River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (20 page)

He tried to bring to mind the image of Decimo’s head, but his memory was blocked by the body in front of him, bones disjointed, stretched out under a yellow sheet. Then it dawned on him. He did not need to be an anatomist to recognize that there was a link between those two smashed skulls.

“A savage blow,” the maresciallo said.

“Indeed,” Soneri mumbled, “and not the first I’ve seen.”

“I imagine,” said the other, without grasping the reference to Decimo.

It was now pitch black. Only the commissario, Aricò and the officer remained beside the corpse. Not far off, the diver, still in his wetsuit, looked like a strange river fish, dripping with slime. The only light came from the headlights of the
police car, around which wisps of mist were swirling. The smell of burning still hung in the air.

“We have to inform the ambulance men and the magistrate before removing the body,” the officer said.

Aricò turned towards the commissario, who nodded. At that moment, a car approached along the embankment road and when it was only a few metres away, Soneri recognized the vehicle belonging to the forensic squad. Before Nanetti could get out, the commissario turned in the dark towards Aricò. “Is there a chapel near here?”

In reply, the maresciallo pointed along the embankment into the darkness, but Soneri understood perfectly. He remembered having passed it.

When he turned back to look at the corpse, he saw Nanetti already bent over it with a little torch which gave out a light as white as the full moon. He recognized the procedures of the forensic squad, as unchanging as any ritual. With a grimace of pain and a creak of his joints, his colleague got to his feet. “I suppose you have already noticed the blindingly obvious?” he said, indicating the head. “Apart from that, I haven’t much to say just now, but at a guess it would seem to me that he died on the same day that he disappeared.”

“It would be better to move him at the earliest opportunity to a cold slab in the morgue,” Aricò said.

“Agreed,” Soneri said with a glance at Nanetti, who nodded before saying: “The killer must have made his calculations very carefully. What better way to cancel out the traces of a crime than a flood on the Po?”

It had never occurred to the commissario that the murderer might have taken into account the rise in the river level before making his move, that he might have waited for the waters to overflow on to the plains, fill them and cover over the scene of the crime. He noticed that Aricò and Nanetti were staring
at him strangely. When he was thinking, his face must have assumed a particular expression, as everyone noticed it. Angela would always say: “What’s the matter, what are you thinking about?”

Fortunately the blue flashing lights of the ambulance arriving attracted everybody’s attention. Before it pulled up, the commissario took a last look around him: Aricò, the officer, Nanetti and himself standing there, in the mist, beside a corpse swollen with water. It was like a scene from a gangster movie.

It was only when the scent of the
pasta con fagioli
worked its way into his nostrils that he remembered about the meeting in the questura. It had completely slipped his mind, but then the questore had completely forgotten about the murder.

“So you’ve won,” Nanetti said, looking around at the walls of
Il Sordo
with that curiosity for detail which he showed when examining corpses or cartridge shells.

“Won what?”

“With Alemanni. He said you were chasing fireflies …”

“Alemanni has never understood anything. He should have been a lawyer.”

“What do you think about it now?”

“That the motive is not one of the usual ones.”

“Why so?”

Soneri looked up at the cross-legged Christ but was unable to translate into words the dance of phantoms, intuitions and conjectures inside his head. “It’s all to do with something that happened a long time ago. Or perhaps that was only a preliminary. On the barge I found a note which said something about the killing of a partisan.”

“That was more than fifty years ago …”

“That’s true, but I have the impression that time passed in vain for the Tonna brothers. Perhaps out of an extreme regard for consistency, or perhaps out of shame, their minds remained the same as when they were in their twenties. It’s strange, in a world of whitened sepulchres.”

Nanetti tucked away four spoonfuls of the pasta as though he were shovelling sand. Then he raised his eyes and said, “That’s to their credit.”

“The price they paid was an isolated life. Decimo pretended he started living when he was forty. His brother spent his days on his own on a barge, willing to deal with people-traffickers, anything to keep him afloat.”

