River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (12 page)

“You still away fishing?” Nanetti began.

“You caught me on the hop with that news about the townee Tonna.”

“So you’re feeling pleased with yourself? What kind of face did Alemanni make?”

“He wanted to bawl me out for having gone searching for the river Tonna, but he had to hold back in case I had something up my sleeve.”

“You missed your chance. Never let him get away with a single thing. Anyway, there’s something new about the brother who fell out the window.”

“What?”

“You remember the dent on the cupboard? Well, I can confirm that it came from one of Tonna’s shoes, but it wasn’t a
strong blow. The steel is only a couple of millimetres thick, so it doesn’t take much to leave a mark. Then the wound on the head. The doctor said it was caused by a heavy object, such as a club, but one with a pointed tip. More likely, something metal. Between the blow and the fall from the window, no more than two or three seconds elapsed, which is why there was no blood of Tonna’s on the floor or on the windowsill.”

“He was being hunted,” Soneri said, translating his thoughts into words. “Someone had been following him from department to department. Someone who was very smart and discreet, who managed to remain unobserved by everyone. Perhaps the same person who had delivered to him a letter capable of unnerving him.”

“That’s your business, Commissario,” Nanetti cut in.

A short time later, Soneri dialled Juvara’s number. “Have you got Decimo’s file to hand? Look up when he was born. Check his brother’s dates as well.” He heard the ispettore’s keyboard click. Juvara’s silence was eloquent testimony to his astonishment over the request. “In your opinion, was there some anniversary of Decimo’s which could fall on one of the days leading up to his death?”

Juvara sighed, a sign that he had finally understood. “It’s not his birthday, that’s in September. Not the boatman’s either. His is in June.”

“I wish we knew what he was talking about …” the commissario muttered.

“The ward sister was able to report only one thing Tonna had said one of the last times he ate in the department, but she had no idea what he was referring to.”

“What did he say?”

“They were talking about his health, about how he was the healthy one among all those sick people, but for some reason he took it the wrong way, got all upset, started mumbling that
perhaps he would soon be going to ‘the angels’. The sister said they all burst out laughing, but later, when she thought about it again, she couldn’t make head nor tail of what he had been on about. Was it that all of our lives hang by a thread? Or something else?”

“And that’s the only detail she can remember?”

“That’s what stuck in her mind. There must be some reason, mustn’t there?”

Soneri said nothing for a few moments. “Has Decimo’s apartment been sealed off ?”

“Yes, but if you want to get in, all you have to do is advise the magistrate.”

Decimo Tonna had lived in a block of flats with a faded facade not too far from the hospital. Two rooms and a bathroom, and the all-pervasive smell of rotting food. The coffee pot had been left on the cooker, and the rooms were in a state of some disorder as though Decimo had had to rush off for an appointment. In the bedroom, Soneri’s attention was drawn to the photograph of an elderly couple who must have been his parents and of a young woman, perhaps his niece. On the sideboard stood a picture of him as a young man, in a black shirt.

Soneri opened the drawers and started to go through them. One was filled with bills arranged year by year in an elastic band. The second contained pension documents, medical certificates and receipts. The apartment gave off the idea of a life lived barely above subsistence level. And the objects in the apartment, even if conserved with great care, were shabby. The mirrors, grown dark with age, the discoloured table covers, the threadbare curtains and the damp corners of the walls which were now the colour of a mountain hare, all spoke of poverty borne with dignity.

As he was going through the wardrobe, in which he found pairs of knickerbockers and a black shirt, the ringing of his mobile startled him. He ignored it for a while before answering.

“So whose house have you broken into this time?” Angela wanted to know, picking up on the absence of background noise.

“I’m engaged on a house search.”

“More likely you’re searching up the skirt of some lady, one of those who adore uniforms and men of action.”

“I do not have a uniform, nor do I have any love of action.”

“There’s no doubting that, and no-one knows it better than I do.”

“I’m in the house of Decimo Tonna, and I have not the faintest idea what I’m looking for.”

