at a guess it would seem to me that he died on the same day that he disappeared.”
“It would be better to move him at the earliest opportunity to a cold slab in the morgue,” Arico said.
“Agreed,” Soneri said with a glance at Nanetti, who nodded before saying: “The killer must have made his calculations very carefully. What better way to cancel out the traces of a crime than a flood on the Po?”
It had never occurred to the commissario that the murderer might have taken into account the rise in the river level before making his move, that he might have waited for the waters to overflow on to the plains, fill them and cover over the scene of the crime. He noticed that Arico and Nanetti were staring at him strangely. When he was thinking, his face must have assumed a particular expression, as everyone noticed it. Angela would always say: “What’s the matter, what are you thinking about?”
Fortunately the blue flashing lights of the ambulance arriving attracted everybody’s attention. Before it pulled up, the commissario took a last look around him: Arico, the officer, Nanetti and himself standing there, in the mist, beside a corpse swollen with water. It was like a scene from a gangster movie.
It was only when the scent of the pasta con fagioli worked its way into his nostrils that he remembered about the meeting in the questura. It had completely slipped his mind, but then the questore had completely forgotten about the murder.
“So you’ve won,” Nanetti said, looking around at the walls of Il Sordo with that curiosity for detail which he showed when examining corpses or cartridge shells.
“Won what?”
“With Alemanni. He said you were chasing fireflies…”
“Alemanni has never understood anything. He should have been a lawyer.”
“What do you think about it now?”
“That the motive is not one of the usual ones.”
“Why so?”
Soneri looked up at the cross-legged Christ but was unable to translate into words the dance of phantoms, intuitions and conjectures inside his head. “It’s all to do with something that happened a long time ago. Or perhaps that was only a preliminary. On the barge I found a note which said something about the killing of a partisan.”
“That was more than fifty years ago…”
“That’s true, but I have the impression that time passed in vain for the Tonna brothers. Perhaps out of an extreme regard for consistency, or perhaps out of shame, their minds remained the same as when they were in their twenties. It’s strange, in a world of whitened sepulchres.”
Nanetti tucked away four spoonfuls of the pasta as though he were shovelling sand. Then he raised his eyes and said, “That’s to their credit.”
“The price they paid was an isolated life. Decimo pretended he started living when he was forty. His brother spent his days on his own on a barge, willing to deal with people-traffickers, anything to keep him afloat.”
“You’re sure they’ve got nothing to do with it?”
“Yes. They thought they were the only threat facing Tonna, but I’m afraid…”
As he spoke to Nanetti, his conviction that he was dealing with an unusual and almost unfathomable crime gathered strength. He was reminded of the death of a well-known criminal many years previously. He had been under threat from all sides, but died in the most banal of ways, falling off a ladder trying to break into an apartment.
“If it was the same person who killed the two brothers,” Nanetti broke in, “it means that in the morning he deposed of Decimo and in the evening Anteo. But was the latter not the main target?”
“Certainly,” Soneri said, deep in thought. “And why kill Decimo in a hospital, with all the risks that involved? And anyway, are we sure we’ve got them in the right order?”
“We’ll find out from the post-mortem.”
“He obviously meant to kill them both, and it seems that both of them were aware of the threat.”
Nanetti put his spoon down on the empty plate and stretched out his arms. He never followed his colleague in his suppositions. The only things which interested him were evidence and proof, and the only hard facts at that moment were corpses, two brothers, killed in the same way.
Soneri made a sign to the landlord to bring a plate of spalla cotta. The restaurant was beginning to fill up, but there was no sign either of Barigazzi or of the others from the boat club. Nanetti kept looking around until he noticed, tucked away in a corner behind him, the notches marking the height of the water and the date of the flood. “Just thinking about all that water makes my arthritis play up.”
“Think of Tonna, underwater for days.”
“A damp patch was the least of his problems. If anything, the water stopped him from decomposing too rapidly. And besides, on the floodplain, there are no pike.”
In fact even the fish had left Tonna’s body untouched. Soneri was contemplating other corpses which had been eaten away by marauding fish and left disfigured as though rubbed by sandpaper, when Nanetti surprised him with an unsuspected knowledge of the Po and its fauna. “I’ve looked it all up,” he said. “I also know that in these parts, over on the Cremona side, there’s a submerged village which re-emerges only when the water is very low.”
“You don’t remember where?”
“No, but it must be right in front of where we are now, on the far side. I think all you’ve got to do is ask. The land reclamation programme in the post-war period modified the course of the river, and the village itself was moved a couple of kilometres inland.”
Soneri reflected on this for a moment and began to feel welling up inside him a sense of unease which was more like deep rancour. It was like a mild pressure on a part of his head he would not have been able to identify too precisely. For days, he had been moving around on the embankments and speaking to the local people without finding out about that sunken village. It annoyed him that Nanetti had simply turned up one evening with a new piece of information. He felt a fool, even if he was not sure that those few miserable hovels whose very existence he had been ignorant of were genuinely important. Perhaps not, but then why was he in such an ill humour?
The barman came over with the spalla cotta and Soneri was tempted to ask him about those submerged houses, but saw he had removed the hearing aid. And anyway, he would not have told him even if he had heard perfectly. Soneri concealed his thoughts by acting for a moment as head waiter, dividing the spalla cotta between the two plates and pouring the Fortanina into both glasses. Nanetti let him get on with it, and when they were about to eat, he said, “This story of the underwater village has really made an impression on you, hasn’t it?”
He expressed himself with such moderation that the commissario calmed down, surprising even himself with his sudden change of mood.
“Absolutely nobody spoke to me about it,” he said, while the possibility that there was a reason for that superimposed itself on what he said.
“It’s still on old maps from the Fascist era. It was in the middle of a marsh,” Nanetti said, “and the Fascist officials refused to initiate the reclamation programme in that zone because, so they said, it was a nest of Reds. The work was done under De Gasperi after the war.”
Soneri remembered Nanetti’s passion for topography and for old maps of any kind, military or civil. In his cellar at home he had a pile of them, which his wife described as the finest woodworm farm in the province.
“And this village was inhabited until they altered the course of the river?”
“I just don’t know,” Nanetti said, “but I believe so, considering it was rebuilt from scratch further inland on the plain.”
He did not know why, but the story interested him. “What was the name of the village?”
“San Quirico. It seems no-one actually lives in the reconstructed houses. The children of the original owners keep them as second homes.”
Soneri continued to think about the walls over which the Po slowly flowed. How many people had been happy or sad in that place? How many personal stories were buried under the water there? He was not sure why, but he imagined that some of these stories were connected to the case of the Tonna brothers. This idea frightened him, but his curiosity was aroused by the fact that no-one had ever told him about that place, even though it was only a stone’s throw from the boat club. Perhaps on clear days you could even make it out beyond the bend in the river.
Nanetti got up and when the two of them were under the colonnade, the stench of burning still in the air, Soneri concluded to himself that the inquiry would need to start afresh from Anteo’s corpse, from the facts in other
