The mobile rang while the Alfa was travelling through the mists of the lower Po at the speed of a horse-drawn carriage. This time, Angela’s voice did no violence to his eardrums, and this of itself was sufficient to put him in a state of alarm.
“You need to keep your finger in the hole in the dyke and can’t get away, is that it?”
“I’m doing my level best to get back, but the fog is so thick you could lean your bicycle against it.”
“Don’t worry. If you do get lost, the worst that could happen is that you’d end up in a fast food joint.”
“I’d rather end up in a ditch.”
“Don’t overdo it.”
“I’ll content myself with a glass of Fortanina and some spalla cotta.”
“Poor thing! They’ll hear your tummy rumbling all the way to the Alps. Do you know that Juvara has been searching high and low for you all day?”
“In some areas you can’t get a signal. But how did you know that?”
“I was down at the police station. I’ve been handed a public defence case.”
“When will I see you?”
“Forget it, it’s almost ten o’clock. I don’t like being kept hanging about by men. It’s better the other way round. But if you’d asked me earlier…” she teased, leaving the suggestion hanging in the air.
“I was late because I had to question the men at the boat club. Today I went to the barge where I found a note that said something about a partisan. Perhaps that’s the key to understanding the motive, but it’s all very puzzling.”
“I’ve never been on board a barge. Anyway, if you’re in your office tomorrow, I’ll see you there.”
“Will you be defending anyone I caught?”
“No, calm down. It’s a small-time dealer picked up by the drugs squad.”
“Just as well.”
“Pity. I’d have made you squirm,” she said, mischief in her voice.
As soon as Angela was gone, he dialled Juvara’s number.
“At long last!” the ispettore exclaimed. “I was about to send a search party along the Po.”
Soneri peered into the mist which made it impossible for him to put on any speed. He was afraid he had completely lost his way, not only on the road but in the investigation he was leading. The sensation was heightened as he listened to the words of his assistant: “Nanetti and Alemanni were both looking for you. Nanetti says he has further results from the analysis of the blood found on the windowpane. It doesn’t belong to anyone in the ward.”
“And Alemanni?”
“I think he was after you for the same reason.”
He felt his stomach tighten with the unpleasant sensation of having got it all wrong. He had set off along the Po searching for the ghosts of times past and for a missing man, while in the city that man’s brother had unquestionably been a murder victim. “Did you tell them where I was?”
“Yes,” Juvara said, with a tremble in his voice.
That tone told him all he needed to know and was in its own way more eloquent than any reproach. He had no wish to go on with the conversation. In annoyance, he pressed the accelerator, but then had to step smartly on the brake when the rear lights of a car suddenly loomed out of the darkness ahead of him.
When he got home, he chose to remain in the half dark in his kitchen, smoking his last cigar, his elbows on the table. Before he fell asleep, with the taste of the Fortanina still in his mouth, he remembered that this was the position often assumed by his father.
Alemanni did not detain him for more than a quarter of an hour. He informed him of the outcome of the tests on the broken window with a degree of pedantry worthy of an infant school teacher, which irritated Soneri, but he refrained at least from making comments on the conduct of the investigation. For his part, Soneri made no reference to the magistrate’s earlier scepticism, but on the telephone Nanetti had set out in detail his impressions. The man must have been at least unconscious before being ejected from the window. There was no sign on the windowsill or on the radiator of any struggle, nor were there any fingerprints, a clear indication that he had not grabbed hold of anything or been able to resist. The only sign of any struggle was the indentation on the steel cabinet where there was the imprint of the rubber sole of one of Decimo’s shoes. Furthermore, no-one had heard the thud, nor had they noted any unusual coming or going. Soneri was curious about the way the killer had struck the blow and how he had stunned his victim. Everything had gone smoothly until the impact with the windowpane and the sound of breaking glass. Then the escape through the ordinary hospital exit. The murderer was plainly a cold-blooded individual, so much so that he had moved off without conspicuous rush, merging in with patients and visitors.
“Juvara!” he yelled.
The ispettore arrived as the secretaries were putting forms in front of him for his signature.
“Interrogate the patients and the nurses in the wards frequented by Decimo Tonna,” he said without raising his eyes from the clerical assistant’s index finger as she showed him where his initials were to go. “I want to know all his movements in the last fortnight and anything he was talking about.”
