River of Shadows cs-1

by Valerio Varesi

  “There’s one missing here at the port,” the commissario said.

  The others made no reply. Ghezzi pretended to be adjusting the radio, and Barigazzi got up to look across the river. He turned to face them and in an effort to lower the tension which had suddenly built up, he announced: “If it was up to me, I’d go at full speed. Unless they’ve already decided to leave the magano at some other port.”

  “Is there any way of checking?” Soneri asked Ghezzi.

  Ghezzi picked up the microphone, pressed a few buttons and sent out a request for information. A few moments later, the replies began to come in. It appeared the boat had not put in at any of the ports.

  “Would you keep on sailing in freezing weather like this?” Soneri said.

  The old boatman shrugged. “They’ve still got a bit of time. There’s one mooring after another and they know the river well.”

  Soneri turned to listen to the news on the radio. According to the bulletins, the temperature was almost ten degrees below zero everywhere.

  “Like a refrigerator,” Ghezzi muttered.

  At Bocca d’Enzo, they had caught a silure weighing ninety kilos, and the lucky angler was now recounting the various stages involved as though he were the guest on a real radio programme.

  “He’ll sell it to the Chinese; they’re keener on silure than on ordinary fish like chub,” Soneri heard Barigazzi say as he left the club. The cold had not lifted. If the magano was to make it back, it would have to be that evening. He would be there waiting for them. To keep the cold at bay, he had equipped himself with supplies of parmesan shavings from Il Sordo.

  Out in the yard, he was seized by an unfamiliar longing for company. He felt that the whole business was now coming into the final straight, like the freeze taking hold of the river bit by bit. At that very moment, the strains of “Aida” began to ring out and he saw it was Angela.

  “Ah, so you haven’t been sucked under by a whirlpool,” she said.

  “I’ll never forgive myself for having disappointed you,” Soneri said, feeling overwhelmed by loneliness.

  “There are so many things for which you need forgiveness, but I won’t go into them now because they’re nearly all un-pardonable.”

  “I know. But it makes sense to do things on a grand scale, especially with women. That way they feel sorry for you.”

  “Don’t get carried away with yourself, and don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what day it is today.”

  Soneri had indeed forgotten their anniversary. One morning many years previously, on a day every bit as cold as today with the same frost clinging to the hedgerows, Angela had appeared quite suddenly, framed by hawthorn. He had been taken by her no-nonsense but beguiling manner, which in some odd way resembled the aroma of his cigar. It had all started there…

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but these inquiries…”

  He heard a sigh. “What have the inquiries got to do with it? It’s just that you and I are one year older, that’s all there is to it.”

  Before he had the chance to reply, he heard the telephone cut out. Angela’s tone of pain and hopelessness lingered in his ears and he called her back, but the telephone was left to ring out and he imagined her throwing herself on to the bed, in tears. He knew she was capable of that. Her tough shell disguised a vulnerable and tender heart.

  With his mind occupied by this distraction, Soneri found he had walked the length of the elevated road, beyond the descent that would have taken him into the town. He only realized how far he had gone when he drew abreast of the monument to the partisans.

  The frost had made the floodplain rock hard underfoot and the undergrowth bristling and sharp-edged. He made his way down the embankment and when he was in front of the small monument, he noticed that someone had tied a bouquet of roses around it. The blooms were already fading in the cold, but that spot was assuming some indecipherable significance. Three partisans and much later one old Fascist had perished there, perhaps the Fascist who had been in command at the battle and was responsible for the slaughter. The story had taken a strange turn, one not easy to comprehend.

  He climbed back up to the road, wondering who the roses were for. Probably for the partisans, but who could have put them there? There would have been roses on the monument on April 25, for as long as there was some old person determined not to forget.

  The commissario hurried into Il Sordo and ate his fill of spalla cotta, salame and culatello. He was going to need a lot of energy that night. He called Angela again, but to no avail. Back on the street, the wind cut through him as it went whistling through the colonnades. He crossed the road, leaving footprints on the frosty surface, came on to the piazza and then turned into the back lanes, passing in front of Melegari’s house, where the shutters were still open. When he was in sight of the Italia, a form emerged from the shadows and barred his way.

  “How on earth did you manage to find me?”

  “All anyone has to do is hang about near an osteria and sooner or later you’ll turn up,” Angela said.

  The commissario looked at her with great delight. She was looking very pretty and he was glad to see her, but this thought was followed by the realization that that night he had a great deal of work to do.

  “I can’t let up this evening,” he said, looking at her in the hope of seeing some sign of understanding.

  “What makes you think I would have anything to do with men that want to let up?” she said, coming up close to him.

  A few moments later, Soneri found himself leading her along the road in the darkness which had fallen suddenly over the river. They skirted the yard before turning on to the pathway that led to the cottages. When they came to Vaeven’s, he went ahead, taking great care to leave no footprints, and then ushered her up the staircase to the balcony. When they got to the doorway, he told her to wait while he made his way round the back and went in as he had done on the previous occasion. He opened the door for her and invited her in with a little bow: “Delighted to welcome you.”

