River of Shadows cs-1

by Valerio Varesi

  “If they get the water pumps started up to drain the water from the houses, it should take less than a week, but it’ll be springtime before they’re really dry. Otherwise, we’d need about a month of freezing weather,” Barigazzi said, continuing to look out over the slow-moving current.

  “You’ve already cleaned up your club, I see.”

  “Almost. The walls are still soaking and we’ll have to wait for the air to do its work for us. Unfortunately,” he said, pointing into the distance towards the bank on the Lombard side, “the fumara, the mist, is drawing in.”

  The sky over the river appeared swollen and the air heavy. Barigazzi, with one hand still on the handle of the shovel, seemed to be waiting for the mist to arrive, an event which had occurred thousands of times, but which had not lost its power to surprise.

  “I’d like to know where it’s born,” Soneri said.

  “Everywhere and nowhere, like those of us who move in the heart of it.”

  The faint autumn sun clouded over, making it possible to stare at it directly. The river blended with the sky, as does the winter snow on the hills, and it was at that moment that a long, dark shape made its appearance, forcing its way upstream and beginning the slow manoeuvre of mooring. As it passed in front of them, a solid stretch of bank concealed its outlines. The engine spluttered quietly with a noise similar to cooking polenta.

  “He’s mooring against the current,” Barigazzi told him, answering a quizzical gesture the commissario had made with his chin. “He’ll go a bit further up and then manoeuvre sideways into the port.”

  After a few minutes, with the movements of some lazy, languid fish, Tonna’s barge began slowly to turn, showing its side. Finally it made its approach crabwise until the hull came to rest against the cushion of old tyres hanging from the coping stones. Two men emerged from the cabin, threw the hawsers on to the land, disembarked and made them fast to the iron rings.

  “The final journey,” Soneri suggested.

  Barigazzi’s glance was eloquent, but he said nothing.

  “Who are they?” asked the commissario, pointing to the boatmen.

  “People from Luzzara,” Barigazzi said evasively. “And they know their business. A perfect bit of manoeuvring. Tonna himself couldn’t have done better.”

  It began to get dark, and Gianna appeared at the door of the club.

  “I’ll see you at the bar, in Il Sordo,” Soneri said as he turned to go, seeming to confirm a previously made appointment. Barigazzi did not move or utter a word, but he raised his free hand in assent.

  Smoking his cigar, the commissario passed along the colonnades in the town. The offices of the carabinieri were wrapped in mist, but on the first floor he saw a light burning at the maresciallo’s window. The guard at the door showed him into the two duty rooms, heavy with the smell of reheated minestrone. Arico was chilled to the bone and cursed the mist and the Po, while every so often the radio transmitted some communications from the radio car.

  “They’ve brought the barge into the port,” the commissario said.

  “So that’s that, then. Thank God!”

  Soneri would have liked to tell him that it was his duty to investigate the disappearance of Anteo, but he held himself back because Arico’s lack of interest afforded him more liberty of movement.

  “Any news?”

  “None,” the maresciallo said in his nasal voice. “I’m afraid he’s come to a bad end.”

  “I never believed he’d simply fled.”

  Arico sighed deeply. “Neither did I.”

  “Do you have any idea what Tonna carried in his various cruises up and down the river?”

  Arico was plainly taken aback. “Grain and various other assorted goods. The barge was not equipped for containers.”

  “That was not all.”

  “And what else, then?”

  “Have you ever heard word of illegal immigrants being landed along the river?”

  “Not around here. Near Cremona and Piacenza perhaps.”

  “Did you ever check up on Tonna?”

  “What was there to check up on? An old man with a barge that had seen better days?” the maresciallo protested. He had taken Soneri’s questions as a criticism. “Do you really think he put in here with a crowd of people in the hold? He would have disembarked them further down, wouldn’t he? Certainly not at a landing stage.”

  “I’m only asking you to make inquiries with your colleagues in the stations along the Po. You do understand, Arico,” Soneri said, drawing close to the other as though in complicity, “this is a nasty business, and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the motive may be found here…seeing as we’re both convinced he didn’t run off.”

  The maresciallo, reassured, was still nodding his head as the commissario left his office. A few seconds later, as he was crossing the mist-covered town, he went over that hypothesis in his mind and felt it crumble away bit by bit. He didn’t know why, but something about it did not convince him. Principally, he didn’t understand what Decimo could have had to do with the whole business.