He was now in the grip of an unhealthy frenzy, and only somewhat later, in the peace of the half-deserted Milord, behind the smoke screen of his own cigar, calmed by the prospect of a plate of tortelli stuffed with herbs and ricotta, did he come to recognize that his anxiety was the product of curiosity aroused on the banks of the Po and capable of being satisfied only there. He brought to mind the faces of Barigazzi and the others, with that slightly contemptuous look they had. He was already aware of a pressing urge to return when his mobile rang. He hated having it ring in the middle of a meal, but he had forgotten to turn it off. The few other diners, hearing the strained tones of “Aida”, turned in mild irritation in his direction. He uttered a peremptory “Hello” to silence it.
“Commissario, I’m in a consulting room at the hospital,” Juvara stuttered.
“Have you broken your leg?” Soneri said, finding Juvara’s preambles more and more tiresome.
“No, but the nurses on duty are telling me something I can’t make sense of…”
“What can you not make sense of?” he said, stuffing a whole tortello into his mouth.
“They say that recently Decimo was extremely nervous and would stare suspiciously at everyone who turned up, and that once they saw him rush off when he noticed someone or other walk down the corridor.”
“Did you get any idea who that person might have been?”
“No, nobody remembers. It was only a brief appearance.”
Juvara’s account had distracted his attention from the tortelli, and when he turned back to it, the dish had gone cold. He could not bear butter and cheese once they formed into lumps and lost the warmth of soul acquired in the oven.
Alceste stared at the plate as though he had espied a beetle on it. “It’s what I always say. The sound of the mobile telephone turns good ricotta bad,” was all he said.
By this time, Soneri was in a state of agitation. Juvara’s report had created for him such a melee of competing scenarios that he could have been in a puppeteer’s workshop. So as not to give way to mere conjecture, he got up and made his way to the hospital. He found the ispettore perched on a high stool in the canteen.
“When you get down from your roost, they’ll take you straight off to the treatment room and case you in plaster,” Soneri said, mildly mocking the ispettore’s less than agile figure.
“I’ve been here all morning,” Juvara said, “and I haven’t broken a single bone yet. But something or someone is breaking my balls.”
“It goes with the job. Who else could I annoy if I want to find out about the worries of the townee Tonna?”
“The sister’s name is Luisa. She finishes her shift at two.”
She was a pleasant woman, solid inside and out. “Was what I told your colleague not enough?” she said with a laugh.
She had received him in the off-duty room, where the odour of disinfectant hung heavy in the air.
“Did he seem anxious recently?”
The sister stared at him a few moments before replying.
“I would have said so, yes.”
“What gave you that impression?”
“Normally,” she said, “he stayed the whole morning but in the last couple of days he came and went as though in a state of distress. He spoke less than ever.”
“Did you form any idea of what was on his mind?”
“I asked around. They told me there was some anniversary, some date looming, but they didn’t know what it was for. Not even if that was what was bothering him.”
“They didn’t tell you anything else?”
“No,” the sister said, “I would have preferred to go into it a bit more deeply, but the man who knew most about it died a few days ago.”
“Was there any explanation of all that popping in and out several times a day?”
She stretched out her arms. “He would go away then come back. I don’t know why. I got the impression he felt someone was pursuing him and that he was keeping on the move all the time so as not to be caught up with.”
“Whereas normally, how did he behave?”
“He was much more calm. They’ll have told you that he would stay here until the last patient had left, and sometimes he even waited till we were all leaving the consulting rooms and he would go out with us. We would often find him in the waiting room reading magazines, and it would take the cleaning ladies to persuade him it was time to go. The nursing staff thought of him as one of the family.”
“What did he talk to the patients about?”
“He comforted them, he listened to them and at times took a real interest in them, taking advantage of the fact that the doctors all knew him. There are a lot of elderly folk who come here and they never have anyone to talk to, but with Signor Tonna they were quite at ease.”
“You say he had an anniversary coming up?”
“So it seems, but it might not have had anything to do with him.”
As he took his leave of the sister, the commissario remembered Sartori. He walked along the wards in the direction of the nephrology unit, where he found the man he was looking for half asleep, needles in his arm and the machine buzzing. He appeared even more yellowish and wizened than before, but he turned a tired smile on Soneri.
“Any news?” he said, opening his eyes wide.