  Angela loved surprises of this sort, and wanted to know all about the house, but halfway through his account, she pushed him into the bedroom which had the heater. Being in the cottage would be more pleasant than lying in wait on the grass slopes of the embankment, and from there the moorings were in clear view. At around eleven o’clock, the commissario began to show signs of impatience as it became clearer that the magano could have put in somewhere else to avoid being caught by the ice, but half an hour later he noticed a light coming steadily upstream in the direction of the riverbank. When it was no more than about ten metres from the quay, it slowed right down. Seconds later, he was aware of a thud, like a bag falling. Soneri kept his eyes on the hawsers curving in the air as they were tossed ashore and on the gangplank being set up between the deck and the landing stage.

  A man came ashore and started hauling in the ends of the cables and wrapping them round the bollards. From his build, it had to be Vaeven, as was confirmed for the commissario when he saw the gangplank sag under the weight of Melegari. The two seemed to exchange a few words before setting off along the pathway. Since they were on their own, Soneri wondered where the other man was. He had prepared his plan with Angela. They would hide in the room with the plants and when the mysterious friend of Dinon and Vaeven was safely in bed and under the covers, they would come rapidly into his room and take him by surprise. However, the two men did not stop at the cottage but walked straight on towards the yard, bypassing the embankment and making their way towards the houses. They gave every impression of coming home from an ordinary trip, as relaxed as any two fishermen after a day on the river.

  During the night, a light wind got up and for a few hours cleared the clouds from the sky, allowing some stars to appear, but with the dawn everything closed in again and the customary grey made its return. Soneri felt like a mole in the darkness. He left the cottage very early to accompany Angela to her car, but got back in time to see Melegari and his companion making their way d
own to the jetty. The ice had already taken over a strip of water stretching two metres out from the bank and almost surrounding the hull of the vessel. He heard one of the men cursing, then they both set to work to get the winch and crane into action.

  The boat freed itself from the ice floe, and a ripping sound like an organ being torn from flesh could be heard as the craft emerged, dripping. Sheets of ice were clinging to the hull, whose underwater sections appeared very dark, very wide and almost flat. This was not a boat which did much fishing. Once the boat was on the land, Melegari slowly climbed the ladder he had placed against its side and walked along the short deck, closing down the hatches which led below. He stretched out a green tarpaulin which he tied down with a rope, leaving only the cabin exposed. From below, Vaeven did the rest.

  Soneri had hoped that the ice might have held up the magano and made everything easier, but in fact it had only complicated things. Once again he had to draw on all his resources of patience and keep alert for every tiny signal. These were the virtues of fishermen and of those who lived on the river.

  He decided to call Arico for further information on the recorded movements of the boat.

  “I’ve given up on sending telexes,” the maresciallo told him. “In this weather, all sailings are suspended. Let’s hope it doesn’t last too long.” And in this wish the commissario detected more exasperation with the cold than enthusiasm for the investigation.

  “Did they report the final movements of the magano before the freeze set in?” he said.

  “Yes, but in the most random order, with no exact chronology,” Arico replied, in an apologetic tone.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Viadana, Pomponesco, Polesine, Casalmaggiore, Sacca and then Stagno,” he read out. “As for the dates, the one thing certain is that the boat made one last stop at Stagno before being dragged ashore here at Torricella.”

  “When did it put in at Stagno?”

  “Yesterday at nightfall, around six.”

  Soneri thought of the moorings exposed to the east wind and so perhaps at that time about to freeze over, but then he remembered Barigazzi explaining how the tributaries flowed into the stream, delaying the formation of the ice. At Stagno the Taro flowed into the Po. The place was redolent of some symbolism which, without his being able to pin it down precisely, came dimly to the commissario’s mind. He remembered Stagno as being the site of great battles between man and water, of trench warfare fought with sandbags to bar the way to a slime-covered horde which had slipped through breaches in the embankments, of resistance along the unsupported line on the plain, of battles in streets and ditches, of house-to-house fighting. He even recalled a photograph published many years previously in a local paper depicting a group of bewhiskered gentlemen, the habitues of bars and sophisticated topers of the local wines, who demonstrated their spirit of sacrifice by stating that in order to restrain the waters of the Po they would drink every last drop. The headline above the photograph read: THE HEROES OF STAGNO.

  He had a mental image of the map showing the course of the river and the towns along its banks. Stagno faced Torricella del Pizzo, and further down the valley Torricella Parmense was more or less opposite Gussola, while Sacca looked out slightly to the east of Casalmaggiore. Between Gussola and Casalmaggiore stood San Quirico — where there were no moorings — but the magano could have drawn into the bank at almost any point along the river. What proof did he have that things had actually gone that way? He reflected for a few moments, smoking the remains of a cigar he had found chewed and abandoned in a pocket of his duffel coat, and concluded that the only reason for thinking that something had occurred at San Quirico was the direction from which the magano had arrived the previous evening before it was winched ashore. If the last leg was Stagno, the boat would have taken advantage of the current from the west. In fact, it had come in the opposite direction, against the current. He had clearly heard the engine step up a gear turning into the stream and cutting diagonally across the river. It was evidently necessary to add one more stop to the records kept on board.

