River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (16 page)

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
caffè 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 Aricò 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.”