“Your friend Decimo didn’t throw himself from the window. He was pushed.”
Sartori, although plainly moved by the news, did not stir. He lay there in silence, staring at the ceiling.
“Is it true that he’s been highly agitated recently? I mean in the last few days,” the commissario said, in an attempt to rouse Sartori from his silence.
He watched as the old man moved his head very slightly in a sign of assent. Then, just as Soneri had resigned himself to not receiving an answer, he made out a feeble voice. “Forgive me, but I am deeply troubled.”
“Did you know that there was some anniversary coming up for him?”
“He had spoken to me about it, but when I tried to discover more, he found a way, as he always did, of avoiding giving an answer to my questions. He was like that. If he didn’t speak of his own accord, there was no way of getting anything out of him.”
“What did he tell you about this anniversary?”
“It was plainly not something he was looking forward to. He referred to it with fear. All he told me was that he had received a letter.”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know. I do know that it had shaken him to the core. He became gloomy. The last time I set eyes on him, he asked if I had noticed any new faces around the ward. I told him that in addition to us long-term cases, there were always new faces in a hospital. I was joking, but he took it the wrong way. He didn’t say anything, he went and sat beside the exit, where he could see anyone coming down the corridor.”
The following day, Tonna had been defenestrated from the General Medical section on the third floor. Everything pointed to the likelihood that someone, perhaps the murderer, had been tailing him from department to department. Soneri was lost in his own train of thought, heedless of Sartori stretched out on his bed, and when he turned back to him, he found he had drifted off to sleep. He got out of the room just in time to avoid waking him with the triumphal march from “Aida”.
“You still away fishing?” Nanetti began.
“You caught me on the hop with that news about the townee Tonna.”
“So you’re feeling pleased with yourself? What kind of face did Alemanni make?”
“He wanted to bawl me out for having gone searching for the river Tonna, but he had to hold back in case I had something up my sleeve.”
“You missed your chance. Never let him get away with a single thing. Anyway, there’s something new about the brother who fell out the window.”
“What?”
“You remember the dent on the cupboard? Well, I can confirm that it came from one of Tonna’s shoes, but it wasn’t a strong blow. The steel is only a couple of millimetres thick, so it doesn’t take much to leave a mark. Then the wound on the head. The doctor said it was caused by a heavy object, such as a club, but one with a pointed tip. More likely, something metal. Between the blow and the fall from the window, no more than two or three seconds elapsed, which is why there was no blood of Tonna’s on the floor or on the windowsill.”
“He was being hunted,” Soneri said, translating his thoughts into words. “Someone had been following him from department to department. Someone who was very smart and discreet, who managed to remain unobserved by everyone. Perhaps the same person who had delivered to him a letter capable of unnerving him.”
“That’s your business, Commissario,” Nanetti cut in.
A short time later, Soneri dialled Juvara’s number. “Have you got Decimo’s file to hand? Look up when he was born. Check his brother’s dates as well.” He heard the ispettore’s keyboard click. Juvara’s silence was eloquent testimony to his astonishment over the request. “In your opinion, was there some anniversary of Decimo’s which could fall on one of the days leading up to his death?”
Juvara sighed, a sign that he had finally understood. “It’s not his birthday, that’s in September. Not the boatman’s either. His is in June.”
“I wish we knew what he was talking about…” the commissario muttered.
“The ward sister was able to report only one thing Tonna had said one of the last times he ate in the department, but she had no idea what he was referring to.”
“What did he say?”
“They were talking about his health, about how he was the healthy one among all those sick people, but for some reason he took it the wrong way, got all upset, started mumbling that perhaps he would soon be going to ‘the angels’. The sister said they all burst out laughing, but later, when she thought about it again, she couldn’t make head nor tail of what he had been on about. Was it that all of our lives hang by a thread? Or something else?”
“And that’s the only detail she can remember?”
“That’s what stuck in her mind. There must be some reason, mustn’t there?”
Soneri said nothing for a few moments. “Has Decimo’s apartment been sealed off?”
“Yes, but if you want to get in, all you have to do is advise the magistrate.”
