Wednesday, September 22

II

In the Field of Truffles

Chapter 9

Could this be the place, could this be the moment he’d been waiting for?

Hoping for?

Finally, was he about to capture the devil he’d been after for months?

Ercole Benelli rolled down the window of his police vehicle, a dusty Ford SUV. American cars were common in Italy, though you didn’t see many big off-roaders like this. But the nature of his work necessitated four-wheel drive and serious suspension. A bigger engine would have been nice, though Ercole had learned that budget was budget and he was thankful for what he could get. He peered through the flagging leaves of a stately magnolia, dominating this little-used country road, twenty kilometers northwest of Naples.

Youthful and taut of body, lean of face, tall and thinner than his mother had liked, Ercole played his Bausch + Lombs over the field that separated him from the abandoned structure one hundred meters away. The hour was dusk but there was enough light to see by, without using night-vision glasses. The land here was messy, carpeted with weeds and stray and struggling vegetables gone to seed. Sitting every ten meters or so, like huge, discarded toys, were parts of old machines, sheet-metal ducts and vehicle exoskeletons, which the thirty-year-old Ercole believed resembled sculpture he had once seen in an exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris on a long holiday weekend with his girlfriend at the time. Ercole hadn’t appreciated the art. No, he had appreciated it. He hadn’t liked it (she had, however—and passionately and tearfully—which explained much about the short life span of the romance).

He climbed from the truck, studying the building across the field again, carefully. He was squinting, though that didn’t seem to improve his vision much in the autumn dusk. He kept low; his uniform and brimmed cap, boasting on the crown a fierce eagle, were gray, in contrast with the pale-buff surroundings. With the sky still illuminated he had to make sure he would not be seen.

Thinking again: Could this be his chance to snare the prey?

Was the perp inside?

Well, for certain, someone was. Ercole could see a lamp within the farmhouse, and a presence was revealed from the motion of shadow. And it was not an animal. All species have distinctive locomotion, and Ercole knew nonhuman movements very well; these shadows were from a Homo sapiens—unsuspecting, unconcerned—as he walked around the interior of the place. And, though the light was fading, he could still make out in the grass and a stand of old wheat what appeared to be the tread marks of a truck. Some of the vegetation had returned to near upright, suggesting to Ercole that Antonio Albini—if indeed the suspect, the devil, this was—had been inside for some time. The officer guessed that he had driven into the farmhouse before first light and, after a long day of unconscionable industry, planned to slip away when dusk bathed the soft hills here in deepening blue light.