“Would you feel threatened by a note like this?” Angela wondered aloud.
He had no idea how to reply. The two phrases belonged to a code he could not break, but the reference to the anniversary was unequivocal.
“The Tonna brothers were the object of virulent hatred by many people.”
“Because—” But she could not finish the sentence before he interrupted her.
“Yes, they were Fascists. The boatman in particular must have been involved in some really nasty business down the valley. But these are old stories …”
“Well, all these things can hardly be considered faults nowadays, seeing that ‘that lot’ are back in power.”
“Memory is not completely dead. Along the Po some species survive that are long extinct everywhere else,” Soneri said with bitter irony.
After seeing Angela out, he thought again of the river and the flood. Perhaps the water had now gone down far enough to reveal the rims of the embankments over the floodplain. The case still seemed to him most amenable to solution if it were approached from the riverbanks, always provided that the killing of Decimo and the disappearance of Anteo were linked. But might they not be? He could not fathom Decimo. It seemed that his life had been enclosed in an impenetrable shell. None of his neighbours had had any relationship with him beyond casual greetings. No-one ever stopped to exchange two words with him at a street corner. He did not drop into bars. Decimo’s day consisted of getting up early in the morning, leaving the house and making his way to the hospital where he would spend the whole day talking to patients, moving from one ward to another. He was given lunch and dinner by the orderlies, who were so used to seeing him around that they regarded him as a relative or a carer. Every evening he went home where he shut himself away in his gloomy apartment. That was his life, year after year, ever since he had returned from abroad. It might be that in this way he had sought to conceal his very existence. In the hospital, where people think only of present illness and future uncertainty, he had found himself so much at ease that he had come to consider it his real home. He had been a man on the run long before the delivery of that note which had seemed to him like a death sentence. Or perhaps he was fleeing only from that message? The oddest thing was that it had come to him at a point when life would soon in any case be presenting him with the final reckoning.
In the police station, Juvara looked long and hard at the sheet of lined paper. “San Pellegrino section …sounds like a graveyard. Considering how he ended up, and the various threats …”
Soneri had had the same impression. But which graveyard? The mystery surrounding the brothers seemed as inscrutable as ever. Hardened by years on the run, they gave the impression of having raised a drawbridge on the outside world, one sailing the Po in solitude, the other choosing to live among aged, suffering humanity.
The telephone rang. “Commissario, it’s Maresciallo Aricò. He wants a word with you,” Juvara said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
Soneri nodded, pointing to his own telephone.
“Commissario, when will the forensic squad be down to examine the barge? I can’t keep a patrol tied up day and night.”
“Aren’t your colleagues in Luzzara attending to it?”
“Now that the water is dropping, they’ve palmed it off on to me. There’s been a robbery at Luzzara and they’ve got their hands full.”
“Be patient for a couple of hours,” Soneri said. “Any news?”
“Your good friends the communists have moved back into the boat club to clean up their flooded premises.”
“They’re not my friends,” he said, annoyed at the maresciallo’s laboured irony. “And I don’t care if they are communists.”
“A bunch of hotheads. It’s only age that has calmed them down a bit, but they’re as pig-headed as ever.”
“They’re all the same along the Po valley, otherwise the river would have carried them away like sand.”
When he hung up, he felt a sense of relief. Aricò had given him the perfect excuse for going back to the places and people who most aroused his curiosity. He felt like a fisherman dozing on a boat yawing in the slow current, waiting for a tug on the line to shake him from his torpor, make him swing into action.
“I’m taking you out today, to Luzzara. We’ll have a look at the barge,” he told Nanetti.
“Just you and me on a boat,” Nanetti said. “Like a honeymoon.”
“And the carabinieri on the walkway to protect our intimacy.”
“If it’s all the same with you, I’ll send along two of my men. I’m not keen on going to a place which is even wetter than this city.”
“No, I want you and nobody else.”
He heard Nanetti groan. His joints would play up for a week.
Half an hour later, Soneri presented himself to the officer standing guard on the barge. As he came through the town, he had noticed that the water level had dropped and even that Tonna’s boat seemed to have sunk down behind the main embankment. The gangplank sloped steeply now towards the deck, though the sides of the floodplain had not yet emerged from the muddy waters. Inside, he found the light unchanged and thought to himself that the seasons, the sun and the mists, would remain forever excluded from this cabin and would never make any impact on the heavy atmosphere of gloomy solitude. His attention was once again drawn to the little wooden chest of drawers where Tonna kept his documents. He looked again at the dates of the sailings and at the cargoes of goods apparently transported up and down the river. The hold should have been packed with grain for the mills at Polesella, but he knew already that it was empty. He would in any case have had no trouble in working that out from the draught. He went back on to the deck and saw the young carabiniere standing in the mud of the embankment, smoking. He opened one of the hatch covers over the hold and switched on his torch. There was a ladder in the corner but something about it made it less than inviting. He made his reluctant descent into what seemed to him no more than a rat trap, being careful to lift the wooden ladder and jam it in the opening to stop the cover slamming shut. The moment he made a move inside that hole, he was assaulted by a dense, nauseating stench of sweaty armpits and groins, of damp and dirty clothes and of the breath of starving people. In one corner, there was a pile of rags and newspaper pages. Tonna had not been carrying grain. In that dank, airless hole it was impossible not to feel the presence of the multitudes who had been conveyed in it. Their breath had remained trapped inside.
