River of Shadows

by Valerio Varesi

  “It would be better to move him at the earliest opportunity to a cold slab in the morgue,” Aricò said.

  “Agreed,” Soneri said with a glance at Nanetti, who nodded before saying: “The killer must have made his calculations very carefully. What better way to cancel out the traces of a crime than a flood on the Po?”

  It had never occurred to the commissario that the murderer might have taken into account the rise in the river level before making his move, that he might have waited for the waters to overflow on to the plains, fill them and cover over the scene of the crime. He noticed that Aricò and Nanetti were staring at him strangely. When he was thinking, his face must have assumed a particular expression, as everyone noticed it. Angela would always say: “What’s the matter, what are you thinking about?”

  Fortunately the blue flashing lights of the ambulance arriving attracted everybody’s attention. Before it pulled up, the commissario took a last look around him: Aricò, the officer, Nanetti and himself standing there, in the mist, beside a corpse swollen with water. It was like a scene from a gangster movie.

  It was only when the scent of the pasta con fagioli worked its way into his nostrils that he remembered about the meeting in the questura. It had completely slipped his mind, but then the questore had completely forgotten about the murder.

  “So you’ve won,” Nanetti said, looking around at the walls of Il Sordo with that curiosity for detail which he showed when examining corpses or cartridge shells.

  “Won what?”

  “With Alemanni. He said you were chasing fireflies …”

  “Alemanni has never understood anything. He should have been a lawyer.”

  “What do you think about it now?”

  “That the motive is not one of the usual ones.”

  “Why so?”

  Soneri looked up at the cross-legged Christ but was unable to translate into words the dance of phantoms, intuitions and conjectures inside his head. “It’s all to do with something that happened a long time ago. Or perhaps that was only a preliminary. On the barge I found a note which said something about the killing of a partisan.”

  “That was more than fifty years ago …”

  “That’s true, but I have the impression that time passed in vain for the Tonna brothers. Perhaps out of an extreme regard for consistency, or perhaps out of shame, their minds remained the same as when they were in their twenties. It’s strange, in a world of whitened sepulchres.”

  Nanetti tucked away four spoonfuls of the pasta as though he were shovelling sand. Then he raised his eyes and said, “That’s to their credit.”

  “The price they paid was an isolated life. Decimo pretended he started living when he was forty. His brother spent his days on his own on a barge, willing to deal with people-traffickers, anything to keep him afloat.”

  “You’re sure they’ve got nothing to do with it?”

  “Yes. They thought they were the only threat facing Tonna, but I’m afraid …”

  As he spoke to Nanetti, his conviction that he was dealing with an unusual and almost unfathomable crime gathered strength. He was reminded of the death of a well-known criminal many years previously. He had been under threat from all sides, but died in the most banal of ways, falling off a ladder trying to break into an apartment.

  “If it was the same person who killed the two brothers,” Nanetti broke in, “it means that in the morning he deposed of Decimo and in the evening Anteo. But was the latter not the main target?”

  “Certainly,” Soneri said, deep in thought. “And why kill Decimo in a hospital, with all the risks that involved? And anyway, are we sure we’ve got them in the right order?”

  “We’ll find out from the post-mortem.”

  “He obviously meant to kill them both, and it seems that both of them were aware of the threat.”

  Nanetti put his spoon down on the empty plate and stretched out his arms. He never followed his colleague in his suppositions. The only things which interested him were evidence and proof, and the only hard facts at that moment were corpses, two brothers, killed in the same way.

  Soneri made a sign to the landlord to bring a plate of spalla cotta. The restaurant was beginning to fill up, but there was no sign either of Barigazzi or of the others from the boat club. Nanetti kept looking around until he noticed, tucked away in a corner behind him, the notches marking the height of the water and the date of the flood. “Just thinking about all that water makes my arthritis play up.”

  “Think of Tonna, underwater for days.”

  “A damp patch was the least of his problems. If anything, the water stopped him from decomposing too rapidly. And besides, on the floodplain, there are no pike.”

  In fact even the fish had left Tonna’s body untouched. Soneri was contemplating other corpses which had been eaten away by marauding fish and left disfigured as though rubbed by sandpaper, when Nanetti surprised him with an unsuspected knowledge of the Po and its fauna. “I’ve looked it all up,” he said. “I also know that in these parts, over on the Cremona side, there’s a submerged village which re-emerges only when the water is very low.”

  “You don’t remember where?”

  “No, but it must be right in front of where we are now, on the far side. I think all you’ve got to do is ask. The land reclamation programme in the post-war period modified the course of the river, and the village itself was moved a couple of kilometres inland.”

  Soneri reflected on this for a moment and began to feel welling up inside him a sense of unease which was more like deep rancour. It was like a mild pressure on a part of his head he would not have been able to identify too precisely. For days, he had been moving around on the embankments and speaking to the local people without finding out about that sunken village. It annoyed him that Nanetti had simply turned up one evening with a new piece of information. He felt a fool, even if he was not sure that those few miserable hovels whose very existence he had been ignorant of were genuinely important. Perhaps not, but then why was he in such an ill humour?

