Arico received him as usual in the first-floor office overlooking the embankment. The telephone rang continually with calls from journalists eager for news of developments in the case of “The Murder on the Po”. Finally he got up to shout an order down the stairwell to the officer on duty on the ground floor: “Don’t put anyone else through: I’m out.” He went back to his desk, giving the heater a kick as he passed. The Po valley climate was getting him down. “This boat is like a stray dog,” he said. “Every single port from Parpanese to San Benedetto knows about it, but its draft allows it to put in anywhere it chooses along the banks of the river. It travels with no cargo and seems not to do much fishing.”
“Have you got all the moorings under surveillance?”
“How could I? I don’t have enough men. I’ve mobilized all the stations along the river, but I can’t call them all out. We’ve put all the moorings downstream from Pavia to Piacenza under surveillance on alternate days: Chignolo, Corte Sant’Andrea and Somaglia, as well as Mortizza, Caorso, San Nazzaro, Isola Serafini, Monticelli, Castelvetro
…but these people move under cover of darkness. To have the least idea where they were, you’d have to attach a motorboat to their stern.”
“Do they know they’re being watched?” Soneri had decided to ignore the maresciallo’s histrionics.
“I assume so. It’s not that they’ve caught sight of uniforms, but my men have called at every boat club along the banks. And” — he added, with an eloquent gesture of one hand — “they all know each other.”
“Does the boat moor for long outside Torricella?”
“No. Sometimes it stays overnight at some port or other in the district near Reggio or Mantua, but in general it goes back home.”
“Is it your view that they’re in the same business as Tonna?”
“Who can say one way or the other?” the maresciallo said, with some vehemence. “We’re not talking big numbers, more a question of selected trips. These people are smart. They can draw alongside, embark and disembark at will. They know the river better than they know their own wives.”
Soneri could not restrain a sly smile, and Arico noticed it. All that attention in the press, a couple of appearances on the television and the praise from the magistrates had convinced the maresciallo that he had the chance of a lifetime. Perhaps he was dreaming of promotion and of going back to Sicily, to those lemon groves he could not get out of his head.
“Arico,” the commissario said, mindful of the sensitivities of his colleague, “our inquiries are proceeding in parallel, so we can give each other a hand. If you can keep the river under surveillance and keep a record of the movements of the magano, this will be useful both to yourself and to me.”
The maresciallo thought it over. He was not an ungrateful man, and he knew that if the inquiries were to lead to his promotion, it would be down to Soneri. “I’ll keep you informed,” he said, “I’ll send off the telex today requesting a higher level of surveillance.”
The cold was even more intense. The thermometer outside the pharmacy registered a sub-zero temperature. There was an east wind over the plain, blowing upstream and slowing even further the river which was already sluggish with the drop in water level. Soneri walked in the direction of the port, crossing the avenue lined with cottages and heading down to the moorings. The level had dropped again, and on what must have been the riverbed he noticed the skeletons of trees dragged down after decades of flooding from the Alpine valleys to the sands of the Po. Squads of scavengers and of the merely curious had begun making their way up and down the banks in search of any strange objects emerging after long years under the water.
In the boat club, Ghezzi was listening to the radio. At Pomponesca a barge from Rovigo — apparently using old charts — had run aground, and along the Luzzara shoreline a sheet of ice had begun to form in a bend exposed to the winds from the Balkans.
“It’s starting,” Ghezzi said. “And tonight if the cold gets any worse…”
“Will the port freeze over as well?” Soneri asked him.
“I’m afraid so, but the boats are all ashore.”
“Apart from the magano belonging to Dinon and Vaeven.”
Ghezzi said only, “I suppose so,” immediately dropping the subject as though they had trespassed on forbidden ground.
“What would happen to a craft like that if it were trapped in the ice?”
“It’s pretty robust, but not sufficiently so to break through thick ice.”
“So it would have to put in somewhere.”
“They’ll all have to put in if it goes on like this. But more than anything else, they’ll be laid up afterwards.”
“After what?”
“When the temperature goes back up. The river will become impassable, a mass of ice floes that can cut like blades. It’ll take days for the last of them to get to the mouth of the river.”
It occurred to the commissario that if the magano was going to become unusable, Melegari would already have worked out some safe haven. Being a man of the river, he was bound to be aware of the consequences of the freeze. There was only one master in the whole business, and that was the river itself. It had concealed Tonna, had managed the drift of the barge and now, by withdrawing its freezing waters, it was upsetting long-established customs along its length and breadth. The men who inhabited the riverbanks were compelled to adapt to its whims as to a sovereign, so now the magano must be in the act of surrendering and retreating to dry land.
“The ice will be here by nightfall. The moorings at Stagno and Torricella on the right bank are exposed to the north-east,” Ghezzi advised anyone who would listen.
Barigazzi came in with a worried expression. “Explain to him that I don’t have the data. Someone pulled up my stake,” he said, pointing to the radio and at some unspecified interlocutor. “All these folk tramping up and down the riverbanks…” he added, uttering an oath as he hung his overcoat on a hook.
“If the river freezes over, they’ll be walking on the waters as well,” Soneri said.
“That won’t happen. I’ve seen it covered only twice in my life, and you need a bitter cold like this every day for a fortnight.”
The radio broke in with its update on the freeze. It seemed that ice was forming all along the Emilia side, where the shore was more exposed to the winds from the north-east.
“A wicked beast,” Barigazzi said. “It starts off on the still water and then advances slowly on all fronts. Gradually it’ll sink its grip into the riverbed. They’ll need to move if they’re to get all the boats on to dry land. Wood and ice don’t go well together.”
“There’s one missing here at the port,” the commissario said.
The others made no reply. Ghezzi pretended to be adjusting the radio, and Barigazzi got up to look across the river. He turned to face them and in an effort to lower the tension which had suddenly built up, he announced: “If it was up to me, I’d go at full speed. Unless they’ve already decided to leave the magano at some other port.”
“Is there any way of checking?” Soneri asked Ghezzi.
Ghezzi picked up the microphone, pressed a few buttons and sent out a request for information. A few moments later, the replies began to come in. It appeared the boat had not put in at any of the ports.
“Would you keep on sailing in freezing weather like this?” Soneri said.
The old boatman shrugged. “They’ve still got a bit of time. There’s one mooring after another and they know the river well.”
Soneri turned to listen to the news on the radio. According to the bulletins, the temperature was almost ten degrees below zero everywhere.
