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

by Varesi, Valerio

  Ghezzi looked out at the enormous sheet of water and felt almost afraid. “Where will he be by now?”

  “Maybe at the mouth of the Enza,” Barigazzi said. “If my boat were in decent shape, I’d go after him. Maybe I’d manage to draw alongside …”

  “I don’t think we’d find anything good,” Barigazzi murmured.

  No-one spoke. The black waters of the swollen river were flowing ever more rapidly, and the sandbank in the middle of the river was all but submerged. It was hard to see far beyond the moorings, but in the liquid darkness the impression was that the great basin, altogether visible in the days of low water, was already overflowing. The water level was just below their line of vision. It was possible to observe the current from above only from the main embankment itself, and the town alongside the river, with a vast mass of water looming threateningly over the houses, gave every appearance of being already inundated.

  Several cars arrived and a dozen or so young men came in to ask what had happened to Tonna. They listened, then made their way back out, letting in a gust of damp air. They would follow the boat from the embankment in their cars, they said they could go faster than the current. By now the barge had made the flood a matter of secondary interest.

  “Yes, I’m here … Are you sure? He hit the railway bridge? A quarter of an hour ago?”

  Silence fell. There was no need for the boy to repeat what he was being told. Everyone instinctively grasped the situation.

  “It’s what I was saying. He hasn’t even got as far as Reggio,” Barigazzi spluttered. “The riverbed widens there and the water is more sluggish.”

  “The way things are going, they must have sounded the alarm all the way downstream to Mantua,” Vernizzi said.

  A couple of car doors slammed shut, and the vehicles set off at speed up the embankment. In the beam of the headlights, the rain looked to be heavier still.

  “If there’s a hole in the hull …” Ghezzi said hesitantly, “Tonna’s done for. He’s food for the pike.”

  “With all the wheat he has in the hold, they’ll be flocking down all the way from Piedmont.”

  “It was only a bump,” Barigazzi said. “It’s a tough old craft. If it goes into a spin, he’s in big trouble. It all depends on the rudder. And on the grip of whoever’s on the tiller.”

  “If it starts spinning, the game’s up. The first bridge he hits side on, he’s going to get jammed, and he’ll be pulled under,” Torelli said.

  “With some bridges, you only need to nudge the prow against them. With all the weight that’s aboard, he’ll bring the columns down on top of him,” the old boatman said.

  “He’s passing in front of the mouth of the Enza,” the radio operator informed them.

  “Let’s hope the extra current doesn’t push him over to the Lombard side,” Barigazzi said, as he peered into the emptiness by the jetty.

  The conversation drifted on, one guess after another, each man in his mind’s eye going over that stretch of water which Tonna would have reached by then. Beneath it all lay one more troubling thought, as insistent as the rain which continued to fall or as the current which dragged everything in its wake. Finally it was Vernizzi who gave voice to a doubt which seemed dictated by a will not his own: “But he set off in such a great rush, and with that crazy manoeuvre …”

  There followed a long silence, broken only by the sound of water dripping from the roof beams, until Gianna said: “Maybe it wasn’t Tonna at the helm.”

  “It’s most certainly not like Tonna to collide with bridges …” Barigazzi said, his voice trailing off.

  No-one drew any conclusions. Everything was so confused. The telephone rang: it was one of the youths who had gone off in a car. “Every town is on the look-out and a lot of people have climbed the embankment to watch the barge careering past,” he whispered into Vernizzi’s ear.

  “You saw it?”

  “Yeah, a short while ago. It seemed out of control, swinging about crazily, sometimes listing to one side, but the current’s keeping it on course. You can see where the paint came off on the side where it hit the bridge.”

  “Is the cabin light still on?”

  “Yes, still on. When the barge comes close to the bank, you can see in, but it’s hard to make anything out. Somebody said they had seen a man at the helm, but I don’t think there’s anyone there.”