Decimo Tonna had lived in a block of flats with a faded facade not too far from the hospital. Two rooms and a bathroom, and the all-pervasive smell of rotting food. The coffee pot had been left on the cooker, and the rooms were in a state of some disorder as though Decimo had had to rush off for an appointment. In the bedroom, Soneri’s attention was drawn to the photograph of an elderly couple who must have been his parents and of a young woman, perhaps his niece. On the sideboard stood a picture of him as a young man, in a black shirt.
Soneri opened the drawers and started to go through them. One was filled with bills arranged year by year in an elastic band. The second contained pension documents, medical certificates and receipts. The apartment gave off the idea of a life lived barely above subsistence level. And the objects in the apartment, even if conserved with great care, were shabby. The mirrors, grown dark with age, the discoloured table covers, the threadbare curtains and the damp corners of the walls which were now the colour of a mountain hare, all spoke of poverty borne with dignity.
As he was going through the wardrobe, in which he found pairs of knickerbockers and a black shirt, the ringing of his mobile startled him. He ignored it for a while before answering.
“So whose house have you broken into this time?” Angela wanted to know, picking up on the absence of background noise.
“I’m engaged on a house search.”
“More likely you’re searching up the skirt of some lady, one of those who adore uniforms and men of action.”
“I do not have a uniform, nor do I have any love of action.”
“There’s no doubting that, and no-one knows it better than I do.”
“I’m in the house of Decimo Tonna, and I have not the faintest idea what I’m looking for.”
“What a coincidence! I’m right downstairs!”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I’ve always been able to get round Juvara. Anyway, I’m coming up to join you.”
The news caused him no little anxiety, in part caused by the fear of breaking regulations and in part by the arousal of desire. When Angela appeared before him a few moments later, it was the second which prevailed, and overwhelmingly. She tossed her coat on to a chair with studied nonchalance, approached Soneri and took hold of his collar. In her face, the commissario saw the same excitement which he too felt as he came into contact with his partner’s body.
“Where?” he said, his imagination telling him where it would all end.
“In the living room. I don’t trust sheets that other people have slept in,” she said, casting a glance at the bed in the room they were in.
Soneri got to his feet feeling a little bruised. The excitement had passed, leaving him so relaxed and yielding that it required an effort to recapture the thoughts that had been in his mind before Angela made her appearance. It was she who brought him back to the investigation once they had their clothes on again, “Have you really no idea what you’re looking for?”
“No,” he said, combing his hair. “Maybe a letter containing some kind of threat.”
“A recent threat?”
“I believe so, judging from Decimo’s anxiety in his last couple of days.”
Together they went over every piece of paper in the sideboard. They searched the clothes which seemed to have been worn in the recent past, examined a dressing gown left hanging behind the bedroom door, but they failed to turn up anything of any interest. They went back to the living room and it occurred to Soneri that if Alemanni had had any idea he was in Decimo’s house with a woman, he would have mobilized every policeman in the city.
“There’s nothing here,” he said with unconcealed irritation, sticking the burned-out cigar back in his mouth.
“Either there’s nothing here or else the thing we are looking for has been left in such an obvious place that it hasn’t occurred to us to look there,” Angela said.
He sat down, leaning his elbows on the table and remembered doing the same thing the previous evening in the half-light of his own kitchen. As he grew older, he tended to resemble his father more and more, a thought which made him more mellow. With a touch of nostalgia, he recalled getting up before sunrise on dark mornings in winter to do his homework, and his father greeting him as he picked up his wallet from the porcelain dish on the top of the fridge. He remembered that dish perfectly. It had a picture of the Mole Antonelliana in Turin on it, and was always full of papers. There was a porcelain dish on the fridge in Decimo Tonna’s house too. In it, along with laundry receipts and bus tickets, he found an envelope without stamp or address but which had been torn roughly open and had the words “Decimo Tonna” scrawled on it in blue ink. He opened it and found a sheet of lined paper taken out of a notebook: “57th anniversary”, and underneath, “San Pellegrino section, square E, 3rd row, number 32.”
“Would you feel threatened by a note like this?” Angela wondered aloud.
He had no idea how to reply. The two phrases belonged to a code he could not break, but the reference to the anniversary was unequivocal.
“The Tonna brothers were the object of virulent hatred by many people.”
“Because-” But she could not finish the sentence before he interrupted her.
“Yes, they were Fascists. The boatman in particular must have been involved in some really nasty business down the valley. But these are old stories…”
“Well, all these things can hardly be considered faults nowadays, seeing that ‘that lot’ are back in power.”
