He was in his car in front of the Italia, whose shutters had been lowered, and the piercing hoot of an owl reached him from down by the river. Owls called to the dead, he remembered being told. As he drove up the embankment, the bird appeared from among the poplar trees and its call seemed to be aimed at the lamp over the boat club, a faint light shimmering in the mists and looking like an illumination at a vigil or at the recitation of the rosary. He thought, giving his imagination rein, that the owl was chanting for all the lives sacrificed on the river, perhaps even for Tonna, who might be somewhere underwater, or on the sandbanks or in the muddy depths of some inlet.
The mist was less dense now, diluting the still darkness of the autumn night. As he drove towards the city, Soneri could not escape that final vision of the sleeping town, sunk in the gloom of the embankment’s long shadow, with the hoot of the owl hovering over everything like a preacher’s warning, solemn and sinister in the silence. “When the waters drop, everything will be revealed,” Barigazzi had said, twisting his moustache. What did he mean — that it was only a question of time? Or that there was something he knew? Or was it just long experience?
That question was still with him as he came back to his house and it remained with him when, standing in the half-light at the window overlooking the street, he let his mind wander over what emerged from the turmoil of sensations accumulated in the course of the day. Every so often, from the stew of conjectures simmering in his mind, a single, perfectly formed thought bubbled to the surface. When will the water drain from the inlets and the floodplain? “One month if there is a freeze, or less if they set the pumps to work,” had been Barigazzi’s judgment. He did not know why, but he expected some development, something that would lead somewhere, from that kind of prediction. He fell asleep clinging to that hope.
He awoke to the sound of his mobile which he had forgotten to switch off before he went to bed. He could not tolerate noise on first waking, but then he could not tolerate anything much at that time, not even finding himself next to a woman who wanted to touch him and talk to him. Every awakening was like coming anew into the world, and inside himself he screamed like a newborn babe wrenched from his mother’s womb. Perhaps that was why he mistook Nanetti for a midwife.
“The damp hurts my bones, but it damages your character,” Nanetti said, in response to Soneri’s complaining.
Soneri said nothing to that so Nanetti went on, “The first results of the tests on the barge are in — they should help you work out what happened that night.”
“You may be a disappointment with gangplanks, but you’re in a class of your own with microscopes,” Soneri said, in an effort to revive their cordial dealings.
“Try to keep Alemanni well away from any contact with the press. He’s dispensing pessimism right, left and centre and making sure that it is us who will be held responsible if this business degenerates into a fiasco.”
“Tell me what the results say,” Soneri said, fearing a return of his black humour.
“It’s a hundred per cent certain that there was someone on board the barge on its final voyage to Luzzara. And someone who was not the owner. Someone who left his fingerprints alongside the older ones belonging to Anteo Tonna.”
“Only one?”
“Yes. A man, tall and well built judging from the shoes he was wearing and from his weight as deduced from the footprints below deck. The same ones that were found on deck, near to where the dinghy was attached.”
“You’re sure Tonna’s fingerprints were all earlier ones?”
“The last person in the wheelhouse was not Anteo, I’m sure of it. The traces of him that we’ve found are not from the same timeframe as those of the other person. No doubt about that,” Nanetti said.
Which meant that if Tonna had been murdered, the crime had not been committed on the barge and that the killer, or his accomplice, had simulated the boatman’s escape by leaving the dinghy at the embankment at Luzzara. This gave him the first nucleus of certainty around which he could wrap some facts.
“I hope it may be of use in sorting out the thousands of suppositions you’ve got in your head,” Nanetti said.
“No question,” Soneri said. “I now know that five hundred of them can be discarded but that five hundred of them might still be valid.”
He had slept longer than normal and was conscious, as he downed his caffe latte, that the silence of dawn had already passed. What Nanetti said about Alemanni caused his anxiety levels to jump. The grey light and the roar of the traffic came in simultaneously from outside. He walked towards the police station, chewing on his depression, feeling like an engine that was too cold to start.
Juvara, with two assistants to give him a hand, was already at work in his office, clapping the dust from old telephone directories and making calls.
“Any luck?”
The ispettore shook his head. “In Cremona there’s a man who died in ’86. I have checked up but he doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the Tonnas. In Pomponesco…”
Soneri cut him off with a gesture. He lit his cigar and leaned back against the cabinet. What cemetery could it be? If indeed it was a cemetery.
Once again the mobile broke into his train of thought.
