River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1)

by Valerio Varesi

  “You arrive when everyone else is getting out,” Barigazzi said.

  “It’s my job.”

  The man gave a slight nod to show he understood. “Anyway, there is no danger. Every so often the river comes along to take back what is his, and we let him get on with it. He doesn’t keep it long. The Po always restores everything.”

  “Including the dead?”

  Barigazzi looked him over attentively. “Even the dead,” he agreed. “If you are referring to what I think you are, you can be sure he’ll turn up. But are you really sure the Po has taken him?”

  The commissario thought it over for a while before replying. “No,” he said with resignation, telling himself that the investigation was still to get under way. “Can I offer you a drink?” he proposed to the old man.

  “I’d be very grateful, in a little while,” Barigazzi said. “First we have to shift the radio. We’ll take it to the Town Hall. That way the mayor will be able to listen for himself.”

  “Where’s the best place for a drink?”

  “Depends on your tastes,” the old man said. “I prefer Il Sordo, run by the deaf barman, under the colonnades, but they’ve got good wine in the Italia, where you’ll have been already.”

  Soneri was astonished that the man knew where he had left his car, but then he remembered that from the embankment it was easy to see down to the road in front of the bar.

  It was growing dark as he went down towards the town. He was aware of a level of feverish agitation among the houses and he understood why when he noticed a group of people gathered around a carabiniere patrol car parked nearby. The maresciallo was issuing evacuation orders, but the people were unwilling to move. As he passed by, the commissario caught sight of the officer’s face, with beads of sweat caused by the excitement mingling with drops of rain. Only a few families loading goods on to the van were paying him any heed. The others seemed on the point of mutiny. On the piazza, on the other hand, everything was quiet, as though the river were receding. A yellow sign concealed behind a large chestnut tree whose last leaves were hanging listlessly on the branches pointed to the Portici bar. Inside there were a few tables and several video games occupied by some young people.

  “You must be Tonna’s niece,” Soneri said to the woman behind the bar.

  A woman of around forty, not especially well preserved, looked at him with obvious distrust. “Yes,” she said, in a forced, vaguely threatening tone.

  “I am Commissario Soneri, from the police.”

  The woman grew even more rigid. She put down the glass she was drying to give him her full attention. “If it’s about my uncle, I have already told all I know to the carabinieri,” she said. “But they don’t exactly seem to be going out of their way to find him.”

  “Do you think there’s been an accident?”

  “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “At the moment, no,” Soneri said. “But the idea that he would have fallen into the water does seem strange.”

  The woman stared at him, with open hostility. She was wearing no make-up, and gave the impression of systematic self-neglect.

  “You haven’t told me your name.”

  “Claretta,” she said. That name, more suitable for a doll, was at odds with the brazen set of her face.

  By a kind of conditioned reflex, Soneri thought of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress. Perhaps because the woman was dressed in black.

  “I imagine you’ve dismissed the possibility that your uncle might have decided to end it all.”

  She dismissed the idea with a sweep of her hand. “He was too fond of the life he was leading, of the river and of his barge. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had found his body in the cabin, but this way—”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Four days ago. He came with his clothes to wash, as he did every week. Each time I asked him when he planned to give it all up, but he wouldn’t discuss it.”

  “Did he have enemies?”

  “Ancient history, from before the war,” Claretta stated, her voice hardening. “Politics.”

  With Claretta Petacci still in his mind, Soneri asked instinctively: “Because of his Fascist past?”

  The woman nodded. Anteo sought solitude on the river, spending his days as a wandering hermit on the water, avoiding contact with hostile towns and people. Perhaps his brother had had the same problem, and that was why he spoke only of illnesses, fleeing from his own past and hiding away whenever anyone wanted to pry into his youth.

  “But here, in this town, did he ever receive threats?”

  “Perhaps he did right after the war, but not nowadays. It’s really a question for the older generation, and many of them are dead now. Young people simply ignored him. They’re nearly all Reds here.”

  Claretta made as if to move off towards the cappuccino machine, but the commissario raised his hand to hold her back.

  “I came to tell you about something else.”

  She stopped in her tracks, as though she were under threat.

  “Your other uncle, Decimo, has gone as well,” Soneri told her in a voice that had dropped two tones below its normal register. “He jumped out of a third-floor window in the hospital in Parma,” he said, not referring to the possibility of murder.

  The woman remained briefly silent. “Two at one time,” she murmured. Then, folding her arms to support her flaccid, heavy breasts, she whispered: “Poor Decimo.”

  The commissario observed her closely, but before he could speak, she got in first. “Where is he now?”

  “In the mortuary.”

  She seemed dumbstruck. She kept her eyes on the floor while the theme tunes from the video games made a mockery of all the tumult inside her.

  Soneri attempted to take advantage of the fact that she had dropped her guard. “Could you tell me if you have any suspicions, if anyone had got in touch with your uncle, or perhaps he dropped some hints …it was your son who sometimes sailed with him, is that not so?”

  “Anteo didn’t talk, not even to me. For my son, the problem was not sailing on the river. It was his silences that got to him.”