“Like a refrigerator,” Ghezzi muttered.
At Bocca d’Enzo, they had caught a silure weighing ninety kilos, and the lucky angler was now recounting the various stages involved as though he were the guest on a real radio programme.
“He’ll sell it to the Chinese; they’re keener on silure than on ordinary fish like chub,” Soneri heard Barigazzi say as he left the club. The cold had not lifted. If the magano was to make it back, it would have to be that evening. He would be there waiting for them. To keep the cold at bay, he had equipped himself with supplies of parmesan shavings from Il Sordo.
Out in the yard, he was seized by an unfamiliar longing for company. He felt that the whole business was now coming into the final straight, like the freeze taking hold of the river bit by bit. At that very moment, the strains of “Aida” began to ring out and he saw it was Angela.
“Ah, so you haven’t been sucked under by a whirlpool,” she said.
“I’ll never forgive myself for having disappointed you,” Soneri said, feeling overwhelmed by loneliness.
“There are so many things for which you need forgiveness, but I won’t go into them now because they’re nearly all un-pardonable.”
“I know. But it makes sense to do things on a grand scale, especially with women. That way they feel sorry for you.”
“Don’t get carried away with yourself, and don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what day it is today.”
Soneri had indeed forgotten their anniversary. One morning many years previously, on a day every bit as cold as today with the same frost clinging to the hedgerows, Angela had appeared quite suddenly, framed by hawthorn. He had been taken by her no-nonsense but beguiling manner, which in some odd way resembled the aroma of his cigar. It had all started there…
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but these inquiries…”
He heard a sigh. “What have the inquiries got to do with it? It’s just that you and I are one year older, that’s all there is to it.”
Before he had the chance to reply, he heard the telephone cut out. Angela’s tone of pain and hopelessness lingered in his ears and he called her back, but the telephone was left to ring out and he imagined her throwing herself on to the bed, in tears. He knew she was capable of that. Her tough shell disguised a vulnerable and tender heart.
With his mind occupied by this distraction, Soneri found he had walked the length of the elevated road, beyond the descent that would have taken him into the town. He only realized how far he had gone when he drew abreast of the monument to the partisans.
The frost had made the floodplain rock hard underfoot and the undergrowth bristling and sharp-edged. He made his way down the embankment and when he was in front of the small monument, he noticed that someone had tied a bouquet of roses around it. The blooms were already fading in the cold, but that spot was assuming some indecipherable significance. Three partisans and much later one old Fascist had perished there, perhaps the Fascist who had been in command at the battle and was responsible for the slaughter. The story had taken a strange turn, one not easy to comprehend.
He climbed back up to the road, wondering who the roses were for. Probably for the partisans, but who could have put them there? There would have been roses on the monument on April 25, for as long as there was some old person determined not to forget.
The commissario hurried into Il Sordo and ate his fill of spalla cotta, salame and culatello. He was going to need a lot of energy that night. He called Angela again, but to no avail. Back on the street, the wind cut through him as it went whistling through the colonnades. He crossed the road, leaving footprints on the frosty surface, came on to the piazza and then turned into the back lanes, passing in front of Melegari’s house, where the shutters were still open. When he was in sight of the Italia, a form emerged from the shadows and barred his way.
“How on earth did you manage to find me?”
“All anyone has to do is hang about near an osteria and sooner or later you’ll turn up,” Angela said.
The commissario looked at her with great delight. She was looking very pretty and he was glad to see her, but this thought was followed by the realization that that night he had a great deal of work to do.
“I can’t let up this evening,” he said, looking at her in the hope of seeing some sign of understanding.
“What makes you think I would have anything to do with men that want to let up?” she said, coming up close to him.
A few moments later, Soneri found himself leading her along the road in the darkness which had fallen suddenly over the river. They skirted the yard before turning on to the pathway that led to the cottages. When they came to Vaeven’s, he went ahead, taking great care to leave no footprints, and then ushered her up the staircase to the balcony. When they got to the doorway, he told her to wait while he made his way round the back and went in as he had done on the previous occasion. He opened the door for her and invited her in with a little bow: “Delighted to welcome you.”
Angela loved surprises of this sort, and wanted to know all about the house, but halfway through his account, she pushed him into the bedroom which had the heater. Being in the cottage would be more pleasant than lying in wait on the grass slopes of the embankment, and from there the moorings were in clear view. At around eleven o’clock, the commissario began to show signs of impatience as it became clearer that the magano could have put in somewhere else to avoid being caught by the ice, but half an hour later he noticed a light coming steadily upstream in the direction of the riverbank. When it was no more than about ten metres from the quay, it slowed right down. Seconds later, he was aware of a thud, like a bag falling. Soneri kept his eyes on the hawsers curving in the air as they were tossed ashore and on the gangplank being set up between the deck and the landing stage.
A man came ashore and started hauling in the ends of the cables and wrapping them round the bollards. From his build, it had to be Vaeven, as was confirmed for the commissario when he saw the gangplank sag under the weight of Melegari. The two seemed to exchange a few words before setting off along the pathway. Since they were on their own, Soneri wondered where the other man was. He had prepared his plan with Angela. They would hide in the room with the plants and when the mysterious friend of Dinon and Vaeven was safely in bed and under the covers, they would come rapidly into his room and take him by surprise. However, the two men did not stop at the cottage but walked straight on towards the yard, bypassing the embankment and making their way towards the houses. They gave every impression of coming home from an ordinary trip, as relaxed as any two fishermen after a day on the river.
During the night, a light wind got up and for a few hours cleared the clouds from the sky, allowing some stars to appear, but with the dawn everything closed in again and the customary grey made its return. Soneri felt like a mole in the darkness. He left the cottage very early to accompany Angela to her car, but got back in time to see Melegari and his companion making their way down to the jetty. The ice had already taken over a strip of water stretching two metres out from the bank and almost surrounding the hull of the vessel. He heard one of the men cursing, then they both set to work to get the winch and crane into action.
The boat freed itself from the ice floe, and a ripping sound like an organ being torn from flesh could be heard as the craft emerged, dripping. Sheets of ice were clinging to the hull, whose underwater sections appeared very dark, very wide and almost flat. This was not a boat which did much fishing. Once the boat was on the land, Melegari slowly climbed the ladder he had placed against its side and walked along the short deck, closing down the hatches which led below. He stretched out a green tarpaulin which he tied down with a rope, leaving only the cabin exposed. From below, Vaeven did the rest.
