River of Shadows cs-1

by Valerio Varesi

  He decided against buying the newspaper. He did not want to begin the day in low spirits.

  He parked in an out-of-the-way spot and walked towards the jetty. He climbed over the embankment and came back down into the yard. Over the water, the clear glow of a timid dawn began to appear. He passed the cottages and walked straight over to the moorings. The space occupied by the magano was empty and the hawsers had been thrown on to the coping stones as on the day before. The commissario was disappointed and even duped, but at least he knew that the men sensed they were being watched. They had accepted their parts and were performing their assigned roles.

  He wandered among the cottages, his path taking him along the avenue between on one side the entrances to the dwellings and on the other the slope at the bottom of which the river flowed. In the ashen light, he gazed at various constructions which had been thrown together with cheap, leftover materials, strange pieces of architecture with the common feature that they were all built on stilts to keep them above the water. All around lay old boats, wheels of farm carts and barbecues for the summer. He examined them one by one until he came to a detail which attracted his attention: two footsteps imprinted on the thin layer of hoar frost which had settled the night before on the avenue alongside one of those raised dwellings, footsteps which stopped abruptly near the road.

  The commissario reflected on this and when he looked up at the embankment he noticed that the cottage was one of those which was invisible from where he had been standing the evening before. He went back to examine more closely those solitary footprints which came to a stop at an invisible wall. He walked along the path and climbed the steps to the upper level. A covered balcony ran round the perimeter of the dwelling, and from there on a summer evening, provided the observer used a good insecticide, the view of the Po must have had a certain charm. He tried to peer between the cracks in the shutters, but he could see only darkness within. However, he felt a draught coming from somewhere, a sign that the windows had not been closed.

  It was not difficult to undo the catch. As he had anticipated, he saw before him a room where the plants had been brought in to shelter them from the frost, an oleander, geraniums and a lemon bush half covered in cellophane. The commissario breathed in the dust-filled air, while spiders’ webs clung to his face. He opened the door in the room and found himself in a corridor. His torch lit up a row of boots and a single shelf above which there was a mirror. He pressed the light switch and there appeared walls abandoned to the damp, with various doors opening off them. The one directly facing Soneri led into a kitchen which contained everything needed to prepare a meal. A calendar open at the month of September was hanging from a hook, and on the other side there were doors giving on to first a bathroom and then two bedrooms, one of which contained a perfectly made double bed which gave off an odour of camphor, while in the centre of the second stood a camp bed and beside it an electric heater.

  Soneri approached the heater with all the caution of a bomb-disposal expert. It was still plugged in, but it was switched off. It was warmer in that room and everything led him to suppose that it had been occupied until a short time before, but the occupant could not have slept for long, four or five hours at the most. He examined every corner of the room. There were no more than odds and ends, a few things left over from the summer, a couple of magazines and assorted objects stuffed into a cupboard without order or neatness. Only one thing appeared to have been left there recently, a box of pills for high blood pressure. He opened it, but there was nothing inside.

  He went back into the corridor and saw that the exit had been closed but not bolted. Whoever had gone out last had simply pulled the door to behind him, as did Soneri. He closed the shutters from the inside of the room with the plants and went out through the main door. When he was at the bottom of the stairs, he made his way towards the road by the shortest path, but it was then that he came across the footprints once more. If he were to continue in the same direction, he was bound to leave his own prints, because the wind had caused the hoar frost to cover the pathway. Unthinkingly, he had done what the person in the house the night before had done, but whoever it was must have noticed he was leaving traces and had turned back on his steps, picking his way between the stilts beneath the house towards a point in the driveway untouched by the hoar frost. But in the dark he had failed to notice a couple of footprints.

  On the street, Soneri lit his cigar and tried to put these facts into some kind of order. Someone was living in hiding here but had been able to move about the Po with the complicity of a circle of orthodox communists who had remained faithful to Stalin. All this after the murder of two old Fascists. It might still have been 1946…

  From the yard he noticed the figure of Barigazzi going down to check the stakes. He followed the old man as he set about his work. When he came up behind him, Barigazzi spun round and stared at him, a quizzical expression on his face.

  “If it goes on like this,” Soneri said, pointing to the water, “even the fish are going to have a hard job of it.”

  “The water is very low,” Barigazzi said, as though he had expected a different kind of question.

  They walked along, leaving footprints side by side in the muddy sand just above the waterline.

  “Whose is the third cottage along from the mooring berths?”

  “It’s Vaeven’s,” he said with a sigh that conceded he had known the commissario would get to that point.

  They went back up towards the beacon. Soneri patiently followed Barigazzi who seemed in a state of resignation. The partisans, like the Kite in those days in 1944, must have walked in the same way as they were led to the wall. When they reached the front of the boat club, the old man walked straight ahead up to the elevated roadway. The commissario caught up with him, both still lost in their own thoughts.

  When they were in sight of the monument, Barigazzi stopped and turned to Soneri, evidently angry. “Look, I’ve got nothing to do with them. To my mind they’re all mad, with Stalin and all those meetings

  …”

  “Stalin has nothing to do with it. They’re threatening you because of the registers,” Soneri said after a brief pause.

