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 Arico. 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. Arico 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.
Soneri put the ladder back in its place and clambered up again, closing the cover behind him. He went into the cabin and opened the log book once more. Tonna had made many voyages, but he had not carried the cargoes entered in that register, and yet, in an old box, the bills of lading with the description of the goods in question had been meticulously recorded. A minimum of four sailings a week between Cremona and the area around Rovigo. On the other hand, if he had not sailed as recorded, how could he have met the running costs of the barge whose engine swallowed litres and litres of fuel as it struggled upstream against the current? An accountant’s punctiliousness was evident in Tonna’s handwritten ledgers. Each purchase of fuel was listed in neat handwriting and on each occasion the sums appeared considerable.
He heard the unmistakeable, irregular footsteps of Nanetti as he paced about on the deck. It sounded like a rhythmless drip-drip from a branch shaken in the wind.
“That’s it. You’re not getting me on that gangplank a second time,” he said.
“I’m sure once will always be good enough for you.”
His colleague stared at him with good-humoured pique. “In this mess, I’d be hard put to find anything,” he said, staring about him in disgust.
“Above all, check the hold,” Soneri advised. “I’ve got an idea this barge was the least comfortable cruise ship ever seen on sea or river.”
Nanetti studied him attentively, and from that look it was clear he had understood. “How do you get into the hold?”
The commissario came back on deck to guide him and as soon as Nanetti saw the hatch, he grimaced and threw back his head like a horse refusing a fence. “Now I’m sure of it. You really do want to see me spend my old age in a wheelchair.”
Soneri helped him down a ladder that was fit only for a chicken hutch, but did not venture beyond the hatch. As soon as he saw his colleague get to work, he felt boredom come over him. “I’ll leave you in the capable hands of the carabiniere,” he called down.
A voice rang out from the depths: “You’re a treacherous bastard. That man will lock me in and slip the mooring.”
Soneri recommended Nanetti to the care of the officer on guard, and made his own way to the town. The road turned away from the embankment at certain points and cut inland between flooded fields. When he came in sight of the bell tower, a blue sign indicated the way to the Casoni residence. Instinctively he turned off the road, taking him further from the embankment. He had remembered about Maria of the sands.
There were no more than seven houses and one very grand building, which stood surrounded by trees and was higher than the bridge at Roccabianca. He entered the lobby and stood there a few moments looking around as various nurses came and went with trolleys which gave off a vague scent of camomile. “I’m Commissario Soneri, Parma police. I’m looking for Maria of the sands…”
“Who?” the nurse said, straining to make out what he was saying.
“I’m afraid I don’t know her full name. I’ve been told that you have here a woman who used to live on an island and who answers to that name.”
“Must be Signora Grignaffini,” said the woman. “She’s the only Maria here.”
“Probably her, then.”