“Hello!” he barked.
“A Doberman would be more polite.”
“Ah, Angela?” Soneri said, in a gentler tone.
“You remember me?”
“Please don’t. It’s too early for that.”
“And don’t you come the tough guy with me, Commissario. I’m not the kind of woman who lets herself be pushed about,” she snarled. “Or maybe you’re muddling me with some other angelic Angela who wouldn’t raise a whimper if she were insulted.”
“And how many angelic males do you have fluttering around you?”
“Carry on in this vein and you will very soon be seeing all the angels you can use.”
Soneri froze. Hadn’t he heard that phrase somewhere before?
“Hey! Are you still there? Did you get frightened when I raised my voice?”
He needed silence to concentrate, but Angela, chattering away in his ear, would not relent. He held the telephone at arm’s length. He could hear the faint voice buzzing away inoffensively like a bee in a blossom while he concentrated on where he had heard that remark. In the yard below, an officer in the white coat of the forensic squad passed by, and then he remembered: the nursing sister, Decimo’s friend. She was the one who had said that he was worried about seeing “the angels”.
He put the telephone back to his ear. “Do you know of a place called ‘the Angels’?” His tone was so serious that Angela replied at once. “In Mantua. It’s a cemetery.”
Of course, Angela was from Mantua. “No woman is more precious than you,” he said, and abruptly ended the conversation.
Juvara could not fail to notice his state of euphoria.
“You can stop all of that,” Soneri announced. “I’ve found the cemetery.”
The ispettore looked at him in amazement, put down his papers and dismissed the two assistants with a jerk of his chin. But before he could seek an explanation, his superior had vanished.
Within a few minutes, Soneri was driving towards the lower Po valley. The houses were beginning to peep out of the mist, taking shape slowly, like the pieces in his investigation. It occurred to him that all of his inquiries were leading to the Po, towards that flat land where the sky was never visible. And he had little faith in coincidences.
Mantua always gave him the impression of land that had risen from a huge bog. It was said that graves there could not be dug deeper than one metre lest the bodies ended up buried in water. On the other hand, it seemed to him bizarre that with all the lands of the plain available, they piled the dead one on top of the other like stacks of Parmesan cheese.
He asked for information about the San Pellegrino section. It was quite a recent wing, with bouquets of artificial flowers and the marble still shiny. It occurred to him that although his job brought him frequently into contact with death, this was the first time that an investigation had taken him to a cemetery. He usually had to occupy himself with the crueller aspects of death, never with its more peaceful, silent side. The unseemly poses of corpses were invariably a yell of rage, and a commissario was called on to deliver the vengeance of law. Once the case had been neatly filed away, he had never had occasion to go and see where the victims ended up, not even those whose lives he had combed through with an investigator’s disrespectful zeal.
When he arrived in front of the smooth, marble plaque without name or date, he felt torn between surprise and disappointment, the same feelings he had once felt when his pistol jammed as he was about to fire on a man. The burial niche in the wall was empty. As was the one next to it. He checked again: square E, row 3, number 32. The crossword puzzle of the dead each time led him to the same conclusion, to the afterlife’s unfilled box. Then he looked over at one side and intuition provided him with the solution, as intuition can sometimes supply the correct word from the opening letters alone. There was a photograph of a woman with a severe countenance: Desolina Tonna of Magnani, and just below: “Husband, daughter, brothers and sisters.”
He reached the graveyard’s administrative office just before it was due to close. The clerk on the information desk was seated in front of a computer screen and over his shoulder the commissario could see that he was engrossed in a video game. The office was there to field enquiries about where the dead were buried, although the dead that Soneri was inquiring about were in all probability not there, or at least not yet.
“I’d like to know who owns the burial places thirty-two and thirty-three in square E, third row, the San Pellegrino section.”
He expected the official to object on the grounds of confidentiality, so without waiting for an answer, he held up his police identity card.
The man appeared to choke on the words he was on the brink of uttering, and turned to his keyboard. “Number thirty-two has been acquired by one Decimo Tonna and thirty-three by one Anteo Tonna.”
It was all he needed to know.
He did not go back to the police station. Once he had crossed the Po by the Casalmaggiore bridge, he turned along the road which followed the course of the river on the Emilia side. As he was getting out of his car, Juvara called him.
“The note was a threat,” he told Juvara. “It explains why Decimo was so frightened.”
“Why?”