  “What really upsets them is the business with the diesel,” Barigazzi said in a voice two tones below his normal speech. “They’re making illegal use of agricultural oil because it costs less. If too many trips appeared on the register, the police would check the files with the fuel records and might start wondering how they covered such distances with so little naphtha.”

  The explanation was plausible. After all, the magano was registered in the name of a co-operative of fishermen.

  “There are other illegal immigrants apart from the ones Tonna was transporting,” the commissario said.

  Barigazzi walked with his head down, and looked up only when the oratory which Anteo had been visiting almost every week in recent times emerged from the mist. Its darker shadow in the surrounding greyness brought them to a halt, and without Soneri’s having applied any more pressure, the old man seemed to feel his back was against the wall.

  “Do you think I don’t know that? But I don’t know what they’re really up to. They’re hardly going to come and explain it all to me.”

  “Melegari frightens you. I recognized as much that time he came to the clubhouse and saw me there.”

  “There are some people who can make themselves clear without issuing threats. They go about their own business, but they know that I know who they are.”

  “And yet they’re all old now,” the commissario murmured.

  Barigazzi walked around the tiny chapel, glancing in at the little altar where the flame of the sanctuary lamp was flickering. Behind the chapel, in a sheltered corner and by a kind of apse, a rosemary plant was growing.

  The old man plucked off a sprig, rubbed the herbs into the palm of his hand and smelled it. “A little miracle,” he said. “Next to the river, with these winters and fog six months a year…and yet it survives. The
walls of the oratory protect it from the north and east winds, and the embankment from the rains from the west. The only air which gets in is the gentle wind from the south. Ten metres away, it would be killed off by the frost, but here it can live.”

  There was some implication, lost to Soneri, in Barigazzi’s words. Soneri did as the old man had done and inhaled the scent. In the misty frost which suppressed all smells, he could detect an aroma of springtime.

  “It’s the only green thing which has remained,” Barigazzi said.

  The hoar frost had not reached that spot, and nor had the waters which gushed through the coypu burrows in times of flood. The plant was sheltered just as Barigazzi had explained.

  “There are certain spots not even winter can reach,” he said. “And the weather, I really mean the seasons, seem to stop and merge into one.”

  The commissario nodded absent-mindedly, both of them focusing on the rosemary. There was nothing else to look at now that the frost-whitened herb had the colour of the mist itself.

  “Did Tonna take care of it?”

  Barigazzi stared at him with eyes made watery by the cold. “It needed more than one man. He came only once a week, more for San Matteo than for anything else,” he said, nodding towards the entrance through which the statue of the saint could be seen.

  “He had turned religious in his latter years…”

  The old man gave the faintest of smiles in which cynicism and wisdom could both be read. “He was preparing himself for death.”

  “Not everybody gets that chance.”

  Barigazzi picked up the allusion. “No, they don’t. When you are young, you live thinking only of your body. When you’re old, you dedicate your time to your soul. At least the communists have remained consistent. They denied God when they were young and they go on denying him now that they’re old.”

  “It was not only old age that was a threat for him,” the commissario said. “And recently the danger was anything but undefined.”

  “Some things you know better than me. Like all those journeys. I know the magano sets sail and arrives back at the strangest of times, but as to what they’re doing… The river gives and the river takes, and around here that’s all there is to it. It gives you what you need to live and then takes your life. The same water which gives you food to eat also leaves you starving. People move away from the river and then come back to it, and those who live on its banks have no choice.”

  What he said still had about it some veiled allusion, sufficient to leave Soneri disconcerted. He seemed to be listening to a sermon from an old priest in a country parish giving a commentary on the Scriptures, the same source, after all, that Barigazzi must have learned from.

  In that sort of greenhouse where the rosemary grew, even the grass seemed more green and more lush. Was that why Barigazzi had brought him there? To make him understand that there were particular conditions there, impossible to reproduce elsewhere? And therefore in the town too…in a bend of the river Po, communists still faithful to Stalin and hard-line Fascists could survive, just as the rosemary could survive between the walls and the embankment?

  The old man turned to move away from that protective shell and face the frost again.

  “At this rate,” he said, “the inlets of stagnant water will freeze over, and when it turns mild again, sheets of ice will break loose and the hulls of the boats will be at risk.”

  “That will be when the magano will have to put in somewhere or other,” Soneri said.

  “And when that happens, you’ll get to know the whole crew.”

  11

  Arico received him as usual in the first-floor office overlooking the embankment. The telephone rang continually with calls from journalists eager for news of developments in the case of “The Murder on the Po”. Finally he got up to shout an order down the stairwell to the officer on duty on the ground floor: “Don’t put anyone else through: I’m out.” He went back to his desk, giving the heater a kick as he passed. The Po valley climate was getting him down. “This boat is like a stray dog,” he said. “Every single port from Parpanese to San Benedetto knows about it, but its draft allows it to put in anywhere it chooses along the banks of the river. It travels with no cargo and seems not to do much fishing.”

  “Have you got all the moorings under surveillance?”

