Once they were back in the city, he had attempted to persuade Angela to come to his apartment, but she had refused. “You’re bound to have two horrible little bedside tables and a Madonna over the bed,” she had said as they parted.
In spite of that, within ten minutes he had settled into his usual routine and even felt relieved at being able to sleep on his own, but his state of agitation had him awake once again before dawn. The city was still noiseless in the mist and he stared out at it through the glass door on to the balcony. He knew that his journeys down to the Po valley could not go on much longer, and that this was perhaps the last day he could justify being absent from the police station to pursue a line of inquiry which might be only secondary or possibly irrelevant. He could already hear Alemanni’s victory chants, further exacerbated by the echo which they would produce in the reprimands of his own chief, the questore: a quartet of shrill, menacing violins.
Instead, the first music he heard was the equally irritating “Aida”.
“Commissario, thank goodness you’re up early,” Arico began.
“These Tonna brothers don’t allow me much sleep.”
“Nor me. Last night someone set fire to the bar belonging to the bargeman’s niece.”
“At what time, exactly?” Soneri said, immediately relating this event to his night-time visit to the barge.
“Around three. There’s no doubt the fire was started deliberately. They found a burned-out petrol can under the bar.”
“Did anyone see anything?”
“What do you think? The baker called us when he went down around four and saw the smoke.”
“Was it an act of hooliganism or something more serious?”
“Professionals, Commissario. They made a thorough job of it. There’s nothing much left,” continued the maresciallo, before adding: “I called you first before getting the others involved… I’m giving you this chance. I know how things are between us and the magistrates.”
“Thanks, Arico,” Soneri said, “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
As he drove through the even thicker dawn mist, he thought gratefully of the maresciallo. Soneri had had to get the questore out of bed to report everything to him, and his superior, still half asleep, had been unable to respond with anything more than a series of Madonna santa! s each time he asked for more time or for the chance to carry out further inquiries. He finally arrived at the conclusion which had seemed evident to Soneri for at least an hour: it was a very serious business, the like of which had never before been seen, could well be the work of extortionists. It might even be that Anteo had been threatened by the gang who had engaged him to transport the illegal immigrants. Maybe he was transporting other things as well and had not kept his side of the bargain, but if he had been killed, why were they still coming after him? Perhaps another lot had got rid of him, or possibly it was all a set-up, a so-called accident so he could make off with the money after selling a cargo of drugs? It was in any case exceedingly strange that this should have happened exactly one day before the murder of his brother.
He parked in front of the Italia as the mist was lifting from over the embankment. The pumps were still roaring and the commissario was tempted to go and see how far the water level on the floodplain had dropped, but a gust of wind brought the smell of burning to his nostrils and focused his attention on the cluster of houses in the old town. From a distance, what remained of the bar gave the impression of a black eye. A coating of black had discoloured the facade of the house up to the first floor, and there was no need to go too close to realize that in the interior nothing had been saved. It occurred to him that black had been a constant in the history of that family, more for evil than for good. The firefighters had gone into the building with their hoses and had shored up the ceiling. Now they were directing jets of water at the centre of the room where embers were still smouldering. On the pavement, a slight distance away from onlookers, Tonna’s niece — with an overcoat over her dressing gown — stood with her son.
Soneri lit a cigar and went over to join Arico beside his van. “You had a good nose for this Tonna…”
The commissario brushed the remark aside with a wave of his hand. “Arico,” he said, putting his mouth beside the maresciallo’s ear, “this one is for you. This is my chance to pay back my debts for this morning.”
This time it was Arico’s turn not to overdo things. After a brief pause, he said, “The question is, why should you hand it over to me?”
“My sense is that the fire has nothing to do with the disappearance of Anteo Tonna. He had various other pieces of business outstanding.”
“Commissario, are you trying to give me a headache? After a sleepless night, with this pile of charcoal here, you’re in the mood for talking in riddles?”
Arico was right. Rather than talking to the maresciallo, Soneri was simply thinking aloud. “It’s like this: Tonna was transporting illegal immigrants. The cargoes of grain which appear on the registers were only a cover.”
Arico turned more serious and pulled the peak of his cap over his eyes.
“He owed something to the traffickers, whoever they were, and that’s why they came after him. When they didn’t find him, they left a little warning. So, they think he’s still alive and they believe he’s giving them the run-around.”
“Are you sure that’s the way it is?”