Soneri had hoped that the ice might have held up the magano and made everything easier, but in fact it had only complicated things. Once again he had to draw on all his resources of patience and keep alert for every tiny signal. These were the virtues of fishermen and of those who lived on the river.
He decided to call Arico for further information on the recorded movements of the boat.
“I’ve given up on sending telexes,” the maresciallo told him. “In this weather, all sailings are suspended. Let’s hope it doesn’t last too long.” And in this wish the commissario detected more exasperation with the cold than enthusiasm for the investigation.
“Did they report the final movements of the magano before the freeze set in?” he said.
“Yes, but in the most random order, with no exact chronology,” Arico replied, in an apologetic tone.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Viadana, Pomponesco, Polesine, Casalmaggiore, Sacca and then Stagno,” he read out. “As for the dates, the one thing certain is that the boat made one last stop at Stagno before being dragged ashore here at Torricella.”
“When did it put in at Stagno?”
“Yesterday at nightfall, around six.”
Soneri thought of the moorings exposed to the east wind and so perhaps at that time about to freeze over, but then he remembered Barigazzi explaining how the tributaries flowed into the stream, delaying the formation of the ice. At Stagno the Taro flowed into the Po. The place was redolent of some symbolism which, without his being able to pin it down precisely, came dimly to the commissario’s mind. He remembered Stagno as being the site of great battles between man and water, of trench warfare fought with sandbags to bar the way to a slime-covered horde which had slipped through breaches in the embankments, of resistance along the unsupported line on the plain, of battles in streets and ditches, of house-to-house fighting. He even recalled a photograph published many years previously in a local paper depicting a group of bewhiskered gentlemen, the habitues of bars and sophisticated topers of the local wines, who demonstrated their spirit of sacrifice by stating that in order to restrain the waters of the Po they would drink every last drop. The headline above the photograph read: THE HEROES OF STAGNO.
He had a mental image of the map showing the course of the river and the towns along its banks. Stagno faced Torricella del Pizzo, and further down the valley Torricella Parmense was more or less opposite Gussola, while Sacca looked out slightly to the east of Casalmaggiore. Between Gussola and Casalmaggiore stood San Quirico — where there were no moorings — but the magano could have drawn into the bank at almost any point along the river. What proof did he have that things had actually gone that way? He reflected for a few moments, smoking the remains of a cigar he had found chewed and abandoned in a pocket of his duffel coat, and concluded that the only reason for thinking that something had occurred at San Quirico was the direction from which the magano had arrived the previous evening before it was winched ashore. If the last leg was Stagno, the boat would have taken advantage of the current from the west. In fact, it had come in the opposite direction, against the current. He had clearly heard the engine step up a gear turning into the stream and cutting diagonally across the river. It was evidently necessary to add one more stop to the records kept on board.
He switched off his mobile and walked down to the moorings. Without giving a greeting or speaking a word, he stood watching the two men working around the boat which was now resting on a wooden frame holding it about a foot above ground level. Both parties, the commissario and the two boatmen, kept their peace, the latter continuing to work, stepping in front of him without so much as turning in his direction. It seemed as though they were engaged in a competition to see whose nerves would fray first. Soneri calmly smoked, challenging even the freeze which seemed to be crawling along the river. The others kept themselves warm by working on the hull, pulling away lumps of ice.
“Made it just in time?” the commissario finally said.
The pair turned slowly, as though they had just registered a familiar voice behind them.
“It can’t be any fun having to stay out on the open river when the banks are frozen.”
Vaeven shrugged, conveying that the very idea was senseless. Melegari, however, said: “We’re not that stupid.”
“And yet, when you travel about a lot…maybe you don’t always realize that in a few hours…you yourselves, for instance, when you got back, a layer of ice a finger thick was already covering the two metres just out from the jetty.”
The two men stared at each other.
“It’s worse here than elsewhere. There’s more air,” Melegari said.
“Certainly,” Soneri said, “and when you’re away for days on end, it’s difficult to keep abreast of what is going on. The Po is a long river.”
Dinon stopped his scraping and drew himself up to his full height to appear even more imposing. He managed, in spite of the obvious provocations, to appear unruffled, as did the commissario, who seemed only to be relishing his cigar as if what happened on the river was no concern of his.
“I’ve already told you we don’t appreciate this line of questioning from policemen,” Melegari replied. “It’s not going to get to us. Tell us what it is you want to know and let’s get it over with.”
Soneri looked him up and down, openly defying him and then, after pausing a few more seconds to let the other man see how unaffected he was by Melegari’s aggression, he said: “Where is he?”
“Who?”
“You know perfectly well. Stop playing the fool.”
The commissario’s tone was so peremptory that Melegari was momentarily caught off balance.
“We wouldn’t like you to entertain any half-baked ideas about us,” he said finally, lowering the tone of his voice in a way that was vaguely menacing. “You know that we’re activists, don’t you? Well then, you must also be aware that comrades come from all over Italy to visit, to get an understanding of our situation and to talk politics. Is there anything illegal in us giving them hospitality and taking them out for a cruise on the Po?”
“There could be if all this takes place in a town where an old Fascist officer, who was also passionate about the river and about navigating it, happens to have been murdered. But that’s not certain,” Soneri said, leaving his words hanging in the air.
“You people in the police,” Dinon came back at him with contempt in his voice. “You always suspect us. The moment there’s any mention of Reds, you have a rush of blood to the head.”
The commissario waved them both away, but then, after a longer pause, said: “One way or the other, I’m of the opinion that politics are involved with this business. From a time when politics could still cause a rush of blood to the head.”
He turned away without saying good-bye, and walked towards the boat club. Halfway along the path, he rummaged in his pockets to find a light. But instead of the matches, he came out with a dirty box, the container for the hypertension pills he had found in the drawer. He had had no idea what to do with such a slender clue, but inside the box there was a receipt issued twenty days previously by a chemist in Casalmaggiore.
A mere shadow of a clue, but it was the best he had.
The chemist was an elderly man, with a large handlebar moustache and two tufts of hair above his ears. The shop was narrow and well laid out, with coloured boxes set out on the shelves in such a way as to look like a mosaic.
The man examined the box, turning it over several times before peering at the receipt. “It’s a very common product,” he said, as his daughter, a woman in her thirties, came over to have a look.
“I would imagine you know your usual clients. The ones with high blood pressure, I mean. Apart from them, is there anyone that stands out? A tubby, elderly man with a shuffling walk, a man who drags his feet?” the commissario said, trying to be helpful.
