River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (13 page)

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 came 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 face. 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.

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.”

“He’d found a way of living and maintaining his barge,” Nanetti said. “I’ve also made some other discoveries which I’ll tell you about later.”

As he put his mobile back in his pocket, Soneri wondered what the trafficking in illegal immigrants had to do with the disappearance of Tonna. He was still gathering information about him and his life without managing to make headway over where he was or who had killed his brother. He walked over to the embankment. Now that the floods had subsided and the Po was growing less turbulent day by day and settling back into its own riverbed, gangs of workmen were removing the sandbags.

The boat club was as feverish as a building site. Ghezzi, Vernizzi and Torelli were hard at work carrying buckets back and forth, while Barigazzi stood leaning on a shovel, observing the river. Soneri came up behind him, catching him unawares. “I bet that once you would have seen me when I was still on the embankment.”

The old man turned round, his expression a mixture of anger and apprehension. “Why do you have to rub salt in the wound? I’m still lucid enough to know that the years are catching up on me.”

“It’s only lack of exercise,” Soneri said in an attempt to play things down. “There are no more threats now.”

Barigazzi looked at him in puzzlement and from his eyes the commissario understood that he considered him a threat.

“The floodplain’s not really visible yet,” he said, changing subject.

“You’re wrong there,” Barigazzi said, pointing to a longitudinal wrinkle across the current. “The floodplain is no more than half a metre under.”

“So tomorrow it will appear and part the waters,” Soneri ventured.

“Some time tonight, around four o’clock. The level of the water is dropping by nearly ten centimetres an hour. The cold reduces it.”

“How long will it take for the floodplain to dry out?”

“If they get the water pumps started up to drain the water from the houses, it should take less than a week, but it’ll be springtime before they’re really dry. Otherwise, we’d need about a month of freezing weather,” Barigazzi said, continuing to look out over the slow-moving current.

“You’ve already cleaned up your club, I see.”

“Almost. The walls are still soaking and we’ll have to wait for the air to do its work for us. Unfortunately,” he said, pointing into the distance towards the bank on the Lombard side, “the
fumara
, the mist, is drawing in.”

The sky over the river appeared swollen and the air heavy. Barigazzi, with one hand still on the handle of the shovel, seemed to be waiting for the mist to arrive, an event which had occurred thousands of times, but which had not lost its power to surprise.

“I’d like to know where it’s born,” Soneri said.

“Everywhere and nowhere, like those of us who move in the heart of it.”

The faint autumn sun clouded over, making it possible to stare at it directly. The river blended with the sky, as does the winter snow on the hills, and it was at that moment that a long, dark shape made its appearance, forcing its way upstream
and beginning the slow manoeuvre of mooring. As it passed in front of them, a solid stretch of bank concealed its outlines. The engine spluttered quietly with a noise similar to cooking
polenta
.