The old man gave the faintest of smiles in which cynicism and wisdom could both be read. “He was preparing himself for death.”
“Not everybody gets that chance.”
Barigazzi picked up the allusion. “No, they don’t. When you are young, you live thinking only of your body. When you’re old, you dedicate your time to your soul. At least the communists have remained consistent. They denied God when they were young and they go on denying him now that they’re old.”
“It was not only old age that was a threat for him,” the commissario said. “And recently the danger was anything but undefined.”
“Some things you know better than me. Like all those journeys. I know the magano sets sail and arrives back at the strangest of times, but as to what they’re doing… The river gives and the river takes, and around here that’s all there is to it. It gives you what you need to live and then takes your life. The same water which gives you food to eat also leaves you starving. People move away from the river and then come back to it, and those who live on its banks have no choice.”
What he said still had about it some veiled allusion, sufficient to leave Soneri disconcerted. He seemed to be listening to a sermon from an old priest in a country parish giving a commentary on the Scriptures, the same source, after all, that Barigazzi must have learned from.
In that sort of greenhouse where the rosemary grew, even the grass seemed more green and more lush. Was that why Barigazzi had brought him there? To make him understand that there were particular conditions there, impossible to reproduce elsewhere? And therefore in the town too…in a bend of the river Po, communists still faithful to Stalin and hard-line Fascists could survive, just as the rosemary could survive between the walls and the embankment?
The old man turned to move away from that protective shell and face the frost again.
“At this rate,” he said, “the inlets of stagnant water will freeze over, and when it turns mild again, sheets of ice will break loose and the hulls of the boats will be at risk.”
“That will be when the magano will have to put in somewhere or other,” Soneri said.
“And when that happens, you’ll get to know the whole crew.”
11
Arico received him as usual in the first-floor office overlooking the embankment. The telephone rang continually with calls from journalists eager for news of developments in the case of “The Murder on the Po”. Finally he got up to shout an order down the stairwell to the officer on duty on the ground floor: “Don’t put anyone else through: I’m out.” He went back to his desk, giving the heater a kick as he passed. The Po valley climate was getting him down. “This boat is like a stray dog,” he said. “Every single port from Parpanese to San Benedetto knows about it, but its draft allows it to put in anywhere it chooses along the banks of the river. It travels with no cargo and seems not to do much fishing.”
“Have you got all the moorings under surveillance?”
“How could I? I don’t have enough men. I’ve mobilized all the stations along the river, but I can’t call them all out. We’ve put all the moorings downstream from Pavia to Piacenza under surveillance on alternate days: Chignolo, Corte Sant’Andrea and Somaglia, as well as Mortizza, Caorso, San Nazzaro, Isola Serafini, Monticelli, Castelvetro
…but these people move under cover of darkness. To have the least idea where they were, you’d have to attach a motorboat to their stern.”
“Do they know they’re being watched?” Soneri had decided to ignore the maresciallo’s histrionics.
“I assume so. It’s not that they’ve caught sight of uniforms, but my men have called at every boat club along the banks. And” — he added, with an eloquent gesture of one hand — “they all know each other.”
“Does the boat moor for long outside Torricella?”
“No. Sometimes it stays overnight at some port or other in the district near Reggio or Mantua, but in general it goes back home.”
“Is it your view that they’re in the same business as Tonna?”
“Who can say one way or the other?” the maresciallo said, with some vehemence. “We’re not talking big numbers, more a question of selected trips. These people are smart. They can draw alongside, embark and disembark at will. They know the river better than they know their own wives.”
Soneri could not restrain a sly smile, and Arico noticed it. All that attention in the press, a couple of appearances on the television and the praise from the magistrates had convinced the maresciallo that he had the chance of a lifetime. Perhaps he was dreaming of promotion and of going back to Sicily, to those lemon groves he could not get out of his head.
“Arico,” the commissario said, mindful of the sensitivities of his colleague, “our inquiries are proceeding in parallel, so we can give each other a hand. If you can keep the river under surveillance and keep a record of the movements of the magano, this will be useful both to yourself and to me.”
The maresciallo thought it over. He was not an ungrateful man, and he knew that if the inquiries were to lead to his promotion, it would be down to Soneri. “I’ll keep you informed,” he said, “I’ll send off the telex today requesting a higher level of surveillance.”
The cold was even more intense. The thermometer outside the pharmacy registered a sub-zero temperature. There was an east wind over the plain, blowing upstream and slowing even further the river which was already sluggish with the drop in water level. Soneri walked in the direction of the port, crossing the avenue lined with cottages and heading down to the moorings. The level had dropped again, and on what must have been the riverbed he noticed the skeletons of trees dragged down after decades of flooding from the Alpine valleys to the sands of the Po. Squads of scavengers and of the merely curious had begun making their way up and down the banks in search of any strange objects emerging after long years under the water.
In the boat club, Ghezzi was listening to the radio. At Pomponesca a barge from Rovigo — apparently using old charts — had run aground, and along the Luzzara shoreline a sheet of ice had begun to form in a bend exposed to the winds from the Balkans.
“It’s starting,” Ghezzi said. “And tonight if the cold gets any worse…”
“Will the port freeze over as well?” Soneri asked him.
“I’m afraid so, but the boats are all ashore.”
“Apart from the magano belonging to Dinon and Vaeven.”
Ghezzi said only, “I suppose so,” immediately dropping the subject as though they had trespassed on forbidden ground.
“What would happen to a craft like that if it were trapped in the ice?”
“It’s pretty robust, but not sufficiently so to break through thick ice.”
“So it would have to put in somewhere.”
“They’ll all have to put in if it goes on like this. But more than anything else, they’ll be laid up afterwards.”
“After what?”
“When the temperature goes back up. The river will become impassable, a mass of ice floes that can cut like blades. It’ll take days for the last of them to get to the mouth of the river.”
It occurred to the commissario that if the magano was going to become unusable, Melegari would already have worked out some safe haven. Being a man of the river, he was bound to be aware of the consequences of the freeze. There was only one master in the whole business, and that was the river itself. It had concealed Tonna, had managed the drift of the barge and now, by withdrawing its freezing waters, it was upsetting long-established customs along its length and breadth. The men who inhabited the riverbanks were compelled to adapt to its whims as to a sovereign, so now the magano must be in the act of surrendering and retreating to dry land.
“The ice will be here by nightfall. The moorings at Stagno and Torricella on the right bank are exposed to the north-east,” Ghezzi advised anyone who would listen.
Barigazzi came in with a worried expression. “Explain to him that I don’t have the data. Someone pulled up my stake,” he said, pointing to the radio and at some unspecified interlocutor. “All these folk tramping up and down
