Juvara HAD LEFT him more confused than before. Libero Gorni, known as “the Kite”, had faced a Fascist firing squad at Sissa on 23 November, 1944. In the encounter on the Po floodplain, both Ivan Varoli and Spartaco Ghinelli had died. Ghinelli was a native of San Quirico, one of the family whose house had been burned down and whose women had been raped by the Blackshirts.
“This much is clear, isn’t it?” Soneri asked the ispettore, who continued to rifle through a pile of papers with scribbled notes in the margins.
Juvara nodded, but he continued to consult the pages, seizing hold of one of them as though he had been searching for it for days. The commissario listened again to a summary reconstruction of the battle which had been read to him the day before, finally focusing on the description provided by the partisans who had retrieved the bodies:… The two who fell on the battlefield had been so badly disfigured by gunshot and stab wounds that they could be identified by their comrades only after an examination of the objects they had about their person. Varoli possessed false documents ever since he belonged to the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica. The Blackshirts had fallen on their bodies with ferocity, which might be evidence of how much they dreaded the Garibaldi Brigade…
“Have you checked to see if Ghinelli and Varoli have relatives still alive?”
“Ghinelli’s brothers and sisters are all dead. One sister committed suicide in the Po, a brother took his life in South America.”
“What about Varoli? And the relatives of the Kite?”
“Varoli… Varoli…” Juvara repeated, fumbling among the paper on the desk in front of him. “Here we are. One sister died in Turin seven years ago. Gorni, the Kite that is, had no relatives. He was brought up by the Sisters of the Child Jesus, before being sent to work as a farmhand when he was eleven.”
Soneri mused on how little life had given to an unloved boy who died in his twentieth year, but this thought gave way to the consideration of the cul de sac into which history had turned. If the killing of the Kite had been in some obscure way a precedent for the death of Tonna, who could have remembered and avenged that event if everyone involved had already gone on to another world? And in that other world, were there already reports circulating about those days? Memory buried by ignorance and by a frivolous, doltish affluence…what had he achieved by his early death?
He noticed that Juvara was staring at him, but fortunately he did not ask him those insufferable questions: “What’s the matter? What are you thinking about?” When he finished brooding and came back to the facts of the case, he asked, “Were there any grandchildren?”
“There were three grandchildren, all girls, on the Varoli side, and five, including two males, on the Ghinelli side.”
“What do they do? Where do they live?” Soneri said impatiently, but he had set Juvara rummaging even more frantically among the documents.
“Jobs: nothing out of the ordinary. One of the grandsons has been living in Switzerland for forty years, the other died in a car accident twelve years ago.”
The commissario sensed that these questions and the ispettore’s exhaustive answers were not helping him much. It seemed that the crimes had been committed by someone for whom time had stood still, as it had for the Tonna brothers.
With his thoughts leaping from one contradiction to the next, he opened the newspaper. The front page was given over entirely to the developments in the inquiry conducted by Arico and the carabinieri from three provinces: HUMAN TRAFFICKING BEHIND THE TONNA CRIME? one headline wanted to know. He read the statements of the carabinieri commander and some magistrates, each expressing the conviction that they were on the right track. He felt Angela’s grim warnings come true. His own superior would no doubt be vacillating, and Soneri would be left high and dry to defend an inquiry which risked sliding into depths of improbability or into obscure aspects of a history of deaths which no-one any longer remembered.
Juvara looked up to see Soneri stride so decisively into the corridor that he had no time to stop him; by the time he got himself out of his chair and round the other side of the desk, the commissario had disappeared.
Shortly afterwards, as he travelled through the mist, Soneri tried to imagine those corpses defaced and deformed by bullet and knife wounds. The Fascists, doubtless motivated by detestation and a thirst for vengeance, must have fallen on them after the battle with appalling ferocity. Perhaps they had been searching for them for some time, to make them pay. Perhaps it was Tonna himself who had been guiding them, he who knew the Po so intimately.
His mobile rang. Juvara’s voice was, as usual, trembling when he had to make use of a mechanism he knew the commissario detested.
“I saw you running off, but I didn’t have time to…”
“The sprint was never your strong point.”
“Listen, I wanted to tell you something that I forgot earlier on. A small detail, just to fill you in.”
