River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (15 page)

He came in sight of the first houses in the town, all huddled under the embankment. From somewhere beyond the stone-crushing plant, he thought he could make out the rhythmic swish of oars. He stopped to listen and picked up the sound more clearly: a boat was moving among the poplars, between
the large embankment and the floodplain which was now beginning to emerge here and there, making the waters even more lifeless on this side. He tried to see more clearly. He turned back across grass flattened by sandbags where, away from the sun, patches on the ground as white as onions had begun to appear. The noise of the eddying water could be heard more distinctly. He crouched in the undergrowth and waited until he thought he could sense something emerging from the shadows. A figure was rowing a small boat, standing upright, using one oar in the style of a gondolier, passing through the poplars at the level of the branches. One stroke to propel the craft forward and then a long pause: it might have been a hunter, but this was not the hunting season. The commissario rose a little to lessen the pressure on his legs but at that moment a pheasant took flight noisily from the river side of the dyke, screeching as it flew low over the water.

The boatman took another couple of strokes, pushing the boat in the direction of a wide inlet and carrying himself out of sight. Soneri waited, attempting to work out the direction the boatman had taken, but he did not hear anything more. He had disappeared into the mist and must have been sculling his oar astern under the water, like a fin. He must have positioned the boat so that he could take advantage of the current, patiently allowing himself to be pulled along by it. The commissario would have given anything to be able to swim after him.

Soneri arrived at the jetty. He saw both the little pennant over the boat club waving once more in the wind and the beacon-lamp facing into the thick, swirling mist. The temperature had dropped still further and it was beginning to freeze. He was fastening up his duffel coat when he heard the strains of “Aida” from one of his pockets.

“Your good friend Alemanni is telling everyone in the
prosecutor’s office that you’re getting nowhere,” were the words with which Angela assailed him.

The magistrate’s name caused him to shiver more than did the icy breeze blowing along the embankment. “He’s got it in for me because I proved that Decimo’s death was no suicide.”

“He’s gone and leaked something to the newspapers too, and they’re all saying that the investigation is in a blind alley.”

Soneri let out something like a roar and cursed himself for not having been the first to go to the press with the story of the murder. He regretted having done anything to spare the magistrate’s blushes. Grinding his teeth, he swore under his breath.

“Calm down,” Angela said. “In a few months the
presidente del tribunale
will pension him off and allow him to live out his days in his club. They won’t even trust him with the most straightforward inquiry. The Tonna case will be his last,” she said. Soneri bitterly regretted his ill luck. “Anyway, get ready: One of these days I’m going to drop in on you. So work out how you’re going to welcome me. I’m already fed up with the Po valley, and if I make the effort to come, I won’t be best pleased if I end up being let down. That barge …”

“It’s right in front of a very busy boat club.”

“You’re a commissario, are you not? So it’s up to you to find the solution.”

He would have been delighted to. Not the solution to the problem of taking Angela below deck on the barge, thereby gifting her the excitement of making love in an unusual place, but to the dilemma of discovering who was the solitary boatman on the waterway and what he was up to. The man had been at risk of being intercepted by the carabinieri, who were keeping an eye on the flooded houses beyond the embankment, but then, with that mist, they would never have caught a boatman skilled in the ways of the Po, not even with a speedboat.
He felt uneasy, and as night spread over the valley already darkened by the mist he was nagged by the thought of another day gone by with nothing to show for it. He was beginning to wonder whether the doubts insinuated here and there in the columns of the newspapers could at any moment be transformed into headlines. He could already picture Alemanni in triumph, foaming at the mouth, his vengeance complete as he resigned from the profession with a sensational parting shot.

His ill humour was still on him when he arrived under the colonnades, and did not leave him even when he was at the door of
Il Sordo
. Hunger had been gnawing at him for some hours, so the usual plate of
spalla cotta
and glass of Fortanina were not now likely to be sufficient. There were only a few customers, and a muted “Otello” seemed to be rising from the darkness of the cellar.

