“But did you get the impression that he was treating the telephone call as a threat?”
“No,” the priest said. “In my opinion, he knew exactly who was looking for him. He might even have thought that the person wanted to harm him, but he was ready for anything. He seemed uninterested in any kind of precaution because he had abandoned himself completely to the will of God.”
An elderly woman appeared at the door behind the priest and observed the commissario with a certain distrust, turning her face slightly away from him. Soneri supposed that, apart from being displeased with unannounced visits, she did not care for the smell of cigar smoke.
“It’s time for the catechism class,” Don Firmino murmured wearily.
The commissario bade him farewell and took his leave.
He chose a roundabout route. He walked towards the embankment through an area some distance from the houses with their tidy gardens, lined up one alongside the other like a chessboard. An icy breeze accompanied the mist, pushing it upstream. Soneri turned onto a track which led to the road alongside the dyke. The river was entirely shrouded by a blanket of greyness which took on even darker colours among the poplar trees which stood in water up to the level of their branches.
He lit a cigar, and as he began to walk back towards the town his thoughts turned to Anteo as he had been described by Don Firmino: serene and at peace after a life on the run. Who could say if the transport of illegal immigrants had been intended to finance the rebuilding of his barge, to make it into a home where he could settle? Not even the telephone call had troubled him — at least in the priest’s opinion — and yet it appeared to be the only unforeseen element in an old age filled with guilt which he was striving to expiate on the benches of the church, head bowed, in sight of a statue of San Giovanni encircled by lighted candles, or in meetings with Don Firmino for confessions face-to-face or for conversations of half an hour, an hour, or more. He could not imagine Tonna talking very much. Perhaps it was the priest who took the lead.
He came in sight of the first houses in the town, all huddled under the embankment. From somewhere beyond the stone-crushing plant, he thought he could make out the rhythmic swish of oars. He stopped to listen and picked up the sound more clearly: a boat was moving among the poplars, between the large embankment and the floodplain which was now beginning to emerge here and there, making the waters even more lifeless on this side. He tried to see more clearly. He turned back across grass flattened by sandbags where, away from the sun, patches on the ground as white as onions had begun to appear. The noise of the eddying water could be heard more distinctly. He crouched in the undergrowth and waited until he thought he could sense something emerging from the shadows. A figure was rowing a small boat, standing upright, using one oar in the style of a gondolier, passing through the poplars at the level of the branches. One stroke to propel the craft forward and then a long pause: it might have been a hunter, but this was not the hunting season. The commissario rose a little to lessen the pressure on his legs but at that moment a pheasant took flight noisily from the river side of the dyke, screeching as it flew low over the water.
The boatman took another couple of strokes, pushing the boat in the direction of a wide inlet and carrying himself out of sight. Soneri waited, attempting to work out the direction the boatman had taken, but he did not hear anything more. He had disappeared into the mist and must have been sculling his oar astern under the water, like a fin. He must have positioned the boat so that he could take advantage of the current, patiently allowing himself to be pulled along by it. The commissario would have given anything to be able to swim after him.
Soneri arrived at the jetty. He saw both the little pennant over the boat club waving once more in the wind and the beacon-lamp facing into the thick, swirling mist. The temperature had dropped still further and it was beginning to freeze. He was fastening up his duffel coat when he heard the strains of “Aida” from one of his pockets.
“Your good friend Alemanni is telling everyone in the prosecutor’s office that you’re getting nowhere,” were the words with which Angela assailed him.
The magistrate’s name caused him to shiver more than did the icy breeze blowing along the embankment. “He’s got it in for me because I proved that Decimo’s death was no suicide.”
“He’s gone and leaked something to the newspapers too, and they’re all saying that the investigation is in a blind alley.”
Soneri let out something like a roar and cursed himself for not having been the first to go to the press with the story of the murder. He regretted having done anything to spare the magistrate’s blushes. Grinding his teeth, he swore under his breath.
“Calm down,” Angela said. “In a few months the presidente del tribunale will pension him off and allow him to live out his days in his club. They won’t even trust him with the most straightforward inquiry. The Tonna case will be his last,” she said. Soneri bitterly regretted his ill luck. “Anyway, get ready: One of these days I’m going to drop in on you. So work out how you’re going to welcome me. I’m already fed up with the Po valley, and if I make the effort to come, I won’t be best pleased if I end up being let down. That barge
…”
“It’s right in front of a very busy boat club.”
“You’re a commissario, are you not? So it’s up to you to find the solution.”
He would have been delighted to. Not the solution to the problem of taking Angela below deck on the barge, thereby gifting her the excitement of making love in an unusual place, but to the dilemma of discovering who was the solitary boatman on the waterway and what he was up to. The man had been at risk of being intercepted by the carabinieri, who were keeping an eye on the flooded houses beyond the embankment, but then, with that mist, they would never have caught a boatman skilled in the ways of the Po, not even with a speedboat. He felt uneasy, and as night spread over the valley already darkened by the mist he was nagged by the thought of another day gone by with nothing to show for it. He was beginning to wonder whether the doubts insinuated here and there in the columns of the newspapers could at any moment be transformed into headlines. He could already picture Alemanni in triumph, foaming at the mouth, his vengeance complete as he resigned from the profession with a sensational parting shot.
His ill humour was still on him when he arrived under the colonnades, and did not leave him even when he was at the door of Il Sordo. Hunger had been gnawing at him for some hours, so the usual plate of spalla cotta and glass of Fortanina were not now likely to be sufficient. There were only a few customers, and a muted “Otello” seemed to be rising from the darkness of the cellar.
He sat down in front of the cross-legged Christ and placed his elbows on the table, bowing his head slightly in a posture which appeared almost devout. The hazy image of the boatman was still in his mind, and so caught up was he that he did not hear the deaf landlord come up beside him. He looked up at him. His rolled-up sleeves exposed enormous, hairy forearms and he was wearing a waistcoat which could scarcely contain his paunch. His face was dominated by his big lips and by a look which seemed to give off a kind of mysterious malevolence. That evening too he had his hearing aid switched off. Soneri picked up the menu and pointed to the pasta con fagioli.
By the time Barigazzi arrived, almost all the tables were filled with people playing cards. The old man still had his working boots on as well as the heavy-duty overalls worn by dockers. “Good choice,” he complimented Soneri, pointing to his dish.
“I have a good nose for food. Better than for investigations.”
“You need patience,” the old man consoled him. “It’s a rare gift. Everybody’s in such a rush nowadays.”
“If only it were a question of patience and nothing else… Here you all are, convinced that the game’s up for Tonna, but no-one can say how or why.”
“Do you believe there is any other solution?”
“Possibly not. But someone knows something and is saying nothing.”
“Tonna didn’t have many friends in the village… Nobody got close to him.”
“Except for Don Firmino and Maria of the sands. She’s outraged with you lot,” Soneri said. “Because you took away her island.”
“Do you think we don’t know! Her beloved little island!” Barigazzi said in a rasping voice. “She was a Fascist spy and had two villagers shot. And that wasn’t all. She started spying on people who went up and down the Po. We should have drowned her,” he said, making a signal to the landlord with his thick thumb.
“Whose house was it that the Fascists torched?”
Barigazzi stared at him, pushing his hat back on his head. “Nothing was torched on this side,” he said at last.