“What is it?”
“In the firefight, there were three Fascists killed as well, but one of them, a man from Brescia, they never found his body. The story went that he might have fallen into the Po and that his body got caught up in the sands or was devoured by the fish.”
Soneri drove on in the mist, deep in thought. The encounter between the two embankments took place in mid-November. In the first days of the same month they had burned down the houses at San Quirico
…and that body that was never found…the circulation of documents among the partisans of the G.A.P… the dead bodies savaged by knives
…”A murky business”, the partisan bulletins had defined it some years later as they strove to reconstruct what had happened along the Po, perhaps on a day of mists like today.
On the way, he saw signs for San Quirico and turned on to the high, narrow road with a ditch on either side which ran above the countryside. He found the old man in the same position as on the previous occasion, as though he had not moved in the interim. He was still staring straight ahead, hands cupped over his walking stick. His wife saw the commissario and opened the door without a word of greeting. When he was close beside him, the old man became aware of his presence and began to explore the space around in search of him, but when Soneri took a seat beside him, he turned to peer once again into the mist. The woman stayed to observe them for a few moments, and then discreetly withdrew.
“Do you remember the battle of ’44, the one that took place in the floodplain between the embankments?”
The old man abruptly raised one arm. It was obvious that he remembered it perfectly.
“Was it ever known with certainty what happened?”
“The only people who know that were those who were there, but they are all dead.”
“Did you, any of you, ever speak about it in the past?”
“There was a lot of talk, yes,” replied the man, still gazing in front of him into the mist. “Do you think we wouldn’t have spoken about it? On the feast of All Souls, the Fascists had burned down the houses in San Quirico and the Blackshirts marched up and down the plains of the Po like masters. People accused the partisans of staying in hiding, like rabbits. It was then that Ghinelli and the others decided to make them pay.”
“An ambush?”
“Along the embankment, near Torricella. They thought they had the Po to help them retreat, and the brush on the floodplain to hide them. They knew them both intimately.”
“Was Ghinelli in command?”
“He was the most decisive one. It was his idea to carry out the ambush. The other commanders were not much in agreement because it might have exposed civilians to reprisals. And anyway, it was very risky.”
“Why were they defaced in that way?”
The old man raised both hands as he had done previously, letting go of the walking stick which fell against him. “Nobody knows, nobody was ever able to explain that. Perhaps they had accounts to settle with Ghinelli and the others from earlier times. Hatred added to hatred, but none of the Blackshirts ever admitted to having desecrated the dead, and anyway there was the mist all around, like today. Sometimes that’s your salvation, other times it’s your destruction. Like life itself, you never know if it’s going to protect you or not. It went very badly for poor Gorni, who had got separated from the rest and was making his way back under the embankment on foot. They came out of nowhere.”
“Is he the one they called ‘the Kite’?”
“As far as I knew he was called ‘Arrow’, but the partisans around here changed their names all the time.”
They remained in silence for a few minutes. After the last sentence the old man made a circling gesture with his hands, indicating some kind of confusion, so the commissario said: “So nobody ever found out anything about the Fascist who went missing?”
The man shook his head.
“He was from Brescia…” was all he could say, but then, after a pause, he added: “Maybe he was injured and ended up in the Po as he tried to make his escape. They’re mountain people and they drown easily.”
“But the body was never found…”
“Normally the river always restores what it has taken, but around here they say that someone who has not learned to swim when he’s alive doesn’t float when he’s dead.”
Soneri tried to imagine what was going through the old man’s mind, what he was watching in that mist he had been observing day after day as though it were a screen on which a nostalgic film of past years was being projected.
“Very few people know what happens in the mist,” he said. “And the question is whether those few people have any inclination to tell. In this case the matter is closed.”
It was not the first time that Soneri found himself facing the irremediable. Death was the most unwavering of all forms of reticence. “Perhaps that’s why there are so many rumours going around…”
The old man repeated the jerky gesture with his hand. “There are some people who even say that maybe one of those who was there did not die,” he said, apparently to fill the silence.
