Black Run (26 page)

Luigi looked anxiously around at his neighbors. “Are you crazy or what?”

“Signor Bionaz, please don't force me to use methods that would be far worse than cursing in church.”

“I . . .”

But now there was a vacuum around Luigi. It was as if he were infected with the plague, and even Amedeo slid his ass down the bench, a good yard away from his former employer and benefactor. “None of this makes any sense. I wouldn't have . . . Leone and I were friends!”

“Take a lesson from the widow,” whispered Rocco. “You can come tell us about your motives at police headquarters. Move it!”

Luigi stood up. Everyone in the pew snapped to attention, standing up to allow him to file out. Slowly, and without the traditional excuse-me's, he made his way, walking sideways past his colleagues and townsfolk. But no one said a word, no one patted his arm in solidarity. Nothing. They simply stood and watched him walk toward the deputy police chief in the most absolute silence. “You'll hear from my lawyer,” said Luigi.

“That's certainly your right.”

At last Luigi emerged from the pew and started walking toward the exit, along with Luisa, Rocco, and Inspector Rispoli. A few steps before he reached the wooden double doors, Rocco stopped and turned to look back at the priest and the congregation. “I'm not in the habit of doing this kind of thing. But you asked me to.” He nodded his head farewell to the audience and left the house of God without crossing himself.

Italo had managed to inch the car to within sixty feet or so of the front steps of the church. Behind him was the squad car, with Casella at the wheel; this was the car in which Inspector Rispoli had come up. The people outside had no idea what was happening. In particular, why the widow and Luigi were leaving the church before the coffin had. But news spread like an ebola outbreak, and when Rocco and Luisa climbed into the police BMW, and Luigi Bionaz and Rispoli got into the squad car driven by Casella, even the people who had been standing outside understood and began whispering, round-eyed and incredulous. Onlookers started snapping pictures with their phones, while others just stood scratching their heads. They clustered around the police cars like moths around a lamp at night. Rocco looked at them through the windshield. “Go, Italo. Let's get out of here.”

Italo put the car in gear, and the cluster of men and women parted to let them through. To add a little drama to the scene, or perhaps just because regulations technically required it, Casella turned on the siren. Rocco picked up the radio handset and immediately called the squad car behind them. “Casella, either you turn off that siren or I'll shove it down your throat.”

Not even a second later, the siren faded away, and at last Rocco could smoke a Camel in blessed peace.

“Couldn't you have waited until we got him to the graveyard?” asked Luisa.

“If it had been up to me, I wouldn't have even let you get into that church. But I got there too late,” Rocco replied. “And now I'd appreciate a golden silence until we get down to Aosta,” he said as he took a drag on his cigarette and spat the stream of smoke out the aperture atop the window he'd lowered half an inch.

The chief of police seemed giddy as he went on paying compliments to Rocco Schiavone, unable to stop. “Not even enough time to finish the funeral before you'd nailed them both!”

“Thanks, Chief,” replied Rocco, trying to change the subject, but the chief insisted. The receiver was hot and sweaty. Rocco undid the top two buttons of his shirt. The chief had already called a press conference despite the late hour; he wanted to finally crow about his victory to “those guys” from the press; he wanted to annihilate them, to crush underfoot their chatter and their skepticism with undeniable results; he wanted to scoff at newsprint that was only good for lining birdcages the next day. And he wanted Rocco to take part. But that was the last thing Rocco wanted to do. Spotlights gave him worse acid than even the most indigestible meal.

He used every tactic at his disposal to worm out of that situation, until Corsi finally issued a peremptory command. “Schiavone! I expect you to be present at that press conference in exactly twenty minutes.”

