hesitated as though he would rather turn back, but he decided to come in, with obvious reluctance, looking past Soneri at Barigazzi. When the commissario fixed his eyes on him, interrogating him with his stare, Dinon pointed an outstretched index finger at Barigazzi who, although evidently taken aback, returned his glance. With no more than that exchange, the two men established a kind of complicity.
“I came for the boats,” Melegari said, embarrassed. “Now that the waters are so low, I thought that it would be better to drag them ashore. The winch is working, isn’t it?”
“You’re right. The boats are on the sand.” Barigazzi was doing a better job of masking his feelings.
“White wine?”
Melegari nodded, as did the commissario. The three men then found themselves around a table while a silence as cold as the frost outside made conversation impossible.
“Will the inlets freeze over?” Soneri said.
The others looked up, wondering who was expected to answer this. “Only if it lasts a week. By the banks on the northern side,” Barigazzi mumbled, looking at Dinon, and in that exchange the commissario perceived a coded message.
He remained obstinately at the table, asking off-hand questions about the Po, about the levels of the water and the boats. After a time Dinon got up, almost banging his head on the light which hung over the table. “I’ll go and have a look at the boat.”
After he had left, Soneri said: “An unexpected visitor.”
Barigazzi said nothing, but got to his feet and took the bottle away. He came back for the glasses.
“The split in the Left has been resolved, then?” the commissario said.
The old man shrugged and tried to make light of the issue. “He drops in every so often. He’s required to inform us about what he’s doing at the jetty. That’s what the regulations say. And then he pays a fee for the boat.”
The commissario got up. It seemed to him pointless to go on. It was enough for him that evidently Melegari had come to speak to Barigazzi, perhaps about matters which concerned the Tonna brothers. He felt his distrust of him increasing, and this told him that he was getting close to something important.
He gave a curt nod to Barigazzi and went out, walking along the pebbly track which led to the jetty, where half of the boats had been left. On a large magano he saw Melegari testing the current with an oar. Melegari saw Soneri too, but pretended not to.
He crossed the river at Torricella, then turned on to the wrong road, but made it to Gussola by lunchtime. There was no great difference between the two banks of the river: the same low houses in rows, the same churches with that distinctive, blood-red Baroque typical of the Po valley. Juvara interrupted Soneri’s contemplation of a kind of cathedral with salame- coloured bricks, on which almost half a century of humidity had left its deposits. “There’s no Kite in our part of the valley,” he said. “There are two of them, and they both fought on the Apennines along the Gothic line.”
Soneri thought this over for a few minutes. “Cast your net wider. Check with the Resistance archives in Mantua, Cremona and Reggio. He must have been somewhere, this Kite.”
“Do you want me to look on the internet?”
“Look anywhere you like. Maybe the killer will pop up on your screen.”
It was not Juvara’s idleness which annoyed him as much as the intrusion of these new-fangled investigative techniques. He detected some vague threat in them, even though he knew perfectly well that it was the fear of feeling redundant which really upset him. At his age, this had become a matter of some delicacy.
He found a seat at a very ordinary restaurant, which did however promise a stracotto d’asinina with genuine credentials. The television was talking about what journalists were now calling “the murder on the Po”. A roomful of lorry drivers, office workers and shopkeepers had stopped eating and were glued to the screen, but Soneri was beginning to feel some unease at not being where logic dictated he should be. He saw the questore behind a microphone, with four officers in yellow jackets marked “Polizia” — worn especially for the cameras — and a group of journalists with their notebooks, and there he was in a country trattoria which had nothing to do with the investigation, along the misty banks of the Po, searching for a phantom village which had long since been swallowed up by the waters. Once again, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of insecurity arising from his invariable role as an outsider, but he comforted himself with the thought that perhaps that was why he was able to see things from the correct angle.
The riverbank was now one long beach littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the flood. He approached, hoping to see if the first stone or the first wall of the sunken village might be emerging. Perhaps it was too early. Barigazzi had said that it would take another couple of days’ freeze to bring the waters right down. He walked along the stretch of sand where he saw trails of old footsteps and the tracks of dogs which had been sniffing out the faint scents left by the encroaching water.
His intuition suggested to him that there was an uneven section of riverbed at the point where the ruins of San Quirico ought to be. There the surface of the water broke up into eddies and curled and twisted like a lazy reptile. He stood a few moments peering into the deeper solitude until it occurred to him that if he really wanted to give some sense to his wanderings, he should make his way inland and go from house to house making inquiries, risking the wrath of guard dogs.
New San Quirico, a soulless place without a centre, thrown up haphazardly across a defunct road, was far worse than anything he could have imagined. He would have sooner owned an underwater house than one of those anonymous villas prematurely aged by the mists. He wandered for a few minutes among shut-up houses, past huts with rusty steel roofs containing only odds and ends no longer useful in city dwellings. The village appeared to be deserted, but at least half a dozen dogs barked somewhere in the mist, though there was no way of knowing where exactly they were. For ten minutes he did not come across a single trace of another human being, but then he noticed a low house with a woodshed under the balcony and a garden covered with sheets of plastic as protection against the frost. Outside it, half-concealed by a glass-fronted veranda framed by gilt aluminium, an old man sat on a wooden bench looking out on to the roadway. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and leaned both hands on a walking stick. He had plainly been there for some time, but it was not clear what he was looking at, unless it was the mist itself as it deposited a sprinkling of ice particles.
Soneri got out of his car and gestured to him, but the old man made no move. He rang the bell, causing the man to turn towards the door to see if anyone in the house had heard. A small dog, which must have been sleeping behind the house, came scampering towards the commissario, growling. He waited until a light was switched on inside. The old man remained motionless, as though under a glass case in a museum. The front door opened and an old woman came out. She exchanged some words with the man. The man gave a start and rose to his feet. The veranda window opened and the commissario introduced himself.
“My husband doesn’t see too well,” the woman said. “He’s got cataracts.”
The dry heat of the wood fire greeted him and the old man’s eyes began to follow him, picking up his voice and tracking his passage across the veranda.
“I’m looking for someone who once lived in San Quirico on the Po,” the commissario began.
The man nodded and his wife explained that he had been the miller.
“When did you come here?”
“Immediately after the war, when the reclamation schemes got under way.”
“The Fascists had excluded you from their reconstruction programmes…”
“They knew things were bad for us and left us up to our arses in the water.”
“Were you sorry to come here?”
“No, here you can live like a human being.” It was the wife who spoke.
“You can’t see the Po,” the man said with heart-felt regret.
Soneri guessed that, in his lonely afternoons on that veranda, the cataracts and the mist forced him to imagine the banks of the river, the flat lands, the inlets and even the fish.
“Were they all communists in San Quirico?”
“For the most part,” the man said, as his pupils stopped roaming and he cast his clouded gaze towards the floor.
A silence fell over the kitchen, now in half-light, the best conditions for cataract sufferers. The commissario felt embarrassed. He was not making a favourable impression, asking for information from two elderly people who had little inclination to dwell on a grim past. The woman came to his rescue. Breaking the silence in which the two
