Think Wolf Page 8

  ‘Like those two poachers netting starlings?’

  The ranger smiled and stood up. ‘Thanks for your time, Signor Marra.’

  He jumped to his feet. ‘No trouble at all. I’ll have a word with my employees. You never know, do you? Someone may have heard a bit of gossip. I doubt it, but, well … Two years ago, you said?’

  ‘Between June and July. And then, suddenly, it all just stopped. As if the ghosts had disappeared,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what they do, don’t they?’

  ‘What? Sorry?’ The ranger had been distracted, putting his file away.

  ‘Disappear. Ghosts, I mean.’

  As Cangio left the building, Marra watched him from the window.

  His knees were shaking as the ranger drove away. It was all he could do to get back to his desk and collapse in his seat. He pulled out his mobile phone, hands shaking as he searched for the number.

  ‘Maria,’ he whispered, the instant she answered, ‘I’m in the shit again.’

  SEVENTEEN

  The breakfast room had the most spectacular view he had ever seen.

  OK, he’d been out east, stayed in luxury hotels, seen those pearl-white beaches out on Phi-Phi island, places like that, but they were just exotic, dreamland locations. Within a week you were bored out of your skull. There was nothing doing, no way of getting ahead out there; the king and the military junta of Thailand had the whole place buttoned up.

  Here, it was different. Here, you were building an empire, taking back what others had already grabbed. Here, you weren’t just some rich boozer on a desert island for a week, leaving paradise to the next bedazzled piss artist the week afterwards. Here, the world was waiting to be taken in hand, waiting to be subdued, waiting to be ruled.

  That was how Don Michele saw it, and that was how Simone saw it.

  He poured himself more coffee, broke the end off the brioche, popped it into his mouth, then stared out of the window at the elegant line of the Roman bridge and aqueduct with its nine irregular arches, the mass of the medieval castle perched on a rock on this side of the gorge, a smaller fortress at the other end of the bridge where the mountain suddenly reared up towards the sky.

  If I ruled the world …

  The song kept on rattling through his brain.

  ‘More coffee, sir?’ a voice murmured at his elbow.

  He didn’t – couldn’t – look away, he just said no.

  Looking at that bridge had him seeing zeros. An endless line of them, all the cash you could make, as if each solid stone was a plastic pack of coke weighing twenty kilos. Umbria was a goldmine waiting to be discovered. Put a turnstile at each end of the bridge; charge a euro a shot to walk across and back. Or jump off, if that was what you fancied doing. The locals called it Lovers’ Leap, though ninety-nine per cent of the people who jumped were single. An eighty-metre drop to the rocky floor below – death guaranteed. Most people did it every day – walked across, not jumped – stopping at the arched viewing window in the centre, admiring the panorama, pointing to the hotel and the picture window where he was sitting at that very moment.

  If I ruled the world …

  I’d buy this place, he thought.

  ‘Who owns that bridge?’ he asked, calling the young waitress over with his finger.

  The lass did a double take. ‘Owns it?’ she said. ‘The … the town, I think, sir.’

  ‘Who owns this hotel, then?’

  Her eyes opened wider. ‘The owner’s name is Signor—’

  A telephone rang on a table in the corner, and she jumped. ‘Excuse me, sir, I’m alone on duty. I have to answer it.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘You can tell me later.’

  He watched her graceful slalom between the tables, shifting her hips and bum to avoid colliding with the chairs. Buy the hotel, he thought, you’d own the bit of road outside that runs beneath the castle and round to the bridge. That was the place for the first turnstile. Right there, in front of the hotel door. The fortress on the far side of the bridge was a ruin, which probably meant it really did belong to the local council. Just slip a bulky envelope stuffed with big bills to the right man.

  The girl came waltzing back. ‘There’s a gentleman in reception asking for you, Signor Candelora. I told them to send him through to the breakfast room. Is that all right, sir? Oh yeah, the name of the owner—’

  ‘Later,’ he said, as the visitor walked into the room.

