The freezing fog had left a fine film of frost on the car roof. Clouds of minute crystals floated through the air, while the drop in temperature had caused the grasses and plants in the fields to stiffen. Alongside him, the little villas with their overhanging roofs reminded Soneri of Christmas cards. As he was going along a stretch of completely white road, his mobile rang.
“I didn’t see you at the meeting,” the questore began, in a tone which was intended to convey a reproach, but he was too weak a man to make it felt.
“I was stuck with a corpse,” Soneri said.
The silence was so long that it seemed for a moment as though they had been cut off. “I would have liked to speak to you about that, among other things.” The questore was attempting to make up lost ground. “Tomorrow we’re going to have the press on our backs.”
“I’d prefer to steer clear of that.”
“We’ll have to give them some account of this new turn in the investigation,” the questore said with greater feeling.
“Yes, sir,” the commissario said. “But you know how to deal with these things much better than I do. Anyway, there’s not a lot to say. We fished the body up this afternoon. Its skull had been cracked open in the same way as the brother’s, and he was probably killed on the same day as he disappeared. The body had been secured underwater, next to the monument to the partisans on the floodplain beside the stone-crushing plant, not very far from the jetty. That’s all there is to it.”
From the long pause, the commissario guessed that his superior was taking notes on one of those sheets of notepaper headed QUESTURA which he kept in front of him at every meeting. He could even picture the pen with the pointed stem which he kept propped upright like an aerial in a kind of inkwell on his desk. He was equally sure that the questore would not pursue the topic. No-one ever appealed in vain to his vanity. Soneri did not have anything against journalists, who after all did the same sort of job as he did, but he never knew how to deal with their questions, so he evaded them by claiming judicial confidentiality and appealing to the complexity of the investigation. They would certainly want to know how he had worked out where the corpse was hidden. What could he say? That it was a matter of intuition? Or a hunch? Would he be able to transform something so fleeting and complex into a coherent answer? In his head, clouds without form and without geometry were blowing about. He could not squeeze them inside any rational perimeter — not that he had ever tried. It seemed to him as impossible a task as giving shape to the mist. There he was, splashing about like a gudgeon in the Po, and that was enough for him. It was all he needed to be able to get on with his job.
Now he felt drawn by the same inexplicable force towards the submerged village, and it was already in his mind that the freeze, with the dry days which accompanied it, would lower the water level to a point where the walls of the old San Quirico would be uncovered, making it possible for him to wander along a kind of Venetian calle surrounded by the ghosts of houses. The investigation was moving in time to the rhythms of the Po, of waters which rose and fell, endlessly changing the outline of the riverbank.
The car almost skidded on a stretch of road which was like a sheet of glass. He was badly shaken and this stopped him hearing the strains of “Aida” which had been ringing out for a few moments in his duffel-coat pocket.
“Where did you end up?” Angela said.
“I almost ended up in the ditch.”
“You must be very distracted…”
“The ice and the tyres are as smooth as each other.”
“Do you know that the carabinieri have mounted a huge inquiry into the trafficking of illegal immigrants?” she asked him.
“How do you know that?”
“A colleague is defending an Albanian pimp who’s been bringing girls here to work on the streets, and he let me read the report. It seems they’ve uncovered a sizeable trafficking racket, and they even know how the girls are brought here.”
“Did you see if Maresciallo Arico was involved?”
“He’s quoted frequently, but with all the big egos in the provincial command, if he’s looking to get any credit, he can forget it. He’ll be left with the crumbs at best.”
The commissario let out a cry of fury. The maresciallo had been beavering away on his own initiative for some time, but he had been leading the commissario astray, either by acting the fool, or by spinning his tale about the lack of resources.
“Don’t forget that you’re in my debt over a certain discovery which has turned out to be very important for your inquiry,” Angela warned him in a mock-threatening tone.
“So what?”
“So, Commissario, debts must be paid. Or would you rather I let the information leak out to your rivals in the carabinieri?”
“Fair enough,” Soneri said, with a touch of resignation in his voice, “but don’t ask for the impossible.”
“The impossible! Quite the reverse, I promise you. Only the most possible of things. In fact, we’ve already achieved it!”
“You mean on the barge again?”
“I liked it very much.”