“It corresponds to the burial places which the Tonna brothers had acquired beside their sister years ago. You understand now?”
“I do. The killer was well informed about their lives.”
“He must have been somebody from the locality.”
“But how did you work out that it was the Mantua cemetery you were looking for?”
“Oh that…” Soneri muttered evasively. “It was all to do with the angels. That’s what they call it in these parts.”
Juvara had no idea what Soneri meant, but he was thankful to be relieved of the tedious task he had been set.
The Tonnas’ niece was not in the bar. Soneri found himself face to face with a tall young man with long hair and one earring.
“You must be the matelot who didn’t quite make it, or have I got that wrong?”
The young man stared at him vacuously, before replying: “I didn’t like it, so I gave it up.”
He did not seem very bright. Perhaps he took after his mother.
“Is your mother-?”
“No, she went into town.” The boy interrupted him curtly, as if to suggest that the conversation was at an end.
Although he had nothing particular in mind to ask, Soneri chose to persist. He had never had much time for braggarts, but there was fun to be had with them. “You didn’t fancy life on the river, then?” he said, deliberately mocking.
“No, maybe a bit at first, but then…” The boy was obviously annoyed.
Half a dozen young people were in the bar, their backs towards them and each one absorbed in a video game. The one behind the bar was not much different from the others.
“What’s your name?”
“Romano.”
Names with Fascist connotations seemed to be a family tradition, although the long hair and earring would hardly have been congenial to Anteo.
“You didn’t like the life or you didn’t like your uncle Anteo?”
“I am not cut out for the solitary life, and anyway, the river is always the same.”
“And yet you carried a lot of cargoes. I’ve been having a look at the rosters…you can’t have been short of cash.”
Romano gave him a swift, nervous glance. He had the air of a pupil who could not answer the teacher’s question. “The barge is very old and wouldn’t have been able to struggle on much longer. The engine eats oil and it needed no end of care and attention…it couldn’t have gone on even if my uncle…”
Soneri thought he picked up a trace of antipathy. He looked out and saw some big, shiny cars parked in a row, an image of the affluence which had invaded the Po valley like a flood. “Were you ever aware of your uncle having received threats? Maybe money problems?”
“He alone had dealings with the clients. He didn’t even have any competition because, considering the times we’re living in and the few landing stages left, it’s much more convenient to transport stuff in lorries. He didn’t realize he was out of date.”
“Is that why you left?”
“In part. Who’s going to put their money in barges? They’ve had their day. Don’t forget, my uncle was around eighty.”
“Did you try to persuade him to settle down on dry land?”
“My mother tried to get me to do it several times, but he would just lose his temper. He said that it was his life and he liked it that way. After a bit, I said good-bye. I couldn’t stay and rot in the middle of a river. I don’t like the Po and I’m not interested in it. And it is a threat. And then all this stuff about its legends and its beauty…young people nowadays couldn’t care less and shove off.”
“Will you leave too?”
“As long as the bar is here, no. I’ve done my best to bring it up to date, with things that people of my age like,” he said, looking over at the video games with their flashing lights and loud music. “In this town, there’s nothing to do but play card games in the Italia and drink Fortanina in Il Sordo, where you’ve got the added attraction of the same old moans and groans from Verdi.”
In the background Soneri heard the irritating, repetitive strains of the video games. “Do you know Barigazzi, Ghezzi and the rest of them?”
Romano gave a disgusted scowl. “Shitty communists!” he hissed.
“At least you agree with your uncle on that one.”
“A bunch of losers who only believe in taxes and stopping other people from getting on in life. If it was up to them, we’d still be going up and down in big boats. They hate us because we own something. Look, they call us shopkeepers, but they’re gushing with sympathy for those foreign beggars who turn up here and start stealing. My uncle was always on the other side. He had his barge and he was always his own boss.”
These were the only sentences Romano spoke with any spontaneity. They were fired out like a belch, having plainly been rehearsed for some time in a brain not much given to rumination.
Soneri got to his feet. Everything now seemed clear to him, but he was not sure if it had much to do with the investigation. He strolled down towards the embankment until, leaving the colonnade behind him, he heard the water pumps at work.
Barigazzi told him that the pumps had been going for a couple of hours. They had arrived that morning from Parma and it had taken some time to get them set up in the best operational position. “A waste of effort,” he said.