The hypothesis aroused Soneri’s interest and once again set his imagination working overtime, but not at the same rate as that of the old man who the moment he stopped talking began once again to observe with a sort of avidity the grey emptiness that surrounded him. Soneri too did his best to absorb himself in an imaginary film, staring into a space stretching from somewhere above the low roofs of the houses before them to unfathomable depths in which it was possible to glimpse everything or nothing. He was trying to stage in his mind all that might have occurred under the main embankment on that land won back from the water, where everything appears precarious.
The ambush, shadows facing shadows, the rounds of gunfire shot at random at ghosts made of air and little else, the awareness of the dying that they were falling without knowing the identity of their killers, the flight in any direction for refuge in the same mist which had made the ambush possible, then the silence after the gunfire in the damp air which had served to muffle the shots, the attempt to listen for the enemy in every blade of grass that rustled, the stumbling over corpses, and the undergrowth growing more dense in a world of dancing wisps of mist. Anything at all could have happened, including the possibility that one of them had not died and so
…perhaps then the ferocity perpetrated on the bodies should not be attributed to Fascist vengeance. But after seeing the body of the Kite savaged by the torture so minutely described in the partisans’ bulletins, who could give credence to any conflicting hypothesis? Eyes pushed in by relentless punching, face swollen and dark like garnet-coloured quince and made to look like sausage meat. And finally the burns, the fingernails wrenched out, the testicles a bloody mess.
Certainly no-one had been identified. It required the intervention of the entire Garibaldi detachment to decide which corpse was which. The pike could not have done worse in a month. And then there was the question of the man from Brescia who had disappeared. A missing body represents an unsolved case, always and everywhere. He was thinking of all this when he turned gently to the old man and saw him concentrate on that unmoving grey.
“What do you think happened?”
“It always seemed strange to me.”
“You don’t believe that it was the Blackshirts?”
The old man shook his head. “They only did those things in their barracks. They wanted to look bold, but in fact they were shit-scared. They were terrified, and anyway, in ’44 they knew their time was up.”
Soneri made no reply and the silence seemed to him deep enough to enable him to hear the sound of the specks of ice falling one by one on the dry leaves. He rose to his feet quite abruptly, as he always did. The old man was startled and turned to look and see where he was. The mist over his eyes must have been populated by something new superimposed on his recollections. When he felt the commissario’s hand on his shoulder, he turned rapidly and tried to stare at him with eyes which were now filled only with apparitions.
“You know how to peer into the depths,” Soneri said, preparing to leave. It was a sentence which might have seemed foolish or jeering, but that was not how it was meant.
He parked outside the Italia to let it be known he had arrived. Up on the embankment, looking down at the boat club, he felt a kind of resentment. He felt alienated from that world which seemed to be betraying him, but as he thought over all that was going on, some form of childish pride filled his breast and made him feel as though he were reverting to his childhood days. He climbed back down towards the centre where, in front of Anteo’s niece’s bar, the labourers were hard at work fixing up the facade of the building which had been blackened by the flames. The woman stood looking on in the same pose as when she was behind the bar, arms folded to support her heavy breasts.
“When do you plan to open up again?” Soneri said.
“In two weeks, if everything goes according to plan,” the woman replied, without turning towards him.
“That telephone call…” the commissario said, “I mean the one from that man who was looking for your uncle…and who spoke dialect very well but was not sure of his Italian…you said he had a foreign accent, maybe Spanish…or Portuguese.”
Showing no interest, the woman made a movement with her chin as if to say: “So what?”
“I want to get it right. He said that he was looking for Barbisin?”
The only reply he received was a kind of gesture of assent, once more with her chin, and an expression of mild irritation.
“I’ve explained it all to you, haven’t I? He didn’t speak in dialect all the time. When I picked up the phone and said ‘Hello’, he hesitated for a moment and then asked in Italian if that was the Tonna household. Maybe he thought he’d got the wrong number. I asked him if it was my uncle he was looking for, and then he began to speak in dialect.”
“Did you answer in dialect?”
“No, I have always used Italian. I hardly ever speak in dialect,” she said, with an edge of contempt in her voice towards customs which no doubt reminded her of the peasant origins she preferred to leave behind her.
“When was the last time your son sailed with the old man?”
“He’s right there, go and ask him,” the woman said, growing more and more hostile and pointing to the boy standing under the scaffolding.