“What a coincidence! I’m right downstairs!”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I’ve always been able to get round Juvara. Anyway, I’m coming up to join you.”

The news caused him no little anxiety, in part caused by the fear of breaking regulations and in part by the arousal of desire. When Angela appeared before him a few moments later, it was the second which prevailed, and overwhelmingly. She tossed her coat on to a chair with studied nonchalance, approached Soneri and took hold of his collar. In her face, the commissario saw the same excitement which he too felt as he came into contact with his partner’s body.

“Where?” he said, his imagination telling him where it would all end.

“In the living room. I don’t trust sheets that other people have slept in,” she said, casting a glance at the bed in the room they were in.

Soneri got to his feet feeling a little bruised. The excitement had passed, leaving him so relaxed and yielding that it required an effort to recapture the thoughts that had been in his mind before Angela made her appearance. It was she who brought him back to the investigation once they had their clothes on again, “Have you really no idea what you’re looking for?”

“No,” he said, combing his hair. “Maybe a letter containing some kind of threat.”

“A recent threat?”

“I believe so, judging from Decimo’s anxiety in his last couple of days.”

Together they went over every piece of paper in the sideboard. They searched the clothes which seemed to have been worn in the recent past, examined a dressing gown left hanging behind the bedroom door, but they failed to turn up anything of any interest. They went back to the living room and it occurred to Soneri that if Alemanni had had any idea he was in Decimo’s house with a woman, he would have mobilized every policeman in the city.

“There’s nothing here,” he said with unconcealed irritation, sticking the burned-out cigar back in his mouth.

“Either there’s nothing here or else the thing we are looking for has been left in such an obvious place that it hasn’t occurred to us to look there,” Angela said.

He sat down, leaning his elbows on the table and remembered doing the same thing the previous evening in the half-light of his own kitchen. As he grew older, he tended to resemble his father more and more, a thought which made him more mellow. With a touch of nostalgia, he recalled getting up before sunrise on dark mornings in winter to do his homework, and his father greeting him as he picked up his wallet from the porcelain dish on the top of the fridge. He remembered that dish perfectly. It had a picture of the Mole
Antonelliana in Turin on it, and was always full of papers. There was a porcelain dish on the fridge in Decimo Tonna’s house too. In it, along with laundry receipts and bus tickets, he found an envelope without stamp or address but which had been torn roughly open and had the words “Decimo Tonna” scrawled on it in blue ink. He opened it and found a sheet of lined paper taken out of a notebook: “57th anniversary”, and underneath, “San Pellegrino section, square E, 3rd row, number 32.”

“Would you feel threatened by a note like this?” Angela wondered aloud.

He had no idea how to reply. The two phrases belonged to a code he could not break, but the reference to the anniversary was unequivocal.

“The Tonna brothers were the object of virulent hatred by many people.”

“Because—” But she could not finish the sentence before he interrupted her.

“Yes, they were Fascists. The boatman in particular must have been involved in some really nasty business down the valley. But these are old stories …”

“Well, all these things can hardly be considered faults nowadays, seeing that ‘that lot’ are back in power.”

“Memory is not completely dead. Along the Po some species survive that are long extinct everywhere else,” Soneri said with bitter irony.

After seeing Angela out, he thought again of the river and the flood. Perhaps the water had now gone down far enough to reveal the rims of the embankments over the floodplain. The case still seemed to him most amenable to solution if it were approached from the riverbanks, always provided that the killing of Decimo and the disappearance of Anteo were linked. But might they not be? He could not fathom Decimo.
It seemed that his life had been enclosed in an impenetrable shell. None of his neighbours had had any relationship with him beyond casual greetings. No-one ever stopped to exchange two words with him at a street corner. He did not drop into bars. Decimo’s day consisted of getting up early in the morning, leaving the house and making his way to the hospital where he would spend the whole day talking to patients, moving from one ward to another. He was given lunch and dinner by the orderlies, who were so used to seeing him around that they regarded him as a relative or a carer. Every evening he went home where he shut himself away in his gloomy apartment. That was his life, year after year, ever since he had returned from abroad. It might be that in this way he had sought to conceal his very existence. In the hospital, where people think only of present illness and future uncertainty, he had found himself so much at ease that he had come to consider it his real home. He had been a man on the run long before the delivery of that note which had seemed to him like a death sentence. Or perhaps he was fleeing only from that message? The oddest thing was that it had come to him at a point when life would soon in any case be presenting him with the final reckoning.

