River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (25 page)

Out on the grass of the embankment, the cold seemed even more biting than in the town. In front of him he could see the fishermen’s cottages and, further down, the port with the moorings, and over to the right the boat club whose great light was, at that distance, no more than a blur in the mist. Thinking over the conversation with Aricò put him in a better mood. The meal helped too, especially now that he was losing the calories in the battle against the freezing cold. He had no means of knowing if the
magano
would turn up, but it was worth waiting at least until after midnight. Was this yet another voyage which would leave no trace in the club’s records?

He wrapped his coat more tightly around him, put on a woollen cap, checked that his mobile was switched off and began feeding himself with pieces of parmesan and slices of
culatello
at the rhythm of someone poking the fire. Shortly after eleven o’clock, he saw the lights of the club being switched off and heard stray snatches of conversation between people moving from the yard towards the embankment. He thought he could make out the shadows of four people as they climbed towards the elevated road: perhaps Barigazzi, Ghezzi, Vernizzi and Torelli going home to bed.

When the town bell struck twelve, the commissario contemplated giving in to the cold. Ten minutes later, he tried to rise, only to find his legs stiff and all feeling gone from his feet. The hoar frost had covered him all over like icing on a cake, but before he had taken a few steps he began to hear a
distant rumble, and as it became louder he clearly recognized the diesel engine of Melegari’s
magano
.

He saw the prow light as it drew up to the mooring, and then heard a muffled thud as the craft bumped against the tyres on the coping stones. A man leapt ashore to take hold of the hawsers. When he came into the strip of light emanating from the prow, the commissario saw that it was Vaeven. The engine and the light were then both switched off and Soneri waited for Melegari to disembark, even if in the darkness he would find it difficult to make out his imposing bulk. Shortly afterwards, lighting his way with a torch, Melegari appeared with a third man of robust build, slightly bent and with a shuffling gait. Soneri believed that this was the man he had seen between Barigazzi and Dinon near the fishermen’s cottages a couple of evenings earlier.

As the three made their way towards the club, the commissario kept watch on them for as long as he could. He could only make out shadows, but for the moment what interested him was the direction those shadows were taking. They proceeded slowly and would shortly disappear from view at the point where the road curved round parallel to the embankment. Perhaps he would hear their footsteps crunch on the gravel hardened by the frost. He thought of following them, but he risked being given away by the frozen grass, so he decided to let them move off but to keep them in sight until they reached the yard, when he could move on to the road and track them in the fog.

It was some time before they reappeared. He had the impression of hearing first footsteps and then the sound of something bumping against a wooden object, perhaps an oar striking the hull of a boat, and then nothing until he saw Melegari and Vaeven striding back towards the yard. The yellowing light of the huge lamp now lit them up very distinctly,
but the third man was no longer with them. He must have gone into one of the cottages whose door could not be seen from where Soneri was, even if it seemed to him impossible that the man would spend the night in such a place. He went down towards the path, slipping on the icy embankment as he did so. The fog and the dark made it difficult to explore that chessboard of gardens and yards which acted as antechambers to the fishermen’s cottages. All he could see were pieces of old furniture piled up, fenced plots that might have been gardens, and a few upturned boats. He did his best to compare his memories with the kind of photographic negative he now saw. What had become of that stooped, apparently elderly man who dragged his feet as he walked?

He made his way back towards the town, walking more quickly to warm himself up. The
Italia
was in darkness with even the light on the sign outside switched off, while between the houses the streetlights were dimmed by the patchy fog. Over the whole scene, the hoar frost cast a frozen mantle. He walked along the streets in the middle of the road rather than under the low colonnades. He came to the piazza which contained the bar owned by Tonna’s niece and turned back into the alleyways. It was there that he came upon Melegari’s shop, where Barigazzi had told him the old communists of the town gathered around the bust of Stalin. The front was no more than a grey metal shutter with a faded sign above it: shoemaker. He looked up to see a couple of windows with the shutters open.