  The barman came over with the spalla cotta and Soneri was tempted to ask him about those submerged houses, but saw he had removed the hearing aid. And anyway, he would not have told him even if he had heard perfectly. Soneri concealed his thoughts by acting for a moment as head waiter, dividing the spalla cotta between the two plates and pouring the Fortanina into both glasses. Nanetti let him get on with it, and when they were about to eat, he said, “This story of the underwater village has really made an impression on you, hasn’t it?”

  He expressed himself with such moderation that the commissario calmed down, surprising even himself with his sudden change of mood.

  “Absolutely nobody spoke to me about it,” he said, while the possibility that there was a reason for that superimposed itself on what he said.

  “It’s still on old maps from the Fascist era. It was in the middle of a marsh,” Nanetti said, “and the Fascist officials refused to initiate the reclamation programme in that zone because, so they said, it was a nest of Reds. The work was done under De Gasperi after the war.”

  Soneri remembered Nanetti’s passion for topography and for old maps of any kind, military or civil. In his cellar at home he had a pile of them, which his wife described as the finest woodworm farm in the province.

  “And this village was inhabited until they altered the course of the river?”

  “I just don’t know,” Nanetti said, “but I believe so, considering it was rebuilt from scratch further inland on the plain.”

  He did not know why, but the story interested him. “What was the name of the village?”

  “San Quirico. It seems no-one actually lives in the reconstructed houses. The children of the original owners keep them as second homes.”

  Soneri continued to think about the walls over which the Po slowly flowed. How many people had been happy or sad in that place? How many personal stories were buried under the water there? He was not sure why, but he imagined that some
of these stories were connected to the case of the Tonna brothers. This idea frightened him, but his curiosity was aroused by the fact that no-one had ever told him about that place, even though it was only a stone’s throw from the boat club. Perhaps on clear days you could even make it out beyond the bend in the river.

  Nanetti got up and when the two of them were under the colonnade, the stench of burning still in the air, Soneri concluded to himself that the inquiry would need to start afresh from Anteo’s corpse, from the facts in other words, the one thing that counted, as Nanetti always insisted.

  “Tomorrow you’re going to have a horde of journalists on your back, and Alemanni will be in a rage,” Nanetti said before getting into his car.

  The commissario gave a forced smile, clenching his extinguished cigar between his teeth. If he had paid heed only to the facts, he would never have set foot near the Po.

  9

  THE FREEZING FOG had left a fine film of frost on the car roof. Clouds of minute crystals floated through the air, while the drop in temperature had caused the grasses and plants in the fields to stiffen. Alongside him, the little villas with their overhanging roofs reminded Soneri of Christmas cards. As he was going along a stretch of completely white road, his mobile rang.

  “I didn’t see you at the meeting,” the questore began, in a tone which was intended to convey a reproach, but he was too weak a man to make it felt.

  “I was stuck with a corpse,” Soneri said.

  The silence was so long that it seemed for a moment as though they had been cut off. “I would have liked to speak to you about that, among other things.” The questore was attempting to make up lost ground. “Tomorrow we’re going to have the press on our backs.”

  “I’d prefer to steer clear of that.”

  “We’ll have to give them some account of this new turn in the investigation,” the questore said with greater feeling.

  “Yes, sir,” the commissario said. “But you know how to deal with these things much better than I do. Anyway, there’s not a lot to say. We fished the body up this afternoon. Its skull had been cracked open in the same way as the brother’s, and he was probably killed on the same day as he disappeared. The body had been secured underwater, next to the monument to the partisans on the floodplain beside the stone-crushing plant, not very far from the jetty. That’s all there is to it.”

  From the long pause, the commissario guessed that his superior was taking notes on one of those sheets of notepaper headed QUESTURA which he kept in front of him at every meeting. He could even picture the pen with the pointed stem which he kept propped upright like an aerial in a kind of inkwell on his desk. He was equally sure that the questore would not pursue the topic. No-one ever appealed in vain to his vanity. Soneri did not have anything against journalists, who after all did the same sort of job as he did, but he never knew how to deal with their questions, so he evaded them by claiming judicial confidentiality and appealing to the complexity of the investigation. They would certainly want to know how he had worked out where the corpse was hidden. What could he say? That it was a matter of intuition? Or a hunch? Would he be able to transform something so fleeting and complex into a coherent answer? In his head, clouds without form and without geometry were blowing about. He could not squeeze them inside any rational perimeter – not that he had ever tried. It seemed to him as impossible a task as giving shape to the mist. There he was, splashing about like a gudgeon in the Po, and that was enough for him. It was all he needed to be able to get on with his job.

  Now he felt drawn by the same inexplicable force towards the submerged village, and it was already in his mind that the freeze, with the dry days which accompanied it, would lower the water level to a point where the walls of the old San Quirico would be uncovered, making it possible for him to wander along a kind of Venetian calle surrounded by the ghosts of houses. The investigation was moving in time to the rhythms of the Po, of waters which rose and fell, endlessly changing the outline of the riverbank.

