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

by Valerio Varesi

  “What was left for them there?” the old woman wondered. “Their house had been pulled down, and the little they had was destroyed.”

  “What about the brother in the partisans?”

  “A brave man who was afraid of nothing. Always in the thick of things, whatever the danger. But nothing more was heard of the Ghinelli family after the war.”

  “Was there anyone in the partisans from San Quirico who was called ‘the Kite’?”

  The old man looked up, trying to locate Soneri’s face, but he turned the wrong way and ended up peering at the lamp, whose light forced him to look down. Instead, palms upwards, he stretched out hands as calloused as hard clay. “There were so many names. The Resistance fighters …the partisans in that formation, what was it called, the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica, kept changing names all the time.”

  They heard the sound of a car drawing up outside. It seemed extraordinary that anyone would willingly come back so late to such a place, but a middle-aged, rather stocky man smelling of iron and oil made his entrance. “My son,” the woman said.

  The commissario looked closely at him and formed a picture of a deeper solitude yet: two old people with an unmarried son destined to remain on his own and to grow old in a place like this. No-one had invested anything in the future of San Quirico.

  As he was taking his leave, all three came out on to the veranda with its glass front and gilt aluminium frame, and from behind the glass the old man gazed at things that were not there. From the window of his car, Soneri kept his eyes on them, still together, until the mist swallowed them up.

  The darkness fell quickly as he tried to find his way back on to the main road. After a while, he fell in behind a lorry and resolved to return to the police station. When he entered the office, Juvara looked up in surprise. “Did you turn off your mobile to avoid the journalists?”

  Soneri took out his telephone and saw it had no battery left. He must have switched it on by mistake. “Have you been trying for long?”

  “Three hours,” Juvara said timidly.

  The commissario would have apologized but could not find the words.

  “I wanted to reach you to let you know,” the ispettore said, “that I’ve found out who the Kite was.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Resistance archive in Mantua. He was from Viadana and a member of the Garibaldi Brigade.”

  “What was his real name?”

  “Libero Gorni. Born 1924, died aged twenty.”

  “Where?”

  Juvara consulted his notebook, running an eye down the page. “Captured during a skirmish on the banks of the Po, province of Parma, near Torricella,” he said, reading word for word the note he had copied out exactly as he had found it. “He was shot at Sissa four days later, in spite of an attempt to save him by a prisoner exchange.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “In the original exchange of fire, two partisans fell: Ivan Varoli and Spartaco Ghinelli.”

  “Get back on to the archive and see if these two or any other members of the partisan group had relatives among the combatants. Ask if they are known to be still alive and if so, where they can be found.”

  Seated in front of the commissario’s desk, his great belly wedged between the arms of the chair, the ispettore favoured his superior with a puzzled glance. “You don’t really think,” he stuttered. “It’s more than sixty years ago …”

  Soneri made no reply. He was not sure himself about what he had just told Juvara he wanted done.

  “It’s because of the note. The one that referred to this Kite. It has to mean something.”

  The moment Soneri was left on his own, the telephone rang. He lifted the receiver impatiently and heard the voice of the questore. The attention lavished on him by the television crews had obviously acted on him like amphetamines. His ego had swelled, as was clear from the waves of rounded rhetorical frills, each as neatly finished as an embroidered quilt. There were even grand words of praise for Soneri, more for having left the stage to him alone than for his having had the intuition to conduct an investigation along the banks of the Po in the first place.

  When he put the telephone down Soneri should have been pleased, but instead he was nagged by a sense of unease. No-one was more aware than he that the conclusion was not yet within sight. He lit a cigar and tried to calm himself, but at that moment the strains of “Aida” rang out. He sat indecisively for a moment, the mobile in his hand, until the noise irritated him so much that he decided to press the button.

  “Commissario, I’m ready to collect payment of your debt.”

  “Angela, could we not just spend the evening in town? I’ll take you to dinner.”

  “It’s a long time since you called me by my name. Pity the only places you know are places to eat in. You measure out your life in restaurants.”

  “We could go macrobiotic or vegetarian.”

  “No. I prefer to be afloat.”

  There was no changing her mind. They would only quarrel and he had no appetite for a barrage of wounding remarks. As it was, his mood was upsetting him more than any ulcer.

  “But there’ll be people at the boat club until ten. Can’t we just stop off somewhere for a bite to eat?”

  “No, you know I love running risks.”

  “We’ll go in your car. Mine’s too recognizable.”

  Walking under the arches of the town, along the less-travelled streets so as not to be seen, made him feel like a teenager again. Angela, hugging him close, went on tiptoe to avoid making any noise with her heels.

  “Be ready for criticism,” she warned in a whisper.

  “Haven’t I had enough already?”

  “All my criticisms are good-natured. I might bark a lot, you know, but I don’t bite. I meant from your superiors.”

  “The questore has just been showering me with praise.”

  “Wait until you hear what he has to say when the carabinieri get the headlines in the papers for the anti-trafficking operation. I heard the prosecutor who’s taken charge of the inquiry talking in the corridor before a trial …it looks like a major breakthrough.”