“You’re sure they’ve got nothing to do with it?”

“Yes. They thought they were the only threat facing Tonna, but I’m afraid …”

As he spoke to Nanetti, his conviction that he was dealing with an unusual and almost unfathomable crime gathered strength. He was reminded of the death of a well-known criminal many years previously. He had been under threat from all sides, but died in the most banal of ways, falling off a ladder trying to break into an apartment.

“If it was the same person who killed the two brothers,” Nanetti broke in, “it means that in the morning he deposed of Decimo and in the evening Anteo. But was the latter not the main target?”

“Certainly,” Soneri said, deep in thought. “And why kill Decimo in a hospital, with all the risks that involved? And anyway, are we sure we’ve got them in the right order?”

“We’ll find out from the post-mortem.”

“He obviously meant to kill them both, and it seems that both of them were aware of the threat.”

Nanetti put his spoon down on the empty plate and stretched out his arms. He never followed his colleague in his
suppositions. The only things which interested him were evidence and proof, and the only hard facts at that moment were corpses, two brothers, killed in the same way.

Soneri made a sign to the landlord to bring a plate of
spalla cotta
. The restaurant was beginning to fill up, but there was no sign either of Barigazzi or of the others from the boat club. Nanetti kept looking around until he noticed, tucked away in a corner behind him, the notches marking the height of the water and the date of the flood. “Just thinking about all that water makes my arthritis play up.”

“Think of Tonna, underwater for days.”

“A damp patch was the least of his problems. If anything, the water stopped him from decomposing too rapidly. And besides, on the floodplain, there are no pike.”

In fact even the fish had left Tonna’s body untouched. Soneri was contemplating other corpses which had been eaten away by marauding fish and left disfigured as though rubbed by sandpaper, when Nanetti surprised him with an unsuspected knowledge of the Po and its fauna. “I’ve looked it all up,” he said. “I also know that in these parts, over on the Cremona side, there’s a submerged village which re-emerges only when the water is very low.”

“You don’t remember where?”

“No, but it must be right in front of where we are now, on the far side. I think all you’ve got to do is ask. The land reclamation programme in the post-war period modified the course of the river, and the village itself was moved a couple of kilometres inland.”

Soneri reflected on this for a moment and began to feel welling up inside him a sense of unease which was more like deep rancour. It was like a mild pressure on a part of his head he would not have been able to identify too precisely. For days, he had been moving around on the embankments and speaking
to the local people without finding out about that sunken village. It annoyed him that Nanetti had simply turned up one evening with a new piece of information. He felt a fool, even if he was not sure that those few miserable hovels whose very existence he had been ignorant of were genuinely important. Perhaps not, but then why was he in such an ill humour?

The barman came over with the
spalla cotta
and Soneri was tempted to ask him about those submerged houses, but saw he had removed the hearing aid. And anyway, he would not have told him even if he had heard perfectly. Soneri concealed his thoughts by acting for a moment as head waiter, dividing the
spalla cotta
between the two plates and pouring the Fortanina into both glasses. Nanetti let him get on with it, and when they were about to eat, he said, “This story of the underwater village has really made an impression on you, hasn’t it?”

He expressed himself with such moderation that the commissario calmed down, surprising even himself with his sudden change of mood.

“Absolutely nobody spoke to me about it,” he said, while the possibility that there was a reason for that superimposed itself on what he said.

“It’s still on old maps from the Fascist era. It was in the middle of a marsh,” Nanetti said, “and the Fascist officials refused to initiate the reclamation programme in that zone because, so they said, it was a nest of Reds. The work was done under De Gasperi after the war.”

Soneri remembered Nanetti’s passion for topography and for old maps of any kind, military or civil. In his cellar at home he had a pile of them, which his wife described as the finest woodworm farm in the province.

“And this village was inhabited until they altered the course of the river?”

“I just don’t know,” Nanetti said, “but I believe so, considering it was rebuilt from scratch further inland on the plain.”