Soneri walked over to where the boy was, lighting a cigar to calm himself. He smoked as he listened to the labourers cursing the frost which made their hands numb.
“When was the last time you went on the river with your uncle?”
“A week before he died,” the boy said. “I remember it well because we went down together and then went to my mother’s house. That happened only once a week.”
“Did you ever notice anything unusual when you passed other boats on the river?”
“On the Po, people always behave in the same way. They exchange a few words or signs of greeting. There’s hardly ever time for more than a couple of words.”
“Did your uncle have that sort of time?”
“Generally it was other people who asked him something and he would answer them. He had a reputation as a good sailor and his advice was always useful.”
“Was there anyone who avoided you, or who would not greet you?”
The boy looked about him as though unsure whether to reply. “The communists,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Who?” Soneri said, even if he already guessed all he needed to know.
“People like Melegari and that other one… What’s his name? Vaeven. If we’d had a smaller vessel instead of a barge, they’d have rammed us.”
“Did they move about a lot?”
“We met them several times. Sometimes with other people.”
“Did you recognize these other people?”
“No, they always kept their distance. They have a magano which can move very fast.”
“One person or more?”
“Almost always one.”
“Were they fishing?”
“Who knows? I’ve never seen them fishing, but I think they travelled quite far. They used their boat instead of a car. I don’t think they had a licence to drive a car.”
“What about Barigazzi, did you ever bump into him?”
“He doesn’t move about very much,” the boy said, shrugging. “And he nearly always stays close in. He’s only got an old boat.”
“And what do you plan to do with the barge now?”
“As soon I can I’ll ask the shipyards to give me an estimate, because I’d like to anchor it at the jetty and convert it into a bar for the summer season. It’s the only way to make use of it now.”
Soneri stood in silence. He imagined the barge with its engine shut down for good, a stopping-off point for couples on a trip up the Po, and he thought of certain former colleagues who had ended up as porters in blocks of flats to supplement their pensions. At his age, he was only too aware of the prospect of hard times ahead. To chase away those grim thoughts, he turned suddenly towards the boy, taking the cigar from his mouth as he did so. “Maybe it would be better to sell it as scrap.”
It was getting dark and a freezing fog was coming down once more from the skies. Under the arches, he took out his mobile and called Juvara. “Check up on the records of the telephone company and see if you can work out where that call to Tonna’s niece came from. The one made a week before they killed him.”
“No problem,” the ispettore said. “Have you seen what the prefetto told the newspapers?”
The commissario replied that he had not, but he could sense trouble ahead.
“He said that the police will be investigating the trafficking because it’s highly probable that that was the motive for the Tonna murder.”
“They can investigate to their heart’s content!” Soneri said angrily. And when Juvara said nothing, intimidated as he was by the commissario’s tone, the latter made an attempt to sound cordial and said: “Cheer up, I’ll call you later.”
He walked back to the jetty. The road was white with hoar frost, while from the skies flakes continued to fall as slowly as the flow of the current when the water level was low. He went down towards the yard, took the track leading to the fishermen’s cottages and then turned to the stairs leading to the moorings. Melegari’s magano was not there, but the ropes which had been thrown on to the concrete quay were clearly in evidence. The other boats, including Barigazzi’s, had been covered with tarpaulins. Along the riverbank, a row of stakes had been driven in to measure how quickly the water was falling.
He returned towards the yard just as the big light was being switched on. He was passing the fishermen’s cottages when his mobile rang. In the silence, he had the impression that his “Aida” had put the whitened branches and the buildings on stilts on the alert.
The commissario put the telephone to his ear. He knew from the number that it was Juvara.
“I’ve checked. The call you asked about came from the Fidenza district, from Zibello. I didn’t go through the official channels, but I was able to make use of our mole inside the company.”
“Did he tell you the time?”
“It lasted from 7.44 to 7.46.”
Soneri ended the call as he reached the yard. He walked round the club and as he was about to go in he saw the carabinieri van pull up. Arico was wearing a coat down to his knees, and he seemed to be in uniform.
“Being in the newspapers at last has done wonders for you,” Soneri said.
“Orders from above, the television people turned up today,” the maresciallo mumbled.
“Did you tell the journalists how Tonna was killed?”
“You don’t believe this story of the trafficking of illegal immigrants?”