  Aldo Capaldi the finance manager was wearing a tracksuit and a pair of Adidas trainers.

  ‘You’d better bring another pot of coffee, too,’ he told the girl.

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  Capaldi sat down at the table without waiting to be asked. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  ‘You been jogging?’

  ‘Walking around the castle and across the bridge,’ Capaldi said, clamming up as the waitress came back. They sat in silence while she poured fresh coffee, only speaking once she’d left them in peace. ‘I do it every morning,’ he said. ‘My constitutional. I thought you ought to know: Antonio Marra was in again yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Another personal loan?’

  Marra had started spending on the basis of the capital the don had put into Marra Truffles. First, the new car, then a planned extension on his house. Like he ruled the fucking world.

  ‘Not that,’ Capaldi said, breaking in on his thoughts. ‘He was talking about repaying the loans and cancelling the mortgage, paying it all back.’

  Simone sipped his coffee. ‘How would he do that?’

  ‘He’s thinking of selling out. Getting rid of the business.’

  Alarm bells sounded in Simone’s head. ‘Who would he sell it to?’

  ‘He mentioned you,’ Capaldi said, wiping sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his tracksuit. ‘It stands to reason, doesn’t it? You’ve already put so much into the company; the best way to guarantee your investment would be to buy out the other partner. That’s the way he sees it. I thought you’d like to know before he tells you. He was asking me to tot up the total value minus debts and repayments. He’ll double it or triple it, depending on what he thinks he can get away with, then he’ll make you a proposal.’

  ‘We aren’t buying,’ Simone said.

  Capaldi sipped his coffee and sat in silence for some moments.

  ‘There’ve been some ups and downs at Marra Truffles,’ he said at last. ‘I mean to say, more downs than ups, though you know all that, of course. You could play him at his own game, buy it cheap, turn it into a respectable earner probably, but, well … while Marra’s there, you’d never have a good name. He’s always getting himself into scrapes of one sort or another.’

  ‘What sort of scrapes?’

  Arnaldo Capaldi gulped down his coffee. ‘Just rumours, things you hear. Nothing specific, nothing criminal, though. I’ll see what I can find out.’

  ‘You do that,’ Simone said.

  The finance manager glanced at his watch, stood up. ‘Just time to go home, have a quick shower, change my clothes, then off to work,’ he said.

  ‘Let me know if you hear from him again, OK?’

  Simone went out onto the balcony at the hotel rear, lit his first cigarette of the day and stared at the bridge.

  So much for the golden boy.

  What had Antonio Marra been up to?

  If he did have skeletons rattling around in his cupboard, Don Michele wasn’t going to like it.

  EIGHTEEN

  Two-thirty. A cold, clear night, the sky full of stars.

  Cangio was up on the mountain again.

  He’d been watching the wolves for an hour, or more.

  Suddenly, the pack leader circled around them, his teeth bared, snarling, and the younger males dropped down on the ground. The leader was enormous, lean and black haired, far bigger than a German sheep dog.

  The wolves had eyes that sparkled like gem-stones in the night-vision glasses.

  They’d been hunting for rabbits, surrounding a
warren built into a bank, growling down into the tunnels, scaring the rabbits so much that they tried to dash out of the other exits. An organised slaughter. A culling, if that was what you wanted to call it. The younger ones were learning how to kill.

  But now the pack was silent and still.

  He was up on the boulder outcrop. He could see the woodlands above Vallo di Nera, the truffle reserves at the foot of Mount Bacugno. It was an excellent vantage point. He could keep an eye on everything that moved: the hunters and the hunted. Until that moment only the barking of the wolves and the screams of the rabbits had disturbed the night.

  The leader was standing over the others now, his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth.

  Despite his hooded jacket, Cangio was freezing cold, a crisp breeze blowing into his face. Downwind, the wolves couldn’t smell him, hadn’t been frightened off by his scent though he was less than two hundred metres away.