“Memory is not completely dead. Along the Po some species survive that are long extinct everywhere else,” Soneri said with bitter irony.
After seeing Angela out, he thought again of the river and the flood. Perhaps the water had now gone down far enough to reveal the rims of the embankments over the floodplain. The case still seemed to him most amenable to solution if it were approached from the riverbanks, always provided that the killing of Decimo and the disappearance of Anteo were linked. But might they not be? He could not fathom Decimo. It seemed that his life had been enclosed in an impenetrable shell. None of his neighbours had had any relationship with him beyond casual greetings. No-one ever stopped to exchange two words with him at a street corner. He did not drop into bars. Decimo’s day consisted of getting up early in the morning, leaving the house and making his way to the hospital where he would spend the whole day talking to patients, moving from one ward to another. He was given lunch and dinner by the orderlies, who were so used to seeing him around that they regarded him as a relative or a carer. Every evening he went home where he shut himself away in his gloomy apartment. That was his life, year after year, ever since he had returned from abroad. It might be that in this way he had sought to conceal his very existence. In the hospital, where people think only of present illness and future uncertainty, he had found himself so much at ease that he had come to consider it his real home. He had been a man on the run long before the delivery of that note which had seemed to him like a death sentence. Or perhaps he was fleeing only from that message? The oddest thing was that it had come to him at a point when life would soon in any case be presenting him with the final reckoning.
In the police station, Juvara looked long and hard at the sheet of lined paper. “San Pellegrino section…sounds like a graveyard. Considering how he ended up, and the various threats…”
Soneri had had the same impression. But which graveyard? The mystery surrounding the brothers seemed as inscrutable as ever. Hardened by years on the run, they gave the impression of having raised a drawbridge on the outside world, one sailing the Po in solitude, the other choosing to live among aged, suffering humanity.
The telephone rang. “Commissario, it’s Maresciallo Arico. He wants a word with you,” Juvara said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
Soneri nodded, pointing to his own telephone.
“Commissario, when will the forensic squad be down to examine the barge? I can’t keep a patrol tied up day and night.”
“Aren’t your colleagues in Luzzara attending to it?”
“Now that the water is dropping, they’ve palmed it off on to me. There’s been a robbery at Luzzara and they’ve got their hands full.”
“Be patient for a couple of hours,” Soneri said. “Any news?”
“Your good friends the communists have moved back into the boat club to clean up their flooded premises.”
“They’re not my friends,” he said, annoyed at the maresciallo’s laboured irony. “And I don’t care if they are communists.”
“A bunch of hotheads. It’s only age that has calmed them down a bit, but they’re as pig-headed as ever.”
“They’re all the same along the Po valley, otherwise the river would have carried them away like sand.”
When he hung up, he felt a sense of relief. Arico had given him the perfect excuse for going back to the places and people who most aroused his curiosity. He felt like a fisherman dozing on a boat yawing in the slow current, waiting for a tug on the line to shake him from his torpor, make him swing into action.
“I’m taking you out today, to Luzzara. We’ll have a look at the barge,” he told Nanetti.
“Just you and me on a boat,” Nanetti said. “Like a honeymoon.”
“And the carabinieri on the walkway to protect our intimacy.”
“If it’s all the same with you, I’ll send along two of my men. I’m not keen on going to a place which is even wetter than this city.”
“No, I want you and nobody else.”
He heard Nanetti groan. His joints would play up for a week.
Half an hour later, Soneri presented himself to the officer standing guard on the barge. As he came through the town, he had noticed that the water level had dropped and even that Tonna’s boat seemed to have sunk down behind the main embankment. The gangplank sloped steeply now towards the deck, though the sides of the floodplain had not yet emerged from the muddy waters. Inside, he found the light unchanged and thought to himself that the seasons, the sun and the mists, would remain forever excluded from this cabin and would never make any impact on the heavy atmosphere of gloomy solitude. His attention was once again drawn to the little wooden chest of drawers where Tonna kept his documents. He looked again at the dates of the sailings and at the cargoes of goods apparently transported up and down the river. The hold should have been packed with grain for the mills at Polesella, but he knew already that it was empty. He would in any case have had no trouble in working that out from the draught. He went back on to the deck and saw the young carabiniere standing in the mud of the embankment, smoking. He opened one of the hatch covers over the hold and switched on his torch. There was a ladder in the corner but something about it made it less than inviting. He made his reluctant descent into what seemed to him no more than a rat trap, being careful to lift the wooden ladder and jam it in the opening to stop the cover slamming shut. The moment he made a move inside that hole, he was assaulted by a dense, nauseating stench of sweaty armpits and groins, of damp and dirty clothes and of the breath of starving people. In one corner, there was a pile of rags and newspaper pages. Tonna had not been carrying grain. In that dank, airless hole it was impossible not to feel the presence of the multitudes who had been conveyed in it. Their breath had remained trapped inside.
