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

by Varesi, Valerio

  “Will the port freeze over as well?” Soneri asked him.

  “I’m afraid so, but the boats are all ashore.”

  “Apart from the magano belonging to Dinon and Vaeven.”

  Ghezzi said only, “I suppose so,” immediately dropping the subject as though they had trespassed on forbidden ground.

  “What would happen to a craft like that if it were trapped in the ice?”

  “It’s pretty robust, but not sufficiently so to break through thick ice.”

  “So it would have to put in somewhere.”

  “They’ll all have to put in if it goes on like this. But more than anything else, they’ll be laid up afterwards.”

  “After what?”

  “When the temperature goes back up. The river will become impassable, a mass of ice floes that can cut like blades. It’ll take days for the last of them to get to the mouth of the river.”

  It occurred to the commissario that if the magano was going to become unusable, Melegari would already have worked out some safe haven. Being a man of the river, he was bound to be aware of the consequences of the freeze. There was only one master in the whole business, and that was the river itself. It had concealed Tonna, had managed the drift of the barge and now, by withdrawing its freezing waters, it was upsetting long-established customs along its length and breadth. The men who inhabited the riverbanks were compelled to adapt to its whims as to a sovereign, so now the magano must be in the act of surrendering and retreating to dry land.

  “The ice will be here by nightfall. The moorings at Stagno and Torricella on the right bank are exposed to the north-east,” Ghezzi advised anyone who would listen.

  Barigazzi came in with a worried expression. “Explain to him that I don’t have the data. Someone pulled up my stake,” he said, pointing to the radio and at some unspecified interlocutor. “All these folk tramping up and down the riverbanks …” he added, uttering an oath as he hung his overcoat on a hook.

  “If the river freezes over, they’ll be walking on the waters as well,” Soneri said.

  “That won’t happen. I’ve seen it covered only twice in my life, and you need a bitter cold like this every day for a fortnight.”

  The radio broke in with its update on the freeze. It seemed that ice was forming all along the Emilia side, where the shore was more exposed to the winds from the north-east.

  “A wicked beast,” Barigazzi said. “It starts off on the still water and then advances slowly on all fronts. Gradually it’ll sink its grip into the riverbed. They’ll need to move if they’re to get all the boats on to dry land. Wood and ice don’t go well together.”

  “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.
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br />   “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 down 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 Aricò 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,” Aricò 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 habitués 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 e
ach 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.”