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

by Valerio Varesi

  Soneri parked at the boat club. There was no-one there yet and the locked door had the melancholy colour of aged straw. He got out of his car and called Juvara again. “Are you at the mortuary?”

  “Yes, but it hasn’t got under way yet. The police doctor said it would begin at nine.”

  “Never mind about the post-mortem,” Soneri told him. “Go over to the Istituto Storico della Resistenza and ask if they know anything about a partisan who was called ‘the Kite’.”

  He deduced from a long silence that Juvara was somewhat taken aback.

  “Are you still there?” he barked.

  Juvara hastened to register his attention with a few grunts. “O.K., I’m on my way,” he said.

  Soneri collected that Juvara was not pleased, and this annoyed him. He could not stand people who required their day to be mapped out in every detail from early morning, especially in a job like his. He detested diaries. He himself could never imagine what he would be doing one hour later, and lived from moment to moment without giving thought to the future. Things occurred according to a sequence which was rarely logical. It was useless to indulge in conjecture, since the prospect shifted as rapidly as it did for high-wire acrobats. His days were a process of continual adaptation to change, as was the case that morning on the banks of the Po. Rather than observing a body being cut open, he was looking at falling water levels which were funnelling the river back into its customary riverbed, and which were now so low that the riverbed itself seemed to him like a cavity in a gum from which a tooth had just been extracted.

  He did not hear Barigazzi arrive and, when he turned round, he found him standing motionless behind him in the middle of the yard.

  “Once you would have been on the jetty well before now,” Soneri said.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Boats have been going up and down the river for quite a while now.”

  Barigazzi said nothing, but made for the club and put a key in the door. The commissario stayed where he was, watching the current. He was happily wondering where San Quirico might have been. Straight ahead, Nanetti had said, so he looked into the middle distance, his gaze suspended somewhere between the water and the mist.

  “Come on in, it’s warmer in here,” Barigazzi’s voice shouted from the club.

  Soneri went in and stood in front of a cast-iron stove where the flames were already roaring. From the windows it was no longer possible to see the barge, which had dropped with the waters. Barigazzi came over and stood beside him at the window.

  “San Quirico must be straight ahead,” Soneri said, pointing.

  The old man remained silent for a few moments before saying: “It’s a bit further down the valley, just before Gussola.”

  “How many people used to live there?”

  “Forty or so. It was a small village.”

  It was only then that he thought of a certain parallel which had been troubling him without his understanding why: the village, like Anteo Tonna, was underwater. And both were dead.

  “Of those who used to live there, are there any still hereabouts?”

  Barigazzi looked at him nervously. He was making an obviously unsuccessful effort to grasp what was behind these questions. “There are one or two up and down the Po valley, but they’re very old. The people who lived there were a pretty odd lot.”

  “They were all communists, I’ve been told.”

  “Strange characters, the sort you find in marshlands,” Barigazzi said uneasily. “Turned savage by the water and prey to malaria. People always on the verge of madness, after generations of intermarriage. Even the Fascists left them alone. And then the land reform programme wiped San Quirico off the map.”

  “Can you still see the ruins of the houses today?”

  “A couple more days and they’ll be sticking out of the water. It happens every time the level drops. They say that on misty nights when this happens you can still hear the voices of the people who lived in those houses. But it’s only a legend. Maybe it’s the wind whistling over the stones dislodged by the current. Others say it’s because in San Quirico they never buried their dead. They threw them into the river with a rock tied to their waists. Water to water.”

  Soneri briefly reflected that this practice was probably not so different from what had happened many years previously all along the banks of the river: men eaten by fish and fish eaten by men. The same substance forever feeding off itself in an eternal cycle. And then his thoughts went back to Anteo Tonna, buried underwater by a boulder from the stone-crushing plant, but pinned, in his case, to the shallow, provisional floor of the flat lands where even the fish feel the precariousness of the sluggish, underwater currents, and for that reason do not stay there for long.

  “It was not by chance that he was found there,” he said, staring straight ahead at the window, where the mists of the Po and a faint reflection of his face were superimposed on the glass.

  He noticed that Barigazzi had turned to observe him, apparently bemused, as though he feared the commissario were talking in a delirium, but Soneri himself continued to look out at the horizon over the river, where for many days now the line between land and sky had been lost. It seemed obvious to him that the killer had had a certain taste for symbolism. Consciously or not, everyone did. Every pre-meditated murder followed the ritual of a theatrical production. Plainly there were some actors who performed their parts well; and others, less well. The problem was to identify the gifted ones.

  To which category did the man who had killed Tonna belong? Soneri imagined him to be a well-focused, brazen type. Who else would plan a murder in a hospital ward, with all the risks he was bound to incur? And then there was the corpse on the floodplain, put there precisely so that it would be found beside the monument to the partisans. An ordinary killer or a professional hit man would have tossed it into deeper waters, weighed down with a stone, in common with the practice for funerals at San Quirico.

  Many things simply did not add up while others seemed to be talking to him, but in a language which was as yet indecipherable.