  Barigazzi sat calmly, absorbed in his own thoughts, resting his head on his left hand, going over the course of the river as though he could see it from Tonna’s bow. He imagined where it was at that moment, he saw the bridges looming out of the night, dark skeletons afloat on the immensity of the current. The conversation on the radio broadly confirmed his hypotheses.

  “The carabinieri have what? … Closed all the bridges as far as Revere? The only one open is the railway bridge? They’re ready to suspend all shipping?”

  “He won’t knock into anything,” Barigazzi murmured, who seemed to be elsewhere.

  “He’ll crash into the iron arches at Pontelagoscuro,” Vernizzi said. “But in that case it’ll be tomorrow around mid-day before we get to hear about it.”

  Silence fell again in the room. And they became aware of the rain falling even more heavily on the tiles.

  Barigazzi was shaking his head, in the manner of the horses in the Po valley. “He’ll never get near Ferrara. Tonna will avoid the delta in these conditions. He’ll stop before then.”

  Meantime, the telephone had rung again and Gianna was in conversation with the young men who were tracking the barge. “When? … One or more than one?”

  Ghezzi had moved over beside her and seemed on the point of grabbing the telephone from her hand.

  “They say that in the light from the cabin they’ve seen some shadows moving about. Maybe more than one, but it seems they haven’t been able to identify Tonna,” Gianna told the room.

  Barigazzi’s imagination was still fixed on the river, so wide midstream that the banks were out of sight, on the craft tossed about on the surface of the water as carelessly as a leaf, on the unending groan of the hull, on the blind drift of the barge as it was battered from all sides, on the darkness. He imagined crowds of locals standing like sentinels along the banks in the rain, greeting the little light on the river even if it was no more visible than a bicycle lamp slowly passing along the embankment road on a foggy night. He felt the sideways jerk of the barge every time it ran into a tree trunk or into a stretch of swirling waters, and felt too the list it took on for a time before righting itself and straightening in the fast-flowing current.

  He would not be able to see a thing because there was zero visibility. The Luzzara curve is wide and bent like the bondiola sausage. That was the most hazardous point, especially if the barge were indeed in the hands of some novice who had taken over from Tonna. There the current and the deep waters could throw anyone off course. Sluggish on the surface, the water, following the channels in the sands, flows faster below and pushes against the embankment. Without an engine, it would be impossible to avoid running aground, except by making a pre-emptive manoeuvre 300 metres upstream, hugging close to the bank on the Lombard side and holding tight. With anyone lacking the expertise, the barge would crash into the embankment like a stake being driven into the ground.

  “Tell them to go and wait for it at Luzzara,” Barigazzi muttered. “It’ll be there by three in the morning.”

  But he spoke so softly that no-one picked up his words. A gust of wind and rain shook the windows. “The libeccio, from the south-west,” Vernizzi said. “Always a bad sign.”

  The rain was getting heavier still, and now the beams were reverberating.

  “Have you seen it go by?” the radio operator wanted to know. “What? It’s passing right now? Look and see if you can make out anyone in the cabin. No? The light is on, but the cabin is empty? Just a while ago, someone on the embankment told us there were signs of movement inside. Yes, yes. I agree. If Tonna were in charge, it would not be sailing this way. And
would not have touched the railway bridge either. Tonna? Who can tell? Perhaps he’s on board or maybe it’s his grandson who has taken over … What do you mean, have we thought of that? Of course we have, but in this weather who could have seen him run away? … Yes, I know, he’s an old fox, but the whole business still looks funny to me …”

  Everyone in the room at the boat club was listening in, but no-one spoke. It was as though they were listening to a dispatch from a war zone. After glancing at the clock, Barigazzi got up and went out. It was past his time for checking the stakes. From the doorway, he looked back and grimaced. For him everything was clear.

  Ghezzi went over to the window to stare out. It was as though black ink was dropping from the sky. All that could be seen was the leaden water in motion with a cargo of flotsam and jetsam on the surface. Further on stood the poplar wood, a shadowy mass against the horizon, the only relief in a flat countryside.