“It could be the man who came in without a prescription,” the daughter remembered.
The chemist concentrated for a moment, then realization dawned. Soneri knew that chemists have good memories; with all those drugs with difficult names to keep them in training.
“An oldish man, yes,” he said, half shutting his eyes as though to focus. “With a way of dragging his feet. He was after some product which is no longer on sale, and he didn’t have a prescription.”
“And you gave him this?” Soneri said, holding up the empty box.
The chemist shook his head. “We cannot sell drugs like that without a doctor’s prescription.”
“So what did you do?”
“He went off and came back that same afternoon with a prescription from Professor Gandolfi, who used to be a surgeon. He lives round the back,” he said, indicating with his thumb some area beyond his shoulder. “He took four boxes so as not to run out.”
“Was there anyone with him?”
“No, he was on his own.”
“Did he have a foreign accent?”
“Anything but! He spoke in a thick dialect.”
Soneri made for the door, but when he had his hand on the handle, another question occurred to him.
“Do you know Professor Gandolfi?”
“Everybody in Casalmaggiore knows the professor.”
“What are his politics?”
Father and daughter exchanged glances, wondering at the point of the question, before the daughter, with an abruptness which might have been taken for scorn, said: “At the university, he was known as the Red Baron.”
Her father gave her a reproachful look in which Soneri read the reluctance of the trader to voice a judgment.
Professor Gandolfi lived in a most elegant villa, which appeared to have been only recently restored. It had a definite air of local nobility. He no longer practised in a hospital, and since his retirement had limited himself to making private visits to elderly, needy patients and to some impoverished comrades sent to him by the Party.
“I work in the voluntary sector,” he joked. “For people who cannot afford the fat fees demanded by my more grasping colleagues,” he added, in a more serious tone.
He was of little use to Soneri, who had no way of establishing whether he was sincere or merely a gifted liar. He explained that Melegari had asked for a prescription for a drug for high blood pressure and that he had written it out without giving much thought to the matter, since he knew that Dinon suffered from hypertension.
“He eats and drinks too much,” he said.
The commissario got up, taking a good look at the professor as he did so, but he could not make him out. He was well dressed and lived in a house furnished with taste. In the courtyard below, Soneri had noted a big Mercedes with a recent number plate. As he opened the gate, he thought how much he had always disliked Mercedes communists, for whom being left-wing was no more than a snobbish affectation.
Walking along with his cigar in his mouth, he became aware of a restlessness, a bothersome itch like a nettle sting all over his arm. He felt an old feeling hovering over him but he could not identify what it was. It occurred to him that he was like a hunting dog with the scent of game in his nostrils, but who has no idea which direction to take because the same smells are all around him. Perhaps that was why he set off towards San Quirico. Certain stray thoughts had taken possession of his mind. He sat at the wheel of his car with no real intention of driving off, but then, mechanically, he started the engine and turned on to a side road, more a makeshift track in the countryside, which veered away from the embankment and the river. He had not gone far before “Aida” rang out and he had to stop in a clearing where the grey curtain of the mist had lifted a little.
“Do you remember Maria of the sands?” It was Arico, sounding unduly serious.
“Of course. Anteo Tonna’s woman.”
“Something odd has occurred. Last night, somebody tried to force the window on the ground floor in the hospice where she now is. Fortunately, the window bars did their job.”
“Were they after her?” Soneri said. He knew the reply in advance.
“In my view, yes, but they didn’t get very far. They gave up, partly because the grille was strong enough and partly because one of the night nurses looked out of the upper floor.”
“Did they see anything?”
“Only a shadow. But we found footprints in the frost. A man with large feet.”
In the commissario’s head various ideas formed, superimposing themselves on those which were already there and reinforcing them. A lorry narrowly missed him as he was coming out of the clearing where he had stopped. For a few seconds, with no roadside verge to keep him right, he lost his bearings, and when he got back on to the road he realized it was a different one, a narrower road which cut across the plain, it too heading away from the Po embankment. In the thick fog, it took him some time to realize that, like the other, this road too led to San Quirico. Fate must have been taking him there.
He drove around a dozen or so houses sunk in the clay of the Plain, before finally making out the veranda of the old man’s home. From the half-closed garden gate, he saw him behind the windows, staring into the grey emptiness ahead of him, still crouched over his walking stick. When Soneri was no more than a few feet away, the old man gave a start and began searching him out, turning his eyes this way and that, like a torch. Soneri spoke, allowing the man to locate him and to calm himself. On this occasion, he had his legs wrapped in a blanket and had a soft hat on his head.
“Is it iced over already?” he said straight off, avid for news.
“Yes, around the riverbanks.”
“Tonight it will get thicker and will reach a few metres further out. They’re all blocked, aren’t they?”
“For normal boats, there’s no way they can sail,” Soneri said.
The old man looked disappointed. He would rather have been on the banks to see for himself the Po turn to ice, but even if they had taken him there, he would not have been able to see a thing.
“You’ve been down?”
“I have.”
The man remained closed in a painful silence for a moment or two, then said: “It’s been a good twenty years since it iced over.”
His wife appeared at the doorway, looked over in the direction of the veranda and then, recognizing Soneri, withdrew.
“The last time it happened,” he started up again, “I was still out and about with my boat.”
He seemed on the point of giving way to the onset of melancholy, but then he stared keenly at the fog outside with an urgency which continued to surprise Soneri. At that point, a car could be heard passing beyond the garden, beyond the dark spot that was all that could be seen of the hedge. The old man raised a hand and pointed to some imprecise spot among the white wisps of mist floating about. Soneri remained silent until that gesture pregnant with meaning found expression in words.
“That…that noise,” he repeated, like a man with a stutter. “I’ve never heard it before.”
“I thought you were a bit hard of hearing,” the commissario said, taken aback.
“I can make out certain noises very clearly and others less so. The doorbell, for example.”
“But you were very sure about that one?” Soneri insisted.
“Yes, it’s new. Last night and then now. I know the sound of all the cars from around here, and I can tell you that one is new.”
“A foreigner?”
“There have never been any here.”
“Could one of your neighbours have changed cars?”
“There are only old folk with no licence here.”
“A relative…”
The old man shook his head. “Nobody comes here on weekdays. Not in this season…only the baker or door-to-door salesmen.”
Something unusual about the sound had made a deep impression on the old man, and it was now beginning to intrigue the commissario as well.