  The car almost skidded on a stretch of road which was like a sheet of glass. He was badly shaken and this stopped him hearing the strains of “Aida” which had been ringing out for a few moments in his duffel-coat pocket.

  “Where did you end up?” Angela said.

  “I almost ended up in the ditch.”

  “You must be very distracted …”

  “The ice and the tyres are as smooth as each other.”

  “Do you know that the carabinieri have mounted a huge inquiry into the trafficking of illegal immigrants?” she asked him.

  “How do you know that?”

  “A colleague is defending an Albanian pimp who’s been bringing girls here to work on the streets, and he let me read the report. It seems they’ve uncovered a sizeable trafficking racket, and they even know how the girls are brought here.”

  “Did you see if Maresciallo Aricò was involved?”

  “He’s quoted frequently, but with all the big egos in the provincial command, if he’s looking to get any credit, he can forget it. He’ll be left with the crumbs at best.”

  The commissario let out a cry of fury. The maresciallo had been beavering away on his own initiative for some time, but he had been leading the commissario astray, either by acting the fool, or by spinning his tale about the lack of resources.

  “Don’t forget that you’re in my debt over a certain discovery which has turned out to be very important for your inquiry,” Angela warned him in a mock-threatening tone.

  “So what?”

  “So, Commissario, debts must be paid. Or would you rather I let the information leak out to your rivals in the carabinieri?”

  “Fair enough,” Soneri said, with a touch of resignation in his voice, “but don’t ask for the impossible.”

  “The impossible! Quite the reverse, I promise you. Only the most possible of things. In fact, we’ve already achieved it!”

  “You mean on the barge again?”

  “I liked it very much.”

  “It’s too risky. We got away with it once, but a second time …”

  “You just don’t get it, do you? No risk, no fun. Be prepared. As soon as I have a free moment, that is. It’s one date you had better not forget …and when it comes to collecting dues, I’m completely unscrupulous.”

  “I’ll take you for a drive along the embankment, down the river.”

  He heard a kind of shriek down the line. “You can’t rise above banalities. The people who write those little sentimental ditties in chocolate wrappers should consult you. What you’re talking about is the antechamber of conjugal love, a quick screw on a Saturday night in the double bed with freshly laundered sheets. I promise you, I’ll never do it between your two loathsome bedside tables,” she hissed.

  It had, in fact, never happened. There was the one occasion when Angela had suddenly had the urge to reprise a situation from one of Boccaccio’s stories, which had her chatting from a window with a friend below and the commissario behind her, invisible from the street.

  Later, at home, in the half-light of his rooms, he thought that it was his good fortune not to be pursued by one of those clingy women who aspire to the role of wife. Perhaps that was why he was so fond of Angela.

  He woke in the same half-light as the night before. The freezing fog had transformed the trees into white lace, the only vivid tone in the part of the city he could see from the kitchen window. With the blanket of clouds covering the skies, there was not much difference between the shimmering light of day and the light coming from the lamp-posts at night: it all resembled a northern dusk. He drank his caffè latte and then began to assemble in his mind the things he had to do. The central heating pipes, filling with warm water, gave a gurgle and a noise like the sound of digestive fluids, which made him think of the water pumps on the Po. Was everything dried out? By the time he put his coffee cup in the sink, he had already taken his decision. He wanted to return to the Po and at that time in the morning he would not encounter much tra
ffic in the city.

  He called Juvara when he was at the wheel, and instructed him to go to the mortuary where, in a couple of hours, they would be doing the post-mortem on Anteo Tonna. He did not expect much to emerge from that examination. What he had deduced from observing the corpse was not likely to be very different from what would be obtained by cutting it open. He tossed his mobile on to the seat beside him and concentrated on his driving. The Po valley was white in every direction. The hoar frost had attached itself to each hanging branch, making them seem thicker and endowing them with new colours, a spectacle that raised his spirits as much as the first snow of winter.

  He travelled along the embankment, stopping where the previous day they had lifted Anteo’s body on to the bank. It was still possible to make out the darker mark on the ground where the corpse had been laid. The commissario got out and looked over the floodplain and noted that all that was left were a few large pools covered by layers of ice. Elsewhere the ground seemed to have been thickened in the cold which had hardened the surface mud into a crust. It was only at that point that he became conscious of the silence. The mist and the white of the frost gave a certain solemnity to the surrounding countryside. They had switched off the pumps when the engines were only sucking in air. The freezing weather would finish the job.

  He heard a tractor approach on the elevated road, but he had to let it draw close before he could make out one of the inhabitants of the floodplain coming back in order to work on his house, now reduced to a mud dyke. He would begin again, as those people there always did: giving new life to land made yet more fertile by the deposits from the river, spreading fresh gravel on the pathways and removing the sand from doors and walls.

  Soneri parked at the boat club. There was no-one there yet and the locked door had the melancholy colour of aged straw. He got out of his car and called Juvara again. “Are you at the mortuary?”