  Soneri cursed himself for having given Aricò so much rope. Angela understood and held him closer. She made him stop and looked him squarely in the face. “Are you sure you’re on the right track?”

  “At this stage it is impossible to be sure.”

  “If you’re talking like that, it means that deep down you are sure,” she replied, giving his jacket lapels a little tug.

  When they were in sight of the embankment, they clambered up the side away from the yard. Below, the club gave off a yellow light from windows through which they could see dark shadows. They climbed back down, keeping to the asphalt path on the far side. They stopped in their tracks when the door of the club opened for a moment and Gianna stretched out an arm to shake a duster, but they then proceeded towards the jetty. This time the ground was frozen hard and the barge was even lower in the water. The gangplank was hanging perilously low.

  They moved from the captain’s berth to the matelot’s quarters, but then Angela wanted to try the wheelhouse. Later they began to feel the cold and got dressed. Soneri glanced at the clock and noticed the little hand almost at one. When he climbed back up to the wheelhouse, he saw three men walk by on the jetty. From his gait, he recognized Barigazzi with Dino, unmistakeable because of his girth, beside him. He could not identify the third man, who was tall, and his head swayed as he walked. Their route took them away from the jetty towards a pathway on either side of which little houses had been built on raised columns.

  “We’re trapped,” Soneri said to Angela, gesturing with his chin in the direction of the moorings and looking at her in gentle reproof.

  “Don’t you dare tell me it wasn’t worthwhile,” she said menacingly. “If you ever solve this case, it will all be down to me,” she added, drawing close to warm herself.

  Soneri tried to control his annoyance at the contact. He could not bear
having anyone too close to him when he was thinking. He was now engrossed in working out what those three could be up to, but his head was clouded by the same mist as the one into which the three had vanished. If Dinon and Barigazzi were the first two, could the third man be Vaeven Fereoli?

  “I’ll have to go and see,” he said with a decisiveness in part due to his discomfort over his proximity to Angela.

  She held him back, clinging to the hem of his duffel coat. “You must take care,” she said, indicating the road with her glance.

  Two outlines slowly emerged some twenty metres from them. The commissario pushed Angela’s head down to hide her, even if in the mist and with no light other than the small lamp a little way off it would not have been easy to make them out through the window. When they passed a few metres from the barge’s cabin, Soneri recognized Dinon and Barigazzi, on their own, walking one beside the other with the nonchalance of fish in a shoal. They strolled slowly by and took the steps leading up to the boat club. The other man must have stopped off in one of the fishermen’s cottages below the embankment.

  “You see, it was worthwhile after all,” Angela said with ironic malice as she stood up.

  Soneri took her in his arms, and that was something that he rarely did.

  10

  JUVARA HAD LEFT him more confused than before. Libero Gorni, known as “the Kite”, had faced a Fascist firing squad at Sissa on 23 November, 1944. In the encounter on the Po floodplain, both Ivan Varoli and Spartaco Ghinelli had died. Ghinelli was a native of San Quirico, one of the family whose house had been burned down and whose women had been raped by the Blackshirts.

  “This much is clear, isn’t it?” Soneri asked the ispettore, who continued to rifle through a pile of papers with scribbled notes in the margins.

  Juvara nodded, but he continued to consult the pages, seizing hold of one of them as though he had been searching for it for days. The commissario listened again to a summary reconstruction of the battle which had been read to him the day before, finally focusing on the description provided by the partisans who had retrieved the bodies: …The two who fell on the battlefield had been so badly disfigured by gunshot and stab wounds that they could be identified by their comrades only after an examination of the objects they had about their person. Varoli possessed false documents ever since he belonged to the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica. The Blackshirts had fallen on their bodies with ferocity, which might be evidence of how much they dreaded the Garibaldi Brigade …

  “Have you checked to see if Ghinelli and Varoli have relatives still alive?”

  “Ghinelli’s brothers and sisters are all dead. One sister committed suicide in the Po, a brother took his life in South America.”

  “What about Varoli? And the relatives of the Kite?”

  “Varoli … Varoli …” Juvara repeated, fumbling among the paper on the desk in front of him. “Here we are. One sister died in Turin seven years ago. Gorni, the Kite that is, had no relatives. He was brought up by the Sisters of the Child Jesus, before being sent to work as a farmhand when he was eleven.”

  Soneri mused on how little life had given to an unloved boy who died in his twentieth year, but this thought gave way to the consideration of the cul de sac into which history had turned. If the killing of the Kite had been in some obscure way a precedent for the death of Tonna, who could have remembered and avenged that event if everyone involved had already gone on to another world? And in that other world, were there already reports circulating about those days? Memory buried by ignorance and by a frivolous, doltish affluence …what had he achieved by his early death?

  He noticed that Juvara was staring at him, but fortunately he did not ask him those insufferable questions: “What’s the matter? What are you thinking about?” When he finished brooding and came back to the facts of the case, he asked, “Were there any grandchildren?”

  “There were three grandchildren, all girls, on the Varoli side, and five, including two males, on the Ghinelli side.”

