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

by Valerio Varesi

  “Have you reported that to the magistrate?”

  “Certainly, but he didn’t attach great importance to it, not as much as you were hoping. He says it doesn’t add anything much, even if it is a step forward.”

  “What do you mean – not add anything much!” the commissario exploded, swerving violently, his mind elsewhere. “The glass was broken before Decimo jumped and the blood is not his. It means there was someone else there.”

  “I did point this out to him,” Nanetti said calmly. “He said that in these cases you always find someone getting himself injured and careering about, or some nosey fool getting cut and … I have to say he’s got something there. It does happen all the time.”

  Soneri had to stop himself taking it out on the mobile. Whenever his temper got the better of him, he always felt the desire to dash it against something. He tried to calm down by letting a few seconds pass before Nanetti brought him back to himself with a deafening “Hello!”

  “Alright. I’ll tell Juvara to do a check on the staff in the ward and on everyone who had any business there,” he roared.

  “Good idea. Reply to sceptics with actions. It’s always good to see them twisting in their seats when you demonstrate to them that they’ve got it all wrong.”

  Soneri drove into the town, following the bends of the embankment. Volunteers hard at work glowered at him resentfully as he went by. In his Alfa sports, he must have looked like someone out on a jaunt while others sweated under the menace of Armageddon. He found Barigazzi observing the boat club shack, now one quarter filled with water. The river was lapping around the window of the front door.

  “I have no more need of stakes. All I have to do is take a look at our premises. I know the measurements.”

  They were both looking in the same direction, at the water caressing the riverbanks and the walls of the shack. It was disconcerting to think that concealed beneath such gentleness lay the capacity to inflict terrible destruction.

  “Is it still rising as fast?”

  “No, fortunately. A couple of centimetres an hour, but soon it will stop and then it will begin to drop. Look, see how it’s stopped raining on the mountains and started freezing.”

  “So how will it all end?”

  “Nothing will happen if the fog persists. All this rushing about …” Barigazzi wailed, pointing at tractors and lorries which were taking away people and their furniture. “If only they would listen to people who know. It’s as if their arses were on fire.”

  “I have to ask you something,” Soneri said.

  Barigazzi turned quickly towards him with a piercing glance, as though to make sure he was still at his side. “O.K., but let’s go over to the bar,” he replied, indicating Il Sordo with a jerk of his head.

  The landlord still had his hearing aid switched off. This time Barigazzi kept his two fingers raised until he received a silent assent.

  The commissario watched him move into the kitchen, and so failed to note the arrival of Torelli, Vernizzi and Ghezzi. He felt himself surrounded, one of the undesirable situations they used to harp on about during training. The men took their seats around the table as silently as they had entered. It was as if they were keeping an eye on each other, as though a password had been exchanged between them. In that position, Soneri felt the unease of a man in the dock. The embarrassment was broken by the deaf landlord, to whom Barigazzi, after a wave which plainly indicated an addition to the order, made a sign with three fingers. Then, looking at the Christ with the drawn-up feet, the old man announced: “Another three days of flooding.”

  No-one made any comment until the drinks arrived and the slow notes of Verdi’s “Requiem”, coming from some mysterious emptiness, reached them. They raised their glasses of the foaming Fortanina in a wordless toast. The wine gave its own mute pleasure, but the tension became unbearable after the first sip.

  Soneri decided to break the silence: “So, who was ‘the Kite’?”

  It seemed as though all four men had swallowed a glass of dregs. Their ashen, impassive faces were masks of hostile indifference, as though carved in marble. His eyes circled from one to the other, ending with Barigazzi, like a roulette ball finding its slot.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s to do with Tonna.”

  “There are no kites around here. At most, there might be some hawks, but …” Barigazzi was attempting to extricate himself.

  “There was one. I have Tonna’s word for it,” the commissario insisted.

  “All sorts of things go on along the Po. You see some of them, you hear about others. The first are obvious, the second are a matter of faith.”

  “You don’t believe what Tonna said?”

  “I don’t know. There’s so much chatter …there was one guy who saw sturgeons leap over the Viadana bridge, another one whose chickens were devoured by a catfish …in Ferrara, they still talk about the magician Chiozzini who one day at Pontelagoscuro sailed up into the skies in a horse-drawn carriage …”

  “We even have a village which appears and disappears …” Torelli said.

  “No,” said Soneri decisively. “‘The Kite’ is a nickname. A nickname of someone from around here.”

  “Are you sure of that?” Ghezzi said with a voice in which the commissario detected the faintest trace of alarm.

  “Yes,” he said, dissembling as skilfully as he could.

  The four men exchanged rapid glances. They had spent years together and must have understood each other in a matter of seconds, in a wager between Verdi and the Fortanina.

  “A partisan,” Soneri said, doubling the wager. His mind raced to Tonna and his Fascist past.

  “So many have passed along this way …” Barigazzi said, now sure of himself.

  The commissario immediately realized he had made a false move. He should have fostered the tension he noticed growing among the four men, but instead he had quite suddenly given it release, affording them an easy way out. However, as he had been about to play his hand, Alemanni, with his scepticism and his invitation to stick to facts and steer clear of conjecture, had swum back into view. And everything had collapsed.

