River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (8 page)

“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.

“We put up with it occasionally, but give it half a chance and it’d be all over us.”

“We’ve taken more water in through our ears swimming in the Po than through our mouths drinking the stuff,” Vernizzi said. “Like the owner of this place, who can’t hear a thing now.”

“There’s some people I could mention that have taken in water through the holes in their arses,” Ghezzi sniggered.

The commissario smiled while his eyes continued to run over the walls where various Falstaffs and Othellos stood out against a background of heavy clay streaked with white lime, the colours of a good Felino
salame
. His eyes fell on a life-size, medium-quality fresco of a Christ executed by some mad artist. The face seemed to express not so much pain as the anger of a man cursing and swearing, while his sturdy, oarsman’s arms seemed capable of tearing the nails from the cross. When the commissario looked lower, he saw that the artist
had painted the legs folded over, crossed slightly beneath the pelvis.

“You’ve noticed it too,” Barigazzi said sarcastically. “Jesus Christ did not die of cold feet.”

Guffaws rang out around the table and created ripples in the Fortanina in the bowls.

“It wasn’t always like that,” he said, turning more serious. “It happened in ’51, with the flood.”

The commissario looked around all the tables. The chances were that not one of them was a church-goer.

“You don’t hold back with your jokes,” he said.

“It’s not a joke,” Torelli protested. “Even the priest agrees, and he made the old women believe it was a miracle.”

“The thing is he might be right.”

Soneri shook his head to say it was time to stop. He felt himself trapped in the middle. He had come to pose questions, and now he found himself in a bizarre situation. The wine was inducing a mood of euphoria in him, while the talk spun round him like a gauze bandage immobilizing him layer by layer.

“I don’t believe in miracles,” Barigazzi said, turning serious. “But nobody can say who redid Christ’s legs, not even the bar owner himself. He found them like that when he got back to his
osteria
after the flood water receded. They say it was some street artist who did the painting standing up to his knees in water.”

Soneri looked back at the Christ. He looked like an Indian holy man, but there was nothing blasphemous or mocking about him. “It’s strange to see an image like that here, where no-one goes to church,” he almost said.

“We don’t go to church and we can’t stand priests, but he,” Barigazzi said, pointing at the painting with deep respect, “he was a man who underwent suffering, like us.”

“He taught us not to kill,” Soneri said.

The three, suddenly suspicious, looked up for a moment and stared at him: “You don’t really think that we …”

“No, I don’t. But they did kill Tonna’s brother.”

“Decimo?”

“Yes.”

The conversation halted and even the music paused. The din of the
osteria
took over. None of the four asked any questions. Their mood was now serious and only Vernizzi murmured, “That’s certainly strange,” and he seemed to be speaking for the others.

There was a silence for a few minutes, which Soneri passed listening to the somewhat acerbic Verdi of “I Lombardi alla prima Crociata” before Barigazzi found the courage to venture: “So in your view, Anteo too was …”

The commissario first stretched out his arms then moved his face closer to Barigazzi’s square, high-cheekboned face. He was not wearing a beret, and this showed off his still thick but whitening hair. “I’m not sure, but as we set aside other hypotheses, I’m almost beginning to grow convinced.”

The other drew back and seemed lost in thought. From the expression on his face, the commissario deduced that he had been very convincing.

“Until this moment, I had been under the impression that the current could have carried the barge downstream and through the arches of a bridge, but you’ve undermined this conviction and with it any real possibility that we’re dealing with an accident. You have simplified the hypotheses, but complicated the story.”

Vernizzi and Torelli nodded in the style of a priest hearing confession.

“So then,” Soneri started up again, “There must have been someone on the barge. Someone who knew what he was
doing, who knew the river well enough to be able to navigate at night-time, in the dark, using only the tiller. Someone who started off from the boat club, casting off the moorings, giving the impression that the rising water of the Po had made the barge break free, or else that Tonna himself had decided to sail without engine or lights. After all, that was strange, was it not? But to make this last hypothesis credible, there needs to be some indication that there was a boatman on board.”