“Shitty line of work,” snarled the deputy police chief as he jabbed as hard as he could on the red
OFF
button. And the usual unpleasant sensation of guilt descended over his senses, his weary, chilled-to-the-bone body. This was how it always was. Every time he wrapped up a case, he felt filthy, foul, in need of a shower or a couple of days away. As if he were the murderer. As if it were somehow his fault that those two idiots had killed Leone. It's just that you can't touch horror without becoming part of it. And he knew that. He necessarily had to plunge his hands into that viscous slime, into that disgusting swamp, if he wanted to catch crocodiles. And in order to do so, he was inevitably obliged to transform himself into a creature of those unclean places. He had to get dirty. Mud became his abode, the stench of decay his deodorant. But the marsh—with dragonflies skimming the water's surface, the venomous snakes, the gray sand that so resembled an elephant's diarrhea—Rocco just couldn't find any way of bringing himself to like it. It was the ugliest, darkest part of his life, and going back there was painful and exhausting. And all this—the investigations, the murders and the murderers, the falsehoods—it all forced him to reexamine his reckonings. He, who was struggling to leave behind the ugliest things he'd lived through. Who was trying to forget the evil committed and the evil received. The blood, the screams, the dead—who presented themselves behind his eyelids every time he shut his eyes. Every time he had someone like Luisa Pec or Luigi Bionaz in front of him. Sons of bitches, filthy individuals, the fauna to be found in those swamps. Who dragged him down with them, down into the quicksand of life, forcing him back into the swamps. And it was worse than a nightmare. Because there's one good thing about nightmares: they usually vanish in the first light of dawn. But the swamp was always there. Real, tangible, alive, and pernicious. Awaiting him. In the swamp, Rocco Schiavone was no different from all the others. No better and no worse. In the swamp, the boundary between good and evil, between right and wrong, no longer exists. And there are no nuances in the swamp. Either you plunge in headfirst or you stay out. There is no middle ground.

The house in Provence was as distant as Halley's Comet. Who could even say if it would ever return.

“Shitty line of work,” he snarled a second time. Then he left his office and headed over to the press conference.

There was no need for a question from any of the professional journalists, either print or television, on the issue of Rocco Schiavone and the findings of his investigation. It was none other than Chief of Police Corsi, finally present in flesh and blood and no longer just a voice on the telephone, who beat everyone else to the punch. “Dottor Schiavone will now tell you how he managed to work his way to the point of requesting arrest warrants for Luisa Pec and Luigi Bionaz.”

Usually the press conferences run by Chief of Police Corsi were simply monologues. He'd give the reporters a chance to ask one or, at the most, two questions, and then he was gone. He was the star of the show, and anyone who tried to steal the scene from this prima donna found that out at their own expense. So it was a gesture of great generosity—as Rocco immediately understood—to give him the spotlight. A generosity that was every bit as pointless as the press conference itself, because there was nothing that meant less to Rocco Schiavone than the spotlight, and the attention of public opinion in general. Corsi had stood to one side, next to Schiavone, arms folded across his chest. He was highlighting the point that this was his deputy, a member of his team, an extension of his own identity. The chief's face was beaming, his suit was impeccable, his hair was neatly gelled, his titanium-frame eyeglasses were gleaming, and, above all, he was exuding joy from every pore.

Rocco cleared his throat. “
Buona sera.
Considering how late it is, I'll try to keep this brief . . .”

Everyone was concentrating on him. Notebooks in hand, TV cameras running. There was just one pitfall he needed to avoid: the thighs of the cute blonde in the front row. With her tip-tilted eyes, like those of an Asian kitten, she seemed to be there to make Rocco's job just as challenging as possible.

Why is she in the front row? Couldn't she have found a seat a little farther back?
thought Rocco as he prepared to address the room.

“I'll start from the beginning, if you have no objections. Thursday. It's about five in the evening. Leone is heading down the mountain to town. A pack of cigarettes, a conversation: in short, he heads out. Three-fourths of the way down the main piste, in the middle of a clearing, right where the shortcut runs through, there's someone waiting for him. That person calls his name. Leone leaves the run and heads over to talk to the person. It's a friend, there's no doubt about it. So he heads over. The friend offers him a cigarette. Leone takes it. He takes off his gloves—he takes them both off,” and here Rocco paused and looked around at the press. “He starts talking to this man. Then the conversation turns into an argument, and the mysterious individual hits Leone Miccichè. But he doesn't kill him. Leone is just knocked unconscious. So the man shoves a handkerchief into Leone's mouth to keep him from shouting and leaves him there, covering him with snow to make sure no one can see him.”