“It’s too risky. We got away with it once, but a second time…”
“You just don’t get it, do you? No risk, no fun. Be prepared. As soon as I have a free moment, that is. It’s one date you had better not forget…and when it comes to collecting dues, I’m completely unscrupulous.”
“I’ll take you for a drive along the embankment, down the river.”
He heard a kind of shriek down the line. “You can’t rise above banalities. The people who write those little sentimental ditties in chocolate wrappers should consult you. What you’re talking about is the antechamber of conjugal love, a quick screw on a Saturday night in the double bed with freshly laundered sheets. I promise you, I’ll never do it between your two loathsome bedside tables,” she hissed.
It had, in fact, never happened. There was the one occasion when Angela had suddenly had the urge to reprise a situation from one of Boccaccio’s stories, which had her chatting from a window with a friend below and the commissario behind her, invisible from the street.
Later, at home, in the half-light of his rooms, he thought that it was his good fortune not to be pursued by one of those clingy women who aspire to the role of wife. Perhaps that was why he was so fond of Angela.
He woke in the same half-light as the night before. The freezing fog had transformed the trees into white lace, the only vivid tone in the part of the city he could see from the kitchen window. With the blanket of clouds covering the skies, there was not much difference between the shimmering light of day and the light coming from the lamp-posts at night: it all resembled a northern dusk. He drank his caffe latte and then began to assemble in his mind the things he had to do. The central heating pipes, filling with warm water, gave a gurgle and a noise like the sound of digestive fluids, which made him think of the water pumps on the Po. Was everything dried out? By the time he put his coffee cup in the sink, he had already taken his decision. He wanted to return to the Po and at that time in the morning he would not encounter much traffic in the city.
He called Juvara when he was at the wheel, and instructed him to go to the mortuary where, in a couple of hours, they would be doing the post-mortem on Anteo Tonna. He did not expect much to emerge from that examination. What he had deduced from observing the corpse was not likely to be very different from what would be obtained by cutting it open. He tossed his mobile on to the seat beside him and concentrated on his driving. The Po valley was white in every direction. The hoar frost had attached itself to each hanging branch, making them seem thicker and endowing them with new colours, a spectacle that raised his spirits as much as the first snow of winter.
He travelled along the embankment, stopping where the previous day they had lifted Anteo’s body on to the bank. It was still possible to make out the darker mark on the ground where the corpse had been laid. The commissario got out and looked over the floodplain and noted that all that was left were a few large pools covered by layers of ice. Elsewhere the ground seemed to have been thickened in the cold which had hardened the surface mud into a crust. It was only at that point that he became conscious of the silence. The mist and the white of the frost gave a certain solemnity to the surrounding countryside. They had switched off the pumps when the engines were only sucking in air. The freezing weather would finish the job.
He heard a tractor approach on the elevated road, but he had to let it draw close before he could make out one of the inhabitants of the floodplain coming back in order to work on his house, now reduced to a mud dyke. He would begin again, as those people there always did: giving new life to land made yet more fertile by the deposits from the river, spreading fresh gravel on the pathways and removing the sand from doors and walls.
Soneri parked at the boat club. There was no-one there yet and the locked door had the melancholy colour of aged straw. He got out of his car and called Juvara again. “Are you at the mortuary?”
“Yes, but it hasn’t got under way yet. The police doctor said it would begin at nine.”
“Never mind about the post-mortem,” Soneri told him. “Go over to the Istituto Storico della Resistenza and ask if they know anything about a partisan who was called ‘the Kite’.”
He deduced from a long silence that Juvara was somewhat taken aback.
“Are you still there?” he barked.
Juvara hastened to register his attention with a few grunts. “O.K., I’m on my way,” he said.
Soneri collected that Juvara was not pleased, and this annoyed him. He could not stand people who required their day to be mapped out in every detail from early morning, especially in a job like his. He detested diaries. He himself could never imagine what he would be doing one hour later, and lived from moment to moment without giving thought to the future. Things occurred according to a sequence which was rarely logical. It was useless to indulge in conjecture, since the prospect shifted as rapidly as it did for high-wire acrobats. His days were a process of continual adaptation to change, as was the case that morning on the banks of the Po. Rather than observing a body being cut open, he was looking at falling water levels which were funnelling the river back into its customary riverbed, and which were now so low that the riverbed itself seemed to him like a cavity in a gum from which a tooth had just been extracted.