He did not know why, but the story interested him. “What was the name of the village?”

“San Quirico. It seems no-one actually lives in the reconstructed houses. The children of the original owners keep them as second homes.”

Soneri continued to think about the walls over which the Po slowly flowed. How many people had been happy or sad in that place? How many personal stories were buried under the water there? He was not sure why, but he imagined that some of these stories were connected to the case of the Tonna brothers. This idea frightened him, but his curiosity was aroused by the fact that no-one had ever told him about that place, even though it was only a stone’s throw from the boat club. Perhaps on clear days you could even make it out beyond the bend in the river.

Nanetti got up and when the two of them were under the colonnade, the stench of burning still in the air, Soneri concluded to himself that the inquiry would need to start afresh from Anteo’s corpse, from the facts in other words, the one thing that counted, as Nanetti always insisted.

“Tomorrow you’re going to have a horde of journalists on your back, and Alemanni will be in a rage,” Nanetti said before getting into his car.

The commissario gave a forced smile, clenching his extinguished cigar between his teeth. If he had paid heed only to the facts, he would never have set foot near the Po.

THE FREEZING FOG
had left a fine film of frost on the car roof. Clouds of minute crystals floated through the air, while the drop in temperature had caused the grasses and plants in the fields to stiffen. Alongside him, the little villas with their overhanging roofs reminded Soneri of Christmas cards. As he was going along a stretch of completely white road, his mobile rang.

“I didn’t see you at the meeting,” the questore began, in a tone which was intended to convey a reproach, but he was too weak a man to make it felt.

“I was stuck with a corpse,” Soneri said.

The silence was so long that it seemed for a moment as though they had been cut off. “I would have liked to speak to you about that, among other things.” The questore was attempting to make up lost ground. “Tomorrow we’re going to have the press on our backs.”

“I’d prefer to steer clear of that.”

“We’ll have to give them some account of this new turn in the investigation,” the questore said with greater feeling.

“Yes, sir,” the commissario said. “But you know how to deal with these things much better than I do. Anyway, there’s not a lot to say. We fished the body up this afternoon. Its skull had been cracked open in the same way as the
brother’s, and he was probably killed on the same day as he disappeared. The body had been secured underwater, next to the monument to the partisans on the floodplain beside the stone-crushing plant, not very far from the jetty. That’s all there is to it.”

From the long pause, the commissario guessed that his superior was taking notes on one of those sheets of notepaper headed
QUESTURA
which he kept in front of him at every meeting. He could even picture the pen with the pointed stem which he kept propped upright like an aerial in a kind of inkwell on his desk. He was equally sure that the questore would not pursue the topic. No-one ever appealed in vain to his vanity. Soneri did not have anything against journalists, who after all did the same sort of job as he did, but he never knew how to deal with their questions, so he evaded them by claiming judicial confidentiality and appealing to the complexity of the investigation. They would certainly want to know how he had worked out where the corpse was hidden. What could he say? That it was a matter of intuition? Or a hunch? Would he be able to transform something so fleeting and complex into a coherent answer? In his head, clouds without form and without geometry were blowing about. He could not squeeze them inside any rational perimeter – not that he had ever tried. It seemed to him as impossible a task as giving shape to the mist. There he was, splashing about like a gudgeon in the Po, and that was enough for him. It was all he needed to be able to get on with his job.

Now he felt drawn by the same inexplicable force towards the submerged village, and it was already in his mind that the freeze, with the dry days which accompanied it, would lower the water level to a point where the walls of the old San Quirico would be uncovered, making it possible for him to wander along a kind of Venetian
calle
surrounded by the ghosts of
houses. The investigation was moving in time to the rhythms of the Po, of waters which rose and fell, endlessly changing the outline of the riverbank.

The car almost skidded on a stretch of road which was like a sheet of glass. He was badly shaken and this stopped him hearing the strains of “Aida” which had been ringing out for a few moments in his duffel-coat pocket.