  “This was frontier land. There were some on the run, some who crossed the river to join up with others. Fascists disguised as partisans. Partisans dressed in black shirts, double agents, spies. There were all sorts.”

  “There were also real partisans,” Soneri said, trying to find his feet again.

  “Yes, members of the group called – what was it? – G.A.P., Gruppo di azione pattriotica, the armed partisan group. For the others, this plain was too dangerous. A brigade of Germans could sweep across it in half a day.”

  “And no-one who went by that name?”

  “Listen.” Barigazzi came in quietly. “I am seventy-five and at the time I was not much more than a boy. This lot” – he indicated the others – “were children. How could we remember?”

  “You don’t only remember the things you have lived through yourself.”

  “Here the partisans were all communists. The man you are talking about might have been loyal to General Badoglio, cut off from his unit … There were a lot like that in Lombardy.”

  “Would no-one in the party know him? Among the older members, I mean.”

  “The party,” Barigazzi snorted, with a theatrical wave which seemed in harmony with the music as it rose in a crescendo towards a closing climax. “What’s left of the party? Just what you can see outside here,” he said, pointing down to the Po. “A fleeing rabble trying to carry with them as much as they can, knowing full well that they’ll not be able to save much and that the best part of their things will be taken by the river. That’s what the party is.” His words tailed off, leaving him to stare grimly ahead, angrily gulping at the wine left in the bowl.

  “You don’t forget certain things. You haven’t.”

  “All that’s left are memories,” said Barigazzi acidly. “And there is no pleasure in raking over them.”

  “
I am sorry, but I am afraid I am going to have to do some raking. Or some wading.”

  “Well then, it might be better to let the water levels drop,” Torelli said. “Bit by bit, everything will become clearer.”

  Soneri looked at him and there appeared on the man’s face the slightest, fleeting outline of a smile. “When the rivers drop, the waters turn clearer but they cover the riverbeds with sand.”

  “You’re a man who knows how to dig about,” Torelli said, in a tone which appeared to carry some kind of dark threat.

  “You haven’t told us if you’ve been to inspect the barge,” Ghezzi said.

  “I have. And the dinghy is missing.”

  “I knew it,” Barigazzi jumped up. “There was someone at the helm. There never has been a barge which sailed under four bridges without crashing into one of them.”

  “The dinghy hasn’t been found.”

  “You could always put out a message on the radio to ask them to look out for it,” Vernizzi suggested. “The watchmen must have caught sight of it. Unless they abandoned it to the current.”

  “That seems the most likely to me,” Barigazzi murmured. “But they must have used it first.”

  “Are you saying that whoever it was fled to the far side?”

  Barigazzi stared at him to see if he was joking.

  “So how did you get on board the barge?”

  “Via the gangplank.”

  “Do you believe that if he had escaped on to the Emilia side, he would have taken the dinghy?”

  “He could have taken it to get off further down the river, but still on the right bank.”

  The boatman shook his head. “Luzzara is the place with least surveillance, and the place hardest to keep under surveillance between Parma and Reggio.”

  “But on the far bank?”

  “Nobody bothers with the inside stretch of the Luzzara bend. The river has never burst its banks there.”

  That could be right. Whoever was on the boat did not have much time to disappear. You needed a bit of time to get the boat into the water, to go with the current, paddle towards the Lombard shore downstream from Dosolo, then abandon the boat to the current and clamber over the embankment. The carabiniere on guard at Tonna’s barge had told him that no more than twenty minutes had elapsed between the barge hitting the bank and the arrival of the search party. And by the same token, there had been no immediate inquiries made on the Emilia side of the river.

  The music swelled to its dramatic climax and provided the perfect accompaniment to Soneri’s thoughts as he imagined that flight, in the evening, on a river in spate, between embankments which had suddenly shrunk for someone looking up at them from midstream. He thought of one solitary, single-minded man clambering up, sliding about in the mud as he attempted to reach safety, wading up to his knees in filth, soaked through like marsh life, hoping to reach a friendly house as the veterans had done of old and to find people speaking the dialects of the Po.

  He failed to notice that the four men were staring at him. The deaf barman was at his side, too discreet to make him aware of his presence. Finally he nodded, and Barigazzi once more held up fingers that were as twisted as old nails.

  “Fortanina is the best thing in the lower Po valley, apart from Verdi and pork,” Torelli said.

  “And none better than what you get here,” Vernizzi said.

  The faint light and the red of the brickwork made the place look like a cellar. The windows were shuttered in the heavy darkness. Soneri was sunk in his thoughts, again imagining that flight.

  “Luzzara, Dosolo …it could be around there …” he murmured in a voice they struggled to make out.

  “These places are all one. The river doesn’t divide: it brings people together,” Barigazzi said.

  “That’s why I asked if you knew the partisans and the Kite.”

  “At my age, I sometimes think the mist over the Po has got into my head.”

  “Wine always clears the mind,” the commissario retorted, looking around that bar where everything seemed redolent of the past. With a swift glance he took in Verdi’s characters displayed on the walls, the Fortanina the customers were drinking, the bricks of a red that seemed permeated by pigs’ blood, the Christ with the crossed legs.

