Black Run by Antonio Manzini Page A

quad, a sort of four-wheeled motorcycle. Rocco had driven one many years before, on the dunes of Sharm el-Sheikh, in the famous motorcade through the desert. He’d overturned the quad and broken the phalanx bone of his wife’s middle finger.
    â€œIt’s faster,” Luigi added. “Theoretically, we aren’t allowed to take this thing onto the pistes.” He lit his cigarette, and the tip glowed red and dropped burning ashes onto the snow. “But you’re from the police, no? So who’s going to tell us what to do?”
    â€œTrue. But you could have come all the way down and picked us up at the cableway terminal, no?” said Rocco. “My feet are drenched from walking up here!”
    Luigi laughed merrily. “Dottore, you’re going to have to get some proper equipment for the mountains!” replied the head snowcat operator as he climbed onto the quad.
    â€œSo that I can look like a clown, the way they do?” and he pointed to the skiers with his nose. “Oh, give me a break.”
    He got on behind Luigi. Pierron got on, too.
    â€œLuigi, will this thing carry three people?”
    Luigi ignored the deputy police chief’s question. He started the engine and, with a half smile and his cigarette clenched between his teeth, he revved it and took off.
    The four studded tires got their teeth right into the snow and, leaving a huge spray of slush in the air behind them, shot the vehicle uphill toward the ski runs at a dizzying velocity. Rocco watched the vehicle narrowly miss skiers as needles of ice stung his face. The wheels drifted, then came back into alignment, only to veer suddenly as the vehicle slid across a sheet of ice. He could feel the quad wobble, career off to one side, roar, plunge into the snow, and then recover, only to lurch forward again in a terrifying plunge, worse than the pitching and yawing of a speedboat in an ocean squall.
    Two minutes of breathtaking speed and they were at Cuneaz.

    Rocco got off, brushing the snow off his overcoat. Then he looked at Luigi, who still had the cigarette dangling from his lips. “On the way back, I’m driving!” he said, pointing a finger at his chest.
    â€œWhy?” Luigi asked innocently. “Were you scared?”
    â€œScared? Of what? This is incredibly cool!”
    Pierron felt quite differently about it. He merely shook his head in disapproval.
    Cuneaz was a perfect little mountain village, with the small central piazza, the houses, the firewood cut and stacked neatly outside the homes. There were three huts. The finest was definitely the Belle Cuneaz, property of the unfortunate Leone Miccichè. It was closed. Luigi knocked on the door. Not thirty seconds had gone by before Luisa Pec’s sad face appeared in the glass window of the door, right behind the Visa and PagoBancomat credit card decals. Those were essential, because they allowed Rocco to keep his feet securely planted on the ground; otherwise, what with the lack of oxygen, the snowy dreamscape, the silence, the smoking chimney pots, and the wooden houses with their mysterious words written in gothic characters, he could easily have given in to the belief that he had fallen into a story by the Brothers Grimm.
    Luisa welcomed Rocco and Pierron in and directed them to two Chesterfield settees.
    â€œNow I’ll get you a little something to drink. It’ll warm you up, and it tastes good, too,” she said without a hint of a smile, as if she were reciting memorized lines.

    The hut, as they called it up here, looked as if it had come straight out of an interior design magazine. The light pine boiserie on the walls, the stone floors interspersed with a time-burnished salvaged parquet, the vintage woodstove with the andirons. The lights, diffuse and warm. The stripped wooden tables and the excellent paintings on the walls, of late-nineteenth-century mountain landscapes. The bar was an antique Venetian apothecary’s