He wandered among the cottages, his path taking him along the avenue between on one side the entrances to the dwellings and on the other the slope at the bottom of which the river flowed. In the ashen light, he gazed at various constructions which had been thrown together with cheap, leftover materials, strange pieces of architecture with the common feature that they were all built on stilts to keep them above the water. All around lay old boats, wheels of farm carts and barbecues for the summer. He examined them one by one until he came to a detail which attracted his attention: two footsteps imprinted on the thin layer of hoar frost which had settled the night before on the avenue alongside one of those raised dwellings, footsteps which stopped abruptly near the road.
The commissario reflected on this and when he looked up at the embankment he noticed that the cottage was one of those which was invisible from where he had been standing the evening before. He went back to examine more closely those solitary footprints which came to a stop at an invisible wall. He walked along the path and climbed the steps to the upper level. A covered balcony ran round the perimeter of the dwelling, and from there on a summer evening, provided the observer used a good insecticide, the view of the Po must have had a certain charm. He tried to peer between the cracks in the shutters, but he could see only darkness within. However, he felt a draught coming from somewhere, a sign that the windows had not been closed.
It was not difficult to undo the catch. As he had anticipated, he saw before him a room where the plants had been brought in to shelter them from the frost, an oleander, geraniums and a lemon bush half covered in cellophane. The commissario breathed in the dust-filled air, while spiders’ webs clung to his face. He opened the door in the room and found himself in a corridor. His torch lit up a row of boots and a single shelf above which there was a mirror. He pressed the light switch and there appeared walls abandoned to the damp, with various doors opening off them. The one directly facing Soneri led into a kitchen which contained everything needed to prepare a meal. A calendar open at the month of September was hanging from a hook, and on the other side there were doors giving on to first a bathroom and then two bedrooms, one of which contained a perfectly made double bed which gave off an odour of camphor, while in the centre of the second stood a camp bed and beside it an electric heater.
Soneri approached the heater with all the caution of a bomb-disposal expert. It was still plugged in, but it was switched off. It was warmer in that room and everything led him to suppose that it had been occupied until a short time before, but the occupant could not have slept for long, four or five hours at the most. He examined every corner of the room. There were no more than odds and ends, a few things left over from the summer, a couple of magazines and assorted objects stuffed into a cupboard without order or neatness. Only one thing appeared to have been left there recently, a box of pills for high blood pressure. He opened it, but there was nothing inside.
He went back into the corridor and saw that the exit had been closed but not bolted. Whoever had gone out last had simply pulled the door to behind him, as did Soneri. He closed the shutters from the inside of the room with the plants and went out through the main door. When he was at the bottom of the stairs, he made his way towards the road by the shortest path, but it was then that he came across the footprints once more. If he were to continue in the same direction, he was bound to leave his own prints, because the wind had caused the hoar frost to cover the pathway. Unthinkingly, he had done what the person in the house the night before had done, but whoever it was must have noticed he was leaving traces and had turned back on his steps, picking his way between the stilts beneath the house towards a point in the driveway untouched by the hoar frost. But in the dark he had failed to notice a couple of footprints.
On the street, Soneri lit his cigar and tried to put these facts into some kind of order. Someone was living in hiding here but had been able to move about the Po with the complicity of a circle of orthodox communists who had remained faithful to Stalin. All this after the murder of two old Fascists. It might still have been 1946…
From the yard he noticed the figure of Barigazzi going down to check the stakes. He followed the old man as he set about his work. When he came up behind him, Barigazzi spun round and stared at him, a quizzical expression on his face.
“If it goes on like this,” Soneri said, pointing to the water, “even the fish are going to have a hard job of it.”
“The water is very low,” Barigazzi said, as though he had expected a different kind of question.
They walked along, leaving footprints side by side in the muddy sand just above the waterline.
“Whose is the third cottage along from the mooring berths?”
“It’s Vaeven’s,” he said with a sigh that conceded he had known the commissario would get to that point.
They went back up towards the beacon. Soneri patiently followed Barigazzi who seemed in a state of resignation. The partisans, like the Kite in those days in 1944, must have walked in the same way as they were led to the wall. When they reached the front of the boat club, the old man walked straight ahead up to the elevated roadway. The commissario caught up with him, both still lost in their own thoughts.
When they were in sight of the monument, Barigazzi stopped and turned to Soneri, evidently angry. “Look, I’ve got nothing to do with them. To my mind they’re all mad, with Stalin and all those meetings
…”
“Stalin has nothing to do with it. They’re threatening you because of the registers,” Soneri said after a brief pause.
“What really upsets them is the business with the diesel,” Barigazzi said in a voice two tones below his normal speech. “They’re making illegal use of agricultural oil because it costs less. If too many trips appeared on the register, the police would check the files with the fuel records and might start wondering how they covered such distances with so little naphtha.”
The explanation was plausible. After all, the magano was registered in the name of a co-operative of fishermen.
“There are other illegal immigrants apart from the ones Tonna was transporting,” the commissario said.
Barigazzi walked with his head down, and looked up only when the oratory which Anteo had been visiting almost every week in recent times emerged from the mist. Its darker shadow in the surrounding greyness brought them to a halt, and without Soneri’s having applied any more pressure, the old man seemed to feel his back was against the wall.
“Do you think I don’t know that? But I don’t know what they’re really up to. They’re hardly going to come and explain it all to me.”
“Melegari frightens you. I recognized as much that time he came to the clubhouse and saw me there.”
“There are some people who can make themselves clear without issuing threats. They go about their own business, but they know that I know who they are.”
“And yet they’re all old now,” the commissario murmured.
Barigazzi walked around the tiny chapel, glancing in at the little altar where the flame of the sanctuary lamp was flickering. Behind the chapel, in a sheltered corner and by a kind of apse, a rosemary plant was growing.
The old man plucked off a sprig, rubbed the herbs into the palm of his hand and smelled it. “A little miracle,” he said. “Next to the river, with these winters and fog six months a year…and yet it survives. The walls of the oratory protect it from the north and east winds, and the embankment from the rains from the west. The only air which gets in is the gentle wind from the south. Ten metres away, it would be killed off by the frost, but here it can live.”
There was some implication, lost to Soneri, in Barigazzi’s words. Soneri did as the old man had done and inhaled the scent. In the misty frost which suppressed all smells, he could detect an aroma of springtime.
“It’s the only green thing which has remained,” Barigazzi said.
The hoar frost had not reached that spot, and nor had the waters which gushed through the coypu burrows in times of flood. The plant was sheltered just as Barigazzi had explained.
“There are certain spots not even winter can reach,” he said. “And the weather, I really mean the seasons, seem to stop and merge into one.”
The commissario nodded absent-mindedly, both of them focusing on the rosemary. There was nothing else to look at now that the frost-whitened herb had the colour of the mist itself.
“Did Tonna take care of it?”
Barigazzi stared at him with eyes made watery by the cold. “It needed more than one man. He came only once a week, more for San Matteo than for anything else,” he said, nodding towards the entrance through which the statue of the saint could be seen.
“He had turned religious in his latter years…”