Soneri put the ladder back in its place and clambered up again, closing the cover behind him. He went into the cabin and opened the log book once more. Tonna had made many voyages, but he had not carried the cargoes entered in that register, and yet, in an old box, the bills of lading with the description of the goods in question had been meticulously recorded. A minimum of four sailings a week between Cremona and the area around Rovigo. On the other hand, if he had not sailed as recorded, how could he have met the running costs of the barge whose engine swallowed litres and litres of fuel as it struggled upstream against the current? An accountant’s punctiliousness was evident in Tonna’s handwritten ledgers. Each purchase of fuel was listed in neat handwriting and on each occasion the sums appeared considerable.
He heard the unmistakeable, irregular footsteps of Nanetti as he paced about on the deck. It sounded like a rhythmless drip-drip from a branch shaken in the wind.
“That’s it. You’re not getting me on that gangplank a second time,” he said.
“I’m sure once will always be good enough for you.”
His colleague stared at him with good-humoured pique. “In this mess, I’d be hard put to find anything,” he said, staring about him in disgust.
“Above all, check the hold,” Soneri advised. “I’ve got an idea this barge was the least comfortable cruise ship ever seen on sea or river.”
Nanetti studied him attentively, and from that look it was clear he had understood. “How do you get into the hold?”
The commissario cam
e back on deck to guide him and as soon as Nanetti saw the hatch, he grimaced and threw back his head like a horse refusing a fence. “Now I’m sure of it. You really do want to see me spend my old age in a wheelchair.”
Soneri helped him down a ladder that was fit only for a chicken hutch, but did not venture beyond the hatch. As soon as he saw his colleague get to work, he felt boredom come over him. “I’ll leave you in the capable hands of the carabiniere,” he called down.
A voice rang out from the depths: “You’re a treacherous bastard. That man will lock me in and slip the mooring.”
Soneri recommended Nanetti to the care of the officer on guard, and made his own way to the town. The road turned away from the embankment at certain points and cut inland between flooded fields. When he came in sight of the bell tower, a blue sign indicated the way to the Casoni residence. Instinctively he turned off the road, taking him further from the embankment. He had remembered about Maria of the sands.
There were no more than seven houses and one very grand building, which stood surrounded by trees and was higher than the bridge at Roccabianca. He entered the lobby and stood there a few moments looking around as various nurses came and went with trolleys which gave off a vague scent of camomile. “I’m Commissario Soneri, Parma police. I’m looking for Maria of the sands …”
“Who?” the nurse said, straining to make out what he was saying.
“I’m afraid I don’t know her full name. I’ve been told that you have here a woman who used to live on an island and who answers to that name.”
“Must be Signora Grignaffini,” said the woman. “She’s the only Maria here.”
“Probably her, then.”
“And you would like to speak to her?”
“I would, but if she is resting, I can come back.”
The nurse gave a laugh. “She only speaks Mantuan dialect. But the woman in the bed next to her can translate, if she chooses to. She’s half mad.”
“Don’t worry. I understand the dialect perfectly.”
Maria of the sands was an old woman of forbidding appearance, overweight, surly and sullen, with long, dishevelled hair that had turned as grey as the dry sand of the Po. She could still have been on her island peering at boats passing on the horizon, apprehensive lest they attempt to moor there. The nurse went over to her and informed her that Soneri was a police officer. She spoke in dialect, but Maria seemed to pay no heed, so intently was her gaze fixed on the commissario.
“You’ve got her on a good day. If she hadn’t wanted to talk to you, she would have already turned away.”
Soneri pulled up a chair and sat facing the woman, who greeted him with a respectful but wary nod. It was clear she had spent her whole life in a little homeland of her own which had been continually invaded and finally swept away by the dredgers.
“I can understand your dialect. It’s very like mine,” the commissario said, inviting her to speak freely.
“So you’re not a southerner?” she said, in the harsh intonation of the people of the Po.
Soneri shook his head.
“What do you want to know? In all my life, I’ve seen only boats and water.”
“Did you know that Anteo has disappeared?”
“They told me.”
“You knew him well. Do you have any idea what might have become of him?”
“He’ll have fled in the direction of Brescia, same as after the war. Those communist dogs …”
“Who?”
The old woman looked up, her look filled with pride and hatred. “The ones that were in the partisans. A lot of them died, as God willed. Others got away after 1946, but before that they did all kinds of things.”