He did not hear Barigazzi arrive and, when he turned round, he found him standing motionless behind him in the middle of the yard.
“Once you would have been on the jetty well before now,” Soneri said.
“And how do you know that?”
“Boats have been going up and down the river for quite a while now.”
Barigazzi said nothing, but made for the club and put a key in the door. The commissario stayed where he was, watching the current. He was happily wondering where San Quirico might have been. Straight ahead, Nanetti had said, so he looked into the middle distance, his gaze suspended somewhere between the water and the mist.
“Come on in, it’s warmer in here,” Barigazzi’s voice shouted from the club.
Soneri went in and stood in front of a cast-iron stove where the flames were already roaring. From the windows it was no longer possible to see the barge, which had dropped with the waters. Barigazzi came over and stood beside him at the window.
“San Quirico must be straight ahead,” Soneri said, pointing.
The old man remained silent for a few moments before saying: “It’s a bit further down the valley, just before Gussola.”
“How many people used to live there?”
“Forty or so. It was a small village.”
It was only then that he thought of a certain parallel which had been troubling him without his understanding why: the village, like Anteo Tonna, was underwater. And both were dead.
“Of those who used to live there, are there any still hereabouts?”
Barigazzi looked at him nervously. He was making an obviously unsuccessful effort to grasp what was behind these questions. “There are one or two up and down the Po valley, but they’re very old. The people who lived there were a pretty odd lot.”
“They were all communists, I’ve been told.”
“Strange characters, the sort you find in marshlands,” Barigazzi said uneasily. “Turned savage by the water and prey to malaria. People always on the verge of madness, after generations of intermarriage. Even the Fascists left them alone. And then the land reform programme wiped San Quirico off the map.”
“Can you still see the ruins of the houses today?”
“A couple more days and they’ll be sticking out of the water. It happens every time the level drops. They say that on misty nights when this happens you can still hear the voices of the people who lived in those houses. But it’s only a legend. Maybe it’s the wind whistling over the stones dislodged by the current. Others say it’s because in San Quirico they never buried their dead. They threw them into the river with a rock tied to their waists. Water to water.”
Soneri briefly reflected that this practice was probably not so different from what had happened many years previously all along the banks of the river: men eaten by fish and fish eaten by men. The same substance forever feeding off itself in an eternal cycle. And then his thoughts went back to Anteo Tonna, buried underwater by a boulder from the stone-crushing plant, but pinned, in his case, to the shallow, provisional floor of the flat lands where even the fish feel the precariousness of the sluggish, underwater currents, and for that reason do not stay there for long.
“It was not by chance that he was found there,” he said, staring straight ahead at the window, where the mists of the Po and a faint reflection of his face were superimposed on the glass.
He noticed that Barigazzi had turned to observe him, apparently bemused, as though he feared the commissario were talking in a delirium, but Soneri himself continued to look out at the horizon over the river, where for many days now the line between land and sky had been lost. It seemed obvious to him that the killer had had a certain taste for symbolism. Consciously or not, everyone did. Every pre-meditated murder followed the ritual of a theatrical production. Plainly there were some actors who performed their parts well; and others, less well. The problem was to identify the gifted ones.
To which category did the man who had killed Tonna belong? Soneri imagined him to be a well-focused, brazen type. Who else would plan a murder in a hospital ward, with all the risks he was bound to incur? And then there was the corpse on the floodplain, put there precisely so that it would be found beside the monument to the partisans. An ordinary killer or a professional hit man would have tossed it into deeper waters, weighed down with a stone, in common with the practice for funerals at San Quirico.
Many things simply did not add up while others seemed to be talking to him, but in a language which was as yet indecipherable.
His mobile telephone brought him back to himself. “They killed him on the day of his disappearance, between eight and ten in the evening,” Nanetti informed him, with no preliminary greeting.
“So the barge set off without him.”
“Exactly. That whole business of the barge was to put us off the scent.”
“Was there anything else apart from the blow to the head?”
“Nothing. The body was otherwise unmarked. He was still a vigorous man in spite of his age.”