  “Don’t get carried away by appearances,” the boatman interrupted his thinking. “The past falls apart when you distrust the present.”

  “I don’t get the impression that you’ve forgotten. This river, for example …”

  Barigazzi interrupted him with a wave. “Don’t go there. It’s important to distinguish between experience and memory. You can fool yourself that you remember because it seems that everything is always the same, like the river perpetually switching between floods and low water. It’s not true. Each time you start over from the beginning. Memories are worth something for two or three generations, then they disappear and others take their place. After fifty years, you are back where you started. I chased out the Fascists and now my grandchildren are bringing them back. Then it will be their turn to end up on their arses.”

  “As happened to Tonna?”

  “He ended up on his arse quite quickly. He didn’t really have time to get a taste for it,” Barigazzi said.

  “He really stood out, did he?”

  “He did his bit. More downriver than here. ‘Barbisin’ was a name that struck terror.”

  “How did he get on after the war?”

  “He went up into the mountains around Brescia for a bit and worked as a driver, the same place he’d been in Mussolini’s final days, under the Republic of Salò. When things calmed down, he returned, but he went back to sailing to make sure he stayed well away from the piazzas of the lower Po.”

  “They had it in for him?”

  “Yes, according to the reports I heard. But as I’ve said, I was still a boy.”

  “But you joined the party quite young …”

  “So what? We didn’t care about Tonna. What did it matter to us if somebody went sailing up and down the Po and never found any peace. He didn’t even put in here any more. The port in Cremona was all he had left, because one or two of his old colleagues were there. There were a couple of places in Polesine where some farmers who used to be in the Blackshirts would give him half a cargo a week as a favour. He hadn’t even enough fuel to keep himself warm in winter. He used to light his stove with bits of rotten wood from the river.”

  “And how do you treat him now?”

  Barigazzi stared at him in surprise, thinking the reply was obvious. “Don’t you see? He doesn’t speak and neither do we. That way we get along.”

  “Is there anyone in the village or nearby who has a grudge against him?”

  “I’ve already told you. It’s all down to a couple of poor old souls. Who wants to remember? Anyway, everybody’s opinion is that he’s just an old bastard weighed down by age and regrets, reduced to living out his days by going round in circles on the water. If he’s not already dead, he’ll die soon with no peace.”

  “I wasn’t talking about politics. I meant, a grudge because of something that might have happened in recent years.”

  “He had no dealings with anybody. He never exchanged more than twenty words a day.”

  “Sometimes that can be enough …”

  “The only person he spoke to was Maria of the sands,” Ghezzi said.

  The others glowered at him in a way that seemed to the commissario to convey the dark shadow of a reproach.

  “Who’s she?”

  Once again the most fleeting of eye contact between the men gave Ghezzi authorization to proceed.

  “She’s a woman of about Tonna’s age who has spent most of her life on an island in the Po, digging sand.”

  “So where does she live now?”

  “In Casoni, two kilometres inland,” the man said, pointing in a direction which was meant to indicate the plain. “She was the only one, apart from his niece, who made him welcome. And when the Po was high and the island was
flooded he paid her back by going and rescuing her possessions.”

  “Does she manage to live far away from the river?”

  “She’s paralysed. She couldn’t live on her own in the cabin any more. When she was younger, she was a kind of savage who spoke only dialect,” Ghezzi said. “Now the island’s not there any more. With all the dredging, they diverted the course of the stream and the river ate it up bit by bit.”

  “Even the Po devours what it has created. Everything is changing all the time. In the party, no more than twenty years ago, they taught us that history is on the march, towards a better future. Now, not only has optimism disappeared, but so has the party. Don’t ask me to say that things are getting better. Just like the Po, we’re marching towards the filth of some stinking sea,” Barigazzi said.

  He gulped back the last drops of Fortanina, slammed his bowl noisily down on the table and rose swiftly to his feet. He was on his way out when the other three got up to follow him, in silence.

  5

  THE MOBILE RANG while the Alfa was travelling through the mists of the lower Po at the speed of a horse-drawn carriage. This time, Angela’s voice did no violence to his eardrums, and this of itself was sufficient to put him in a state of alarm.

  “You need to keep your finger in the hole in the dyke and can’t get away, is that it?”

  “I’m doing my level best to get back, but the fog is so thick you could lean your bicycle against it.”

  “Don’t worry. If you do get lost, the worst that could happen is that you’d end up in a fast food joint.”

  “I’d rather end up in a ditch.”

  “Don’t overdo it.”

  “I’ll content myself with a glass of Fortanina and some spalla cotta.”

  “Poor thing! They’ll hear your tummy rumbling all the way to the Alps. Do you know that Juvara has been searching high and low for you all day?”

  “In some areas you can’t get a signal. But how did you know that?”

  “I was down at the police station. I’ve been handed a public defence case.”

  “When will I see you?”

  “Forget it, it’s almost ten o’clock. I don’t like being kept hanging about by men. It’s better the other way round. But if you’d asked me earlier …” she teased, leaving the suggestion hanging in the air.