  Soneri was about to let the matter drop. He let his arms fall to his side and gave a deep sigh. It was then that the woman raised her eyes from the floor and stared straight at him. The commissario was on the point of striking a match but stopped and waited expectantly.

  “There was something strange, but I don’t know if it has anything to do with it.” Soneri did not move a muscle. “A week ago, someone phoned here looking for him.”

  “Had that ever happened before?”

  “Never.”

  “Did they say who they were?”

  “No. A man. From the voice it seemed he was an older person.”

  “Did he seem to you to belong to these parts?”

  Claretta stood thinking, as though she were unsure of the precise answer to give. “He spoke dialect perfectly, but he didn’t speak good Italian.”

  “That can happen with people who hadn’t been to school all that much.”

  “No, I mean he spoke Italian with a foreign accent.”

  “What do you mean, foreign?”

  “I’m not sure. Spanish, perhaps.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “That he was looking for my uncle.” After a pause, Claretta was more precise. “But he didn’t say straightaway that he was looking for Anteo Tonna. He said he was looking for ‘Barbisin’.”

  “And who is ‘Barbisin’?”

  “It was a nickname they used to give my uncle in the past.”

  Someone opened a window, allowing in a gust of wet wind. The woman shivered as though she had been struck a blow, and went behind the bar to serve a customer who had just come in. The commissario’s mobile rang. He left the bar, saying good-bye with a wave, and waited until he was in the middle of the street before pressing the answer button. Juvara shouted out “Hello!” a couple of times without hearing anything in reply.
Soneri cursed the machine and had to move to another corner of the piazza to get a signal.

  “Boss, I haven’t really got much to report. Decimo Tonna really and truly did live on his own. His neighbours saw him come and go, but he only ever exchanged the time of day with them. He did his shopping at the supermarket and never went to the local bar. I’ve also heard that some social workers went to see him a couple of times, but he chased them away.”

  “Does the parish priest know anything about him?” the commissario said. More and more frequently the priests were the only ones you could turn to. And more and more frequently, they knew nothing either. “Check the files on the two Tonnas. They were once Fascists …”

  “That’s nearly fifty years ago,” Juvara said.

  Soneri thought this over for a few moments until he heard the ispettore repeat again: “Hello, hello?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said, closing his mobile without saying good-bye.

  He walked a little way with myriad thoughts churning in his head, and only after a minute did he realize that what he was experiencing was the overture to a thoroughly bad mood. He felt he was caught up in twin cases but was incapable of disentangling from either any workable lead or even the outline of a hypothesis to work on. Meantime, he found himself confronting the silent faces of the Tonna brothers whom he had never seen alive. The only one he had seen was Decimo under the special white sheet used for corpses, with only the white of his eyes visible and blood trickling from his mouth in the graceless grin of death.

  In one of the narrow streets, the mobile rang again.

  “So you’re not drowned.” It was Angela.

  “Not yet, but don’t lose hope. The river’s still rising.”

  “Why not throw yourself in, seeing you’re so keen to be there.”

  “I’m afraid of drowning in the dark. Anyway, I’ve just eaten.”

  “That’s the one thing you’ll never forget to do.”

  “Christ, Angela, I’ve only just got here. And I can’t make head nor tail of the business.”

  “O.K., Commissario, you do your investigating. And when you come back, bring me a little something.”

  “It’s so much easier for you lawyers: you play about with words, you pull down and build on the facts other people have dug up for you.”

  “Don’t play the victim,” Angela said. “I’d like to see you plunge every day into that tank of alligators called a courtroom. I have colleagues who would sell their mothers for a handful of coins.”

  “Could anyone be worse than a murderer?”

  “Have you any idea what happened to the barge?” she said, her mood becoming more cheerful.

  “No, but I have persuaded Alemanni to unite the inquiries into the two brothers.”

  “You can pat yourself on the back, then. In all my dealings with that one, I’ve never once got anything out of him. He rejects every application I make, even the most straightforward ones.”

  “He’s nothing but a gloomy old bugger who can’t get it into his head that it’s time for him to move on.”

  “I hope to see you before you go drifting off somewhere. Maybe there’ll be an opportunity in a couple of days. If you have any memory left, you’ll understand …”

  He heard the mobile being closed with a snap which seemed to him like the sound of something being broken, but at that moment, walking under the colonnade, he chanced on the osteria called Il Sordo. Inside, under hanging chandeliers with a few candles in each, there were eight beechwood tables. The light was faint but sufficient for games of briscola. He recognized Barigazzi and three other men he had seen at the boat club standing at the bar.

  “Did you get out in time?”

  “Nando, the boy operating the radio, is still there dismantling it. He’ll be here shortly.”

  “Did it come up sooner than you expected?”

  “No. It will reach the shack about three o’clock. We know the river, so we know it’s pointless hanging about waiting for it.” It was Barigazzi who did the talking.

  “Can I get you something?”

  “We never say no. It’s an offer that might cost you dear around here,” they all replied, making for an empty table.