“It can be, yes. But I suspect there’s more to it than that,” said Soneri. “But I’m giving you a free hand. The matter of the illegal immigrants is your case.”
Arico pushed his cap further back and leaned on the door of the van, peering into the dark cavity of the burned-out bar. Soneri left the piazza in the direction of the jetty. He climbed up the embankment and when he was near the elevated road, he heard the buzz of the engines. At the entrance to the club he could see Barigazzi in knee-high boots. He went down the slope to the yard.
“You’re not over in the piazza?”
“Been there already.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s never happened before that they set fire to a bar or restaurant. When something new happens, there’s something sinister behind it,” the man muttered, making no effort to disguise his pessimism.
“Is the niece’s family clean?”
“They go about their own business, same as everybody else. Money is the only religion here nowadays. The husband of Tonna’s niece is a right-wing councillor. I mean the new right wing, the shopkeepers’ right wing, one which has taken off its black shirt and put on a tie.”
Barigazzi spat on the road as he always did when he disapproved of something, expressing unease at living in a world which was too deeply changed. All that remained for him was the Po, his landscape, the mist and that little corner of his past which opened up inside the doors of Il Sordo.
“I met Dinon sculling among the poplars,” Soneri said. “He said he was checking how far the water had gone down.”
The old man looked at him in amazement. “No, he would have been checking on the memorial to the partisans. The river damages it every time.”
“Do you mean to say there’s a memorial on the floodplain?”
“Always has been. A monument to the comrades who fought along the Po.”
“And Dinon takes care of it?”
“Him and that group of his who call themselves orthodox communists, and who believe they’re the only ones with the right credentials for the custody of the monument. In fact, we do it too. We’re well mannered towards each other and choose different days.”
“How many are there besides Dinon and Vaeven?”
“Very few now,” Barigazzi said in a derisive tone. “A tiny group of nostalgics who meet every so often in an old shoemaker’s shop to adore the bust of Stalin.”
“So much the better for them. At least they’ve lived their lives hoping for the revolution. It was worse for Tonna who had only memories and frustrations to live on.”
“Tell me the truth,” Barigazzi said. “He was in deep trouble, wasn’t he?”
“How do you know that?”
“Along the Po everybody knows everybody else, word gets around. From what I hear, he didn’t carry very much grain. However, he did a lot of boating and a barge like that costs a lot of money. In other words, the money must have come from somewhere.”
“I have to agree with you,” Soneri said. “This mist covers more and more mysteries.”
“The valley is wide and there are fewer and fewer people about. There are houses where nobody knows what’s in them, nor even who lives there.”
The commissario turned away. “How much water is there left on the floodplain?”
“A metre and a half. You’ll see the bottom by this afternoon.”
Even where they were standing, the air was still heavy with the smell of burning. The smoke had mingled with the mist and together they formed a cloud which hung over the village. What had happened to the bar had galvanized everyone and this made things easier for the commissario. The questore would spend days chairing meetings and the press would pay no more heed to the toxic leaks from Alemanni.
“What would you say to going out over the floodplain in your boat?”
“We’d risk getting stuck in the middle, or beached on a sandbank or banging into a tree trunk. It’s a fishing boat that I’ve got…” Barigazzi said.
“If there were two of us, we could manage.”
“What has brought on this appetite for a bit of tourism?”
“You started it. Did you not tell me to wait until the waters were less muddy?”
Barigazzi fixed a sharp, penetrating look on him, but he said nothing. Only when the commissario was ten steps away did he shout after him, “Come immediately after lunch, before the waters drop too far.”
Soneri walked towards Il Sordo, through air still rank with the stench of the embers which swept up the streets and under the arches. He was passed by large saloon cars, their lights flashing. He recognized the chauffeurs from the prefettura. He too had been summoned to a meeting in the questura, together with the questore, the prefetto and the mayors of the towns on the plain. Official anxiety had returned to the levels it had been at when the Po was threatening the houses.
Before going into the osteria, he called Juvara. “Have they left you all on your own? They’re all here.”
“More or less… Is this fire going to help clear things up?”
“Yes, but only up to a point.”
“What does that mean? The questore is persuaded that it’s the work of the gang that did for the Tonna brothers.”
“If they had killed them, why would they have torched his niece’s bar?”