The chug-chug of the diesel engines seemed to cause the inlets to shake, and sent up clouds of smoke. To one side, he noticed Arico in earnest conversation with a group of about twenty people. “Who are they?” he said.
“The ones who were evacuated from their houses in the floodplain,” Barigazzi said. “It’s for their sake that this whole shambles is under way, but if they don’t erect some kind of breakwater across the river upstream of the port, they’ll never drain anything. The pump that can empty the Po has yet to be invented.”
Vernizzi joined them to say that the dredger and the excavators were placed sideways across the river to close off the floodplain. Barigazzi spat on the grass and that seemed to be his verdict.
“They want to go back to their houses,” Soneri said.
“Do they really believe that merely getting the water out will solve their problems? The walls are soaked, so when it freezes, they’ll crack. Houses don’t dry out here in the Po valley in winter.”
“Wouldn’t you do the same?”
“If you buy a house on the flat lands, you’ve got to allow for the fact that things will not always go well. Sooner or later, the Po’s going to come and pay you a little visit.”
Arico was perspiring. He had pushed his cap to the back of his head, exposing the beads of sweat on his forehead. The crowd who clustered round him, pacified by seeing the pumps at work, had allowed him a moment’s peace. The people forced out of their homes had moved on to the embankment to watch the water being drained out litre by litre and poured back into the riverbed. Soneri too made his way up to the elevated road, leaving the town centre behind him. Having reached the same point where he had been the previous evening, he crouched among the branches which had been so damaged by the current. He moved to halfway down the embankment and studied the poplar trees with the water lapping around them.
In the silence, the inlet looked like an immense pot from which thin streaks of vapour were beginning to rise, as invisible as the lines used in fishing for barbel. The Canadian poplars made the autumnal twilight draw in more quickly. Squatting on his heels, he waited, rolling the extinguished cigar around his mouth. He lit it, but held the glowing end towards him, as his grandfather had done at the front. He took wartime precautions, but he did not expect to see a warship with cannons, only a solitary boat in a strip of dead water. The light faded at the same pace as the mist thickened. It seemed to him that the time had come.
Soneri became aware of its presence, hearing it before he saw it. He heard the low swishing sound, as when water is poured from a bucket over gravel, then made out the profile of a boatman rowing with few, slow strokes in a rhythm mastered by long familiarity with the oar. Undoubtedly it was the same man as the night before, and if he was coming back, it was a sign that he had not noticed anything on the previous occasion. The commissario let him approach until the boat was in line with the stone-crusher. A few more strokes and he could have called out to him, maybe even have looked him in the face, but suddenly the man shifted his oar to the other side of the boat and changed tack. He seemed to want to go back, even if he was only making for the centre of the poplar wood. The tree trunks stood in geometrically regular lines and diagonals, dividing equally all that water between the two embankments.
Soneri kept his eyes fixed on the boatman, who gave the impression of circling round like a buzzard on a warm afternoon in summer but then, unexpectedly, he jabbed his oar against a trunk to stop the boat, which stayed where it was, swaying slightly. He looked as though he were peering hard into the flood water which, in the absence of any current, was completely still. Soneri looked too and noted that the stagnation, by freeing the water of the clouds of sand, had caused it to lose its iron-grey colour as well.
The man dipped his oar to the right and set off again in the direction of the riverbank where Soneri was waiting. When he was ten metres away, the commissario rose to his feet and called out, causing the boatman to turn rapidly. He remained very still from the neck up. The boat swayed slightly without making him lose his balance. Soneri had the impression that for a few moments the boatman was undecided whether to flee or draw alongside him. When he realized that he was close enough to be recognized, he gave a couple of energetic strokes to direct the boat towards the great embankment. The commissario walked a few steps in the squelching mud, keeping his feet well apart to avoid tumbling into the river. The boatman drew closer, until he was almost on the grass.
He said not a word, restricting himself to jerking his chin in a way that implied a question. He was elderly, but still full of energy and pride. His enormous hands were like Barigazzi’s, in whose fist glasses could disappear. He now observed Soneri from the shell of the boat, his eyes grey and piercing, with the strong hint of a challenge.
“A strange hour to be out between the embankments.”
“Every hour is a good hour. The thing is to know where you are going.”
“And where were you making for?”
“I’m here to see how well the pumps are working. I’ve put some stakes in the ground.”
“Has it dropped much?” Soneri said.
“Five centimetres. Nothing much. But the water is still coming in over the barrier upstream of the port. I’ll have to adjust it.”