  The deaf barman, whose misfortune gave its name to the Il Sordo bar, kept his eye on them until they sat down. When he came over, no words were spoken, but Barigazzi held up four fingers and his thumb and the man nodded. Soneri was about to ask him about something else, but he stopped when he felt a hand on his elbow. “No point. He’s taken out his hearing aid this evening, so he wouldn’t hear a thing.”

  It was only then that the commissario became aware that small amplifiers the size of cotton wool balls were protruding from both of the landlord’s ears.

  Barigazzi introduced Vernizzi, Ghezzi and Torelli. “In fact,” he said, “you’ve met the whole committee of the boat club all at once.”

  Then he pointed to the owner of the bar. “He does that when he’s in a bad temper. He pulls the apparatus out of his ears and listens only to his own silence.”

  “What a bit of luck,” Soneri said, thinking of certain calls from Angela. He looked around at the walls covered with photographs of great opera singers, all in parts from Verdi. His eyes fell on a Rigoletto while, in the background, the notes from one of the more romantic numbers swelled up.

  “Aureliano Pertile,” Ghezzi said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  The deaf landlord himself wanted to live in silence, but he provided music for his guests. He reappeared with a dark, thick glass bottle and four majolica bowls foaming at the brim. Soneri recognized it as a Fortanina, a wine low in alcohol but high in tannin, sparkling like lemonade.

  “I thought it had vanished from circulation,” he said.

  “It was declared illegal because it didn’t reach the required grade of alcohol, but the landlord makes it in his cellar,” Vernizzi informed him. “You’re not here as a spy, are you?”

  “No, not if he’ll bring me some spalla cotta,” the commissario said. “I’m concerned with a different kind of crime.”

  “Of course,” Barigazzi said, intercepting Soneri’s thought.

  He looked at them one after the other, as though issuing a challenge. “Have you any idea what could have happened?”

  Vernizzi and Torelli leaned back in their chairs, raising their eyes upwards to imply they had no idea. Ghezzi kept his counsel and the commissario had the impression that he had no intention of speaking, leaving this to Barigazzi, a ritual that reminded him of meetings in the prefettura where people spoke in order of seniority.

  “It’s no good asking us. You know as much as we do about how it all might have gone,” said the recognized senior.

  “I haven’t formed a precise idea. I’m not a riverman.”

  “Tonna would never have abandoned his barge. It was the only place he could live in peace.”

  “In that case, either he had a stroke and fell into the river, or else someone bumped him off and cut the mooring. Some irresponsible idiot, even if it all turned out alright for him in the end.”

  In reply, all four busied themselves with the food in front of them.

  The spalla cotta was quite exceptional, pinkish with just the right level of streaky fat. Soneri made a sandwich with the bread and as the music grew louder and louder, some people at the tables behind joined in with an improvised version of “Rigoletto or The Duke of Mantua”.

  The commissario knew when to bide his time. The main thing was to allow thoughts to mature, give them time to take form and organize themselves into speech. The wine played its part. When he had finished chewing, Barigazzi took up the subject.

  “Look, Commissario, there’s one thing I don’t get about the last voyage of the barge. Do you believe it’s possible for a forty-metre vessel to pass under four bridges without smashing into the columns, with no-one at the helm and, to crown it all, with the engine switched off?”

  Soneri’s expression told them that he had no idea.


  “Four, uh!” the old man repeated, raising his hand and holding up the same number of bent fingers with the thick, broken nails typical of a man who had laboured on the docks. “Three road bridges and one railway bridge: Viadana, Boretto and Guastalla.”

  “So, then, there was someone on the barge. But if it was Tonna, what happened to him?”

  “You’re the investigator,” Ghezzi said.

  “We’ve just agreed that Tonna would not have abandoned his barge. He might have fallen into the river if something or someone struck him, and then the current might have carried the boat downstream. So perhaps it sneaked under the bridges by itself by pure chance.”

  “There is one way of finding out if that’s what happened …” Barigazzi was sitting sideways on the seat, his arm against the back of the chair in a theatrical pose which seemed in keeping with the music.

  Soneri, respecting the pause, raised his bowl to his lips and drank a deep draft of the Fortanina. It was like a young wine, halfway between a fresh must and the heavy, black Lambrusco from the lands around the Po.

  “You’d have to find out if he’s still on the dinghy.”

  “The dinghy?”

  “Something like that,” Barigazzi said. “It’s something you need when you have to get ashore and the mooring is out of reach. Maybe because of a sandbank or shallows.”

  The dinghy. Soneri looked at his watch with the idea of contacting the carabinieri in Luzzara, but then he thought it might be more fruitful to go there in person and perhaps even get on board. Meantime, the music had changed. “Aida” echoed off the walls of the osteria, tripping along the beams of the ceiling and bouncing back into the ears of the listeners. The wall facing the commissario was bare brick, the plain, red brick prevalent in the lower Po valley, while the other walls were partially covered with plaster. In a low corner, near the bar, there was a gauge with a series of notches indicating the dates of various floods. The highest was ’51.

  “An insult, so much water in a drinking den like this,” Soneri said to Barigazzi.