are, you can be sure he’ll turn up. But are you really sure the Po has taken him?”
The commissario thought it over for a while before replying. “No,” he said with resignation, telling himself that the investigation was still to get under way. “Can I offer you a drink?” he proposed to the old man.
“I’d be very grateful, in a little while,” Barigazzi said. “First we have to shift the radio. We’ll take it to the Town Hall. That way the mayor will be able to listen for himself.”
“Where’s the best place for a drink?”
“Depends on your tastes,” the old man said. “I prefer Il Sordo, run by the deaf barman, under the colonnades, but they’ve got good wine in the Italia, where you’ll have been already.”
Soneri was astonished that the man knew where he had left his car, but then he remembered that from the embankment it was easy to see down to the road in front of the bar.
It was growing dark as he went down towards the town. He was aware of a level of feverish agitation among the houses and he understood why when he noticed a group of people gathered around a carabiniere patrol car parked nearby. The maresciallo was issuing evacuation orders, but the people were unwilling to move. As he passed by, the commissario caught sight of the officer’s face, with beads of sweat caused by the excitement mingling with drops of rain. Only a few families loading goods on to the van were paying him any heed. The others seemed on the point of mutiny. On the piazza, on the other hand, everything was quiet, as though the river were receding. A yellow sign concealed behind a large chestnut tree whose last leaves were hanging listlessly on the branches pointed to the Portici bar. Inside there were a few tables and several video games occupied by some young people.
“You must be Tonna’s niece,” Soneri said to the woman behind the bar.
A woman of around forty, not especially well preserved, looked at him with obvious distrust. “Yes,” she said, in a forced, vaguely threatening tone.
“I am Commissario Soneri, from the police.”
The woman grew even more rigid. She put down the glass she was drying to give him her full attention. “If it’s about my uncle, I have already told all I know to the carabinieri,” she said. “But they don’t exactly seem to be going out of their way to find him.”
“Do you think there’s been an accident?”
“Do you have a better explanation?”
“At the moment, no,” Soneri said. “But the idea that he would have fallen into the water does seem strange.”
The woman stared at him, with open hostility. She was wearing no make-up, and gave the impression of systematic self-neglect.
“You haven’t told me your name.”
“Claretta,” she said. That name, more suitable for a doll, was at odds with the brazen set of her face.
By a kind of conditioned reflex, Soneri thought of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress. Perhaps because the woman was dressed in black.
“I imagine you’ve dismissed the possibility that your uncle might have decided to end it all.”
She dismissed the idea with a sweep of her hand. “He was too fond of the life he was leading, of the river and of his barge. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had found his body in the cabin, but this way-”
“When did you see him last?”
“Four days ago. He came with his clothes to wash, as he did every week. Each time I asked him when he planned to give it all up, but he wouldn’t discuss it.”
“Did he have enemies?”
“Ancient history, from before the war,” Claretta stated, her voice hardening. “Politics.”
With Claretta Petacci still in his mind, Soneri asked instinctively: “Because of his Fascist past?”
The woman nodded. Anteo sought solitude on the river, spending his days as a wandering hermit on the water, avoiding contact with hostile towns and people. Perhaps his brother had had the same problem, and that was why he spoke only of illnesses, fleeing from his own past and hiding away whenever anyone wanted to pry into his youth.
“But here, in this town, did he ever receive threats?”
“Perhaps he did right after the war, but not nowadays. It’s really a question for the older generation, and many of them are dead now. Young people simply ignored him. They’re nearly all Reds here.”
Claretta made as if to move off towards the cappuccino machine, but the commissario raised his hand to hold her back.
“I came to tell you about something else.”
She stopped in her tracks, as though she were under threat.
“Your other uncle, Decimo, has gone as well,” Soneri told her in a voice that had dropped two tones below its normal register. “He jumped out of a third-floor window in the hospital in Parma,” he said, not referring to the possibility of murder.
The woman remained briefly silent. “Two at one time,” she murmured. Then, folding her arms to support her flaccid, heavy breasts, she whispered: “Poor Decimo.”
The commissario observed her closely, but before he could speak, she got in first. “Where is he now?”
“In the mortuary.”
She seemed dumbstruck. She kept her eyes on the floor while the theme tunes from the video games made a mockery of all the tumult inside her.
Soneri attempted to take advantage of the fact that she had dropped her guard. “Could you tell me if you have any suspicions, if anyone had got in touch with your uncle, or perhaps he dropped some hints…it was your son who sometimes sailed with him, is that not so?”
“Anteo didn’t talk, not even to me. For my son, the problem was not sailing on the river. It was his silences that got to him.”
Soneri was about to let the matter drop. He let his arms fall to his side and gave a deep sigh. It was then that the woman raised her eyes from the floor and stared straight at him. The commissario was on the point of striking a match but stopped and waited expectantly.
“There was something strange, but I don’t know if it has anything to do with it.” Soneri did not move a muscle. “A week ago, someone phoned here looking for him.”
“Had that ever happened before?”
“Never.”
“Did they say who they were?”
“No. A man. From the voice it seemed he was an older person.”
“Did he seem to you to belong to these parts?”
Claretta stood thinking, as though she were unsure of the precise answer to give. “He spoke dialect perfectly, but he didn’t speak good Italian.”
“That can happen with people who hadn’t been to school all that much.”
“No, I mean he spoke Italian with a foreign accent.”
“What do you mean, foreign?”
“I’m not sure. Spanish, perhaps.”
“And what did he say?”
“That he was looking for my uncle.” After a pause, Claretta was more precise. “But he didn’t say straightaway that he was looking for Anteo Tonna. He said he was looking for ‘Barbisin’.”
“And who is ‘Barbisin’?”
“It was a nickname they used to give my uncle in the past.”
Someone opened a window, allowing in a gust of wet wind. The woman shivered as though she had been struck a blow, and went behind the bar to serve a customer who had just come in. The commissario’s mobile rang. He left the bar, saying good-bye with a wave, and waited until he was in the middle of the street before pressing the answer button. Juvara shouted out “Hello!” a couple of times without hearing anything in reply. Soneri cursed the machine and had to move to another corner of the piazza to get a signal.
“Boss, I haven’t really got much to report. Decimo Tonna really and truly did live on his own. His neighbours saw him come and go, but he only ever exchanged the time of day with them. He did his shopping at the supermarket and never went to the local bar. I’ve also heard that some social workers went to see him a couple of