“Maybe she was mixed up in it too…”
‘Tonna was carrying illegal immigrants from the delta up to the cities on either side of the river. Some hours before they burned the bar down, they came looking for him on the barge. That means they thought he was still alive and double-crossing them. They didn’t destroy the boat because it might still be useful. There’s no safer or easier way to deliver immigrants into the heart of the industrial zones than by transferring them from one vessel to another offshore in the delta without the inconvenience of berthing. Minimum risk and maximum profit.”
“Commissario, you have to go and tell this to the questore. They’re all convinced that this means people-trafficking has arrived in these parts and that the two brothers were bumped off by a bunch of gangsters.”
The ispettore was right. He knew the kerfuffle that they could get into at headquarters every time something out of the ordinary, like this, happened. There was the risk of them opening a new, useless line of inquiry. In addition, he thought that Arico would certainly have sent in a report on Anteo Tonna’s trafficking and at that point the circle was closed. He kept his mobile in his hand for a few minutes, unsure whether to call the questore immediately or to wait. The meeting in the questura was at 4.00 that afternoon. Perhaps he would manage to get down to the floodplain and back in time.
The landlord in the bar was wearing his hearing aid, but the means of communication were not much different. Soneri had to make use of the sign language he had learned from Barigazzi. There was no-one in the osteria and perhaps that was why the owner had his hearing aid switched on. Watching him shuffle between the tables, it occurred to Soneri that he must know a great deal about life in the town, about Tonna and about the past. Perhaps he even knew the Kite. It was for this reason that he had asked Barigazzi to take him out on the floodplain. He wanted to examine the monument and read what was inscribed on the marble.
As he made his way to the jetty, the Fortanina wine was still bubbling in his stomach. Barigazzi was waiting for him.
“We’d better get a move on,” the old man said. “By this evening the water will be too low and I might not manage to get the boat back to the jetty.”
They stepped aboard and, as a precaution, Soneri sat down while Barigazzi set his feet wide apart on the bottom boards, a position which allowed him to manoeuvre without moving his upper body one centimetre. They arrived at a point a little beyond the pumps, disembarked, raised the boat with the winch and lowered it carefully on to the other side, into the waters of the flooded plain.
“You see? The undergrowth is beginning to appear,” Barigazzi said, pointing to the first branches emerging from the water.
“There’s enough to keep us afloat,” the commissario said.
“Not everywhere. The land on these plains is irregular and there are no navigation lanes.”
The light was very faint, even though the poplar trees were totally bare. The mist seemed to be trapped in that spiderwork of branches, or perhaps the shade was caused by the embankments which shut off that stretch of flooded land. They passed the great outline of the stone-crushing plant, with its gantries and enormous skips, a kingdom of rust and mud on which the water had spread the fresh stain of its passage. With a few quick strokes, Barigazzi rowed through the trees which would remain damp until the first foliage appeared. The thrusts of the oar made the boat skim along smoothly, and when necessary, the old man turned the oar on its side behind the stern, using it as a rudder to give more precise direction.
At a certain point, Barigazzi stopped rowing and, standing quite still, without uttering a word, raised his arm with his index finger outstretched. Soneri saw a low column of white marble emerge from the water like a fleshless bone, its colour clashing with the surrounds.
“We can’t go too close,” the boatman muttered, “because it’s not very deep there and the monument is planted on a raised piece of land.”
They approached as near as possible until the bottom of the hull rubbed against the sand. Soneri made out the words clearly: TO THE PARTISANS OF ALL FORMATIONS WHO FOUGHT AND DIED HERE OPPOSING BARBARISM. There was nothing else.
“Who erected it?” he asked.
“The old Party,” Barigazzi said, “when we were all still united.”
“Why here where the water comes and goes?”
“The floodplain was the place where the partisans were able to move more easily. Once it was full of trees and undergrowth, but when needed there was the Po to get them out of trouble.”
A sense of mystery emanated from the monument and from the spot on which it stood. The commissario reread the words engraved on the marble and became aware of the contrast between their solemn ring and the dialect speech of Barigazzi. It was at that moment that he recalled the words uttered by Tonna’s niece about the telephone call and some mysterious person looking for Barbisin, her uncle. The man had spoken excellent dialect, but had stumbled over his Italian which he pronounced with a foreign accent.
Barigazzi began to circle the monument. In the stillness, mud had settled and the water was now much clearer. Soneri looked for other marks on the marble, but there was no inscription save the one on the side facing the Po. The commissario leaned out of the craft to touch the marble, risking losing his balance. He moved back in and looked over the side of the boat.