  “The water’s on the floodplain,” he said. He could not see it and was only guessing.

  “Has been for the last half an hour,” Barigazzi said.

  “We can only hope it flows slowly,” Torelli said.

  “It’s rising constantly, so it’ll be gradual,” Barigazzi assured them. “It’s already knee deep in the poplars. The ponds will be overflowing.”

  Each one of them imagined the water gushing out over the floodplain, like water bubbling over from a pot cooking cotechino at New Year.

  “By now,” Vernizzi said, “it will have drenched the monument to the partisans below the embankment.”

  “It’s just giving it a blessing.”

  The radio croaked back into life. At Casalmaggiore, the river had reached the “alert” level, and the houses on the floodplain were being evacuated by the military. The elderly had been carried off, sometimes forcibly, in the firemen’s dinghies. People who had barricaded themselves on the top floor were putting up some resistance. It was not so unusual for the river to come calling every so often to wet the feet of those who lived along its banks.

  The jeep driven by the carabinieri made its way along the road on top of the embankment and then turned down towards the boat club. The maresciallo came in, his overcoat dripping. “I’ve received the evacuation order for everything in the main embankment zone,” he announced. Including the club, it was clearly understood. No-one said anything, and the maresciallo took the silence as a challenge.

  “Do you think that after seventy years on the Po, I don’t know when it’s time to jump over the embankment?” Barigazzi said at last.

  The maresciallo looked along the row of bottles behind Gianna and realized what kind of people he was dealing with. If the river had not managed to scare them off, what chance had he?

  “Go and see the people who bought the poplar wood. They might need advice from the prefetto. All you’ve got here are experts, or fishermen’s huts.”

  The maresciallo’s frown expressed his annoyance, and he changed tack. He pointed at the radio. “Where is he now?”

  Barigazzi glanced at the clock, then said, “He’ll be near Guastalla. But don’t worry. He’s not going to collide with the bridge, because the current there’ll carry him into the middle of the stream, just right for navigation.”

  “My colleagues will shut it anyway.”

  “They can do what they like. It’s only a matter of hours. Sooner or later you’d have to close it off because of the flooding.”

  The man uttered a curse, but against a different target, the feast of All Souls, when everybody wanted a holiday, leaving him with an empty office. And then against the flood which gave him extra work when there were only two of them left on duty.

  “Every year around All Souls the river swells up,” Barigazzi told him. “It too wants to remember its dead, and goes to pay them a visit in the cemeteries. It caresses the tombstones for a few days, shows the funeral chapels their reflections in the waters it has brought up from the riverbed. It stops off inside the graveyard walls, before settling back, leaving everything clean and sparkling.”

  The maresciallo listened in silence to that unpolished elder, who could turn poetical when he was talking about his own world. He observed for a moment those hard-headed men whose lives had been spent on the banks of the Po and decided it would be a waste of his time talking to them or attempting to lay down the law. They reminded him of the fishermen in his own land, in Sicily. He set off in his jeep.

  The clock above the bar struck midnight and Barigazzi continued travelling in his mind along the route taken by the barge. The current would flow more slowly where the river spreads out into the floodplain. Tractors and lorries had begun to move along the embankment road. There were carts loaded with furniture covered roughly with tarpaulin to protect them from the wind and rain. The leafless poplar trees were blowing about wildly at the wide curve in the embankment, behind the stone-crushing plant, where once the stables for the cart horses had stood.

  “The partisans’ monument will be well and truly underwater by now,” Vernizzi said.

  “Like a sea-wall at high tide.”

  “The time will come when no-one will remember it any more and the river will carry it all away. Then the stone-crusher will crush it as well,” Torelli said bitterly.

  “Tonna’s being carried off by the current right now,” Barigazzi said, as though talking to himself. He reckoned that, with the current as strong as it was, he would be just about at the mouth of the Crostolo.