So, whoever had killed Decimo in the morning had killed Anteo in the evening. He must have known his two victims well. Above all, he must have been aware that the boatman — who rarely left his barge — would not have known about his brother’s death or else he would have taken precautions. In any case, the brothers had only occasional contact and Anteo was a man accustomed to threats.
Barigazzi switched on the radio, but now that the water was low the look-outs along the embankment had nothing to report to each other. In a silence broken only by the low buzz of the loudspeaker, the click of the door handle made itself heard. Dinon Melegari stood framed in the doorway. As soon as he saw the commissario he hesitated as though he would rather turn back, but he decided to come in, with obvious reluctance, looking past Soneri at Barigazzi. When the commissario fixed his eyes on him, interrogating him with his stare, Dinon pointed an outstretched index finger at Barigazzi who, although evidently taken aback, returned his glance. With no more than that exchange, the two men established a kind of complicity.
“I came for the boats,” Melegari said, embarrassed. “Now that the waters are so low, I thought that it would be better to drag them ashore. The winch is working, isn’t it?”
“You’re right. The boats are on the sand.” Barigazzi was doing a better job of masking his feelings.
“White wine?”
Melegari nodded, as did the commissario. The three men then found themselves around a table while a silence as cold as the frost outside made conversation impossible.
“Will the inlets freeze over?” Soneri said.
The others looked up, wondering who was expected to answer this. “Only if it lasts a week. By the banks on the northern side,” Barigazzi mumbled, looking at Dinon, and in that exchange the commissario perceived a coded message.
He remained obstinately at the table, asking off-hand questions about the Po, about the levels of the water and the boats. After a time Dinon got up, almost banging his head on the light which hung over the table. “I’ll go and have a look at the boat.”
After he had left, Soneri said: “An unexpected visitor.”
Barigazzi said nothing, but got to his feet and took the bottle away. He came back for the glasses.
“The split in the Left has been resolved, then?” the commissario said.
The old man shrugged and tried to make light of the issue. “He drops in every so often. He’s required to inform us about what he’s doing at the jetty. That’s what the regulations say. And then he pays a fee for the boat.”
The commissario got up. It seemed to him pointless to go on. It was enough for him that evidently Melegari had come to speak to Barigazzi, perhaps about matters which concerned the Tonna brothers. He felt his distrust of him increasing, and this told him that he was getting close to something important.
He gave a curt nod to Barigazzi and went out, walking along the pebbly track which led to the jetty, where half of the boats had been left. On a large magano he saw Melegari testing the current with an oar. Melegari saw Soneri too, but pretended not to.
He crossed the river at Torricella, then turned on to the wrong road, but made it to Gussola by lunchtime. There was no great difference between the two banks of the river: the same low houses in rows, the same churches with that distinctive, blood-red Baroque typical of the Po valley. Juvara interrupted Soneri’s contemplation of a kind of cathedral with salame- coloured bricks, on which almost half a century of humidity had left its deposits. “There’s no Kite in our part of the valley,” he said. “There are two of them, and they both fought on the Apennines along the Gothic line.”
Soneri thought this over for a few minutes. “Cast your net wider. Check with the Resistance archives in Mantua, Cremona and Reggio. He must have been somewhere, this Kite.”
“Do you want me to look on the internet?”
“Look anywhere you like. Maybe the killer will pop up on your screen.”
It was not Juvara’s idleness which annoyed him as much as the intrusion of these new-fangled investigative techniques. He detected some vague threat in them, even though he knew perfectly well that it was the fear of feeling redundant which really upset him. At his age, this had become a matter of some delicacy.
He found a seat at a very ordinary restaurant, which did however promise a stracotto d’asinina with genuine credentials. The television was talking about what journalists were now calling “the murder on the Po”. A roomful of lorry drivers, office workers and shopkeepers had stopped eating and were glued to the screen, but Soneri was beginning to feel some unease at not being where logic dictated he should be. He saw the questore behind a microphone, with four officers in yellow jackets marked “Polizia” — worn especially for the cameras — and a group of journalists with their notebooks, and there he was in a country trattoria which had nothing to do with the investigation, along the misty banks of the Po, searching for a phantom village which had long since been swallowed up by the waters. Once again, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of insecurity arising from his invariable role as an outsider, but he comforted himself with the thought that perhaps that was why he was able to see things from the correct angle.