He took a few steps and turned back to look once again at those windows which seemed to him like the staring eyes of a corpse. He was still puzzling over that peculiarity when he realized he had reached his own car parked in front of the
Italia,
and he understood. Melegari had not gone home. When they disembarked from the
magano
, they had been convinced they would find the town deserted. The two men had left their
friend in the cottage, but they had then noticed the commissario’s car which was easily visible from the elevated roadway. At that point, Melegari and his friend must have suspected something was up and had not come back to their houses – an old precaution from their activist days when they had clashes with the police.

Once home, he managed only a couple of hours’ sleep. All he felt was a kind of grim determination. The light of the late autumn dawn was as faint as at night-time, but the cold was more intense.

Things were already on the move in the town. Some lights could be glimpsed through the still-closed shutters, and shopkeepers were beginning to unload merchandise from vans. The lights were on in the newsagent’s, and as he passed, Soneri glanced at the hoardings:

MURDER ON THE PO
ANTEO TONNA KILLED BY TRAFFICKERS

He decided against buying the newspaper. He did not want to begin the day in low spirits.

He parked in an out-of-the-way spot and walked towards the jetty. He climbed over the embankment and came back down into the yard. Over the water, the clear glow of a timid dawn began to appear. He passed the cottages and walked straight over to the moorings. The space occupied by the
magano
was empty and the hawsers had been thrown on to the coping stones as on the day before. The commissario was disappointed and even duped, but at least he knew that the men sensed they were being watched. They had accepted their parts and were performing their assigned roles.

He wandered among the cottages, his path taking him along the avenue between on one side the entrances to the dwellings and on the other the slope at the bottom of which the river flowed. In the ashen light, he gazed at various constructions which had been thrown together with cheap, leftover materials, strange pieces of architecture with the common feature that they were all built on stilts to keep them above the water. All around lay old boats, wheels of farm carts and barbecues for the summer. He examined them one by one until he came to a detail which attracted his attention: two footsteps imprinted on the thin layer of hoar frost which had settled the night before on the avenue alongside one of those raised dwellings, footsteps which stopped abruptly near the road.

The commissario reflected on this and when he looked up at the embankment he noticed that the cottage was one of those which was invisible from where he had been standing the evening before. He went back to examine more closely those solitary footprints which came to a stop at an invisible wall. He walked along the path and climbed the steps to the upper level. A covered balcony ran round the perimeter of the dwelling, and from there on a summer evening, provided the observer used a good insecticide, the view of the Po must have had a certain charm. He tried to peer between the cracks in the shutters, but he could see only darkness within. However, he felt a draught coming from somewhere, a sign that the windows had not been closed.

It was not difficult to undo the catch. As he had anticipated, he saw before him a room where the plants had been brought in to shelter them from the frost, an oleander, geraniums and a lemon bush half covered in cellophane. The commissario breathed in the dust-filled air, while spiders’ webs clung to his face. He opened the door in the room and found himself in a corridor. His torch lit up a row of boots and a single shelf
above which there was a mirror. He pressed the light switch and there appeared walls abandoned to the damp, with various doors opening off them. The one directly facing Soneri led into a kitchen which contained everything needed to prepare a meal. A calendar open at the month of September was hanging from a hook, and on the other side there were doors giving on to first a bathroom and then two bedrooms, one of which contained a perfectly made double bed which gave off an odour of camphor, while in the centre of the second stood a camp bed and beside it an electric heater.

Soneri approached the heater with all the caution of a bomb-disposal expert. It was still plugged in, but it was switched off. It was warmer in that room and everything led him to suppose that it had been occupied until a short time before, but the occupant could not have slept for long, four or five hours at the most. He examined every corner of the room. There were no more than odds and ends, a few things left over from the summer, a couple of magazines and assorted objects stuffed into a cupboard without order or neatness. Only one thing appeared to have been left there recently, a box of pills for high blood pressure. He opened it, but there was nothing inside.