  His mobile telephone brought him back to himself. “They killed him on the day of his disappearance, between eight and ten in the evening,” Nanetti informed him, with no preliminary greeting.

  “So the barge set off without him.”

  “Exactly. That whole business of the barge was to put us off the scent.”

  “Was there anything else apart from the blow to the head?”

  “Nothing. The body was otherwise unmarked. He was still a vigorous man in spite of his age.”

  So, whoever had killed Decimo in the morning had killed Anteo in the evening. He must have known his two victims well. Above all, he must have been aware that the boatman – who rarely left his barge – would not have known about his brother’s death or else he would have taken precautions. In any case, the brothers had only occasional contact and Anteo was a man accustomed to threats.

  Barigazzi switched on the radio, but now that the water was low the look-outs along the embankment had nothing to report to each other. In a silence broken only by the low buzz of the loudspeaker, the click of the door handle made itself heard. Dinon Melegari stood framed in the doorway. As soon as he saw the commissario he hesitated as though he would rather turn back, but he decided to come in, with obvious reluctance, looking past Soneri at Barigazzi. When the commissario fixed his eyes on him, interrogating him with his stare, Dinon pointed an outstretched index finger at Barigazzi who, although evidently taken aback, returned his glance. With no more than that exchange, the two men established a kind of complicity.

  “I came for the boats,” Melegari said, embarrassed. “Now that the waters are so low, I thought that it would be better to drag them ashore. The winch is working, isn’t it?”

  “You’re right. The boats are on the sand.” Barigazzi was doing a better job of masking his feelings.

  “White wine?”

  Melegari nodded, as did the commissario. The thre
e men then found themselves around a table while a silence as cold as the frost outside made conversation impossible.

  “Will the inlets freeze over?” Soneri said.

  The others looked up, wondering who was expected to answer this. “Only if it lasts a week. By the banks on the northern side,” Barigazzi mumbled, looking at Dinon, and in that exchange the commissario perceived a coded message.

  He remained obstinately at the table, asking off-hand questions about the Po, about the levels of the water and the boats. After a time Dinon got up, almost banging his head on the light which hung over the table. “I’ll go and have a look at the boat.”

  After he had left, Soneri said: “An unexpected visitor.”

  Barigazzi said nothing, but got to his feet and took the bottle away. He came back for the glasses.

  “The split in the Left has been resolved, then?” the commissario said.

  The old man shrugged and tried to make light of the issue. “He drops in every so often. He’s required to inform us about what he’s doing at the jetty. That’s what the regulations say. And then he pays a fee for the boat.”

  The commissario got up. It seemed to him pointless to go on. It was enough for him that evidently Melegari had come to speak to Barigazzi, perhaps about matters which concerned the Tonna brothers. He felt his distrust of him increasing, and this told him that he was getting close to something important.

  He gave a curt nod to Barigazzi and went out, walking along the pebbly track which led to the jetty, where half of the boats had been left. On a large magano he saw Melegari testing the current with an oar. Melegari saw Soneri too, but pretended not to.

  He crossed the river at Torricella, then turned on to the wrong road, but made it to Gussola by lunchtime. There was no great difference between the two banks of the river: the same low houses in rows, the same churches with that distinctive, blood-red Baroque typical of the Po valley. Juvara interrupted Soneri’s contemplation of a kind of cathedral with salame-coloured bricks, on which almost half a century of humidity had left its deposits. “There’s no Kite in our part of the valley,” he said. “There are two of them, and they both fought on the Apennines along the Gothic line.”

  Soneri thought this over for a few minutes. “Cast your net wider. Check with the Resistance archives in Mantua, Cremona and Reggio. He must have been somewhere, this Kite.”

  “Do you want me to look on the internet?”

  “Look anywhere you like. Maybe the killer will pop up on your screen.”

  It was not Juvara’s idleness which annoyed him as much as the intrusion of these new-fangled investigative techniques. He detected some vague threat in them, even though he knew perfectly well that it was the fear of feeling redundant which really upset him. At his age, this had become a matter of some delicacy.

  He found a seat at a very ordinary restaurant, which did however promise a stracotto d’asinina with genuine credentials. The television was talking about what journalists were now calling “the murder on the Po”. A roomful of lorry drivers, office workers and shopkeepers had stopped eating and were glued to the screen, but Soneri was beginning to feel some unease at not being where logic dictated he should be. He saw the questore behind a microphone, with four officers in yellow jackets marked “Polizia” – worn especially for the cameras – and a group of journalists with their notebooks, and there he was in a country trattoria which had nothing to do with the investigation, along the misty banks of the Po, searching for a phantom village which had long since been swallowed up by the waters. Once again, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of insecurity arising from his invariable role as an outsider, but he comforted himself with the thought that perhaps that was why he was able to see things from the correct angle.