The riverbank was now one long beach littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the flood. He approached, hoping to see if the first stone or the first wall of the sunken village might be emerging. Perhaps it was too early. Barigazzi had said that it would take another couple of days’ freeze to bring the waters right down. He walked along the stretch of sand where he saw trails of old footsteps and the tracks of dogs which had been sniffing out the faint scents left by the encroaching water.
His intuition suggested to him that there was an uneven section of riverbed at the point where the ruins of San Quirico ought to be. There the surface of the water broke up into eddies and curled and twisted like a lazy reptile. He stood a few moments peering into the deeper solitude until it occurred to him that if he really wanted to give some sense to his wanderings, he should make his way inland and go from house to house making inquiries, risking the wrath of guard dogs.
New San Quirico, a soulless place without a centre, thrown up haphazardly across a defunct road, was far worse than anything he could have imagined. He would have sooner owned an underwater house than one of those anonymous villas prematurely aged by the mists. He wandered for a few minutes among shut-up houses, past huts with rusty steel roofs containing only odds and ends no longer useful in city dwellings. The village appeared to be deserted, but at least half a dozen dogs barked somewhere in the mist, though there was no way of knowing where exactly they were. For ten minutes he did not come across a single trace of another human being, but then he noticed a low house with a woodshed under the balcony and a garden covered with sheets of plastic as protection against the frost. Outside it, half-concealed by a glass-fronted veranda framed by gilt aluminium, an old man sat on a wooden bench looking out on to the roadway. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and leaned both hands on a walking stick. He had plainly been there for some time, but it was not clear what he was looking at, unless it was the mist itself as it deposited a sprinkling of ice particles.
Soneri got out of his car and gestured to him, but the old man made no move. He rang the bell, causing the man to turn towards the door to see if anyone in the house had heard. A small dog, which must have been sleeping behind the house, came scampering towards the commissario, growling. He waited until a light was switched on inside. The old man remained motionless, as though under a glass case in a museum. The front door opened and an old woman came out. She exchanged some words with the man. The man gave a start and rose to his feet. The veranda window opened and the commissario introduced himself.
“My husband doesn’t see too well,” the woman said. “He’s got cataracts.”
The dry heat of the wood fire greeted him and the old man’s eyes began to follow him, picking up his voice and tracking his passage across the veranda.
“I’m looking for someone who once lived in San Quirico on the Po,” the commissario began.
The man nodded and his wife explained that he had been the miller.
“When did you come here?”
“Immediately after the war, when the reclamation schemes got under way.”
“The Fascists had excluded you from their reconstruction programmes…”
“They knew things were bad for us and left us up to our arses in the water.”
“Were you sorry to come here?”
“No, here you can live like a human being.” It was the wife who spoke.
“You can’t see the Po,” the man said with heart-felt regret.
Soneri guessed that, in his lonely afternoons on that veranda, the cataracts and the mist forced him to imagine the banks of the river, the flat lands, the inlets and even the fish.
“Were they all communists in San Quirico?”
“For the most part,” the man said, as his pupils stopped roaming and he cast his clouded gaze towards the floor.
A silence fell over the kitchen, now in half-light, the best conditions for cataract sufferers. The commissario felt embarrassed. He was not making a favourable impression, asking for information from two elderly people who had little inclination to dwell on a grim past. The woman came to his rescue. Breaking the silence in which the two men sat facing each other, she said: “We paid a heavy price for that.”
The Fascists. She could not be talking of anything else.
“What did they do to you?”
“Reprisals, round-ups. Fortunately we could always hear them coming from a long way off and we were able to make our escape along the Po. Sometimes they burned down houses, although there was not much to burn. They even set fire to my home, but we managed to get there just in time. There being no shortage of water.”
“Were there any partisans among you?”
“Yes, but they stayed away so as not to get their families involved. All that were left were women, old folk and children.”
The man made an effort to focus on the commissario, but his eyes were too weak and stared up towards the ceiling, having been misled by the shadows.
“So there were not many people killed, is that so?” Soneri said cautiously, thinking of what San Quirico must have been like, a mass of grey stone suspended over the water, at the mercy of the currents.
“Life’s hardships took many more,” the woman said.