  “How could I? I don’t have enough men. I’ve mobilized all the stations along the river, but I can’t call them all out. We’ve put all the moorings downstream from Pavia to Piacenza under surveillance on alternate days: Chignolo, Corte Sant’Andrea and Somaglia, as well as Mortizza, Caorso, San Nazzaro, Isola Serafini, Monticelli, Castelvetro

  …but these people move under cover of darkness. To have the least idea where they were, you’d have to attach a motorboat to their stern.”

  “Do they know they’re being watched?” Soneri had decided to ignore the maresciallo’s histrionics.

  “I assume so. It’s not that they’ve caught sight of uniforms, but my men have called at every boat club along the banks. And” — he added, with an eloquent gesture of one hand — “they all know each other.”

  “Does the boat moor for long outside Torricella?”

  “No. Sometimes it stays overnight at some port or other in the district near Reggio or Mantua, but in general it goes back home.”

  “Is it your view that they’re in the same business as Tonna?”

  “Who can say one way or the other?” the maresciallo said, with some vehemence. “We’re not talking big numbers, more a question of selected trips. These people are smart. They can draw alongside, embark and disembark at will. They know the river better than they know their own wives.”

  Soneri could not restrain a sly smile, and Arico noticed it. All that attention in the press, a couple of appearances on the television and the praise from the magistrates had convinced the maresciallo that he had the chance of a lifetime. Perhaps he was dreaming of promotion and of going back to Sicily, to those lemon groves he could not get out of his head.

  “Arico,” the commissario said, mindful of the sensitivities of his colleague, “our inquiries are proceeding in parallel, so we can give each other a hand. If you can keep the river under surveillance and keep a record of the movements of the magano, this will be useful both to yourself and to me.”

  The maresciallo thought it over. He was not an ungrateful man, and he knew that if the inquiries were to lead to his promotion, it would be down to Soneri. “I’ll keep you informed,” he said, “I’ll send off the telex today requesting a higher level of surveillance.”

  The cold was even more intense. The thermometer outside the pharmacy registered a sub-zero temperature. There was an east wind over the plain, blowing upstream and slowing even further the river which was already sluggish with the drop in water level. Soneri walked in the direction of the port, crossing the avenue lined with cottages and heading down to the moorings. The level had dropped again, and on what must have been the riverbed he noticed the skeletons of trees dragged down after decades of flooding from the Alpine valleys to the sands of the Po. Squads of scavengers and of the merely curious had begun making their way up and down the banks in search of any strange objects emerging after long years under the water.

  In the boat club, Ghezzi was listening to the radio. At Pomponesca a barge from Rovigo — apparently using old charts — had run aground, and along the Luzzara shoreline a sheet of ice had begun to form in a bend exposed to the winds from the Balkans.

  “It’s starting,” Ghezzi said. “And tonight if the cold gets any worse…”

  “Will the port freeze over as well?” Soneri asked him.

  “I’m afraid so, but the boats are all ashore.”

  “Apart from the magano belonging to Dinon and Vaeven.”

  Ghezzi said only, “I suppose so,” immediately dropping the subject as though they had trespassed on forbidden ground.

  “What would happen to a craft like that if it were trapped in the ice?”


  “It’s pretty robust, but not sufficiently so to break through thick ice.”

  “So it would have to put in somewhere.”

  “They’ll all have to put in if it goes on like this. But more than anything else, they’ll be laid up afterwards.”

  “After what?”

  “When the temperature goes back up. The river will become impassable, a mass of ice floes that can cut like blades. It’ll take days for the last of them to get to the mouth of the river.”

  It occurred to the commissario that if the magano was going to become unusable, Melegari would already have worked out some safe haven. Being a man of the river, he was bound to be aware of the consequences of the freeze. There was only one master in the whole business, and that was the river itself. It had concealed Tonna, had managed the drift of the barge and now, by withdrawing its freezing waters, it was upsetting long-established customs along its length and breadth. The men who inhabited the riverbanks were compelled to adapt to its whims as to a sovereign, so now the magano must be in the act of surrendering and retreating to dry land.

  “The ice will be here by nightfall. The moorings at Stagno and Torricella on the right bank are exposed to the north-east,” Ghezzi advised anyone who would listen.

  Barigazzi came in with a worried expression. “Explain to him that I don’t have the data. Someone pulled up my stake,” he said, pointing to the radio and at some unspecified interlocutor. “All these folk tramping up and down the riverbanks…” he added, uttering an oath as he hung his overcoat on a hook.

  “If the river freezes over, they’ll be walking on the waters as well,” Soneri said.

  “That won’t happen. I’ve seen it covered only twice in my life, and you need a bitter cold like this every day for a fortnight.”

  The radio broke in with its update on the freeze. It seemed that ice was forming all along the Emilia side, where the shore was more exposed to the winds from the north-east.

  “A wicked beast,” Barigazzi said. “It starts off on the still water and then advances slowly on all fronts. Gradually it’ll sink its grip into the riverbed. They’ll need to move if they’re to get all the boats on to dry land. Wood and ice don’t go well together.”