  The riverbank was now one long beach littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the flood. He approached, hoping to see if the first stone or the first wall of the sunken village might be emerging. Perhaps it was too early. Barigazzi had said that it would take another couple of days’ freeze to bring the waters right down. He walked along the stretch of sand where he saw trails of old footsteps and the tracks of dogs which had been sniffing out the faint scents left by the encroaching water.

  His intuition suggested to him that there was an uneven section of riverbed at the point where the ruins of San Quirico ought to be. There the surface of the water broke up into eddies and curled and twisted like a lazy reptile. He stood a few moments peering into the deeper solitude until it occurred to him that if he really wanted to give some sense to his wanderings, he should make his way inland and go from house to house making inquiries, risking the wrath of guard dogs.

  New San Quirico, a soulless place without a centre, thrown up haphazardly across a defunct road, was far worse than anything he could have imagined. He would have sooner owned an underwater house than one of those anonymous villas prematurely aged by the mists. He wandered for a few minutes among shut-up houses, past huts with rusty steel roofs containing only odds and ends no longer useful in city dwellings. The village appeared to be deserted, but at least half a dozen dogs barked somewhere in the mist, though there was no way of knowing where exactly they were. For ten minutes he did not come across a single trace of another human being, but then he noticed a low house with a woodshed under the balcony and a garden covered with sheets of plastic as protection against the frost. Outside it, half-concealed by a glass-fronted veranda framed by gilt aluminium, an old man sat on a wooden bench looking out on to the roadway. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and leaned both hands on a walking stick. He had plainly been there for some time, but it was not clear what he was looking at, unless it was the mist itself as it deposited a sprinkling of ice particles.

  Soneri got out of his car and gestured to him, but the old man made no move. He rang the bell, causing the man to turn towards the door to see if anyone in the house had heard. A small dog, which must have been sleeping behind the house, came scampering towards the commissario, growling. He waited until a light was switched on inside. The old man remained motionless, as though under a glass case in a museum. The front door opened and an old woman came out. She exchanged some words with the man. The man gave a start and rose to his feet. The veranda window opened and the commissario introduced himself.

  “My husband doesn’t see too well,” the woman said. “He’s got cataracts.”

  The dry heat of the wood fire greeted him and the old man’s eyes began to follow him, picking up his voice and tracking his passage across the veranda.

  “I’m looking for someone who once lived in San Quirico on the Po,” the commissario began.

  The man nodded and his wife explained that he had been the miller.

  “When did you come here?”

  “Immediately after the war, when the reclamation schemes got under way.”

  “The Fascists had excluded you from their reconstruction programmes …”

  “They knew things were bad for us and left us up to our arses in the water.”

  “Were you sorry to come here?”

  “No, here you can live like a human being.” It was the wife who spoke.

  “You can’t see the Po,” the man said with heart-felt regret.

  Soneri guessed that, in his lonely afternoons on that veranda, the cataracts and the mist forced him to imagine the banks of the river, the flat lands, the inlets and even the fish.

  “Were they all communists in San Quirico?”

  “For the most part,” the man said, as his pupils stopped roaming and he cast his clouded gaze towards the floor.

  A silence fell over the kitchen, now in half-light, the best conditions for cataract sufferers. The commissario felt embarrassed. He was not making a favourable impression, asking for information from two elderly people who had little inclination to dwell on a grim past. The woman came to his rescue. Breaking the silence in which the two men sat facing each other, she said: “We paid a heavy price for that.”

  The Fascists. She could not be talk
ing of anything else.

  “What did they do to you?”

  “Reprisals, round-ups. Fortunately we could always hear them coming from a long way off and we were able to make our escape along the Po. Sometimes they burned down houses, although there was not much to burn. They even set fire to my home, but we managed to get there just in time. There being no shortage of water.”

  “Were there any partisans among you?”

  “Yes, but they stayed away so as not to get their families involved. All that were left were women, old folk and children.”

  The man made an effort to focus on the commissario, but his eyes were too weak and stared up towards the ceiling, having been misled by the shadows.

  “So there were not many people killed, is that so?” Soneri said cautiously, thinking of what San Quirico must have been like, a mass of grey stone suspended over the water, at the mercy of the currents.

  “Life’s hardships took many more,” the woman said.

  There followed another silence which seemed all the more profound in that house with its dimmed lights, oppressed by a cellar-like darkness. Just as it was becoming embarrassing and Soneri was about to take their unwillingness to speak as a sign that it was time for him to leave, the man said: “The worst thing was when they burned the Ghinelli house, and the women …” The sentence was moving to its climax, but he stopped. His wife made a gesture expressing her displeasure, turned her face away, overcome by the horror brought on by the recollections.

  “Was he a partisan?” Soneri said.

  “He was killed near Parma. In ’44, I think.”

  “And the women?”

  The old couple looked at each other, and something like a reproach came into the woman’s eyes. Memories from a far-distant time, long buried and now being hauled out, must have been bitter.

  “They … I don’t know how to say it. They used them,” the man said. “There were so many of them. One of the women couldn’t bear the shame and threw herself in the Po near the whirlpools. The rest of them disappeared and were never seen again.”