There followed another silence which seemed all the more profound in that house with its dimmed lights, oppressed by a cellar-like darkness. Just as it was becoming embarrassing and Soneri was about to take their unwillingness to speak as a sign that it was time for him to leave, the man said: “The worst thing was when they burned the Ghinelli house, and the women…” The sentence was moving to its climax, but he stopped. His wife made a gesture expressing her displeasure, turned her face away, overcome by the horror brought on by the recollections.
“Was he a partisan?” Soneri said.
“He was killed near Parma. In ’44, I think.”
“And the women?”
The old couple looked at each other, and something like a reproach came into the woman’s eyes. Memories from a far-distant time, long buried and now being hauled out, must have been bitter.
“They… I don’t know how to say it. They used them,” the man said. “There were so many of them. One of the women couldn’t bear the shame and threw herself in the Po near the whirlpools. The rest of them disappeared and were never seen again.”
“What was left for them there?” the old woman wondered. “Their house had been pulled down, and the little they had was destroyed.”
“What about the brother in the partisans?”
“A brave man who was afraid of nothing. Always in the thick of things, whatever the danger. But nothing more was heard of the Ghinelli family after the war.”
“Was there anyone in the partisans from San Quirico who was called ‘the Kite’?”
The old man looked up, trying to locate Soneri’s face, but he turned the wrong way and ended up peering at the lamp, whose light forced him to look down. Instead, palms upwards, he stretched out hands as calloused as hard clay. “There were so many names. The Resistance fighters…the partisans in that formation, what was it called, the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica, kept changing names all the time.”
They heard the sound of a car drawing up outside. It seemed extraordinary that anyone would willingly come back so late to such a place, but a middle-aged, rather stocky man smelling of iron and oil made his entrance. “My son,” the woman said.
The commissario looked closely at him and formed a picture of a deeper solitude yet: two old people with an unmarried son destined to remain on his own and to grow old in a place like this. No-one had invested anything in the future of San Quirico.
As he was taking his leave, all three came out on to the veranda with its glass front and gilt aluminium frame, and from behind the glass the old man gazed at things that were not there. From the window of his car, Soneri kept his eyes on them, still together, until the mist swallowed them up.
The darkness fell quickly as he tried to find his way back on to the main road. After a while, he fell in behind a lorry and resolved to return to the police station. When he entered the office, Juvara looked up in surprise. “Did you turn off your mobile to avoid the journalists?”
Soneri took out his telephone and saw it had no battery left. He must have switched it on by mistake. “Have you been trying for long?”
“Three hours,” Juvara said timidly.
The commissario would have apologized but could not find the words.
“I wanted to reach you to let you know,” the ispettore said, “that I’ve found out who the Kite was.”
“Where?”
“In the Resistance archive in Mantua. He was from Viadana and a member of the Garibaldi Brigade.”
“What was his real name?”
“Libero Gorni. Born 1924, died aged twenty.”
“Where?”
Juvara consulted his notebook, running an eye down the page. “Captured during a skirmish on the banks of the Po, province of Parma, near Torricella,” he said, reading word for word the note he had copied out exactly as he had found it. “He was shot at Sissa four days later, in spite of an attempt to save him by a prisoner exchange.”
“Nothing else?”
“In the original exchange of fire, two partisans fell: Ivan Varoli and Spartaco Ghinelli.”
“Get back on to the archive and see if these two or any other members of the partisan group had relatives among the combatants. Ask if they are known to be still alive and if so, where they can be found.”
Seated in front of the commissario’s desk, his great belly wedged between the arms of the chair, the ispettore favoured his superior with a puzzled glance. “You don’t really think,” he stuttered. “It’s more than sixty years ago…”
Soneri made no reply. He was not sure himself about what he had just told Juvara he wanted done.
“It’s because of the note. The one that referred to this Kite. It has to mean something.”
The moment Soneri was left on his own, the telephone rang. He lifted the receiver impatiently and heard the voice of the questore. The attention lavished on him by the television crews had obviously acted on him like amphetamines. His ego had swelled, as was clear from the waves of rounded rhetorical frills, each as neatly finished as an embroidered quilt. There were even grand words of praise for Soneri, more for having left the stage to him alone than for his having had the intuition to conduct an investigation along the banks of the Po in the first place.