  The niece was behind the bar as usual. She had the familiar, slightly down-at-heel look of middle-aged women who have let themselves go. Her clinging skirt drew attention to her broad, flabby, matronly hips, while her hair would have required bleaching if it was ever again to be viewed as blonde. She came over to the commissario, placing her folded arms on the bar as though she were leaning out of a window. The gesture caused her to push up her breasts, making them bulge out of her low-cut blouse. Soneri could not avoid looking at her. In spite of everything, she gave the impression of a woman in the rude health of a mare.

  “I would like to talk to you about that phone call.”

  She stared at him vacuously.

  “I mean the one from the guy who was looking for your uncle, Barbisin.”

  Something seemed to light up in her face: a faint, vague light. “I don’t know anything apart from what I’ve already told you.”

  “When he came off the boat, did he just bring you his dirty clothes to wash or did he spend time in the town?”

  “Recently he would be here for a couple of hours.”

  “Would he drop in to the bar to see you?”

  “No, absolutely not. He never set foot in here. He would come to my house.”

  “And then?”

  “He would always arrive very early in the morning. No problem for me, I get up early to open the bar. We would have breakfast together, then he would go off for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, I don’t know… Towards the oratory of San Matteo along the embankment.”

  “Why there?”

  “Old people are generally fond of the places they used to go to when they were young. Our family contributed to the restoration of the oratory and once, when there were more people here than there are now, they used to say mass for this quarter of the town.”

  “Was the oratory the only place he went?”

  “Sometimes he would visit Don Firmino in the parish house.”

  “Was he very religious?”

  “He became so as he grew older. I couldn’t tell you why,” the woman said as though this fact was somehow inconvenient.

  “Did you notice anything else about this change? I mean, something he said, some change in his behaviour that might have explained the reasons, the motives behind it?”

  As he put the question, he saw Claretta looking at him with a kind of irritated bewilderment. He found himself staring into an obtuse face, and there seemed no way of making any headway with her. They stood saying nothing, looking at each other for a while, until some young people who had arrived in a large, black B.M.W. came into the bar.

  Even later, as he walked under the colonnade in the direction of the parish house, the commissario continued to see in his mind’s eye that obtuse expression. It was the disorientation of a person used to thinking only in material terms, who quite suddenly finds herself obliged to deal with an abstra
ction, with something which has no weight, no shape, and no price.

  As he stood face to face with Don Firmino, he would have liked to explain in detail what was on his mind, but he remembered he was a police officer. The priest, on the other hand, had the combative air of someone brought up in the days when the Reds would do anything to make his life difficult. He was a chubby man, but his hands betrayed someone more accustomed to handling a spade than an aspersorium.

  “I’m very worried about Anteo,” he said. “Disappearing in the Po valley is simply impossible. Only the river can keep you hidden, but it nearly always gives back what it has taken.”

  “So there’s nothing for it but to wait?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Don Firmino said quickly. “I’m going on intuition.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s all I can do too,” Soneri said. “I came to you hoping that you could help me to understand.”

  “I don’t know if I can help you in any way.”

  “Lately, Anteo came to see you quite often, is that not so?”

  The priest drew himself upright, assuming a solemn pose, but all he said was, “Yes.”

  “The impression I am getting is not of a particularly devout man. What was it that encouraged him to come back to the Church?”

  “There’s always a moment when we become aware that it’s time to draw a line under things, to make your final reckoning. It’s my belief that that moment had arrived even for Anteo. He came to see me the first time in May. I was surprised, but I felt the joy that only a priest can feel when he sees someone return to the Church.”

  “Did he feel death was near?”

  “It would be only natural if he felt that way. He was about eighty. But that doesn’t matter. Have you any idea how many people die without having faced the need for repentance?”

  “Did he repent the life he had led?”

  “That, among other things. Anyone who has been through a war inevitably will carry on his shoulders a weight which sooner or later he will look to shed. And when your strength begins to diminish… No-one emerged unscathed from the times he had had to live through…”

  “Tonna was a Fascist, an activist, a Blackshirt…”

  Don Firmino sighed deeply. “Don’t delude yourself that the other side…”

  “But he’s the one who has disappeared.”

  “I understand your curiosity, but what does the past have to do with it? More than fifty years have gone by.”

  “As I told you, I’m working only on suppositions. There’s a lot to be taken into account.”