“The trafficking, yes, I believe that.”
The maresciallo fell silent, deep in thought, before adding: “I don’t really believe either that…”
“The magistrate spoke to the press and now it seems that everybody has embraced this idea of the traffickers’ revenge,” Soneri said.
“They’ve cottoned on to the one certain fact. Put yourself in their shoes. What would you do? These two murders have remained unsolved for some time now. If nothing else, this story will help to calm public disquiet.”
Unwittingly, Arico had put his finger on the wound. The only certainty was the trafficking, and to make matters worse, it originated largely from the commissario’s own investigations.
“Have you managed to reconstruct the traffickers’ organization?” Soneri said, feeling annoyance grow inside him as he spoke.
“We’re nearly there. We’ve only one or two points to verify,” he said. Pointing to the door of the club, he went on: “I’ve come to piece together the barge’s movements in the last month from here to other ports along the river.”
“It won’t be too difficult. They keep meticulous records,” Soneri said distractedly.
Arico frowned. “They used to keep meticulous records, but it seems that for the last two months they forgot to keep any account at all of the river traffic. But it shouldn’t be too difficult to put it all together, granted that so few of them carry any cargo,” he said in a tone in which the commissario detected something halfway between seriousness and malice.
“Who worked the river apart from Tonna?”
“Melegari and the one called Vaeven. Whose boat is registered in the name of a fishing co-operative, which — it transpires — is inactive. At Torricella there’s not much indication of activity but I’ve sent an officer to check the registers in the ports in the provinces of Reggio, Mantua, Cremona and Piacenza. Over the last month, it seems that the magano has moored on several occasions in each of them, but here it’s put in only three times.”
“He has to be involved in the same line of business as Tonna,” the commissario said and began to move on. But he had only gone a couple of steps when the maresciallo said: “Don’t you want to come in?”
Soneri thought, and then said, “You have more important questions to ask.”
He clambered over the embankment in big strides, and turned into the colonnaded street. From Il Sordo he heard a tipsy “Rigoletto”, perhaps a consequence of the singer’s second bottle. There was only one table occupied, all British by the sound of them; perhaps they had been on a Verdi pilgrimage and had lost their way in the mist. The landlord had no problem in making himself understood in sign language, since he was accustomed to doing so with those who spoke his own language.
Soneri ate his pumpkin tortelli and stracotto d’asinina and then, after some gesticulating, succeeded in having the landlord cut and parcel up some pieces of culatello and some slivers of well-matured parmesan, which he slipped into the wide pockets of his duffel coat. He went out, leaving both Rigoletto and the Duke of Mantua behind him.
Out on the grass of the embankment, the cold seemed even more biting than in the town. In front of him he could see the fishermen’s cottages and, further down, the port with the moorings, and over to the right the boat club whose great light was, at that distance, no more than a blur in the mist. Thinking over the conversation with Arico put him in a better mood. The meal helped too, especially now that he was losing the calories in the battle against the freezing cold. He had no means of knowing if the magano would turn up, but it was worth waiting at least until after midnight. Was this yet another voyage which would leave no trace in the club’s records?
He wrapped his coat more tightly around him, put on a woollen cap, checked that his mobile was switched off and began feeding himself with pieces of parmesan and slices of culatello at the rhythm of someone poking the fire. Shortly after eleven o’clock, he saw the lights of the club being switched off and heard stray snatches of conversation between people moving from the yard towards the embankment. He thought he could make out the shadows of four people as they climbed towards the elevated road: perhaps Barigazzi, Ghezzi, Vernizzi and Torelli going home to bed.
When the town bell struck twelve, the commissario contemplated giving in to the cold. Ten minutes later, he tried to rise, only to find his legs stiff and all feeling gone from his feet. The hoar frost had covered him all over like icing on a cake, but before he had taken a few steps he began to hear a distant rumble, and as it became louder he clearly recognized the diesel engine of Melegari’s magano.