  He switched off his mobile and walked down to the moorings. Without giving a greeting or speaking a word, he stood watching the two men working around the boat which was now resting on a wooden frame holding it about a foot above ground level. Both parties, the commissario and the two boatmen, kept their peace, the latter continuing to work, stepping in front of him without so much as turning in his direction. It seemed as though they were engaged in a competition to see whose nerves would fray first. Soneri calmly smoked, challenging even the freeze which seemed to be crawling along the river. The others kept themselves warm by working on the hull, pulling away lumps of ice.

  “Made it just in time?” the commissario finally said.

  The pair turned slowly, as though they had just registered a familiar voice behind them.

  “It can’t be any fun having to stay out on the open river when the banks are frozen.”

  Vaeven shrugged, conveying that the very idea was senseless. Melegari, however, said: “We’re not that stupid.”

  “And yet, when you travel about a lot…maybe you don’t always realize that in a few hours…you yourselves, for instance, when you got back, a layer of ice a finger thick was already covering the two metres just out from the jetty.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “It’s worse here than elsewhere. There’s more air,” Melegari said.

  “Certainly,” Soneri said, “and when you’re away for days on end, it’s difficult to keep abreast of what is going on. The Po is a long river.”

  Dinon stopped his scraping and drew himself up to his full height to appear even more imposing. He managed, in spite of the obvious provocations, to appear unruffled, as did the commissario, who seemed only to be relishing his cigar as if what happened on the river was no concern of his.

  “I’ve already told you we don’t appreciate this line of questioning from policemen,” Melegari replied. “It’s not going to get to us. Tell us what it is you want to know and let’s get it over with.”

  Soneri looked him up and down, openly defying him and then, after pausing a few more seconds to let the other man see how unaffected he was by Melegari’s aggression, he said: “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “You know perfectly well. Stop playing the fool.”

  The commissario’s tone was so peremptory that Melegari was momentarily caught off balance.

  “We wouldn’t like you to entertain any half-baked ideas about us,” he said finally, lowering the tone of his voice in a way that was vaguely menacing. “You know that we’re activists, don’t you? Well then, you must also be aware that comrades come from all over Italy to visit, to get an understanding of our situation and to talk politics. Is there anything illegal in us giving them hospitality and taking them out for a cruise on the Po?”

  “There could be if all this takes place in a town where an old Fascist officer, who was also passionate about the river and about navigating it, happens to have been murdered. But that’s not certain,” Soneri said, leaving his words hanging in the air.

  “You people in the police,” Dinon came back at him with contempt in his voice. “You always suspect us. The moment there’s any mention of Reds, you have a rush of blood to the head.”

  The commissario waved them both away, but then, after a longer pause, said: “One way or the other, I’m of the opinion that politics are involved with this business. From a time when politics could still cause a rush of blood to the head.”

  He turned away without saying good-bye, and walked towards the boat club. Halfway along the path, he rummaged in his pockets to find a light. But instead of the matches, he came out with a dirty box, the container for the hypertension pills he had found in the drawer. He had had no idea what to do with such a slender clue, but inside the box there was a receipt issued twenty days previously by a chemist in Casalmaggiore.

  A mere shadow of a clue, but it was t
he best he had.

  The chemist was an elderly man, with a large handlebar moustache and two tufts of hair above his ears. The shop was narrow and well laid out, with coloured boxes set out on the shelves in such a way as to look like a mosaic.

  The man examined the box, turning it over several times before peering at the receipt. “It’s a very common product,” he said, as his daughter, a woman in her thirties, came over to have a look.

  “I would imagine you know your usual clients. The ones with high blood pressure, I mean. Apart from them, is there anyone that stands out? A tubby, elderly man with a shuffling walk, a man who drags his feet?” the commissario said, trying to be helpful.

  “It could be the man who came in without a prescription,” the daughter remembered.

  The chemist concentrated for a moment, then realization dawned. Soneri knew that chemists have good memories; with all those drugs with difficult names to keep them in training.

  “An oldish man, yes,” he said, half shutting his eyes as though to focus. “With a way of dragging his feet. He was after some product which is no longer on sale, and he didn’t have a prescription.”

  “And you gave him this?” Soneri said, holding up the empty box.

  The chemist shook his head. “We cannot sell drugs like that without a doctor’s prescription.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “He went off and came back that same afternoon with a prescription from Professor Gandolfi, who used to be a surgeon. He lives round the back,” he said, indicating with his thumb some area beyond his shoulder. “He took four boxes so as not to run out.”

  “Was there anyone with him?”

  “No, he was on his own.”

  “Did he have a foreign accent?”

  “Anything but! He spoke in a thick dialect.”

  Soneri made for the door, but when he had his hand on the handle, another question occurred to him.