“When it comes to engines, I know what I’m talking about,” the old man said, in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “On the river, I could tell who was coming and going from the pitch of the outboard motor, long before they were in sight. Sometimes I would greet another craft as it passed without my even seeing the outline of its hull.”
They stood in silence, broken by Soneri saying: “Have you heard other unusual noises lately?”
“No, there’s never anything out of the ordinary here. I could draw up a list of all the noises you hear by day and by night. I don’t sleep much. I live in darkness nowadays.”
“Who could it be?” the commissario said, thinking aloud.
The old man stretched out his arms. “Sometimes people go off the road in the fog and end up in this God-forsaken place, but that never happens twice in a row. The second time, they must be coming here deliberately.”
The commissario thought back to the road: a narrow, raised track running from the main road and ending at San Quirico. Someone must have known his way to one of the summer residences scattered here and there in that tangle of a village, but it could not have been, in the old man’s view, someone who came regularly. Soneri walked along the path to the road on the other side of the hedge where the car had passed. On the thin white of the frost, he saw the treads left by the tyres and followed them. They led to a low villa, with chubby, plaster-cast angels in the garden. The house seemed completely shut up. The lower part of the door was even barred with a metal guard. At the side of the house, under an overhanging roof, a camper van had been parked.
Soneri made his way back, being careful to tread on patches of the roadway free of frost to avoid leaving any footprints. He was back in front of the house with the veranda when his mobile struck up with its laboured version of the triumphal march.
“Commissario, the questore asked me where you were.” Juvara.
“And it was you he asked?” Soneri said, with some annoyance.
“He said he’d been trying to reach you himself, but he always found your mobile switched off.”
“What does he want?”
“He’s upset because he’s found out that you knew about the illegal traffickers and the inquiry has ended up in the hands of the carabinieri. And he doesn’t understand why you’re still out on the Po instead of being at your desk. He even asked if you were away on your holidays.”
“Tell him that tomorrow or the day after there will be developments on the Tonna case,” Soneri cut him short. When he put his mobile back in his pocket, he was amazed at the self-possession with which he had spoken.
“Who’s the owner of that low-roofed villa with the statues of the angels in the garden?” he asked the old man who had heard him return.
“The Ghiretti family. The sons and daughters live in Milan, but the older members of the family live in Cremona. They come here three times a year.”
“There’s a camper van under the shelter. Would that belong to the family?”
“A diesel? The car that went along the road a short while ago was a diesel.”
“I think so, but it’s been there a while.”
“Ah then, I don’t know. I don’t think it belongs to the family. They must have rented the place to someone or other.”
“The car, the one you heard, finished up there at the same house.”
The old man stopped to think things over, but then repeated several times: “Strange, all very strange, it seems strange…”
The commissario went to stand beside him. “When exactly did you hear the car last night?”
“It was late, maybe eleven o’clock.”
Soneri wrote out in large print the number of his mobile and handed it to the old man.
“Tell your wife to call me the moment she hears the car get back. It’s very important.”
The old man clutched the paper and nodded.
By now he should know the road, Soneri thought, but it was not easy in the fog, and perhaps he would have to return to San Quirico later that night.
It was around 8.00 when he made his way into Il Sordo and he immediately felt himself enveloped by the atmosphere of warmth and beguiled by the scents from the kitchen. As he passed the open entrance to the cellar, his nostrils were filled with the mildly mildewed aroma of salame hanging from the beams below.
The landlord himself passed among the tables in the imperturbable silence in which he chose to wrap himself, heedless of the powerful strains of “Falstaff” echoing from the salame — coloured walls. When he came to Soneri, he stopped a moment to look closely at him, watching as the commissario rolled his cigar in his lips with a certain voluptuousness. He then picked up the menu, put it in his apron pocket and took out a notepad on which he had written in large letters on a lined sheet of paper: La vecchia.
Soneri was puzzled for a moment. La vecchia: the elderly woman? The old girl? The ageing female? His first thought was of Maria, Maria of the sands, but immediately he stopped himself: it was too easy to be distracted by professional concerns. His host simply wanted to let him know that he had some vecchia al pesto, minced horsemeat flavoured with a peperone sauce. Childhood memories came flooding back, and he nodded enthusiastically. The landlord kept his best dishes for those whom he considered most likely fully to appreciate them. The commissario was now of that company.
The vecchia lived up to every expectation and Soneri nodded gratefully to the landlord who must have cooked it especially for himself and his wife. It was like being invited to his home for dinner. Around 9.00 the osteria began to fill up. Barigazzi and Ghezzi came in, but when they saw the commissario, they took a table at the far side of the room. Soneri, untroubled, turned towards them, staring at them with a look which was also a challenge but at the same time keeping half an eye on the mobile which, unusually for him, he had laid on the table.
To wash down the vecchia, he ordered some Bonarda which bubbled like Fortanina but had more body. The bottle on offer in Il Sordo had so much tannin that it looked like ink. He drank it in little sips to help loosen the powerful mixture of peppers and minced horsemeat which lay heavily on his stomach. All the while he was waiting. He looked at the Christ with folded legs, at the marks of the levels reached by the floods, at the ceiling of the same colour as chopped pork and at the heads of the customers in the room, moving like the spherical blooms of onions blowing in the wind.
The jibe made by his superior, “Is he away on his holidays?”, came back to him. At certain times his job did resemble a holiday, mainly in the periods of inactivity in the course of an investigation when there was nothing to do except wait for something to happen. His was the kind of work which could sometimes be indistinguishable from idleness. His father had never liked his choice of profession. As a good peasant, the man had concluded that “for the most part, you lot do nothing all day long”. Furthermore, he had no taste for all that questioning, that sticking your nose into other people’s affairs…
It was 10.00, and Soneri’s patience was wearing thin. The unceasing hubbub in the osteria was making everything a blur and made him feel as though he were on the point of dropping off. Perhaps the old man had fallen asleep and not heard the car pull up? Or maybe, after all, it had not come?
The landlord reappeared and once again produced his notepad. This time he had written polenta fritta, “fried polenta”, a fresh reminder of childhood days and one Soneri found irresistible. The man must have studied him deeply on the occasions he had eaten there and had calculated his tastes precisely. Even more, he had chosen to serve him with a deliberate slowness which seemed rather in keeping with the skills of a theatre director. Did he know that the waiting time was still likely to be lengthy? By 10.30, some diners began to rise from their tables and move to the door. The principal topic of conversation was the freeze and several of the guests seemed to be leaving the osteria to go down to the riverbanks and check the spread of the ice. Barigazzi, very much the centre of attention, went with them.