  The wolf’s head turned, and a moment later Cangio heard the rumble of gears, a distant roar of rubber on the empty road down below in the valley.

  Their sense of hearing was amazing.

  The younger wolves raised their ears, sniffed the air, then settled down again, as if they knew that the sound presented no threat.

  ‘Have you heard that noise before?’ he asked out loud.

  He slid forward on his elbows and knees to the edge of the rocky platform. He could see the road more easily from there. He shifted his night-vision glasses and stared down into the valley. He spotted the antlers of a stag gleaming white in a thicket, but he kept on moving left until he picked out four fluorescent beams of light, two vehicles, the headlights coming and going behind dark, dense clumps of trees that grew between the river and the road.

  Suddenly, the lights swerved left, one set after the other, then they went out altogether.

  He focused the glasses, but it didn’t help. Not at that distance. There was nothing to see, just shadows fragmenting and breaking up, leaving splintered imprints on the lenses like a flickering silent movie.

  He glanced at his watch.

  Two forty-two.

  Had they started working nights at Marra Truffles, he wondered. There was a planning permission notice outside the gates. Marra was building an extension on empty space at the rear of the factory, expanding the business, people said. Were lorries travelling in with building materials by night to avoid the daytime traffic?

  He shifted the night-glasses to the woods where Marzio’s body had been found just beyond Marra’s truffle reserve. Everything was dark over there, no sign of lights or movement. He really would have liked to stop in at the factory on his way home and ask the drivers if they had been working the night that Marzio died – ask them if they’d seen anything.

  He moved the glasses over the woods where the road wound up to the summit of Mount Bacugno. That was where the ‘elves’ had been spotted, if Marzio’s reports could be relied on.

  Two years before …

  Antonio Marra had been trying to expand his company then, as well, but the work had come to a sudden halt.

  Just like the ‘strange sightings.’

  ‘An anonymous complaint,’ the clerk at the courthouse in Spoleto had told him when she pulled the file from the archive that afternoon. ‘It didn’t go to court for lack of evidence. But that put an end to his ambitions.’

  An unlucky man?

  ‘No head for business,’ the clerk confided.

  She was in her late fifties, a daunting woman, with dyed ginger hair and big round tortoiseshell glasses. She gave the impression that she knew a lot, but wouldn’t tell you a thing without a warrant signed by a magistrate. And yet, with so much power at hand, why waste it?

  ‘There was talk of some … irregularity,’ she murmured, resting her chin on her hand.

  ‘Irregularity?’

  ‘Those woods are protected.’

  ‘What was going on?’

  The woman stared at him, her grey eyes clouding over.

  ‘No action was taken,’ she said, ‘but … something wasn’t right.’

  She pronounced the word right, as if wrong was an unthinkable.

  ‘With the land?’

  He had tried, but she wasn’t going to tell him any more. He could understand it if she was talking about the truffle factory. There were rules and regulations, health and hygiene, safety, and so on, but the land?

  ‘Something not quite … right,’ she had said again, ‘but it was never proved.’

  Cangio turned the binoculars back on Marra Truffles.

  There were no lights, no sounds now.

  Maybe they had an underground garage, or a loading bay.

  He turned back to the mountain, looking for the wolves again.

  The pack had disappeared while he had been distracted.

  Had they gone down to the valley, hunting for hens and sheep?

  He cursed himself for having let them out of his sight.

  He cursed for having lost sight of the trucks in Marra’s compound.

  NINETEEN

  Two-thirty.

  Antonio Marra was standing by the window.

  The sky was clear and full of stars, but it was freezing out there.

  Then the sound of motors broke the silence, wheels crunching hard on the gravel as two trucks pulled into the compound, ground to a halt, then switched off their headlights and engines.

  As the drivers jumped down, Simone and Ettore stepped forward to greet them.

