River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (3 page)

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. The 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.”

“Who believes it’s navigating normally in this weather?” Torelli was growing impatient.

“With no engine, the battery will run flat.”

“In just a few hours?”

“Tonna’s as mean as the drought in ’61. He uses batteries lorry drivers have thrown away.”

“He always lives in the dark or he uses the candles you put round coffins. As soon as it gets dark, he moors at the first place, gets off to have something to eat and then goes to bed.”

“What a cheery life! You can see why his grandson …”

“So the light kept burning all that time, down at the mooring …” Barigazzi said. He spun his hand round, all five fingers pointing upwards in a gesture suggesting some piece of machinery searching in vain for a plug.

“It’s not that difficult to work out,” Vernizzi said.

“No,” Barigazzi murmured, looking up at the clock. “In less than two hours we’ll know everything.”

They all looked up. The hands on the club clock were almost at 1.00.

The carabinieri returned. “I’ll say I haven’t seen you,” the maresciallo mumbled, as damp and swollen as a
savoiardo
biscuit dipped in Marsala. He was an unhealthy colour, whether from the onset of influenza or from suppressed rage.

“You’re just not used to this rain,” Barigazzi told the maresciallo, who gave him an evil look in return.

“Another nine centimetres. It’s coming up like Fortanina wine when you pull the cork,” the old man went on.

The radio operator passed on this news, and received equally alarming data in reply.

“At this rate, you’re going to have to sound the retreat in the carabinieri headquarters as well,” Barigazzi said. “But it won’t take much evacuating,” he said, staring at the only carabiniere, a shy young man accompanying his superior officer.

The maresciallo swallowed the grappa which Gianna had poured for him without waiting to be asked.

Barigazzi joined him at the bar. “It suits you fine to let your colleagues in Luzzara attend to this other business,” he said gravely.

“What other business?” came the surly response from somewhere under the officer’s helmet.

“This business of the barge.”

The officer’s face brightened. He was evidently relieved. “Why Luzzara?”

“It will get as far as that,” Barigazzi assured him. “Tell them at the station, if anyone’s still there.”

Vernizzi went out for a pee. “It brings good luck if you piss in the river,” he said. He lived in the town but he had never got used to peeing in a closed W.C. As he drew near the riverbank, he became aware of just how high the water had risen. There was someone at work with the winch at the moorings, trying to pull ashore a boat still riding at anchor. The clammy
libeccio
wind ensured that the rain drove into the side of his body.

“You’ve pissed yourself,” Torelli teased him when he saw Vernizzi come in with his trousers wet.

“Not at all. I’ve salted the sea.”

The radio announced that the barge was close to the Guastalla bridge.

“Call them and ask if they can actually see it,” Ghezzi instructed Gianna.

In seconds the woman was on the line. “Moving slowly … And the lights are still off, right? Ah, difficult to see. The cars have pointed their headlights where it sails in and out of view.”

Barigazzi imagined himself on the embankment, standing behind the vehicles whose headlights were resting on the surface of the water, picking out glimpses of the hull in the bobbing confusion of barrels, logs, dead animals, tree trunks.

“It’s going past?” Gianna was shouting into the receiver. “Are you sure? Too dark? In midstream … This bit has gone smoothly as well.”

Barigazzi looked up at the clock. “It’s all over now.”

The others looked at him, not sure if he was referring to the river or to Tonna. Probably both. Vernizzi remembered hearing his pee gurgle on the surface of the water scarcely a metre from where he had been standing.

“Gianna, start packing up,” Barigazzi told her.

The operator unplugged the radio in preparation for moving out. Everything that could be carried to safety was swiftly put into large boxes, making the club look in no time like temporary premises. Torelli manoeuvred the lorry into place in the yard and for a moment the lights played on the surface of the river without reaching the far shore. Then they started loading. In all the coming and going, the radios on both sides of the river continued broadcasting a litany which became a sort of rosary for all the wrecks dragged away by the current.

“What about the clock?” Vernizzi said.

“The water’ll never get that high,” Barigazzi said firmly, noting that it was a few minutes before three. “This is the epilogue,” he reminded everyone.