In the police station, Juvara looked long and hard at the sheet of lined paper. “San Pellegrino section …sounds like a graveyard. Considering how he ended up, and the various threats …”

Soneri had had the same impression. But which graveyard? The mystery surrounding the brothers seemed as inscrutable as ever. Hardened by years on the run, they gave the impression of having raised a drawbridge on the outside world, one sailing the Po in solitude, the other choosing to live among aged, suffering humanity.

The telephone rang. “Commissario, it’s Maresciallo Aricò. He wants a word with you,” Juvara said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

Soneri nodded, pointing to his own telephone.

“Commissario, when will the forensic squad be down to examine the barge? I can’t keep a patrol tied up day and night.”

“Aren’t your colleagues in Luzzara attending to it?”

“Now that the water is dropping, they’ve palmed it off on to me. There’s been a robbery at Luzzara and they’ve got their hands full.”

“Be patient for a couple of hours,” Soneri said. “Any news?”

“Your good friends the communists have moved back into the boat club to clean up their flooded premises.”

“They’re not my friends,” he said, annoyed at the maresciallo’s laboured irony. “And I don’t care if they are communists.”

“A bunch of hotheads. It’s only age that has calmed them down a bit, but they’re as pig-headed as ever.”

“They’re all the same along the Po valley, otherwise the river would have carried them away like sand.”

When he hung up, he felt a sense of relief. Aricò had given him the perfect excuse for going back to the places and people who most aroused his curiosity. He felt like a fisherman dozing on a boat yawing in the slow current, waiting for a tug on the line to shake him from his torpor, make him swing into action.

“I’m taking you out today, to Luzzara. We’ll have a look at the barge,” he told Nanetti.

“Just you and me on a boat,” Nanetti said. “Like a honeymoon.”

“And the carabinieri on the walkway to protect our intimacy.”

“If it’s all the same with you, I’ll send along two of my men. I’m not keen on going to a place which is even wetter than this city.”

“No, I want you and nobody else.”

He heard Nanetti groan. His joints would play up for a week.

Half an hour later, Soneri presented himself to the officer standing guard on the barge. As he came through the town, he had noticed that the water level had dropped and even that Tonna’s boat seemed to have sunk down behind the main embankment. The gangplank sloped steeply now towards the deck, though the sides of the floodplain had not yet emerged from the muddy waters. Inside, he found the light unchanged and thought to himself that the seasons, the sun and the mists, would remain forever excluded from this cabin and would never make any impact on the heavy atmosphere of gloomy solitude. His attention was once again drawn to the little wooden chest of drawers where Tonna kept his documents. He looked again at the dates of the sailings and at the cargoes of goods apparently transported up and down the river. The hold should have been packed with grain for the mills at Polesella, but he knew already that it was empty. He would in any case have had no trouble in working that out from the draught. He went back on to the deck and saw the young carabiniere standing in the mud of the embankment, smoking. He opened one of the hatch covers over the hold and switched on his torch. There was a ladder in the corner but something about it made it less than inviting. He made his reluctant descent into what seemed to him no more than a rat trap, being careful to lift the wooden ladder and jam it in the opening to stop the cover slamming shut. The moment he made a move inside that hole, he was assaulted by a dense, nauseating stench of sweaty armpits and groins, of damp and dirty clothes and of the breath of starving people. In one corner, there was a pile of rags and newspaper pages. Tonna had not been carrying grain. In that dank, airless hole it was
impossible not to feel the presence of the multitudes who had been conveyed in it. Their breath had remained trapped inside.