There was something dark below, something which, even in its vague outline, seemed to him like a body. He had seen so many that it was sufficient for him to take one more look to be sure. A body which must have been held down by a weight. The hem of something that looked like a cloak was moving gently with the undulation caused by the boat. The commissario stood up, turned to Barigazzi and pointed to the shape beneath them: “He didn’t get very far.”
At first the boatman did not say a word but then he murmured: “I never thought that he had run off.”
Soneri took his mobile from the pocket of his duffel coat and dialled the number of the forensic squad.
“You’ll have to come back to the Po,” he said to Nanetti. “And this time you’re going to get your arse wet.”
He then called Arico. It was the officer who replied and told him that the maresciallo was in bed.
“Get him up. Tell him we’ve found Tonna’s corpse.”
“Right away,” the officer said, swallowing hard before hanging up.
Soneri sat back down in the boat and looked over at Barigazzi to seek his advice. In reply, the other man stared back and shook his head. “We couldn’t manage with just the two of us. It must be tied down and we’d have to go underwater to cut the ropes. It’s not going to be easy, because as soon as anybody touches the bottom he’ll disturb the mud and then he’ll see nothing.”
“How long will they take?” the commissario said, looking over at the pumps.
“By tomorrow morning there’ll be nothing but a few puddles.”
“Push over to the embankment,” Soneri said. “I’ll take the short cut.”
Barigazzi took the boat to the bank, between two bushes. Soneri jumped out, rocking the boat so violently that the old man had to press down with his oar so as not to capsize. “People who move that awkwardly always end up at the bottom,” he shouted to Soneri before moving off among the poplar trees.
As soon as he was out of earshot the commissario took out his mobile and called the questore. He would ruin the afternoon ceremonial of tea and cakes, with secretaries scurrying about and the inevitable grand orations against organized crime. The mincing secretary was exasperatingly obstructive until Soneri, with the vaguely menacing tone he used with criminals, told him in no uncertain terms to put him through to the questore.
A fresh burst of Madonna santa! s with audible exclamation marks. “Of course, go right ahead… Yes, yes, all the necessary inquiries into the case… Certainly, mobilize the forensic squad…and the frogmen…” And, finally: “Keep me informed!”
His superior evidently had no inclination to muddy his shoes. The commissario’s had a double layer of earth clinging to each side, allowing the pebbles on the pathway to attach themselves. He crouched, as he had done the preceding afternoon while waiting for Dinon Melegari’s boat. The light was failing minute by minute like a fade-out on a cinema screen, and down there, where the bright marble was now emerging, the water was doing its work, eating away at the body of Anteo Tonna. He had spent his life on the water and now he was under its surface.
The first to arrive was Arico, his light flashing. The commissario asked him to switch it off for fear of attracting too many onlookers.
The maresciallo had an ugly face resembling a map where the severe contours of mountains and unforgiving valleys alternated. “How much water is he under?”
“A metre, perhaps less. But he’s tied down. Someone’ll need to go in and cut the ropes.”
“I’ll call the divers; even in this town there are people with wetsuits.”
For a few moments, the commissario pondered the best solution — to wait until the following morning when the pumps would have emptied the water from the plain, or else to bring the body up right away — but even as he was thinking it over, Arico was already talking to someone who was promising to be there in a quarter of an hour. He felt a sudden, terrible unwillingness to move the body. He was afraid that he might miss something, that a piece of evidence might be destroyed. He looked around for Nanetti, but in the gathering darkness there was no sign of him.
When the diver went under, he could see only a couple of metres in front of him, at least until Arico aimed the police car lights into the water. The monument was now halfway out of the water, shining white. The diver walked towards it slowly so as not to disturb the sludge. He then went down on his knees, switched on a strong torch which he fixed to his forehead and plunged his head into the water. From the embankment, Soneri watched the illuminated water bubble and the hem of Tonna’s cloak come to the surface. Then, with the slowness of bread starting to rise, the whole body came up, swollen with water, back first, legs wide apart, rotating slowly. The diver took hold of one shoulder and manoeuvred it to the bank.
Only when they were at the top of the embankment and could lay the body on a plastic sheet did they roll it over onto its back. They were confronted with a waxen face, eaten away by the water and encrusted with slime. But it was him. When the commissario shifted his glance from the forehead, he realized that half the skull was missing. A deep cavity gaped open at the top, looking like a cut in an over-ripe watermelon.