“Where do you moor your boat?”
“At the port. Where else with the waters this low?”
“How about if we arrange to meet in Il Sordo?”
The man thought it over for a moment, the intensity of his stare obscured in the gathering dusk.
“No, not there. We can meet in the Italia in thirty minutes.”
“You think you can make it in that time?”
“Listen, policeman, I know the Po better than you know the inside of your police station.”
Being in the large, single room of the restaurant felt like being inside a refectory. The loud voices, the smoke and the crush made the meeting oddly discreet. There was too much going on and too much to overhear to allow people to take notice of anything. The commissario made his entrance and occupied one of the few free tables no bigger than a window recess. Only when he was sitting down did he see that the boatman was waiting for him at the bar, where he had already ordered a white wine. He caught sight of Soneri and made his way over, followed by someone else, evidently a colleague. When they arrived at the table, Soneri eyed them up and down as training required, then gave them a sign to sit.
“This is my lawyer,” the boatman said.
Soneri took in his bulk and the skin made leathery by the sun on the Po. He did not look like a lawyer.
“What made you think I was a policeman?”
“Your type is easily picked out,” the man said. “I’ve a lot of experience of them.”
The second man stretched out a hand with the dimensions of a small shovel. “Arnaldo Fereoli, but everyone around here calls me Vaeven. It’s dialect for someone who comes and goes.”
“I know the dialect. Do you have a barge too?”
“A magano.”
Soneri turned to the first man who, without offering his hand, said: “Dino Melegari, or Dinon to the people around here.”
Melegari was built on a monumental scale. Soneri had not appreciated the sheer bulk of the man when he was in the boat, but now that he was there in front of him, he seemed as overwhelming as the statues of Hercules and Antaeus outside the questura. “Will you join me? A drop of wine?”
“I never say no to another glass.”
They were served by a tiny, silent, serious-looking girl who seemed just out of school.
“Will they do any good?” Soneri asked, meaning the pumps, which were still droning away on the other side of the embankment.
Dinon stretched out his great hands so wide that he almost touched his neighbours. If he closed them too suddenly he might crush the table. “The plain is low and the water is going down. They had to do something to satisfy the people who were evacuated from their homes.”
“What is the level now?”
“Can’t you see from the poplars? A couple of metres.”
Vaeven had pulled up the sleeves of his pullover, revealing a hammer and sickle tattoo on his forearm. It was the right time to ask: “Did you know Tonna?”
The two men exchanged glances. Their expressions implied that they thought they were being tricked. “By reputation,” Dinon said.
“As a boatman, or because of his Fascism?”
“What do you think?” Dinon said, pushing back the rim of his beret with his knuckles. “Will one or the other not do for you?”
“I know he has left some painful memories.”
“A number of widows and orphans,” the boatman said sardonically. “But nowadays people have short memories.”
“But you remember very well.”
“We’re old enough to have known him.”
“I believe it’s all ended badly for him.”
“Maybe he set off with the engine not running to take advantage of the wind, lost control of the barge and ended up running aground against the embankment. He would have been deeply ashamed. His reputation as a fine sailor was all he had left.”
“He had nothing else but the barge,” Vaeven said. “He couldn’t have lived with the idea that he’d made a mistake that would make a novice cringe.”
Soneri thought this over for a few moments as he sipped his Malvasia. The notion of his having fled out of shame had not occurred to him. It might even be plausible. After all, it could just have been the way out he had been searching for. But if that was the truth, what was he, the commissario, doing there on the Po, hunting down a phantom when a real crime had been committed in the city? The jeering face of Alemanni — all skull-like features and receding white hair — was imprinted on his mind.
“Who was ‘the Kite’?” he said, shaking away these jarring thoughts.
The two looked at each other. “We’re not actually under arrest, I take it,” Dinon protested. “Tell us what you want and we’ll save a lot of time.”
He was staring at Soneri with those clear, piercing eyes. Soneri took his time lighting his cigar. He wanted to let the accumulated animosity evaporate. “I’ve told you I have reason to suspect that Tonna is dead. They’ve already got rid of his brother.”
“What’s all that got to do with the so-called ‘Kite’?”
“We found a note on Tonna’s barge which referred to some decision concerning him.”
“Must have been one of the partisans. But there were so many of them,” Vaeven said.
“If that’s true, you would have known him,” Soneri said firmly.