Soneri put the ladder back in its place and clambered up again, closing the cover behind him. He went into the cabin and opened the log book once more. Tonna had made many voyages, but he had not carried the cargoes entered in that register, and yet, in an old box, the bills of lading with the description of the goods in question had been meticulously recorded. A minimum of four sailings a week between Cremona and the area around Rovigo. On the other hand, if he had not sailed as recorded, how could he have met the running costs of the barge whose engine swallowed litres and litres of fuel as it struggled upstream against the current? An accountant’s punctiliousness was evident in Tonna’s handwritten ledgers. Each purchase of fuel was listed in neat handwriting and on each occasion the sums appeared considerable.
He heard the unmistakeable, irregular footsteps of Nanetti as he paced about on the deck. It sounded like a rhythmless drip-drip from a branch shaken in the wind.
“That’s it. You’re not getting me on that gangplank a second time,” he said.
“I’m sure once will always be good enough for you.”
His colleague stared at him with good-humoured pique. “In this mess, I’d be hard put to find anything,” he said, staring about him in disgust.
“Above all, check the hold,” Soneri advised. “I’ve got an idea this barge was the least comfortable cruise ship ever seen on sea or river.”
Nanetti studied him attentively, and from that look it was clear he had understood. “How do you get into the hold?”
The commissario came back on deck to guide him and as soon as Nanetti saw the hatch, he grimaced and threw back his head like a horse refusing a fence. “Now I’m sure of it. You really do want to see me spend my old age in a wheelchair.”
Soneri helped him down a ladder that was fit only for a chicken hutch, but did not venture beyond the hatch. As soon as he saw his colleague get to work, he felt boredom come over him. “I’ll leave you in the capable hands of the carabiniere,” he called down.
A voice rang out from the depths: “You’re a treacherous bastard. That man will lock me in and slip the mooring.”
Soneri recommended Nanetti to the care of the officer on guard, and made his own way to the town. The road turned away from the embankment at certain points and cut inland between flooded fields. When he came in sight of the bell tower, a blue sign indicated the way to the Casoni residence. Instinctively he turned off the road, taking him further from the embankment. He had remembered about Maria of the sands.
There were no more than seven houses and one very grand building, which stood surrounded by trees and was higher than the bridge at Roccabianca. He entered the lobby and stood there a few moments looking around as various nurses came and went with trolleys which gave off a vague scent of camomile. “I’m Commissario Soneri, Parma police. I’m looking for Maria of the sands…”
“Who?” the nurse said, straining to make out what he was saying.
“I’m afraid I don’t know her full name. I’ve been told that you have here a woman who used to live on an island and who answers to that name.”
“Must be Signora Grignaffini,” said the woman. “She’s the only Maria here.”
“Probably her, then.”
“And you would like to speak to her?”
“I would, but if she is resting, I can come back.”
The nurse gave a laugh. “She only speaks Mantuan dialect. But the woman in the bed next to her can translate, if she chooses to. She’s half mad.”
“Don’t worry. I understand the dialect perfectly.”
Maria of the sands was an old woman of forbidding appearance, overweight, surly and sullen, with long, dishevelled hair that had turned as grey as the dry sand of the Po. She could still have been on her island peering at boats passing on the horizon, apprehensive lest they attempt to moor there. The nurse went over to her and informed her that Soneri was a police officer. She spoke in dialect, but Maria seemed to pay no heed, so intently was her gaze fixed on the commissario.
“You’ve got her on a good day. If she hadn’t wanted to talk to you, she would have already turned away.”
Soneri pulled up a chair and sat facing the woman, who greeted him with a respectful but wary nod. It was clear she had spent her whole life in a little homeland of her own which had been continually invaded and finally swept away by the dredgers.
