“The questore has just been showering me with praise.”
“Wait until you hear what he has to say when the carabinieri get the headlines in the papers for the anti- trafficking operation. I heard the prosecutor who’s taken charge of the inquiry talking in the corridor before a trial…it looks like a major breakthrough.”
Soneri cursed himself for having given Arico so much rope. Angela understood and held him closer. She made him stop and looked him squarely in the face. “Are you sure you’re on the right track?”
“At this stage it is impossible to be sure.”
“If you’re talking like that, it means that deep down you are sure,” she replied, giving his jacket lapels a little tug.
When they were in sight of the embankment, they clambered up the side away from the yard. Below, the club gave off a yellow light from windows through which they could see dark shadows. They climbed back down, keeping to the asphalt path on the far side. They stopped in their tracks when the door of the club opened for a moment and Gianna stretched out an arm to shake a duster, but they then proceeded towards the jetty. This time the ground was frozen hard and the barge was even lower in the water. The gangplank was hanging perilously low.
They moved from the captain’s berth to the matelot’s quarters, but then Angela wanted to try the wheelhouse. Later they began to feel the cold and got dressed. Soneri glanced at the clock and noticed the little hand almost at one. When he climbed back up to the wheelhouse, he saw three men walk by on the jetty. From his gait, he recognized Barigazzi with Dino, unmistakeable because of his girth, beside him. He could not identify the third man, who was tall, and his head swayed as he walked. Their route took them away from the jetty towards a pathway on either side of which little houses had been built on raised columns.
“We’re trapped,” Soneri said to Angela, gesturing with his chin in the direction of the moorings and looking at her in gentle reproof.
“Don’t you dare tell me it wasn’t worthwhile,” she said menacingly. “If you ever solve this case, it will all be down to me,” she added, drawing close to warm herself.
Soneri tried to control his annoyance at the contact. He could not bear having anyone too close to him when he was thinking. He was now engrossed in working out what those three could be up to, but his head was clouded by the same mist as the one into which the three had vanished. If Dinon and Barigazzi were the first two, could the third man be Vaeven Fereoli?
“I’ll have to go and see,” he said with a decisiveness in part due to his discomfort over his proximity to Angela.
She held him back, clinging to the hem of his duffel coat. “You must take care,” she said, indicating the road with her glance.
Two outlines slowly emerged some twenty metres from them. The commissario pushed Angela’s head down to hide her, even if in the mist and with no light other than the small lamp a little way off it would not have been easy to make them out through the window. When they passed a few metres from the barge’s cabin, Soneri recognized Dinon and Barigazzi, on their own, walking one beside the other with the nonchalance of fish in a shoal. They strolled slowly by and took the steps leading up to the boat club. The other man must have stopped off in one of the fishermen’s cottages below the embankment.
“You see, it was worthwhile after all,” Angela said with ironic malice as she stood up.
Soneri took her in his arms, and that was something that he rarely did.
10
Juvara HAD LEFT him more confused than before. Libero Gorni, known as “the Kite”, had faced a Fascist firing squad at Sissa on 23 November, 1944. In the encounter on the Po floodplain, both Ivan Varoli and Spartaco Ghinelli had died. Ghinelli was a native of San Quirico, one of the family whose house had been burned down and whose women had been raped by the Blackshirts.
“This much is clear, isn’t it?” Soneri asked the ispettore, who continued to rifle through a pile of papers with scribbled notes in the margins.
Juvara nodded, but he continued to consult the pages, seizing hold of one of them as though he had been searching for it for days. The commissario listened again to a summary reconstruction of the battle which had been read to him the day before, finally focusing on the description provided by the partisans who had retrieved the bodies:… The two who fell on the battlefield had been so badly disfigured by gunshot and stab wounds that they could be identified by their comrades only after an examination of the objects they had about their person. Varoli possessed false documents ever since he belonged to the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica. The Blackshirts had fallen on their bodies with ferocity, which might be evidence of how much they dreaded the Garibaldi Brigade…
“Have you checked to see if Ghinelli and Varoli have relatives still alive?”
“Ghinelli’s brothers and sisters are all dead. One sister committed suicide in the Po, a brother took his life in South America.”
“What about Varoli? And the relatives of the Kite?”
“Varoli… Varoli…” Juvara repeated, fumbling among the paper on the desk in front of him. “Here we are. One sister died in Turin seven years ago. Gorni, the Kite that is, had no relatives. He was brought up by the Sisters of the Child Jesus, before being sent to work as a farmhand when he was eleven.”
Soneri mused on how little life had given to an unloved boy who died in his twentieth year, but this thought gave way to the consideration of the cul de sac into which history had turned. If the killing of the Kite had been in some obscure way a precedent for the death of Tonna, who could have remembered and avenged that event if everyone involved had already gone on to another world? And in that other world, were there already reports circulating about those days? Memory buried by ignorance and by a frivolous, doltish affluence…what had he achieved by his early death?
He noticed that Juvara was staring at him, but fortunately he did not ask him those insufferable questions: “What’s the matter? What are you thinking about?” When he finished brooding and came back to the facts of the case, he asked, “Were there any grandchildren?”
“There were three grandchildren, all girls, on the Varoli side, and five, including two males, on the Ghinelli side.”
“What do they do? Where do they live?” Soneri said impatiently, but he had set Juvara rummaging even more frantically among the documents.
“Jobs: nothing out of the ordinary. One of the grandsons has been living in Switzerland for forty years, the other died in a car accident twelve years ago.”
The commissario sensed that these questions and the ispettore’s exhaustive answers were not helping him much. It seemed that the crimes had been committed by someone for whom time had stood still, as it had for the Tonna brothers.
With his thoughts leaping from one contradiction to the next, he opened the newspaper. The front page was given over entirely to the developments in the inquiry conducted by Arico and the carabinieri from three provinces: HUMAN TRAFFICKING BEHIND THE TONNA CRIME? one headline wanted to know. He read the statements of the carabinieri commander and some magistrates, each expressing the conviction that they were on the right track. He felt Angela’s grim warnings come true. His own superior would no doubt be vacillating, and Soneri would be left high and dry to defend an inquiry which risked sliding into depths of improbability or into obscure aspects of a history of deaths which no-one any longer remembered.
Juvara looked up to see Soneri stride so decisively into the corridor that he had no time to stop him; by the time he got himself out of his chair and round the other side of the desk, the commissario had disappeared.
Shortly afterwards, as he travelled through the mist, Soneri tried to imagine those corpses defaced and deformed by bullet and knife wounds. The Fascists, doubtless motivated by detestation and a thirst for vengeance, must have fallen on them after the battle with appalling ferocity. Perhaps they had been searching for them for some time, to make them pay. Perhaps it was Tonna himself who had been guiding them, he who knew the Po so intimately.
His mobile rang. Juvara’s voice was, as usual, trembling when he had to make use of a mechanism he knew the commissario detested.