He sat down in front of the cross-legged Christ and placed his elbows on the table, bowing his head slightly in a posture which appeared almost devout. The hazy image of the boatman was still in his mind, and so caught up was he that he did not hear the deaf landlord come up beside him. He looked up at him. His rolled-up sleeves exposed enormous, hairy forearms and he was wearing a waistcoat which could scarcely contain his paunch. His face was dominated by his big lips and by a look which seemed to give off a kind of mysterious malevolence. That evening too he had his hearing aid switched off. Soneri picked up the menu and pointed to the
pasta con fagioli
.

By the time Barigazzi arrived, almost all the tables were filled with people playing cards. The old man still had his working boots on as well as the heavy-duty overalls worn by dockers. “Good choice,” he complimented Soneri, pointing to his dish.

“I have a good nose for food. Better than for investigations.”

“You need patience,” the old man consoled him. “It’s a rare gift. Everybody’s in such a rush nowadays.”

“If only it were a question of patience and nothing else … Here you all are, convinced that the game’s up for Tonna, but no-one can say how or why.”

“Do you believe there is any other solution?”

“Possibly not. But someone knows something and is saying nothing.”

“Tonna didn’t have many friends in the village … Nobody got close to him.”

“Except for Don Firmino and Maria of the sands. She’s outraged with you lot,” Soneri said. “Because you took away her island.”

“Do you think we don’t know! Her beloved little island!” Barigazzi said in a rasping voice. “She was a Fascist spy and had two villagers shot. And that wasn’t all. She started spying on people who went up and down the Po. We should have drowned her,” he said, making a signal to the landlord with his thick thumb.

“Whose house was it that the Fascists torched?”

Barigazzi stared at him, pushing his hat back on his head. “Nothing was torched on this side,” he said at last.

“And on the Lombard side?”

“I have no idea. You don’t concern yourself with fires when there’s a river in between.”

He raised a glass of Lambrusco which was as dark as black pudding. The commissario did the same, and when both had put their glasses down, he said: “Have there been any robberies in the flooded houses?”

“We’ll find out when the river level drops, but I don’t think there’s much to steal around here.”

“This evening I saw a boat among the poplars, in the inlet beyond the stone-crushing plant.”

Barigazzi assumed a puzzled expression, and noticing Soneri staring hard at him he made an effort to appear calm. “Obviously somebody is still out hunting. After a flood, the embankments swarm with insects which attract pheasants and grouse.”

“There was one pheasant, but the hunter made off as soon as I caused it to get up.”

Barigazzi said nothing, then changed the subject: “What did that savage tell you?” he said, meaning Maria.

“She said that, through the co-operative, you obtained licences to dig up the sand deliberately so as to shift the course of the water, so that it would erode her island. And that when she was forced off the little land she had, you made her walk in front of you while you chanted ‘Bandiera Rossa’.”

“Those were memorable moments, like when we shaved her head after the war,” Barigazzi exulted, evidently still bent on revenge.

“Did she and Anteo live as man and wife?”

“Two Fascist bastards, and she the worst of the two.”

Someone had turned up the volume of “Otello”, which occasionally drowned out the hubbub in the room.

“I don’t believe it was a hunter,” Soneri said, returning to the subject which was foremost in his mind.

“Who do you think would be going down to the floodplain in the dark in this season?” Barigazzi said. “It could have been someone going back to see their house. There are some people who tie their boats to the bars on the window and move upstairs. The water didn’t get that high.”

“He wouldn’t have made off.”

The old man sat a moment in thought. The wine glass seemed to disappear inside his huge oarsman’s hand.

“There are some sinister characters along the Po. They keep away from everybody else, like beasts in the woods. The
only time you run into them is when your paths cross, but then each goes in his own direction,” he said, but with little conviction.

The commissario had the impression that Barigazzi was just as curious about the episode. He was about to take out his mobile and call Maresciallo Aricò, but he thought better of it. He would play this his own way, and was more persuaded that this was the right course as he looked into the old man’s face, where a trace of surprise was still evident.