When he put the telephone down Soneri should have been pleased, but instead he was nagged by a sense of unease. No-one was more aware than he that the conclusion was not yet within sight. He lit a cigar and tried to calm himself, but at that moment the strains of “Aida” rang out. He sat indecisively for a moment, the mobile in his hand, until the noise irritated him so much that he decided to press the button.
“Commissario, I’m ready to collect payment of your debt.”
“Angela, could we not just spend the evening in town? I’ll take you to dinner.”
“It’s a long time since you called me by my name. Pity the only places you know are places to eat in. You measure out your life in restaurants.”
“We could go macrobiotic or vegetarian.”
“No. I prefer to be afloat.”
There was no changing her mind. They would only quarrel and he had no appetite for a barrage of wounding remarks. As it was, his mood was upsetting him more than any ulcer.
“But there’ll be people at the boat club until ten. Can’t we just stop off somewhere for a bite to eat?”
“No, you know I love running risks.”
“We’ll go in your car. Mine’s too recognizable.”
Walking under the arches of the town, along the less-travelled streets so as not to be seen, made him feel like a teenager again. Angela, hugging him close, went on tiptoe to avoid making any noise with her heels.
“Be ready for criticism,” she warned in a whisper.
“Haven’t I had enough already?”
“All my criticisms are good-natured. I might bark a lot, you know, but I don’t bite. I meant from your superiors.”
“The questore has just been showering me with praise.”
“Wait until you hear what he has to say when the carabinieri get the headlines in the papers for the anti-trafficking operation. I heard the prosecutor who’s taken charge of the inquiry talking in the corridor before a trial…it looks like a major breakthrough.”
Soneri cursed himself for having given Arico so much rope. Angela understood and held him closer. She made him stop and looked him squarely in the face. “Are you sure you’re on the right track?”
“At this stage it is impossible to be sure.”
“If you’re talking like that, it means that deep down you are sure,” she replied, giving his jacket lapels a little tug.
When they were in sight of the embankment, they clambered up the side away from the yard. Below, the club gave off a yellow light from windows through which they could see dark shadows. They climbed back down, keeping to the asphalt path on the far side. They stopped in their tracks when the door of the club opened for a moment and Gianna stretched out an arm to shake a duster, but they then proceeded towards the jetty. This time the ground was frozen hard and the barge was even lower in the water. The gangplank was hanging perilously low.
They moved from the captain’s berth to the matelot’s quarters, but then Angela wanted to try the wheelhouse. Later they began to feel the cold and got dressed. Soneri glanced at the clock and noticed the little hand almost at one. When he climbed back up to the wheelhouse, he saw three men walk by on the jetty. From his gait, he recognized Barigazzi with Dino, unmistakeable because of his girth, beside him. He could not identify the third man, who was tall, and his head swayed as he walked. Their route took them away from the jetty towards a pathway on either side of which little houses had been built on raised columns.
“We’re trapped,” Soneri said to Angela, gesturing with his chin in the direction of the moorings and looking at her in gentle reproof.
“Don’t you dare tell me it wasn’t worthwhile,” she said menacingly. “If you ever solve this case, it will all be down to me,” she added, drawing close to warm herself.
Soneri tried to control his annoyance at the contact. He could not bear having anyone too close to him when he was thinking. He was now engrossed in working out what those three could be up to, but his head was clouded by the same mist as the one into which the three had vanished. If Dinon and Barigazzi were the first two, could the third man be Vaeven Fereoli?
“I’ll have to go and see,” he said with a decisiveness in part due to his discomfort over his proximity to Angela.
She held him back, clinging to the hem of his duffel coat. “You must take care,” she said, indicating the road with her glance.
Two outlines slowly emerged some twenty metres from them. The commissario pushed Angela’s head down to hide her, even if in the mist and with no light other than the small lamp a little way off it would not have been easy to make them out through the window. When they passed a few metres from the barge’s cabin, Soneri recognized Dinon and Barigazzi, on their own, walking one beside the other with the nonchalance of fish in a shoal. They strolled slowly by and took the steps leading up to the boat club. The other man must have stopped off in one of the fishermen’s cottages below the embankment.
“You see, it was worthwhile after all,” Angela said with ironic malice as she stood up.
Soneri took her in his arms, and that was something that he rarely did.