He went back into the corridor and saw that the exit had been closed but not bolted. Whoever had gone out last had simply pulled the door to behind him, as did Soneri. He closed the shutters from the inside of the room with the plants and went out through the main door. When he was at the bottom of the stairs, he made his way towards the road by the shortest path, but it was then that he came across the footprints once more. If he were to continue in the same direction, he was bound to leave his own prints, because the wind had caused the hoar frost to cover the pathway. Unthinkingly, he had done what the person in the house the night before had done,
but whoever it was must have noticed he was leaving traces and had turned back on his steps, picking his way between the stilts beneath the house towards a point in the driveway untouched by the hoar frost. But in the dark he had failed to notice a couple of footprints.

On the street, Soneri lit his cigar and tried to put these facts into some kind of order. Someone was living in hiding here but had been able to move about the Po with the complicity of a circle of orthodox communists who had remained faithful to Stalin. All this after the murder of two old Fascists. It might still have been 1946 …

From the yard he noticed the figure of Barigazzi going down to check the stakes. He followed the old man as he set about his work. When he came up behind him, Barigazzi spun round and stared at him, a quizzical expression on his face.

“If it goes on like this,” Soneri said, pointing to the water, “even the fish are going to have a hard job of it.”

“The water is very low,” Barigazzi said, as though he had expected a different kind of question.

They walked along, leaving footprints side by side in the muddy sand just above the waterline.

“Whose is the third cottage along from the mooring berths?”

“It’s Vaeven’s,” he said with a sigh that conceded he had known the commissario would get to that point.

They went back up towards the beacon. Soneri patiently followed Barigazzi who seemed in a state of resignation. The partisans, like the Kite in those days in 1944, must have walked in the same way as they were led to the wall. When they reached the front of the boat club, the old man walked straight ahead up to the elevated roadway. The commissario caught up with him, both still lost in their own thoughts.

When they were in sight of the monument, Barigazzi
stopped and turned to Soneri, evidently angry. “Look, I’ve got nothing to do with them. To my mind they’re all mad, with Stalin and all those meetings …”

“Stalin has nothing to do with it. They’re threatening you because of the registers,” Soneri said after a brief pause.

“What really upsets them is the business with the diesel,” Barigazzi said in a voice two tones below his normal speech. “They’re making illegal use of agricultural oil because it costs less. If too many trips appeared on the register, the police would check the files with the fuel records and might start wondering how they covered such distances with so little naphtha.”

The explanation was plausible. After all, the
magano
was registered in the name of a co-operative of fishermen.

“There are other illegal immigrants apart from the ones Tonna was transporting,” the commissario said.

Barigazzi walked with his head down, and looked up only when the oratory which Anteo had been visiting almost every week in recent times emerged from the mist. Its darker shadow in the surrounding greyness brought them to a halt, and without Soneri’s having applied any more pressure, the old man seemed to feel his back was against the wall.

“Do you think I don’t know that? But I don’t know what they’re really up to. They’re hardly going to come and explain it all to me.”

“Melegari frightens you. I recognized as much that time he came to the clubhouse and saw me there.”

“There are some people who can make themselves clear without issuing threats. They go about their own business, but they know that I know who they are.”

“And yet they’re all old now,” the commissario murmured.

Barigazzi walked around the tiny chapel, glancing in at the little altar where the flame of the sanctuary lamp was flickering. Behind the chapel, in a sheltered corner and by a kind of
apse, a rosemary plant was growing.

The old man plucked off a sprig, rubbed the herbs into the palm of his hand and smelled it. “A little miracle,” he said. “Next to the river, with these winters and fog six months a year …and yet it survives. The walls of the oratory protect it from the north and east winds, and the embankment from the rains from the west. The only air which gets in is the gentle wind from the south. Ten metres away, it would be killed off by the frost, but here it can live.”