He saw the prow light as it drew up to the mooring, and then heard a muffled thud as the craft bumped against the tyres on the coping stones. A man leapt ashore to take hold of the hawsers. When he came into the strip of light emanating from the prow, the commissario saw that it was Vaeven. The engine and the light were then both switched off and Soneri waited for Melegari to disembark, even if in the darkness he would find it difficult to make out his imposing bulk. Shortly afterwards, lighting his way with a torch, Melegari appeared with a third man of robust build, slightly bent and with a shuffling gait. Soneri believed that this was the man he had seen between Barigazzi and Dinon near the fishermen’s cottages a couple of evenings earlier.
As the three made their way towards the club, the commissario kept watch on them for as long as he could. He could only make out shadows, but for the moment what interested him was the direction those shadows were taking. They proceeded slowly and would shortly disappear from view at the point where the road curved round parallel to the embankment. Perhaps he would hear their footsteps crunch on the gravel hardened by the frost. He thought of following them, but he risked being given away by the frozen grass, so he decided to let them move off but to keep them in sight until they reached the yard, when he could move on to the road and track them in the fog.
It was some time before they reappeared. He had the impression of hearing first footsteps and then the sound of something bumping against a wooden object, perhaps an oar striking the hull of a boat, and then nothing until he saw Melegari and Vaeven striding back towards the yard. The yellowing light of the huge lamp now lit them up very distinctly, but the third man was no longer with them. He must have gone into one of the cottages whose door could not be seen from where Soneri was, even if it seemed to him impossible that the man would spend the night in such a place. He went down towards the path, slipping on the icy embankment as he did so. The fog and the dark made it difficult to explore that chessboard of gardens and yards which acted as antechambers to the fishermen’s cottages. All he could see were pieces of old furniture piled up, fenced plots that might have been gardens, and a few upturned boats. He did his best to compare his memories with the kind of photographic negative he now saw. What had become of that stooped, apparently elderly man who dragged his feet as he walked?
He made his way back towards the town, walking more quickly to warm himself up. The Italia was in darkness with even the light on the sign outside switched off, while between the houses the streetlights were dimmed by the patchy fog. Over the whole scene, the hoar frost cast a frozen mantle. He walked along the streets in the middle of the road rather than under the low colonnades. He came to the piazza which contained the bar owned by Tonna’s niece and turned back into the alleyways. It was there that he came upon Melegari’s shop, where Barigazzi had told him the old communists of the town gathered around the bust of Stalin. The front was no more than a grey metal shutter with a faded sign above it: shoemaker. He looked up to see a couple of windows with the shutters open.
He took a few steps and turned back to look once again at those windows which seemed to him like the staring eyes of a corpse. He was still puzzling over that peculiarity when he realized he had reached his own car parked in front of the Italia, and he understood. Melegari had not gone home. When they disembarked from the magano, they had been convinced they would find the town deserted. The two men had left their friend in the cottage, but they had then noticed the commissario’s car which was easily visible from the elevated roadway. At that point, Melegari and his friend must have suspected something was up and had not come back to their houses — an old precaution from their activist days when they had clashes with the police.
Once home, he managed only a couple of hours’ sleep. All he felt was a kind of grim determination. The light of the late autumn dawn was as faint as at night-time, but the cold was more intense.
Things were already on the move in the town. Some lights could be glimpsed through the still-closed shutters, and shopkeepers were beginning to unload merchandise from vans. The lights were on in the newsagent’s, and as he passed, Soneri glanced at the hoardings:
MURDER ON THE PO
ANTEO TONNA KILLED BY TRAFFICKERS
He decided against buying the newspaper. He did not want to begin the day in low spirits.
He parked in an out-of-the-way spot and walked towards the jetty. He climbed over the embankment and came back down into the yard. Over the water, the clear glow of a timid dawn began to appear. He passed the cottages and walked straight over to the moorings. The space occupied by the magano was empty and the hawsers had been thrown on to the coping stones as on the day before. The commissario was disappointed and even duped, but at least he knew that the men sensed they were being watched. They had accepted their parts and were performing their assigned roles.
He wandered among the cottages, his path taking him along the avenue between on one side the entrances to the dwellings and on the other the slope at the bottom of which the river flowed. In the ashen light, he gazed at various constructions which had been thrown together with cheap, leftover materials, strange pieces of architecture with the common feature that they were all built on stilts to keep them above the water. All around lay old boats, wheels of farm carts and barbecues for the summer. He examined them one by one until he came to a detail which attracted his attention: two footsteps imprinted on the thin layer of hoar frost which had settled the night before on the avenue alongside one of those raised dwellings, footsteps which stopped abruptly near the road.
