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