The deaf man then tried to communicate with the commissario, using signs the latter could not interpret. Was he referring to the food or to something else? The fried polenta was undoubtedly exceptional and Soneri replied with a sign indicative of deep gratitude, but the landlord displayed some surprise before responding with a brief shake of his head, giving the commissario the impression that there had been some misunderstanding. Shortly afterwards, the landlord came back with a liqueur glass and a large jar of cherries in alcohol. As a final course, it was somewhere between a special treat and a medicine guaranteed against all ailments, but it too brought back memories from other days.
The osteria was almost empty. The only ones left while the last act of “Falstaff” blared out were Soneri, whose glass was almost filled with cherry stones, and the landlord who was seated sideways at the bar, staring into the middle distance. In that pose, he resembled the old man in San Quirico, and the commissario’s thoughts returned to the tedium of waiting when, quite suddenly, everything happened as in a scene in a melodrama. Verdi’s music ended on a long drawn-out sharp and a fortissimo of brasses, sinking the osteria into silence and leaving Soneri and the landlord staring at each other intently. Just as “Falstaff” was replaced by “Aida”, the commissario pressed the answer button, said “hello” and heard a whisper at the other end as the old woman passed the telephone to her husband.
“I’ve heard it,” he said.
Soneri did not speak for some seconds and just as he was about to reply, the old man hung up.
As was his habit, the commissario rose immediately to his feet, and the landlord seemed to understand exactly what he was about to do. He gave a good-bye wave, and the look he received in reply seemed to convey an awareness of what was going on.
Outside the cold was as intense as ever, but the Bonarda countered it quite satisfactorily, filling him with a lucid euphoria indispensable for nights like the one ahead. In the fog, it was as ever a struggle to find the way to San Quirico. The road he had chanced on in the afternoon now seemed impassable in the wall of mist that the bonnet of his car had to plough into. After a while he found himself suspended over the countryside, and for a moment had the impression that he was motoring among the clouds. He crawled along in second gear, his fog lights incapable of picking out the verges, and every curve brought the fear that he was about to plunge down the slope.
He left the car not too far from the old man’s house, thinking of him lying in his bed listening to the sound of the engine being switched off at the roadside, seeing everything in his mind’s eye, as he was now obliged to follow every scene in life. The commissario wondered if the old man had heard his footsteps on the road as he passed under one of the few lamp-posts in San Quirico. He certainly could not have heard him when he almost bumped into the gate of the house opposite the spot where the mysterious car’s tyre marks stopped.
Soneri took out his torch to examine the tracks to make sure they were fresh. The sharp definition left him in no doubt. The old man’s hearing was very keen. The house was as silent as a graveyard. There were no footprints in the pathway leading to the front door, which was still barred by a metal guard to protect it from the damp. The shutters too looked as though they had been closed for some time. He inspected the camper van but there was no sign of any movement, so all that remained was to check the back of the house. It gave on to a kitchen garden with some fruit trees overgrown by creepers. And then he noticed some ten steps leading down to a cellar door.
He took out and cocked his pistol and stood for a few seconds in front of the door, the sound of his knuckles rapping on the wood announcing the beginning of a long night. No-one replied, so he went on knocking again and again until his patience ran out, at which point he took to beating on the door with his open palm, causing it to shake on its hinges.
At last, he heard the sound of footsteps dragging, and in the faint light there appeared before him a stout elderly, bearded, slightly stooped man wearing an expression of tired resignation.
Soneri stepped over the threshold, meeting no resistance from the occupant of the house, who moved to one side, just sufficiently to give the appearance of surrender. The commissario went in, stopping beside a table beneath a flickering bulb. The old man closed the door unhurriedly, as though having welcomed an expected guest, and when Soneri introduced himself, he responded with a simple nod of the head. His demeanour was grave, respectful.
In a dark corner of the room, an electric heater was blowing warm air, while on the other side a bed with a walnut headboard stood out amid the rustic poverty of the greying, rough-plaster walls of the cellar. The commissario sat down and the other did likewise. Seated at the same level, they looked into each other’s eyes. The man, with his long beard and wrinkled skin, called to mind a well-seasoned radicchio, but what most took Soneri aback was the submissiveness he displayed towards him, a submissiveness combined with awareness.
They sat for a few minutes face to face in an unnerving silence. Now that he was able to observe him from close up, it was plain that the old man showed all the signs of hypertension: dark blotches on the cheeks, a bulbous nose the colour of cotecchino, the sheer mass of a body perhaps capable of explosions of rage, even if now he was sitting motionless, waiting. There was no question that waiting was the right tactic, particularly since Soneri was unable to find the words to begin.
“Was all this necessary?” he finally managed to say, realizing as soon as the words were out that they were born more of curiosity than of a line of inquiry. The inquiry was now over, but the sense of strangeness and of deviation from normal codes of behaviour remained. There were occasions, like the one he was living through at that moment, when stripping off the official uniform to assume the guise of the confidant was unavoidable. After all, the old man had no choice and was perhaps not even seeking a way out, as was clear from his state of resignation, in which Soneri perceived a sense of liberation, perhaps even of pride.
“Was it necessary?” he insisted.
The other man swallowed hard, but made no reply, not because he lacked the will to speak but because a pressure in his throat from having too much to say prevented his feelings from finding coherent expression. He had no more idea where to start than did Soneri, and so hesitated for a few seconds before coming out with an introduction dictated more by emotion than by reason. “If you had gone through what I have…”
The pronunciation of the words with a Spanish accent was confirmation enough.
“How many years have you lived in Argentina?”
“Do your own sums. From ’47.”
“A lifetime.”
“True. I lived my life there.”
“Except for your youth.”
The old man wiped his forehead with his right hand and in so doing revealed a forearm with a tattoo of a hammer and sickle. “I’d have been happy to have done without that youth. I have lived two lives. I died and was reborn.”
“Resuscitated,” Soneri corrected him. “You have remained the same person.”
“Unfortunately, a man carries his past on his back. Your blood is diseased by it forever.”
He pronounced these last words more firmly, almost with finality. A rage which had remained undiminished over the decades seemed to exert a profound influence on his thinking.
“The disease still holds sway.”