The commissario reflected on this and when he looked up at the embankment he noticed that the cottage was one of those which was invisible from where he had been standing the evening before. He went back to examine more closely those solitary footprints which came to a stop at an invisible wall. He walked along the path and climbed the steps to the upper level. A covered balcony ran round the perimeter of the dwelling, and from there on a summer evening, provided the observer used a good insecticide, the view of the Po must have had a certain charm. He tried to peer between the cracks in the shutters, but he could see only darkness within. However, he felt a draught coming from somewhere, a sign that the windows had not been closed.
It was not difficult to undo the catch. As he had anticipated, he saw before him a room where the plants had been brought in to shelter them from the frost, an oleander, geraniums and a lemon bush half covered in cellophane. The commissario breathed in the dust-filled air, while spiders’ webs clung to his face. He opened the door in the room and found himself in a corridor. His torch lit up a row of boots and a single shelf above which there was a mirror. He pressed the light switch and there appeared walls abandoned to the damp, with various doors opening off them. The one directly facing Soneri led into a kitchen which contained everything needed to prepare a meal. A calendar open at the month of September was hanging from a hook, and on the other side there were doors giving on to first a bathroom and then two bedrooms, one of which contained a perfectly made double bed which gave off an odour of camphor, while in the centre of the second stood a camp bed and beside it an electric heater.
Soneri approached the heater with all the caution of a bomb-disposal expert. It was still plugged in, but it was switched off. It was warmer in that room and everything led him to suppose that it had been occupied until a short time before, but the occupant could not have slept for long, four or five hours at the most. He examined every corner of the room. There were no more than odds and ends, a few things left over from the summer, a couple of magazines and assorted objects stuffed into a cupboard without order or neatness. Only one thing appeared to have been left there recently, a box of pills for high blood pressure. He opened it, but there was nothing inside.
He went back into the corridor and saw that the exit had been closed but not bolted. Whoever had gone out last had simply pulled the door to behind him, as did Soneri. He closed the shutters from the inside of the room with the plants and went out through the main door. When he was at the bottom of the stairs, he made his way towards the road by the shortest path, but it was then that he came across the footprints once more. If he were to continue in the same direction, he was bound to leave his own prints, because the wind had caused the hoar frost to cover the pathway. Unthinkingly, he had done what the person in the house the night before had done, but whoever it was must have noticed he was leaving traces and had turned back on his steps, picking his way between the stilts beneath the house towards a point in the driveway untouched by the hoar frost. But in the dark he had failed to notice a couple of footprints.
On the street, Soneri lit his cigar and tried to put these facts into some kind of order. Someone was living in hiding here but had been able to move about the Po with the complicity of a circle of orthodox communists who had remained faithful to Stalin. All this after the murder of two old Fascists. It might still have been 1946…
From the yard he noticed the figure of Barigazzi going down to check the stakes. He followed the old man as he set about his work. When he came up behind him, Barigazzi spun round and stared at him, a quizzical expression on his face.
“If it goes on like this,” Soneri said, pointing to the water, “even the fish are going to have a hard job of it.”
“The water is very low,” Barigazzi said, as though he had expected a different kind of question.
They walked along, leaving footprints side by side in the muddy sand just above the waterline.
“Whose is the third cottage along from the mooring berths?”
“It’s Vaeven’s,” he said with a sigh that conceded he had known the commissario would get to that point.
They went back up towards the beacon. Soneri patiently followed Barigazzi who seemed in a state of resignation. The partisans, like the Kite in those days in 1944, must have walked in the same way as they were led to the wall. When they reached the front of the boat club, the old man walked straight ahead up to the elevated roadway. The commissario caught up with him, both still lost in their own thoughts.
When they were in sight of the monument, Barigazzi stopped and turned to Soneri, evidently angry. “Look, I’ve got nothing to do with them. To my mind they’re all mad, with Stalin and all those meetings
…”
“Stalin has nothing to do with it. They’re threatening you because of the registers,” Soneri said after a brief pause.