  Marra drew back from the window, collapsed in the padded chair behind his father’s desk, head in his hands. He had been directing his company from behind that desk ever since the day his dad had passed away.

  Thirteen years now, for better or worse.

  Worse, he conceded in a flash of deep despair.

  It wasn’t his company any more, except on paper in the form of bills to pay and phoney contracts to sign. If he’d been running things, he wouldn’t be cowering inside his office like a dog some careless owner had forgotten in the car, having more important things to think about. He was doing only what he was told to do, and nothing more than that. Let them get their hands dirty. His hands were black enough already. Simone had told him to be there to sign receipts for the incoming merchandise.

  He was smoking when Ettore came crashing into the room and dropped two sheets of paper on the desk. The dockets were made out to a company in Reggio Calab—

  ‘Don’t read ’em, Antò,’ Ettore said. ‘Just fucking sign ’em.’

  Building materials.

  Shit was what they were bringing in.

  And he was up to his neck in it.

  Antonio Marra signed his name, trying to stop the pen from shaking.

  He was sliding deeper into a nasty hole that he had dug for himself. Simone had offered him a hand to jump into it, and Ettore pushed him back whenever he tried to crawl out of it. They were both evil, each in his own way, that was the truth of it. The trouble was, if they went down, they’d be taking him with them.

  ‘Move it,’ Ettore growled, watching as he stamped the sheets with Marra Truffles International in blue ink, then wrote Received and the date on top of the ink stamp.

  With each signature, he felt himself slipping further away.

  How the hell was he supposed to get out of it?

  Had he signed his own death warrant this time?

  ‘Right,’ Ettore said, sweeping up the papers. ‘Fuck off home, then.’

  Maria Gatti had read the tarot cards, but that was a disaster, too. Maria saw black in every card, predicting danger for him and trouble for the company.

  Even death, she had said the last time.

  Maria was never wrong when it came to reading the cards.

  TWENTY

  Cangio knocked on the front door.

  The Pastore brothers knew the local woods and the people who frequented them.

  Might they have heard about the strange sightings mentioned in Marzio’s file?

  He had left it late
in the day before stopping by, in the hope of finding them at home. It was twenty to six. Too early for dinner. Too early for drinking – not that that would stop anyone with a real thirst. If the brothers weren’t home, they could be anywhere, and they might not come back until late.

  He knocked again, but harder this time.

  The cottage where they lived was in perfect order, he noted, standing back, taking it all in. The stone walls had been freshly pointed, the wooden windows and shutters varnished, a smart coat of green paint on the front door. After the last earthquake, the area around Vallo di Nera had been extensively rebuilt. It looked as if the brothers had claimed the EU funds and set their home in order. Had they done the work themselves, he wondered. A lot of people had. In which case, they’d have a shed or a workshop, a garage, maybe, where they kept their tools.

  He decided to have a look around the property.

  Two ground-floor windows were barred on the far end of the house, as if they feared thieves. As he turned the corner, he heard faint sounds behind a thicket of bushes. A path of large stones set in the cropped grass led into a grove of bushes.

  He hadn’t taken three steps when a dog started barking.

  ‘Who goes there?’ a voice growled.

  Next thing, he was facing a dark shadow with a shovel raised like an axe.

  ‘Ranger bloody Cangio,’ came the voice again, the shovel slowly falling as the hand that was holding it relaxed. Manlio Pastore was blocking the pathway, a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, the yapping dachshund hiding behind his rubber boots. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was looking for you,’ Cangio said. ‘I tried the house, but no one answered.’

  ‘We’re in the shed,’ Pastore said. ‘Bottling.’

  Without another word he turned away, so Cangio followed him.

  It was more of a barn than a shed, with chains and padlocks hanging from the doors.

  Teo was working, sitting on a stool by a sink, the tap running continuously. He took what looked like a lump of mud from a basket, held it under the tap, then rubbed it with a stiff brush until a truffle materialised, like a gleaming black miniature model of the human brain.