  “What do they do? Where do they live?” Soneri said impatiently, but he had set Juvara rummaging even more frantically among the documents.

  “Jobs: nothing out of the ordinary. One of the grandsons has been living in Switzerland for forty years, the other died in a car accident twelve years ago.”

  The commissario sensed that these questions and the ispettore’s exhaustive answers were not helping him much. It seemed that the crimes had been committed by someone for whom time had stood still, as it had for the Tonna brothers.

  With his thoughts leaping from one contradiction to the next, he opened the newspaper. The front page was given over entirely to the developments in the inquiry conducted by Aricò and the carabinieri from three provinces: HUMAN TRAFFICKING BEHIND THE TONNA CRIME? one headline wanted to know. He read the statements of the carabinieri commander and some magistrates, each expressing the conviction that they were on the right track. He felt Angela’s grim warnings come true. His own superior would no doubt be vacillating, and Soneri would be left high and dry to defend an inquiry which risked sliding into depths of improbability or into obscure aspects of a history of deaths which no-one any longer remembered.

  Juvara looked up to see Soneri stride so decisively into the corridor that he had no time to stop him; by the time he got himself out of his chair and round the other side of the desk, the commissario had disappeared.

  Shortly afterwards, as he travelled through the mist, Soneri tried to imagine those corpses defaced and deformed by bullet and knife wounds. The Fascists, doubtless motivated by detestation and a thirst for vengeance, must have fallen on them after the battle with appalling ferocity. Perhaps they had been searching for them for some time, to make them pay. Perhaps it was Tonna himself who had been guiding them, he who knew the Po so intimately.

  His mobile rang. Juvara’s voice was, as usual, trembling when he had to make use of a mechanism he knew the commissario detested.

  “I saw you running off, but I didn’t have time to …”

  “The sprint was never your strong point.”

  “Listen, I wanted to tell you something that I forgot earlier on. A small detail, just to fill you in.”

  “What is it?”

  “In the firefight, there were three Fascists killed as well, but one of them, a man from Brescia, they never found his body. The story went that he might have fallen into the Po and that his body got caught up in the sands or was devoured by the fish.”

  Soneri drove on in the mist, deep in thought. The encounter between the two embankments took place in mid-November. In the first days of the same month they had burned down the houses at San Quirico …and that body that was never found …the circulation of documents among the partisans of the G.A.P. … the dead bodies savaged by knives …”A murky business”, the partisan bulletins had defined it some years later as they strove to reconstruct what had happened along the Po, perhaps on a day of mists like today.

  On the way, he saw signs for San Quirico and turned on to the high, narrow road with a ditch on either side which ran above the countryside. He found the old man in the same position as on the previous occasion, as though he had not moved in the interim. He was still staring straight ahead, hands cupped over his walking stick. His wife saw the commissario and opened the door without a word of greeting. When he was close beside him, the old man became aware of his presence and began to explore the space around in search of him, but when Soneri took a seat beside him, he turned to peer once again into the mist. The woman stayed to observe them for a few moments, and then discreetly withdrew.

  “Do you remember the battle of ’44, the one that took place in the floodplain between the embankments?”

  The old man abruptly raised one arm. It was obvious that he remembered it perfectly.

  “Was it ever known with certainty what happened?”

  “The only people who know that were those who were there, but they are all dead.”

  “Did you, any of you, ever speak about i
t in the past?”

  “There was a lot of talk, yes,” replied the man, still gazing in front of him into the mist. “Do you think we wouldn’t have spoken about it? On the feast of All Souls, the Fascists had burned down the houses in San Quirico and the Blackshirts marched up and down the plains of the Po like masters. People accused the partisans of staying in hiding, like rabbits. It was then that Ghinelli and the others decided to make them pay.”

  “An ambush?”

  “Along the embankment, near Torricella. They thought they had the Po to help them retreat, and the brush on the floodplain to hide them. They knew them both intimately.”

  “Was Ghinelli in command?”

  “He was the most decisive one. It was his idea to carry out the ambush. The other commanders were not much in agreement because it might have exposed civilians to reprisals. And anyway, it was very risky.”

  “Why were they defaced in that way?”

  The old man raised both hands as he had done previously, letting go of the walking stick which fell against him. “Nobody knows, nobody was ever able to explain that. Perhaps they had accounts to settle with Ghinelli and the others from earlier times. Hatred added to hatred, but none of the Blackshirts ever admitted to having desecrated the dead, and anyway there was the mist all around, like today. Sometimes that’s your salvation, other times it’s your destruction. Like life itself, you never know if it’s going to protect you or not. It went very badly for poor Gorni, who had got separated from the rest and was making his way back under the embankment on foot. They came out of nowhere.”

  “Is he the one they called ‘the Kite’?”

  “As far as I knew he was called ‘Arrow’, but the partisans around here changed their names all the time.”

  They remained in silence for a few minutes. After the last sentence the old man made a circling gesture with his hands, indicating some kind of confusion, so the commissario said: “So nobody ever found out anything about the Fascist who went missing?”