He tried to bring to mind the image of Decimo’s head, but his memory was blocked by the body in front of him, bones disjointed, stretched out under a yellow sheet. Then it dawned on him. He did not need to be an anatomist to recognize that there was a link between those two smashed skulls.
“A savage blow,” the maresciallo said.
“Indeed,” Soneri mumbled, “and not the first I’ve seen.”
“I imagine,” said the other, without grasping the reference to Decimo.
It was now pitch black. Only the commissario, Arico and the officer remained beside the corpse. Not far off, the diver, still in his wetsuit, looked like a strange river fish, dripping with slime. The only light came from the headlights of the police car, around which wisps of mist were swirling. The smell of burning still hung in the air.
“We have to inform the ambulance men and the magistrate before removing the body,” the officer said.
Arico turned towards the commissario, who nodded. At that moment, a car approached along the embankment road and when it was only a few metres away, Soneri recognized the vehicle belonging to the forensic squad. Before Nanetti could get out, the commissario turned in the dark towards Arico. “Is there a chapel near here?”
In reply, the maresciallo pointed along the embankment into the darkness, but Soneri understood perfectly. He remembered having passed it.
When he turned back to look at the corpse, he saw Nanetti already bent over it with a little torch which gave out a light as white as the full moon. He recognized the procedures of the forensic squad, as unchanging as any ritual. With a grimace of pain and a creak of his joints, his colleague got to his feet. “I suppose you have already noticed the blindingly obvious?” he said, indicating the head. “Apart from that, I haven’t much to say just now, but at a guess it would seem to me that he died on the same day that he disappeared.”
“It would be better to move him at the earliest opportunity to a cold slab in the morgue,” Arico said.
“Agreed,” Soneri said with a glance at Nanetti, who nodded before saying: “The killer must have made his calculations very carefully. What better way to cancel out the traces of a crime than a flood on the Po?”
It had never occurred to the commissario that the murderer might have taken into account the rise in the river level before making his move, that he might have waited for the waters to overflow on to the plains, fill them and cover over the scene of the crime. He noticed that Arico and Nanetti were staring at him strangely. When he was thinking, his face must have assumed a particular expression, as everyone noticed it. Angela would always say: “What’s the matter, what are you thinking about?”
Fortunately the blue flashing lights of the ambulance arriving attracted everybody’s attention. Before it pulled up, the commissario took a last look around him: Arico, the officer, Nanetti and himself standing there, in the mist, beside a corpse swollen with water. It was like a scene from a gangster movie.
It was only when the scent of the pasta con fagioli worked its way into his nostrils that he remembered about the meeting in the questura. It had completely slipped his mind, but then the questore had completely forgotten about the murder.
“So you’ve won,” Nanetti said, looking around at the walls of Il Sordo with that curiosity for detail which he showed when examining corpses or cartridge shells.
“Won what?”
“With Alemanni. He said you were chasing fireflies…”
“Alemanni has never understood anything. He should have been a lawyer.”
“What do you think about it now?”
“That the motive is not one of the usual ones.”
“Why so?”
Soneri looked up at the cross-legged Christ but was unable to translate into words the dance of phantoms, intuitions and conjectures inside his head. “It’s all to do with something that happened a long time ago. Or perhaps that was only a preliminary. On the barge I found a note which said something about the killing of a partisan.”
“That was more than fifty years ago…”
“That’s true, but I have the impression that time passed in vain for the Tonna brothers. Perhaps out of an extreme regard for consistency, or perhaps out of shame, their minds remained the same as when they were in their twenties. It’s strange, in a world of whitened sepulchres.”
Nanetti tucked away four spoonfuls of the pasta as though he were shovelling sand. Then he raised his eyes and said, “That’s to their credit.”
“The price they paid was an isolated life. Decimo pretended he started living when he was forty. His brother spent his days on his own on a barge, willing to deal with people-traffickers, anything to keep him afloat.”
“You’re sure they’ve got nothing to do with it?”
“Yes. They thought they were the only threat facing Tonna, but I’m afraid…”
As he spoke to Nanetti, his conviction that he was dealing with an unusual and almost unfathomable crime gathered strength. He was reminded of the death of a well-known criminal many years previously. He had been under threat from all sides, but died in the most banal of ways, falling off a ladder trying to break into an apartment.
“If it was the same person who killed the two brothers,” Nanetti broke in, “it means that in the morning he deposed of Decimo and in the evening Anteo. But was the latter not the main target?”
