laid the photograph flat just as the door swung open. Baldi looked cool and cheerful, the lock of hair covering part of his forehead was finer and softer than the day before, and it bounced with every step. When the judge shook hands, his grip was dry, firm, and strong.

“I'm sorry I'm late, I was up at Champoluc.”

“We have any news?” asked Baldi.

“Some. I'm running down the lead of the jealous ex-lover. A certain Omar Borghetti. I've summoned him to come in.”

“I did find something, you know? Look here,” said the judge, lifting his forefinger. He walked around the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a red folder. He sat down and opened the file. “What do we have here . . . what do we have here,” the magistrate repeated as he leafed through the pages, licking his finger as he went. “Ah, here we are. Luisa Pec and Leone Miccichè were married a year and a half ago. The ceremony was performed by a city clerk. Not in church. The ceremony was held in Cuneaz, where they own that sort of hotel up above the resort. Joint ownership of all property, et cetera, et cetera. Here.” Baldi looked up at Rocco with his finger on the documents. “They'd asked the local office of Banca Intesa here in Aosta for a loan of several tens of thousands of euros. But the bank said no.”

“So they had some project in mind, you think?”

“I'd say so. You see?” the judge pulled a sheet of paper out of the folder. “They'd offered a couple of buildings down in Sicily as collateral.”

“Joint property of Leone Miccichè and his brother. But that doesn't prove anything.”

“No. It doesn't prove anything. But they're tiles, Schiavone. They're all tiles in a mosaic, and if you put them together, they may give us a nice clear overall picture of the situation.”

“Ah, yes, a nice clear overall picture of the situation. Speaking of tiles, by the way, look at this.” Rocco pulled out the gloves he'd bought just a few hours earlier in Annarita's shop.

“Nice,” said the judge.

“Right? They're identical to the gloves poor Leone had on. Can I smoke?”

“I'd say you can't.”

“It's to prove a point.”

“Then go right ahead.”

Rocco put a cigarette in his mouth. He picked up the lighter. Then he put on the gloves. He tried to light the cigarette. He couldn't do it. The judge watched him. “What are you trying to show me?”

“Something very simple. Before Leone Miccichè was murdered, he smoked a cigarette. He went up to the middle of that shortcut, veering off the main piste, and he smoked a cigarette, and he probably had a conversation with his murderer. But he wasn't wearing gloves. That means, first of all!”—and he lifted his thumb, still begloved—“that the cigarette wasn't one that his killer offered him, but that he must have pulled out of his own pack.”

“He might already have been smoking it when he got there, no? Before heading up for a little chat with his killer.”

“No, because if he'd already been smoking it, he would have had no reason to take off his gloves.”

“Right.”

“Second!”—and Rocco lifted his forefinger—“he probably lit it, too. But that still doesn't explain another thing.”

“What would that be?”

“Why take off two gloves? Taking off one would be enough.”

Baldi thought it over. “That's true. And did you come up with an idea?”

“No. For now I've got nothing. All I know is that the pack of Marlboros that Leone Miccichè had in his pocket was empty. Maybe he smoked the last one and didn't discard the pack on the ground because he didn't want to be a litterbug.”

“Maybe so. Excellent, Dottor Schiavone. Excellent. Let's think this thing through.”

Rocco took off the gloves and put them back in his pocket while the judge folded up the Leone Miccichè file and put it away. “But now, Schiavone, let me get some work done. I've got the financial police coming at me fast and furious. We've nailed a couple of tax evaders. Major players.”

Rocco stood up from the chair.

“You know what? If it wasn't for all this tax evasion, we'd be one of the richest countries in Europe.”

Rocco stopped to listen. He felt sure that he was about to be treated to one of the magistrate's jeremiads.

And in fact he was. “But no one recognizes the state as something that belongs to them. So many people in Italy think and reason as if it was still the nineteenth century, that the state is the enemy, an invader that battens off us and sucks us dry. And there's just one way, a very simple way, of eliminating tax evasion once and for all. And you know what that is?”

“Whether I do or not, you're about to tell me.”

“Eliminate cash entirely. All payments, and I mean all of them, would have to be done with a credit card or a debit card. No one can pay in bills and coins anymore. And there, you're done! We'd have a way of documenting all payments and no one could ever again say that they weren't paid.”

Rocco Schiavone thought it over. “That might be an idea. But there's still a
but
, Dottore.”

“Tell me,” the magistrate said encouragingly.

“What are we going to do about seigniorage?”

Baldi looked at him.

“Do you know how much it costs to print a hundred-euro bill? Thirty cents. And it's worth a hundred euros. The central banks pocket the difference. Now, you tell me whether you think the central bankers are likely to give up these immense and effortless earnings, just to combat tax evasion?”