The old man looked at him with a mixture of amazement and irritation. “Much less now. I have done what I had to do. But if you imagine that that’s enough… I have even asked myself whether it was all worthwhile, seeing that it still has me in its grip… Only time can allow hatred to subside, and my time is almost up. I have only just managed to achieve what I had promised myself for all these years.”
“You should have thought of yourself as well.”
The old man considered that point for a moment, then shrugged. “It was worse for others. If I got away, it was because I did think about myself. I had nothing here. I’d have had to get out whatever happened. I made up my mind after the reprisals against my family.”
The allusion to the reprisals caused Soneri to run over the facts — particularly the encounter between the embankments — in his mind. He looked hard at the old man and noticed a glint in his eyes, as bright as the flash of a short circuit. “That battle on the floodplain made everything clear to me,” he said. “At the beginning, I just could not formulate any hypothesis, because everything came up short against the one fact — the people who had a motive for revenge on the Tonnas were all dead, including you. But when they recounted to me how that battle in the mists had really gone, and when I found out about the disfigured bodies and the missing corpse of that Fascist…at that point I worked out how it might have gone. What I have never managed to resolve is why you, considering that you were officially dead, did not act immediately at the end of the war. After all, many on your side wasted no time in ’46.”
The old man raised his head proudly, but then dropped it just as suddenly with a sigh.
“Do you believe they wouldn’t have found out? I was the man who had the best of all motives for making them pay, and I had the reputation of being a hothead. Some of them already had some inkling
…and anyway, the Party would never have forgiven me. Don’t forget that I had gone to the lengths of disfiguring the body of a comrade, and that they had previously disciplined me when I was in the Garibaldi brigade. Then you’ve got to bear in mind that I had absented myself from the final phases of the fighting and the Resistance. In those days, the Communist Party was highly organized and had kept intact the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica, the partisan network closest to them. I’d been lucky once not to be found out. After the Liberation, I went into hiding for nearly two years with the connivance of some of my comrades who had fallen out with the party. They were the only ones who knew anything. Do you understand now why I was not able to act after April 25? My funeral had even taken place. I went up and down the river, living in the holds of barges or in cabins belonging to people I could trust. As I relived that life in recent weeks, it seemed as though I was reliving my boyhood. Take it from me, if I were still young, if I enjoyed the health I did then, you would never have caught me. I have been on the run all my life.”
“And not a single one of the partisans realized what you were up to? Or perhaps some of them just pretended not to?” asked the commissario.
“I couldn’t say. I had other things on my mind. The episode of the disfigured bodies appeared sinister and ambiguous, but the Fascists got the blame. The same ones who shot my friend, the Kite, not long afterwards. Anyway, it was payback time for them, and they got what they deserved.”
“It took me a long time to work out that this was the key to the whole affair. You had to do it,” said the commissario. “Somebody had to take your place among the dead. So that Fascist who was recorded as missing, the savagery on the bodies of those killed in battle…it was all a set-up. You made it seem an act of hatred, you made them unrecognizable and passed off the Blackshirt as yourself.” Soneri was struggling to understand.
The other man took up the story. “Yes. I had to set to work with my knife. I then picked up a huge rock and smashed it several times on the faces of each one of them until they were a mangled mess. I dressed the Fascist in my clothes before slashing and ripping his skin. I even took a photograph of my mother and put it in his jacket pocket to make the whole thing more credible. I was really sorry to lose that portrait, but I justified it with the thought that it would make it easier to avenge her for what she had been through. The Fascist was the same build as me, and it was all very convincing. Those were not days for faint hearts.”
“Two lives. I can see that this was the only possible solution,” the commissario said. The light flickered on and off. “The others all died before you. The members of your brigade, I mean.”
“I am the last one,” the old man confirmed. “And that was another reason why I felt compelled to do justice for the others…in the name of those of my comrades who were only able to live one life, and a very brief one at that.”
“Has it been on your mind all these years?”
“Always. Each and every morning I went over the plan as though I were to execute it a few hours later. I made contact again with my comrades here, and twice a month they updated me on my intended victims. I lived with the fear that they might die before I had the chance to murder them. I would even have defended them if they had been under threat from anyone else. Maybe that’s a kind of love, like the love you have for rabbits that you tend and look after with the sole intention of having them for dinner once they have been fattened up.”
“Did the idea of forgetting the whole thing, of coming back here and starting over, never cross your mind? After all, nobody could have done anything to you after the amnesty,” Soneri said, lighting another cigar.
“As far as people here were concerned, I was dead. That was true of the Party as well,” the old man said with a shrug. “They would not have looked me straight in the eye, and I would have lived year after year in isolation, a stranger, so I was just as well off being a real stranger elsewhere. Until fifteen years ago, what they took to be my body was buried in the graveyard. Thirty years after my disappearance, they dug it up, but since there was no-one here to pay to have it transferred to the ossuary, all trace of it has been lost. The Party said the records in the National Association for Italian Partisans and the stone on the floodplain were monument enough, so I had no doubt that the one amnesty I would never have received was the one from the Party. As I’ve already said: they had no qualms, they were pitiless.”
“You would have had to explain too many things and mix personal histories with the political struggle,” the commissario said.
“That’s not all. I felt myself still too young to…” He stopped in mid sentence, overcome by conflicting emotions. “Now,” he began again, the words tumbling over each other, “now I’m of an age when I have nothing to lose.”
Soneri peered at him through the bluish smoke which acted as a lens. He was able to feel what the man wanted to express, but not to put it adequately into words. He feared that too direct a question might stem the old man’s flow. The discussion ought not to be an interrogation so much as a series of prompts for a confession and so, lingering over certain details, he raised queries which aimed to strip away the mystery, layer by layer.
“Did you feel any remorse over those boys whose faces you made unrecognizable that day down by the river?”
The old man sighed. “How would you feel after smashing the head of someone you grew up with, someone you had shared your best years with? I knew that I was saying good-bye to all hope of happiness and consigning myself to the loneliness of an existence far from my own home. Do you think I didn’t miss the Po? My dialect? All the time I was away, I always forced myself to think in dialect, but I had nothing left here. I would have been an ordinary emigrant, like so many others. I deluded myself into believing that with a new identity I could be more free, but the desire for revenge never left me.”
“And your life in Argentina?”
“I did what I could to get by, enjoying all that I could enjoy. I didn’t lack for anything, women, the good life, holidays…but when you live like that, you have to be careful not to put down roots, because otherwise the present covers the past and is in its turn, day after day, ground down by boredom.”