“We weren’t here then. We were too well known and they’d have picked us out immediately. In ’43, we were up on Monte Caio.”
“Have you ever heard tell of this ‘Kite’?”
“There were all kinds who passed this way,” Dinon said, to quash any further discussion. “There were followers of General Badoglio, as well as members of the Garibaldi Resistance group. They came from Lombardy, from the Veneto or up from the Gothic Line. And then there was the other lot, the G.A.P., and nobody had any idea who they were. They wouldn’t have given away their undercover names even to their own families.”
“Perhaps Tonna had killed-”
“Nothing more likely,” Dinon interrupted him. “And it wouldn’t have been the only time.”
Soneri signalled to the waitress to bring another bottle and when he had refilled the glasses, he confronted them: “I believe you both know exactly who this ‘Kite’ is.”
Vaeven now pushed his hat to the back of his head with his knuckles, put one elbow on the table and leaned forward, causing the table to tilt to one side: “Listen, Commissario, I got to know lots of you police types back in 1960 when we took to the streets to stop Tambroni becoming prime minister. So you’re not going to catch me out.”
Soneri said nothing and the other took it as a surrender, but instead of attacking, he retreated, relaxing against the back of his seat. They remained in that position until the commissario decided to drop the subject. The equilibrium underlying their exchange was as precarious as the currents of the Po.
“You’ve stayed in the party?”
“Always. We’ve never changed our banner. Ours has the hammer and sickle,” Vaeven said forcibly, pulling up his sleeve to show off his tattoo.
“Are you saying that others…”
The man raised his right hand as though he were going to toss something over his shoulder. “The majority has changed. Nowadays they’re cosying up to the priests and the churchy lot. They’ve got their co-operatives and strike deals with the bosses.”
“Barigazzi as well?”
“He’s getting on now, but the people he has around him…they’ve watered everything down. They used to be Lambrusco, but they’re very thin wine now.”
“Do the two of you still sail?”
“We do some fishing as a hobby. I’ve got an old magano which is holding up well.”
“What did Tonna transport?”
“They say he carried odds and ends, but what was really below, nobody knows. There are no borders or customs along the Po.”
It was dark now, nearly time for dinner, and the bar was emptying. Dinon rose to his feet, slowly stretching his giant body. Each of his movements was deliberate, as though he were keeping his balance on a boat on the river. “Commissario, what are you looking for?” he asked, when the conversation seemed over.
Soneri was thrown by the question. He had lowered his guard and that question reopened the door on all his doubts, because he was not sure himself what he was looking for. For a second time he felt lost, and all the while the boatman kept his steely gaze on him. There was in him a certainty which had probably never faltered. There was no trace of doubt in his eyes. Soneri felt a twinge of envy.
“I’m looking for Tonna,” he said, but he had voiced the first thought that came into his mind.
The other two stared harder at him and then left the Italia without another word.
At that hour, the town was deserted. The only noise that cut through the mist was the unchanging sound of the water pumps. Behind the embankment, the floodlights trained twin beams, two shining circles made almost solid by the enveloping mists, on to the floodplain at the points where the pumps were draining the water away. He felt the full weight of the question: was he wasting his time in a town indifferent to the fate of a boatman who had been a leading figure in an age long gone? Not even his family wanted to understand. For them, too, Tonna had been dead for some time. He belonged to a past that no-one wished, or was able, to remember — the old from abhorrence and the young from ignorance.
He walked under the colonnade leading to Il Sordo, and on the far side of the street he heard the click of heels, a woman’s heels. He stopped but could see no-one. He went on walking but again heard from under the arches the steps of someone who seemed to be playing hide-and-seek with him. He stepped into the middle of the road and shouted, “Come out, whoever you are!”
Angela appeared from behind a pillar and walked towards him, imitating a streetwalker.
“Stop that,” he said with a smile. “This is a small town and people talk.”
“I can see the headline and the photograph already. The commissario and his lady friend.”
“I’m not important enough for the gossip columns. The stuff Alemanni is planting with the journalists is ample for the time being.”
“They’re getting all hot and bothered now about your absences. Juvara is running out of things to say. He tells them that you’re away, pursuing leads, and he has no idea when you’ll be back.”
“How did you get here?”
“I came down when it was still light and followed you until you went into that bar.”
“I had someone to meet.”
“And two bottles of Malvasia to down.”
“I can’t stand vegetarians and teetotallers.”