“What really upsets them is the business with the diesel,” Barigazzi said in a voice two tones below his normal speech. “They’re making illegal use of agricultural oil because it costs less. If too many trips appeared on the register, the police would check the files with the fuel records and might start wondering how they covered such distances with so little naphtha.”
The explanation was plausible. After all, the magano was registered in the name of a co-operative of fishermen.
“There are other illegal immigrants apart from the ones Tonna was transporting,” the commissario said.
Barigazzi walked with his head down, and looked up only when the oratory which Anteo had been visiting almost every week in recent times emerged from the mist. Its darker shadow in the surrounding greyness brought them to a halt, and without Soneri’s having applied any more pressure, the old man seemed to feel his back was against the wall.
“Do you think I don’t know that? But I don’t know what they’re really up to. They’re hardly going to come and explain it all to me.”
“Melegari frightens you. I recognized as much that time he came to the clubhouse and saw me there.”
“There are some people who can make themselves clear without issuing threats. They go about their own business, but they know that I know who they are.”
“And yet they’re all old now,” the commissario murmured.
Barigazzi walked around the tiny chapel, glancing in at the little altar where the flame of the sanctuary lamp was flickering. Behind the chapel, in a sheltered corner and by a kind of apse, a rosemary plant was growing.
The old man plucked off a sprig, rubbed the herbs into the palm of his hand and smelled it. “A little miracle,” he said. “Next to the river, with these winters and fog six months a year…and yet it survives. The walls of the oratory protect it from the north and east winds, and the embankment from the rains from the west. The only air which gets in is the gentle wind from the south. Ten metres away, it would be killed off by the frost, but here it can live.”
There was some implication, lost to Soneri, in Barigazzi’s words. Soneri did as the old man had done and inhaled the scent. In the misty frost which suppressed all smells, he could detect an aroma of springtime.
“It’s the only green thing which has remained,” Barigazzi said.
The hoar frost had not reached that spot, and nor had the waters which gushed through the coypu burrows in times of flood. The plant was sheltered just as Barigazzi had explained.
“There are certain spots not even winter can reach,” he said. “And the weather, I really mean the seasons, seem to stop and merge into one.”
The commissario nodded absent-mindedly, both of them focusing on the rosemary. There was nothing else to look at now that the frost-whitened herb had the colour of the mist itself.
“Did Tonna take care of it?”
Barigazzi stared at him with eyes made watery by the cold. “It needed more than one man. He came only once a week, more for San Matteo than for anything else,” he said, nodding towards the entrance through which the statue of the saint could be seen.
“He had turned religious in his latter years…”
The old man gave the faintest of smiles in which cynicism and wisdom could both be read. “He was preparing himself for death.”
“Not everybody gets that chance.”
Barigazzi picked up the allusion. “No, they don’t. When you are young, you live thinking only of your body. When you’re old, you dedicate your time to your soul. At least the communists have remained consistent. They denied God when they were young and they go on denying him now that they’re old.”
“It was not only old age that was a threat for him,” the commissario said. “And recently the danger was anything but undefined.”
“Some things you know better than me. Like all those journeys. I know the magano sets sail and arrives back at the strangest of times, but as to what they’re doing… The river gives and the river takes, and around here that’s all there is to it. It gives you what you need to live and then takes your life. The same water which gives you food to eat also leaves you starving. People move away from the river and then come back to it, and those who live on its banks have no choice.”
What he said still had about it some veiled allusion, sufficient to leave Soneri disconcerted. He seemed to be listening to a sermon from an old priest in a country parish giving a commentary on the Scriptures, the same source, after all, that Barigazzi must have learned from.
In that sort of greenhouse where the rosemary grew, even the grass seemed more green and more lush. Was that why Barigazzi had brought him there? To make him understand that there were particular conditions there, impossible to reproduce elsewhere? And therefore in the town too…in a bend of the river Po, communists still faithful to Stalin and hard-line Fascists could survive, just as the rosemary could survive between the walls and the embankment?
The old man turned to move away from that protective shell and face the frost again.
“At this rate,” he said, “the inlets of stagnant water will freeze over, and when it turns mild again, sheets of ice will break loose and the hulls of the boats will be at risk.”
“That will be when the magano will have to put in somewhere or other,” Soneri said.
“And when that happens, you’ll get to know the whole crew.”