“Pretty impressive taxidermy, wouldn’t you say?” Basil said.
I turned to find him sitting at a table, his ledger spread out before him. He stood, closed the ledger, and joined me.
“But the really impressive trophies are the ibex, over here.” He led me to a wall of mounted horns, each pair sharp and erect as sabers. “The family has over a thousand pairs of ibex horns mounted in this trophy room. It used to be a sign of virility to capture an ibex, and the Montebiancos were nothing if not virile. They only stopped trapping the poor things when they became endangered in the nineteenth century.”
I felt, suddenly, a kinship with the ibex: captured, trapped, on the verge of extinction. “Basil, I need your help,” I said. “I’ve had enough. It’s time to call Zimmer and tell him to come get me.”
“I see.” I must have sounded as desperate as I felt, because Basil gave me a look of concern. “I know Dolores has been unwell, but perhaps I can speak with her.”
“You know his number,” I said. “Why don’t you call him for me? I can’t stay here any longer.”
“Understood,” Basil said, going back to the table and collecting his ledger. “I would be very happy to communicate with Mr. Zimmer on your behalf, but I will need permission to do so.”
“You don’t have to call yourself. You can just give me his number,” I pleaded. “Please, Basil.”
But Basil didn’t reply. He had walked to the far end of the trophy room, where he was returning something to a glass cabinet. I followed him and found a case filled with exotic objects—fossilized ammonites, butterflies pressed between sheets of glass, chunks of quartz, dozens of amethyst geodes, a stuffed hummingbird, and a string of sharp yellow teeth, perhaps fifty, bound together with twine.
“What is that?” I asked, walking to the cabinet.
“Trophies of another sort,” Basil said. “I have been cataloging the collection of rock crystals. They are extraordinary and should really be in a natural history museum rather than locked up in a dusty trophy room.”
I reached into the cabinet and took the string of teeth between my fingers.
“Wolves’ teeth,” Basil said. “Quite old, I believe. Collected for good luck and worn by generations of Montebiancos during the hunt.”
As I returned the teeth, something else caught my eye: a glossy white coil at the back of the shelf. “May I?”
Basil nodded in assent, and I lifted a long, thick braid of white hair from the cabinet. It was course, like horse’s hair, and thick as a rope. “What on earth . . . ?”
“Hair,” Basil said. “Quite a lot of it.”
I unfurled the coil. It slithered over the floor like a bullwhip. “Hair from what?”
“I cannot verify the story,” Basil said. “And it is, in all likelihood, apocryphal, but Guillaume told me that his grandfather Ambrose Montebianco, the twenty-sixth Count of Montebianco, your great-great-grandfather, killed the owner of that hair in the early nineteenth century.”
I turned back to him, fascinated. “Really?”
“The story goes that he came across a man while hunting. He shot him, then cut and braided his hair as a kind of trophy.”
“There’s so much of it,” I said, running the braid through my fingers as I wound it back into a coil and placed it on the shelf.
Basil lifted a photograph, tucked between two crystals, and showed it to me. “That is probably what the man looked like.”
I recognized the photo immediately as the one I had seen in Turin: the Beast of Nevenero.
“This fellow is not the owner of the hair, as this photograph was taken in the early twentieth century, but, from the account I heard from Guillaume, this man in the picture and the owner of the hair seem to be of the same breed.”
“How strange,” I said, examining the photo more closely. “I saw this photo before.”
“Let me guess: The Monsters of the Alps,” Basil said, shaking his head. “That book has done quite a lot of damage to this region. Look.” Basil turned the photograph over. Written in faint pencil was the word: Iceman.
“Iceman?” I asked, perplexed.
“That’s what the family called it,” Basil said. “Not very tasteful, if you ask me, to keep human trophies, but . . .” Basil returned the photograph to the cabinet and closed the door. “No one has asked me, so I leave it alone.”
With Basil’s help, I found Dolores’s rooms. She sat in her wheelchair near the fire and, hearing me at the door,