Angela started unbuttoning her shirt, but Soneri pulled her close to him to make her stop.
“Please, don’t hit me. I’m feeling very fragile tonight,” he begged her in a voice weighed down with anxiety.
Suddenly recognizing his vulnerability, she returned his look, gave him a tender hug and a kiss. “You’re irresistible when you surrender,” she whispered in his ear. “But do remember that you owe me one. Remember? That barge and only us on board making…”
“What are you talking about? There might still be people at the boat club.”
“So much the better. More exciting.”
Resistance was pointless, but as they walked on, Soneri felt ill at ease in the unaccustomed role of a fragile man looking for consolation from a woman, yet if he was disconcerted at first, he rediscovered his self-assurance in assuming the more usual role of taking the necessary precautions to avoid being seen by the members of the club, whose shadowy outlines were visible as they passed in front of the brightly lit windows. They climbed up the embankment and came down at a dark corner of the yard. Once more the commissario was acting as guide to Angela.
They proceeded cautiously in the dark on the far side, away from the lamp light, in the shelter of the slope. There were no steps there alongside the club, so they had to make their way on the riverbank itself.
“I’ve got high heels on,” Angela murmured.
Soneri cursed under his breath. In addition to vegetarians and teetotallers, he now had to cope with an insane woman. He lifted her in his arms and began the descent, while she whispered ironical flatteries, “How strong you are!” and such like, punctuated with melodramatic sighs.
“Carry on with that nonsense, and I’ll drop you in the Po.”
They reached the bottom, out of sight of the club. They ran the risk that someone might come outside for a pee and catch sight of them on the landing stage. The noise from the pumps mixed with the splash of the water as it gushed over the embankment from the field was particularly loud there, in contrast to the river which flowed silently by. Whoever had set off in the barge on the night of the flood had in all probability taken the same route, unseen by Barigazzi and the others.
Soneri put the gangplank in place and helped Angela across before following her. When he was safely on board himself, he used the perch pole to carefully reposition the plank on the quay. They went down below, and Angela made an immediate beeline for the cabin.
“I want the captain’s bunk,” she said, peremptorily.
They lay in each other’s arms for a while until the barge was rocked by bigger waves and the mutter of voices made itself heard alongside. A craft was passing close to the jetty, causing Soneri some alarm. The cavernous roar of its engine, only partially drowned out by the noise of the pumps, died away as it drew alongside the barge. The commissario leapt up from the bunk. He tried to pull on his clothes, but Angela held him by the arm and made him lie back on the mattress. Every time he attempted to raise his head to listen, she gripped him firmly round the neck and pulled him over to her. Outside, an engine was turning over and someone was talking. Then the barge rocked gently and feet were heard on the deck.
“They’re coming down,” Soneri said, struggling to free himself from her embrace. She clasped him more tightly with both her arms and legs, forcing him to stay where he was and concentrate on not making a sound.
Up above, someone was walking about. The commissario tried to picture what was happening on deck, and remembered with relief that an hour earlier he had been meticulous about closing the wheelhouse door from the inside. Shortly afterwards, he heard the rusty creak of the doorhandle as it was tried a couple of times. Someone was attempting to break in. The footsteps rang out again, passed directly over their heads and then went towards the side of the barge. Moments passed, and then the engine revved up again and moved away.
“That is the most exciting situation I have ever been in,” Angela said, close to ecstasy.
He stared at her. “Do you think we’ll ever be able to meet in bed at home, between two bedside tables, with a picture of the Madonna hanging above the headboard?”
“If ever we do, that will mean it’s all over.”
Soneri went back up to the wheelhouse, pushed open the door and stepped out on to the deck. He jumped on to the jetty to put the gangplank in place. The two of them climbed back up the incline which they had earlier descended, and came out on the dark side of the square. There was no-one left in the boat club. The lights were off and the shutters drawn. Whoever had come aboard the barge had probably taken the club’s closing time into account.
“Who do you think it was?”
“I have no idea. I think they were there looking for Tonna. He’d been keeping bad company.”
“Well, I am indebted to whoever it was. That was unforgettable.”
“I would be interested to see how you would react if someone did catch us during one of your mad moments.”
“I wouldn’t turn a hair. Are you or are you not the commissario of police?” she said, giving him another hug. She pulled away and looked squarely at him, trying to read his thoughts. “Did you not like it, or is there something else buzzing about in that head of yours?”
“I’m thinking about the people who came aboard.”