“What about your family? Did you ever think of them?”
The old man gave another start, threw his arms in the air and then let them fall heavily on the table in front of him. The bulb began to sway once more and the stagnant smoke was disturbed by the ripples and currents of air.
“My family!” he said sadly, more to himself than to Soneri. “Did I ever think of them? Of course I thought of them, but I thought of them as dead or violated. Ida, the eldest, they dragged her round the back of the house…there were seven of them…the middle sister managed to escape down to the river, but was chased by the Blackshirts. She threw herself in to get away from the bastards, but the current pulled her under. My father tried to save the women in the family…he came out with an axe, but they killed him with one burst of gunfire. The only one that got away was my sister Franca, the youngest of the family. Ida was left distraught and filled with shame and she disappeared. No-one heard from her again. The sister who jumped into the Po was washed up at Boretto and was brought back home on the cart of some travelling puppeteers. My mother died of a broken heart a few months later at her sister’s house, since ours had been burned down.” He had laid both his hands, palms down, on the table, and the two enormous hands seemed like the paws of some wild beast ready to spring. Then he lifted them, clenching them into fists, muttering in a broken voice: “Nothing, nothing left.”
Soneri went on gazing at him, an old man scarred by a deep, incurable wound. As he pondered the condition of those who, like him, had been caught up in violence and had sought in vain all their lives for some escape route, he had no difficulty in locating the kernel of genuine humanity behind a thick cover of hatred. In the wrinkled face he could still detect the trauma of the boy who, with one terrible leap into hatred, had become an adult.
All the while, the commissario felt a powerful need to put the one question that he nevertheless suppressed, afraid that it might yet be premature. He preferred to allow the discussion to drift in the hope that in the account it would slip out. He looked at the old man sunk in memories which had hardened into a fixation many years earlier, and which could not now be loosened. He knew almost everything now, specifically who had killed the Tonnas and what the motive was. In his role as commissario, he could relax and think of the case as closed, but curiosity held him in a tense grip which would give him no respite until it was satisfied.
“Ghinelli, Spartaco Ghinelli,” he said softly, as though the name had been whispered from a dark corner of the cellar.
The old man looked up and peered at him intently. It was his way of offering confirmation.
“Ghinelli,” Soneri repeated, “Argentina must be very beautiful
…did you never think of…”
The other man understood and replied frankly. “No. One of the beautiful things about Argentina is that there’s plenty of space for everyone, and you’re not always treading on other people’s toes. The cities are very big as well, so if you want to lose yourself in them, you can. But I was there only provisionally.”
“Was there never some woman who asked you to start living again?”
“From the moment they came into my life, I removed any illusion they might have had. How could I do otherwise? Every time I thought about it my family came back to mind, and I would have been a coward if I had forgotten. The Fascists would have won. And that Tonna who carried on sailing up and down the river, while on riverbanks on the other side of the world I looked in vain for something similar to what he had… Oh, I wanted a life, that’s true, but I could not erase the past.”
“But they too, the Tonnas, their lives were destroyed. They were never happy,” Soneri said.
“They brought it on themselves,” was Ghinelli’s furious answer. “It was other people’s lives they chose to ruin, our hopes for a more dignified future. The Party gave us that hope, because the priests never gave it to us. With a few exceptions, they too were on the other side.”
“Now the Party too is dead.”
Ghinelli clenched his fists tightly while his face turned a deeper shade of scarlet, but it lasted only seconds before quite suddenly the tension evaporated. “It’s a time of plenty, and people have forgotten the grim days of the past. In an age of prosperity, everybody hates everyone else because egoism springs up everywhere, and nowadays that’s the only foundation of the world. Mark my words, poverty will return and people will seek unity again, but it’ll have nothing to do with me. At the most, I’ll have left an example, and sooner or later someone will follow it.”
The commissario rolled that ambiguous remark around in his head, then asked: “Where you inspired by some example from the past?”
“I killed them with an ice-pick. Does that tell you anything?”
“Trotsky was no Fascist.”
“He was a dangerous visionary. I trust those who describe him in those terms. If we had paid heed to him, they would have massacred us all, each and every one of us.”
Soneri felt as though he was back at the debates he had listened to as a student. These were words he had heard de-claimed thousands of times at assemblies in occupied sports halls and cinemas, and now they left him with a bitter savour of nostalgia and of passion spent amidst the glittering well-being of today. It seemed as though a century of history had gone by, but in fact all that had passed was the brief period separating youth from the present.
When he came back to himself, he saw Ghinelli looking at him intently, communicating thereby his need to retell his story. Soneri then felt entitled to put the question that he had been wanting to ask from the outset.
Before he got the words out, the old man resumed in a new flurry of words. “In what I did, I wanted there to be something symbolic, can you understand that? Something that would leave a mark on people’s minds. It wasn’t only the ice-pick that might make people remember me, nor the act of revenge in itself. I understood that the value of what I was doing was linked to the timing. Revenge more than fifty years later. A crime of the post-war period, left suspended but executed a half-century on.” Ghinelli went on relentlessly, warding off Soneri’s question. “Never mind curiosity about the incident and journalistic tittle-tattle. What matters is the coherence of my act. They’ll say I was mad, but I know that some people will remember me and will hold to an idea that was mine. In times like these, all you can do is keep the flame alive. When the time is right, it will act as a detonator.”
The commissario relit his cigar. “Maybe,” he said dryly, “but the majority will look on it as a crime committed among pathetic old folk.”
“I know,” Ghinelli said sadly, “but I don’t much care.”
Soneri felt there was more to be said. He had an overwhelming sense that besides the politics and the desire for revenge, there was a private motive behind Ghinelli’s flight, and once again the urge to ask the question became strong, but at the crucial moment, he found himself lost for words. What was lacking was the more intimate, the perhaps less noble but infinitely more human side of things. All he could do was whisper, “You have not told me everything.”
The old man once more peered at him with focused menace and deep rage, and this allowed the commissario finally to utter the question, the question he should have asked first, even though he also knew that if he had, he would never have found out what he now knew.
“Why after fifty years?” he said, ignoring the replies he had already been given.
His insistence implicitly meant that he wanted to know all the rest, the factors that now seemed to him the most important of all.
He watched Ghinelli’s face dissolve among its wrinkles into an expression which could produce either laughter or tears. Finally it settled into a bitter, sardonic grin, perhaps one of shame. “Because first I wanted to live,” he said.