“Why would he do such a thing? Does he want to let him freeze to death?” asked a bespectacled reporter with a prominent nose, prompting a sneer of contempt from Police Chief Corsi.

“No. The mysterious man has a very specific plan. He leaves him there, unconscious, under a foot and a half of snow with a handkerchief in his mouth. But that's not his handkerchief. The mysterious man stole it. To be exact, he stole it from Omar Borghetti. Omar Borghetti is the head ski instructor up at Champoluc. Everyone knows him.”

“Sure, but why would he steal it?” asked the cute blonde with the thighs.

“The son of a bitch—forgive me, the murderer,” he said, correcting his gaffe, to the ill-concealed embarrassment of the police chief, “wanted to make sure it was found on the scene of the crime, no? Leone dead, with Omar's handkerchief stuffed in his mouth. Omar Borghetti. The longtime boyfriend of Leone's wife, Luisa Pec. In other words, the murderer did it to frame that unlucky wretch.”

“A crime of passion?” asked the blonde with the thighs.

“Sure. A crime of passion. A crime of jealousy, anger, frustration, and so on. That's why I said that the killer committed what was clearly premeditated murder. That handkerchief speaks loud and clear. What do we know about him? First of all, that he's no fool.”

“Right,” broke in Police Chief Corsi, who'd held back until then. “He must have read a few detective novels or seen a few TV shows.”

The reporters all nodded in unison but turned their eyes back to Rocco. Who felt it his duty to proceed with his explanation. “My superior officer just stated a great truth. This guy must know something about DNA. Which is why he takes great care to get rid of his and Leone's cigarette butts.”

“Okay, that's all clear up to this point,” said the reporter with the big nose. “Then what?”

“If you'd just give us a chance to explain, Dottor Angrisano!” The police chief scolded him, with the cold indignation of a headmaster visiting the worst class in the school.

Rocco resumed his explanation to keep the atmosphere from deteriorating further. “All right. But at this point I asked myself a question: What did they argue about? Debts? I don't see that. This is no ordinary argument. The killer was there for the specific purpose of taking Leone's life. So I came to this conclusion: there never was an argument. You don't need an excuse to commit premeditated murder. If you've decided to kill a person, you just go straight for the target. Our mysterious man strikes Leone and knocks him unconscious because his victim has discovered something.”

The roomful of journalists waited in silence. Pens poised over their notebooks. The smartphones blinked as they recorded.

“That's right. He'd suspected something that he then confirmed with further analysis. His wife, Luisa, was pregnant. But Leone Miccichè was sterile.”

“Oh, Jesus . . .” someone blurted.

“Who got her pregnant, then?”

“If you ask me, the murderer,” volunteered the blonde in the front row.

“If you all don't mind,” put in the police chief, “why don't we let Dottor Schiavone finish.”

“No, no, you're perfectly right, ma'am. Now we only need to figure out who he is.”

“Well, all you'd really need is a DNA sample from the fetus, no?” ventured the reporter with the big nose.

“True. But there's another way of finding out, without even falling back on forensic science. The crucial point has to do with the cigarettes. I really racked my brains over that one, you know? The whole question of the gloves just didn't add up. The victim took off both gloves. But you only need to take off one glove to smoke a cigarette, no?”

The reporters all nodded their heads.

“But Leone took off both gloves. Why?”

“To light the cigarette?” theorized one reporter, bald as a cue ball.

“No. You only really need one hand for that,” Rocco replied. “Then I understood. It was so simple. A person has to take off both gloves to
roll
a cigarette. Right? That's why,” he said, and he mimicked the act of rolling a cigarette.

“So the murderer who gave him the cigarette smoked loose tobacco?”

“Bravo!”
Rocco replied to the schnozzola. “We even know the brand: Samson. The same brand that Luigi Bionaz smokes.”

Cue Ball nodded. So did the blonde with the thighs. But the schnozzola bit his lip. “Wait—wait just a minute. Fine, so he smokes that brand of tobacco. But that alone isn't grounds for murder charges, is it?”