“I can understand your dialect. It’s very like mine,” the commissario said, inviting her to speak freely.
“So you’re not a southerner?” she said, in the harsh intonation of the people of the Po.
Soneri shook his head.
“What do you want to know? In all my life, I’ve seen only boats and water.”
“Did you know that Anteo has disappeared?”
“They told me.”
“You knew him well. Do you have any idea what might have become of him?”
“He’ll have fled in the direction of Brescia, same as after the war. Those communist dogs…”
“Who?”
The old woman looked up, her look filled with pride and hatred. “The ones that were in the partisans. A lot of them died, as God willed. Others got away after 1946, but before that they did all kinds of things.”
“Are any of them still here?”
Maria made an affirmative sign with her hand. “Barigazzi stayed on, and it was him that brought along that gang of Reds. Twice they burned down my cabin, but the carabinieri didn’t want to know. They know the Po well, and they know the right doors to knock all along the riverbanks.” Maria’s breasts were heaving with rage. In spite of her years, a savage force emanated from that body made almost masculine by labour.
“Barigazzi says that in the days of Mussolini he was only a boy.”
“He was sixteen and went around with a pistol. It was him who killed Bardoni so as to take his boat which was moored at Stagno. Everybody knows that.”
“So how did Anteo get away?”
“I’ve told you. For a couple of years he was in Val Camonica.”
“And later?”
“Fortunately the waters calmed down, but he was always on the alert. He sailed by night and slept by day.”
“Was there some particular reason why they had it in for him?”
“When you’re talking about a war, there is always a reason for hating. The Fascists did their round-ups, and the other side ran off like rabbits, but then they struck back treacherously.” The woman grew more embittered as she spoke.
“As far as you remember, did Tonna take part in the reprisals?”
“How should I know? I spent years on my island, never moving off it. Only the floods could make me leave. The world is so evil, it’s better to stay huddled in a corner.”
“Why did Anteo come to see you?”
Only after speaking these words did Soneri realize that he had touched a very private nerve.
The old woman bridled, but immediately pulled herself together. “Neither of us spoke very much, but we were always in agreement. During the day, while he was asleep, I kept watch. He trusted me, especially since we were on an island in the middle of the Po.”
“So he felt threatened, even in recent times?”
“I told him to trust nobody, but he always said the world had changed. He even started going to the club that Barigazzi went to, saying that it was time to draw a line under the past. He said we were all poor old folk who should be getting ready to leave everything behind, and that we should toss all our grudges into the Po. He came to see me whenever he could and always asked me to come with him on his barge. I told him that at his age he should be thinking of moving on to dry land. So, together…but he was not happy with his feet on the ground, he preferred to be afloat. He used to say that the years he had spent in the mountains had been harder for him than the war, because he had had to live between rocks and peaks. That was one of the reasons he came to see me on my island. The only kind of land he could put up with was land surrounded by water.”
“You could have made a new life for yourselves somewhere near the sea.”
“We thought about that, but he was not fond of water with no flow, or water that battered against the walls. He wanted the reliable water of the river, water that knows where it’s going. He even had a plan for restructuring his barge and making it into a house where we could live when it wasn’t possible to live at my place. But then they came and even swept away the island, so here I am now and I don’t know where he is.”
“Who destroyed the island?”
“The people in the co-operative. The communists,” she said, almost spitting.
“Did they attack with the dredgers?”
“There was no need to attack. All they had to do was modify the course of the stream so as to make it erode the island. It disappeared under my feet, metre by metre. The co-operative knew what it was doing alright. They had their ways and means of obtaining a licence to dredge sand in a place that could only ever give them a return of half of what they’d spent. They paid a fortune just to get rid of the island. When finally I had to leave, they were all lined up along the embankment celebrating. As I went by, they were chanting ‘Bandiera Rossa’, and they’d hung a real red banner from the jib of the dredger.”
The old woman had turned livid and her skin had taken on the colour of silt. The patient in the next bed looked at her in fear and began to scream. Two male nurses took hold of her by her arms, while Maria cast a glance of pure contempt in her direction. It was obvious that she would have gladly struck her across the face. Immediately afterwards, Soneri found himself the object of equally harsh looks from the two men in white coats. He went up to Maria, patted her gently on the back and made his way out.