  Meantime the radio provided an accompaniment to their talk. “It went under the arches at Boretto quite smoothly? … As though Tonna were himself at the helm?”

  “It’s done that so often it could manage by itself,” Ghezzi murmured.

  The telephone rang, and Gianna repeated aloud what she was hearing.

  “There’s not a soul to be seen in the cabin … The light is still on. It’s much weaker now? … The barge has swung round and started listing. It ran into a whirlpool? … And now has righted itself.”

  “A marvel of a hull, that one,” Barigazzi said. “It can hold the current without anyone working the helm.”

  “Once you clear the Becca bridge, you can go to sleep until Porto Tolle,” Vernizzi said.

  Another silence, heads nodding in wonderment. Then Barigazzi said: “I don’t believe Tonna’s piloting that boat.”

  He got to his feet and went out to check the midnight level on the stakes.

  On the road on top of the embankment, there was more traffic than on a Sunday. The carabinieri, blue light flashing, drove up and down several times, escorting lorries and tractors. Inside the misted-up vehicles, there seemed to be mothers holding in their arms babies wrapped in brightly coloured blankets, and men with bags over their shoulders. Voices on the radio were recommending that some kind of surveillance of the empty houses in the villages should be organized.

  “Another eight centimetres,” Barigazzi told them as he came back.

  The radio operator asked for a line and communicated immediately the news that the river was a good three metres above low-water level.

  “Did they say anything about Tonna?” Barigazzi said.

  “He’s still midstream.”

  “If that’s the case, by three he’ll run into the bend at Luzzara. Once he’s passed the bridge at Viadana, there’s no way he can move towards the Mantua bank without rudder and engine.”

  “If he’s dead, it’d be better if he went down with the barge. It’s what he would have wanted,” Gianna said.

  It was the first time anyone had voiced the notion of Tonna perhaps being dead, but the thought had come into each one’s mind.

  “No barge can navigate four bridges on its own,” Ghezzi said, cutting short the discussion.

  Once again it was the radio which broke the silence. The order had been given to pile the newly filled sandbags near the embankments and alongside old coypu burrows.

  Barigazzi once again left the clubhouse, crossed the yard under the driving rain and climbed the embankment. T
he river had risen considerably in a few hours. The sandbank which separated the quay from midstream had been swallowed up, and the boats which were still tied up looked as restless as stallions. The town was afloat in a lake of lights oxidized by the wet weather. A few hours more and the fish would be swimming higher than the magpie nests. An immense pressure was building up against the embankment, stubbornly searching for some cavity. Barigazzi was making his way back to the club through sheets of driving rain, but first went back down to take another look at the stakes. The midnight marks were already deep underwater. The light from the club, battered by the driving rain, seemed like wisps of smoke or steam in the yard.

  The old man shook himself in the doorway before going in, relishing the warmth within. The radio was talking about Tonna. “They’ve lost sight of it … The light is out? … You think it’s the battery? … Ah! It flickered out … And now there is nothing to be seen? … The carabinieri have switched on floodlights near the Guastalla bridge. At other spots they’ve turned the headlights of their jeeps on to the river?”

  “The final curtain,” Vernizzi said.

  “Now they’ll turn their attention to the flooding.”

  The telephone rang again.

  “Yes, yes, we know that the light has gone out,” Gianna said. “You’re coming back? Barigazzi,” she said, looking over at him, “Barigazzi says it’ll run aground at the Luzzara bend … He says about three o’clock.”

  When she had hung up, she explained: “They’re going to the Guastalla bridge to watch it pass under the floodlights, then they’ll wait for it at Luzzara.”

  Barigazzi shrugged. “Now that the light’s gone off, they’ll leave him to his fate.”

  The radio repeated the news several times with maddening insistence. “Tonna’s barge is making its way downstream. It’s holding to the middle, but it seems the hand on the tiller is not exactly up to it … Yes, yes, I am telling you, the engine’s not running.”