“Certainly,” Soneri said, deep in thought. “And why kill Decimo in a hospital, with all the risks that involved? And anyway, are we sure we’ve got them in the right order?”
“We’ll find out from the post-mortem.”
“He obviously meant to kill them both, and it seems that both of them were aware of the threat.”
Nanetti put his spoon down on the empty plate and stretched out his arms. He never followed his colleague in his suppositions. The only things which interested him were evidence and proof, and the only hard facts at that moment were corpses, two brothers, killed in the same way.
Soneri made a sign to the landlord to bring a plate of spalla cotta. The restaurant was beginning to fill up, but there was no sign either of Barigazzi or of the others from the boat club. Nanetti kept looking around until he noticed, tucked away in a corner behind him, the notches marking the height of the water and the date of the flood. “Just thinking about all that water makes my arthritis play up.”
“Think of Tonna, underwater for days.”
“A damp patch was the least of his problems. If anything, the water stopped him from decomposing too rapidly. And besides, on the floodplain, there are no pike.”
In fact even the fish had left Tonna’s body untouched. Soneri was contemplating other corpses which had been eaten away by marauding fish and left disfigured as though rubbed by sandpaper, when Nanetti surprised him with an unsuspected knowledge of the Po and its fauna. “I’ve looked it all up,” he said. “I also know that in these parts, over on the Cremona side, there’s a submerged village which re-emerges only when the water is very low.”
“You don’t remember where?”
“No, but it must be right in front of where we are now, on the far side. I think all you’ve got to do is ask. The land reclamation programme in the post-war period modified the course of the river, and the village itself was moved a couple of kilometres inland.”
Soneri reflected on this for a moment and began to feel welling up inside him a sense of unease which was more like deep rancour. It was like a mild pressure on a part of his head he would not have been able to identify too precisely. For days, he had been moving around on the embankments and speaking to the local people without finding out about that sunken village. It annoyed him that Nanetti had simply turned up one evening with a new piece of information. He felt a fool, even if he was not sure that those few miserable hovels whose very existence he had been ignorant of were genuinely important. Perhaps not, but then why was he in such an ill humour?
The barman came over with the spalla cotta and Soneri was tempted to ask him about those submerged houses, but saw he had removed the hearing aid. And anyway, he would not have told him even if he had heard perfectly. Soneri concealed his thoughts by acting for a moment as head waiter, dividing the spalla cotta between the two plates and pouring the Fortanina into both glasses. Nanetti let him get on with it, and when they were about to eat, he said, “This story of the underwater village has really made an impression on you, hasn’t it?”
He expressed himself with such moderation that the commissario calmed down, surprising even himself with his sudden change of mood.
“Absolutely nobody spoke to me about it,” he said, while the possibility that there was a reason for that superimposed itself on what he said.
“It’s still on old maps from the Fascist era. It was in the middle of a marsh,” Nanetti said, “and the Fascist officials refused to initiate the reclamation programme in that zone because, so they said, it was a nest of Reds. The work was done under De Gasperi after the war.”
Soneri remembered Nanetti’s passion for topography and for old maps of any kind, military or civil. In his cellar at home he had a pile of them, which his wife described as the finest woodworm farm in the province.
“And this village was inhabited until they altered the course of the river?”
“I just don’t know,” Nanetti said, “but I believe so, considering it was rebuilt from scratch further inland on the plain.”
He did not know why, but the story interested him. “What was the name of the village?”
“San Quirico. It seems no-one actually lives in the reconstructed houses. The children of the original owners keep them as second homes.”
Soneri continued to think about the walls over which the Po slowly flowed. How many people had been happy or sad in that place? How many personal stories were buried under the water there? He was not sure why, but he imagined that some of these stories were connected to the case of the Tonna brothers. This idea frightened him, but his curiosity was aroused by the fact that no-one had ever told him about that place, even though it was only a stone’s throw from the boat club. Perhaps on clear days you could even make it out beyond the bend in the river.
Nanetti got up and when the two of them were under the colonnade, the stench of burning still in the air, Soneri concluded to himself that the inquiry would need to start afresh from Anteo’s corpse, from the facts in other words, the one thing that counted, as Nanetti always insisted.
“Tomorrow you’re going to have a horde of journalists on your back, and Alemanni will be in a rage,” Nanetti said before getting into his car.
The commissario gave a forced smile, clenching his extinguished cigar between his teeth. If he had paid heed only to the facts, he would never have set foot near the Po.