  “He did have some sense of remorse, that is true,” the priest said hesitantly, as though that sentence had been dragged from somewhere deep inside him.

  “What for?”

  Don Firmino gave another sigh before looking at a point halfway up the wall where a crucifix was hanging. “For having been a member of a corps notorious for its atrocities. Once he spoke to me about burning down a house, but I don’t know what he was referring to. Maybe it was an act of reprisal, or perhaps a punitive expedition. There were many partisans in these parts.”

  Soneri thought of the many fires he had seen in his years with the police force. The crackle of the flames, the floors collapsing suddenly after being weakened by the heat and the windows exploding like eyes pulled out of their sockets. A burning house is an insult to memory. “Do you remember where the house was?”

  Don Firmino raised his eyebrows. “No, he never told me.”

  “Is that the only grave matter he ever spoke to you about?”

  “In general, he felt guilty for the outrages which had been committed around here by the Blackshirts.”

  They sat facing each other in silence in the low-beamed room where the parish priest received the faithful on Saturday afternoons. At a certain point, Don Firmino removed his biretta to reveal a head almost totally bald and as pale as the underside of a snake. For some seconds his few remaining hairs seemed to move about in agitation. After smoothing them with one hand, the priest threw his hat into a corner of the sofa.

  “Was he preparing for death?” the commissario insisted.

  Don Firmino spread out his arms: “There are many old people here, but none of them behaved like him. Those who came to church when they were young have continued to come, but those who never set foot across its threshold have not changed.”

  “Do you think someone was pursuing him for certain things which had happened in the past?”

  Once again the priest revealed himself incapable of replying. “I do understand your curiosity, but it is different from mine. What I was looking for was something inner, while you are looking for something external.”

  “Sometimes it’s necessary to look inside to understand what is going on outside.”

  “I can tell you that Anteo was very troubled, but he had found the path to peace. In the last few weeks he had seemed to me much more serene than usual. He told me he would give up sailing and that the barge would become his home once he had restored it. He liked the idea of a house-boat, like the ones he had seen in Amsterdam. It also seemed to him a good compromise. He would give up spending whole nights at the tiller, but he would not abandon the water and his barge.”

  “Did he ever speak to you about Maria?”

  “He was a widower and he tried to make a new life for himself. However, neither he nor she were really the marrying kind. Both of them preferred to go their own way, like cats.”

  “Did he ever refer to a telephone call? Somebody who was searching for him, using the nickname he had had in his Fascist days?”

  “Yes, he did mention that to me.”

  “Was he agitated about this?”

  “No, he had attained a state of serenity. He felt that his life was drawing to a close. Once he even confessed to me that he was at an age when it was possible to die without recriminations.”

  “But did you get the impression that he was treating the telephone call as a threat?”

  “No,” the priest said. “In my opinion, he knew exactly who was looking for him. He might even have thought that the person wanted to harm him, but he was ready for anything. He seemed uninterested in any kind of precaution because he had abandoned himself completely to the will of God.”

  An elderly woman appeared at the door behind the priest and observed the commissario with a certain distrust, turning her face slightly away from him. Soneri supposed that, apart from being displeased with unannounced visits, she did not care for the smell of cigar smoke.

  “It’s time for the catechism class,” Don Firmino murmured wearily.

  The commissario bade him farewell and took his leave.

  He chose a roundabout route. He walked towards the embankment through an area some distance from the houses with their tidy gardens, lined up one alongside the other like a chessboard. An icy breeze accompanied the mist, pushing it upstream. Soneri turned onto a track which led to the road alongside the dyke. The river was entirely shrouded by a blanket of greyness which took on even darker colours among the poplar trees which stood in water up to the level of their branches.

  He lit a cigar, and as he began to walk back towards the town his thoughts turned to Anteo as he had been described by Don Firmino: serene and at peace after a life on the run. Who could say if the transport of illegal immigrants had been intended to finance the rebuilding of his barge, to make it into a home where he could settle? Not even the telephone call had troubled him — at least in the priest’s opinion — and yet it appeared to be the only unforeseen element in an old age filled with guilt which he was striving to expiate on the benches of the church, head bowed, in sight of a statue of San Giovanni encircled by lighted candles, or in meetings with Don Firmino for confessions face-to-face or for conversations of half an hour, an hour, or more. He could not imagine Tonna talking very much. Perhaps it was the priest who took the lead.

  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.”