Po valley was white in every direction. The hoar frost had attached itself to each hanging branch, making them seem thicker and endowing them with new colours, a spectacle that raised his spirits as much as the first snow of winter.
He travelled along the embankment, stopping where the previous day they had lifted Anteo’s body on to the bank. It was still possible to make out the darker mark on the ground where the corpse had been laid. The commissario got out and looked over the floodplain and noted that all that was left were a few large pools covered by layers of ice. Elsewhere the ground seemed to have been thickened in the cold which had hardened the surface mud into a crust. It was only at that point that he became conscious of the silence. The mist and the white of the frost gave a certain solemnity to the surrounding countryside. They had switched off the pumps when the engines were only sucking in air. The freezing weather would finish the job.
He heard a tractor approach on the elevated road, but he had to let it draw close before he could make out one of the inhabitants of the floodplain coming back in order to work on his house, now reduced to a mud dyke. He would begin again, as those people there always did: giving new life to land made yet more fertile by the deposits from the river, spreading fresh gravel on the pathways and removing the sand from doors and walls.
Soneri parked at the boat club. There was no-one there yet and the locked door had the melancholy colour of aged straw. He got out of his car and called Juvara again. “Are you at the mortuary?”
“Yes, but it hasn’t got under way yet. The police doctor said it would begin at nine.”
“Never mind about the post-mortem,” Soneri told him. “Go over to the Istituto Storico della Resistenza and ask if they know anything about a partisan who was called ‘the Kite’.”
He deduced from a long silence that Juvara was somewhat taken aback.
“Are you still there?” he barked.
Juvara hastened to register his attention with a few grunts. “O.K., I’m on my way,” he said.
Soneri collected that Juvara was not pleased, and this annoyed him. He could not stand people who required their day to be mapped out in every detail from early morning, especially in a job like his. He detested diaries. He himself could never imagine what he would be doing one hour later, and lived from moment to moment without giving thought to the future. Things occurred according to a sequence which was rarely logical. It was useless to indulge in conjecture, since the prospect shifted as rapidly as it did for high-wire acrobats. His days were a process of continual adaptation to change, as was the case that morning on the banks of the Po. Rather than observing a body being cut open, he was looking at falling water levels which were funnelling the river back into its customary riverbed, and which were now so low that the riverbed itself seemed to him like a cavity in a gum from which a tooth had just been extracted.
He did not hear Barigazzi arrive and, when he turned round, he found him standing motionless behind him in the middle of the yard.
“Once you would have been on the jetty well before now,” Soneri said.
“And how do you know that?”
“Boats have been going up and down the river for quite a while now.”
Barigazzi said nothing, but made for the club and put a key in the door. The commissario stayed where he was, watching the current. He was happily wondering where San Quirico might have been. Straight ahead, Nanetti had said, so he looked into the middle distance, his gaze suspended somewhere between the water and the mist.
“Come on in, it’s warmer in here,” Barigazzi’s voice shouted from the club.
Soneri went in and stood in front of a cast-iron stove where the flames were already roaring. From the windows it was no longer possible to see the barge, which had dropped with the waters. Barigazzi came over and stood beside him at the window.
“San Quirico must be straight ahead,” Soneri said, pointing.
The old man remained silent for a few moments before saying: “It’s a bit further down the valley, just before Gussola.”
“How many people used to live there?”
“Forty or so. It was a small village.”
It was only then that he thought of a certain parallel which had been troubling him without his understanding why: the village, like Anteo Tonna, was underwater. And both were dead.
“Of those who used to live there, are there any still hereabouts?”
Barigazzi looked at him nervously. He was making an obviously unsuccessful effort to grasp what was behind these questions. “There are one or two up and down the Po valley, but they’re very old. The people who lived there were a pretty odd lot.”
“They were all communists, I’ve been told.”
“Strange characters, the sort you find in marshlands,” Barigazzi said uneasily. “Turned savage by the water and prey to malaria. People always on the verge of madness, after generations of intermarriage. Even the Fascists left them alone. And then the land reform programme wiped San Quirico off the map.”
“Can you still see the ruins of the houses today?”
“A couple more days and they’ll be sticking out of the water. It happens every time the level drops. They say that on misty nights when this happens you can still hear the voices of the people who lived in those houses. But it’s only a legend. Maybe it’s the wind whistling over the stones dislodged by the current. Others say it’s because in San Quirico they never buried their dead. They threw them into the river with a rock tied to their waists. Water to water.”
Soneri briefly reflected that this practice was probably not so different from what had happened many years previously all along the banks of the river: men eaten by fish and fish eaten by men. The same substance forever feeding off itself in an eternal cycle. And then his thoughts went back to Anteo Tonna, buried underwater by a boulder from the stone-crushing plant, but pinned, in his case, to the shallow, provisional floor of the flat lands where even the fish feel the precariousness of the sluggish, underwater currents, and for that reason do not stay there for long.
“It was not by chance that he was found there,” he said, staring straight ahead at the window, where the mists of the Po and a faint reflection of his face were superimposed on the glass.
He noticed that Barigazzi had turned to observe him, apparently bemused, as though he feared the commissario were talking in a delirium, but Soneri himself continued to look out at the horizon over the river, where for many days now the line between land and sky had been lost. It seemed obvious to him that the killer had had a certain taste for symbolism. Consciously or not, everyone did. Every pre-meditated murder followed the ritual of a theatrical production. Plainly there were some actors who performed their parts well; and others, less well. The problem was to identify the gifted ones.
To which category did the man who had killed Tonna belong? Soneri imagined him to be a well-focused, brazen type. Who else would plan a murder in a hospital ward, with all the risks he was bound to incur? And then there was the corpse on the floodplain, put there precisely so that it would be found beside the monument to the partisans. An ordinary killer or a professional hit man would have tossed it into deeper waters, weighed down with a stone, in common with the practice for funerals at San Quirico.
Many things simply did not add up while others seemed to be talking to him, but in a language which was as yet indecipherable.
His mobile telephone brought him back to himself. “They killed him on the day of his disappearance, between eight and ten in the evening,” Nanetti informed him, with no preliminary greeting.
“So the barge set off without him.”
“Exactly. That whole business of the barge was to put us off the scent.”
“Was there anything else apart from the blow to the head?”
“Nothing. The body was otherwise unmarked. He was still a vigorous man in spite of his age.”
So, whoever had killed Decimo in the morning had killed Anteo in the evening. He must have known his two victims well. Above all, he must have been aware that the boatman — who rarely left his barge — would not have known about his brother’s death or else he would have taken precautions. In any case, the brothers had only occasional contact and Anteo was a man accustomed to threats.
Barigazzi switched on the radio, but now that the water was low the look-outs along the embankment had nothing to report to each other. In a silence broken only by the low buzz of the loudspeaker, the click of the door handle made itself heard. Dinon Melegari stood framed in the doorway. As soon as he saw the commissario he