“Are any of them still here?”
Maria made an affirmative sign with her hand. “Barigazzi stayed on, and it was him that brought along that gang of Reds. Twice they burned down my cabin, but the carabinieri didn’t want to know. They know the Po well, and they know the right doors to knock all along the riverbanks.” Maria’s breasts were heaving with rage. In spite of her years, a savage force emanated from that body made almost masculine by labour.
“Barigazzi says that in the days of Mussolini he was only a boy.”
“He was sixteen and went around with a pistol. It was him who killed Bardoni so as to take his boat which was moored at Stagno. Everybody knows that.”
“So how did Anteo get away?”
“I’ve told you. For a couple of years he was in Val Camonica.”
“And later?”
“Fortunately the waters calmed down, but he was always on the alert. He sailed by night and slept by day.”
“Was there some particular reason why they had it in for him?”
“When you’re talking about a war, there is always a reason for hating. The Fascists did their round-ups, and the other side ran off like rabbits, but then they struck back treacherously.” The woman grew more embittered as she spoke.
“As far as you remember, did Tonna take part in the reprisals?”
“How should I know? I spent years on my island, never moving off it. Only the floods could make me leave. The world is so evil, it’s better to stay huddled in a corner.”
“Why did Anteo come to see you?”
Only after speaking these words did Soneri realize that he had touched a very private nerve.
The old woman bridled, but immediately pulled herself together. “Neither of us spoke very much, but we were always in agreement. During the day, while he was asleep, I kept watch. He trusted me, especially since we were on an island in the middle of the Po.”
“So he felt threatened, even in recent times?”
“I told him to trust nobody, but he always said the world had changed. He even started going to the club that Barigazzi went to, saying that it was time to draw a line under the past. He said we were all poor old folk who should be getting ready to leave everything behind, and that we should toss all our grudges into the Po. He came to see me whenever he could and always asked me to come with him on his barge. I told him that at his age he should be thinking of moving on to dry land. So, together …but he was not happy with his feet on the ground, he preferred to be afloat. He used to say that the years he had spent in the mountains had been harder for him than the war, because he had had to live between rocks and peaks. That was one of the reasons he came to see me on my island. The only kind of land he could put up with was land surrounded by water.”
“You could have made a new life for yourselves somewhere near the sea.”
“We thought about that, but he was not fond of water with no flow, or water that battered against the walls. He wanted the reliable water of the river, water that knows where it’s going. He even had a plan for restructuring his barge and making it into a house where we could live when it wasn’t possible to live at my place. But then they came and even swept away the island, so here I am now and I don’t know where he is.”
“Who destroyed the island?”
“The people in the co-operative. The communists,” she said, almost spitting.
“Did they attack with the dredgers?”
“There was no need to attack. All they had to do was modify the course of the stream so as to make it erode the island. It disappeared under my feet, metre by metre. The co-operative knew what it was doing alright. They had their ways and means of obtaining a licence to dredge sand in a place that could only ever give them a return of half of what they’d spent. They paid a fortune just to get rid of the island. When finally I had to leave, they were all lined up along the embankment celebrating. As I went by, they were chanting ‘Bandiera Rossa’, and they’d hung a real red banner from the jib of the dredger.”
The old woman had turned livid and her skin had taken on the colour of silt. The patient in the next bed looked at her in fear and began to scream. Two male nurses took hold of her by her arms, while Maria cast a glance of pure contempt in her direction. It was obvious that she would have gladly struck her across the fa
ce. Immediately afterwards, Soneri found himself the object of equally harsh looks from the two men in white coats. He went up to Maria, patted her gently on the back and made his way out.
6
ONCE AGAIN THE strains of “Aida”. Even before Nanetti could begin speaking, Soneri heard his laboured breath.
“Have you been swimming across the Po?”
“To get me back on to the embankment across that gangway, they had to call out an extra patrol. We’re going down big with the carabinieri!”
“Don’t you worry. You’re not known as a man of action, but you do represent the intellectual branch of the inquiry.”
“You could spare me these little jibes. You make me feel ready for a care home.”
“What did you make of the barge?”
“There was all kinds of rubbish in the hold. There must have been a whole army of poor buggers down there. Including children.”
“Tonna was not transporting grain of any kind – or anything else. His cargo was illegal immigrants,” the commissario said.
“Got any proof ?” Nanetti said with his usual scientific punctiliousness.
“No, but it seems quite clear to me. He went up and down from the mouth of the river using as cover bills of lading drawn up by some compliant wholesale merchant. Officially he was transporting grain, but in fact he was carrying people who had to be kept out of sight. The ideal cover, the more you think about it: from the Adriatic, where the ships dock, to the industrial heart of the country where it is much easier to get fixed up. The whole thing done by a mode of transport which is much less risky than lorries or trains. No-one checks anything on the Po.”
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