“Don’t brood too long over it,” Barigazzi said in an attempt to conceal his own embarrassment. “Little by little, with the onset of cold, the waters will go down and become clearer. At that point, all will be revealed.”

It was not the first time Soneri had heard that said, but the old man had spoken with a kind of sneer, curling his moustache like a grandfather playing with his grandchildren.

Soneri, as when he almost jumped into the flood to pursue the boatman, or when a few seconds earlier he had been about to call Aricò, now felt his instinct at odds with his self-control. Giving in to instinct would have meant taking Barigazzi by the scruff of the neck and shaking him. As a young ispettore he would have sprung out of his seat and threatened him. He was not at his best in those moments, and by now he had learned to stay calm, to take it easy and not betray his intentions. He could not be sure if this was down to experience or middle-aged cowardice, but he had decided to suspend his enquiries on that topic.

The volume of “Otello” was turned up even more as the din within the room rose. The atmosphere was growing more heated as second bottles were consumed and the general merriment increased. Every so often one of the customers would rise from his seat to accompany the tenor and give voice to as much of the aria as he could recall. It was said that the landlord
kept his hearing aid switched off precisely so as not to hear the voices of great singers drowned out by over-excited tenors under the influence of wine. He had been listening to that noise for forty years. At the climax of the opera, Soneri became aware of other dissonant notes, those of “Aida” from his mobile.

“Where are you, in a theatre?” Juvara said, somewhat simple-mindedly.

“Do you really think I would be in a theatre?”

“I can hear music …”

“I’m eating in a place where they love opera,” Soneri said irritably, wondering whether Juvara could tell an operatic aria from a Gregorian chant.

“Commissario, we can’t solve that puzzle.”

“You mean the note?”

“Exactly. The only thing we’re sure about is that we’re dealing with a graveyard. There is nothing else like it divided into lines, squares and sections.”

“And as it happens, Decimo is dead …”

“The problem is that even small cemeteries have this same kind of sub-division and in the Po valley there are hundreds of them.”

“So how are you going about it?”

“We’re going through them one by one. I mean, those in the provinces on the banks of the Po.”

“And so far no match?”

“Once or twice, but they correspond to people who died many years ago and there is no apparent connection.”

“Well, I’m afraid that’s the only way of dealing with it,” Soneri said briskly.

“That much we can agree on,” Juvara snorted, and was gone.

HE WAS IN
his car in front of the
Italia
, whose shutters had been lowered, and the piercing hoot of an owl reached him from down by the river. Owls called to the dead, he remembered being told. As he drove up the embankment, the bird appeared from among the poplar trees and its call seemed to be aimed at the lamp over the boat club, a faint light shimmering in the mists and looking like an illumination at a vigil or at the recitation of the rosary. He thought, giving his imagination rein, that the owl was chanting for all the lives sacrificed on the river, perhaps even for Tonna, who might be somewhere underwater, or on the sandbanks or in the muddy depths of some inlet.

The mist was less dense now, diluting the still darkness of the autumn night. As he drove towards the city, Soneri could not escape that final vision of the sleeping town, sunk in the gloom of the embankment’s long shadow, with the hoot of the owl hovering over everything like a preacher’s warning, solemn and sinister in the silence. “When the waters drop, everything will be revealed,” Barigazzi had said, twisting his moustache. What did he mean – that it was only a question of time? Or that there was something he knew? Or was it just long experience?

That question was still with him as he came back to his
house and it remained with him when, standing in the half-light at the window overlooking the street, he let his mind wander over what emerged from the turmoil of sensations accumulated in the course of the day. Every so often, from the stew of conjectures simmering in his mind, a single, perfectly formed thought bubbled to the surface. When will the water drain from the inlets and the floodplain? “One month if there is a freeze, or less if they set the pumps to work,” had been Barigazzi’s judgment. He did not know why, but he expected some development, something that would lead somewhere, from that kind of prediction. He fell asleep clinging to that hope.