Valerio Varesi - River of Shadows

“I knew it,” Barigazzi jumped up. “There was someone at the helm. There never has been a barge which sailed under four bridges without crashing into one of them.”

“The dinghy hasn’t been found.”

“You could always put out a message on the radio to ask them to look out for it,” Vernizzi suggested. “The watchmen must have caught sight of it. Unless they abandoned it to the current.”

“That seems the most likely to me,” Barigazzi murmured. “But they must have used it first.”

“Are you saying that whoever it was fled to the far side?”

Barigazzi stared at him to see if he was joking.

“So how did you get on board the barge?”

“Via the gangplank.”

“Do you believe that if he had escaped on to the Emilia side, he would have taken the dinghy?”

“He could have taken it to get off further down the river, but still on the right bank.”

The boatman shook his head. “Luzzara is the place with least surveillance, and the place hardest to keep under surveillance between Parma and Reggio.”

“But on the far bank?”

“Nobody bothers with the inside stretch of the Luzzara bend. The river has never burst its banks there.”

That could be right. Whoever was on the boat did not have much time to disappear. You needed a bit of time to get the boat into the water, to go with the current, paddle towards the Lombard shore downstream from Dosolo, then abandon the boat to the current and clamber over the embankment. The carabiniere on guard at Tonna’s barge had told him that no more than twenty minutes had elapsed between the barge hitting the bank and the arrival of the search party. And by the same token, there had been no immediate inquiries made on the Emilia side of the river.

The music swelled to its dramatic climax and provided the perfect accompaniment to Soneri’s thoughts as he imagined that flight, in the evening, on a river in spate, between embankments which had suddenly shrunk for someone looking up at them from midstream. He thought of one solitary, single-minded man clambering up, sliding about in the mud as he attempted to reach safety, wading up to his knees in filth, soaked through like marsh life, hoping to reach a friendly house as the veterans had done of old and to find people speaking the dialects of the Po.

He failed to notice that the four men were staring at him. The deaf barman was at his side, too discreet to make him aware of his presence. Finally he nodded, and Barigazzi once more held up fingers that were as twisted as old nails.

“Fortanina is the best thing in the lower Po valley, apart from Verdi and pork,” Torelli said.

“And none better than what you get here,” Vernizzi said.

The faint light and the red of the brickwork made the place look like a cellar. The windows were shuttered in the heavy darkness. Soneri was sunk in his thoughts, again imagining that flight.

“Luzzara, Dosolo…it could be around there…” he murmured in a voice they struggled to make out.

“These places are all one. The river doesn’t divide: it brings people together,” Barigazzi said.

“That’s why I asked if you knew the partisans and the Kite.”

“At my age, I sometimes think the mist over the Po has got into my head.”

“Wine always clears the mind,” the commissario retorted, looking around that bar where everything seemed redolent of the past. With a swift glance he took in Verdi’s characters displayed on the walls, the Fortanina the customers were drinking, the bricks of a red that seemed permeated by pigs’ blood, the Christ with the crossed legs.

“Don’t get carried away by appearances,” the boatman interrupted his thinking. “The past falls apart when you distrust the present.”

“I don’t get the impression that you’ve forgotten. This river, for example…”

Barigazzi interrupted him with a wave. “Don’t go there. It’s important to distinguish between experience and memory. You can fool yourself that you remember because it seems that everything is always the same, like the river perpetually switching between floods and low water. It’s not true. Each time you start over from the beginning. Memories are worth something for two or three generations, then they disappear and others take their place. After fifty years, you are back where you started. I chased out the Fascists and now my grandchildren are bringing them back. Then it will be their turn to end up on their arses.”

“As happened to Tonna?”

“He ended up on his arse quite quickly. He didn’t really have time to get a taste for it,” Barigazzi said.

“He really stood out, did he?”

“He did his bit. More downriver than here. ‘Barbisin’ was a name that struck terror.”

“How did he get on after the war?”

“He went up into the mountains around Brescia for a bit and worked as a driver, the same place he’d been in Mussolini’s final days, under the Republic of Salo. When things calmed down, he returned, but he went back to sailing to make sure he stayed well away from the piazzas of the lower Po.”

“They had it in for him?”

“Yes, according to the reports I heard. But as I’ve said, I was still a boy.”

“But you joined the party quite young…”

“So what? We didn’t care about Tonna. What did it matter to us if somebody went sailing up and down the Po and never found any peace. He didn’t even put in here any more. The port in Cremona was all he had left, because one or two of his old colleagues were there. There were a couple of places in Polesine where some farmers who used to be in the Blackshirts would give him half a cargo a week as a favour. He hadn’t even enough fuel to keep himself warm in winter. He used to light his stove with bits of rotten wood from the river.”

“And how do you treat him now?”

Barigazzi stared at him in surprise, thinking the reply was obvious. “Don’t you see? He doesn’t speak and neither do we. That way we get along.”

“Is there anyone in the village or nearby who has a grudge against him?”

“I’ve already told you. It’s all down to a couple of poor old souls. Who wants to remember? Anyway, everybody’s opinion is that he’s just an old bastard weighed down by age and regrets, reduced to living out his days by going round in circles on the water. If he’s not already dead, he’ll die soon with no peace.”

“I wasn’t talking about politics. I meant, a grudge because of something that might have happened in recent years.”

“He had no dealings with anybody. He never exchanged more than twenty words a day.”

“Sometimes that can be enough…”

“The only person he spoke to was Maria of the sands,” Ghezzi said.

The others glowered at him in a way that seemed to the commissario to convey the dark shadow of a reproach.

“Who’s she?”

Once again the most fleeting of eye contact between the men gave Ghezzi authorization to proceed.

“She’s a woman of about Tonna’s age who has spent most of her life on an island in the Po, digging sand.”

“So where does she live now?”

“In Casoni, two kilometres inland,” the man said, pointing in a direction which was meant to indicate the plain. “She was the only one, apart from his niece, who made him welcome. And when the Po was high and the island was flooded he paid her back by going and rescuing her possessions.”

“Does she manage to live far away from the river?”

“She’s paralysed. She couldn’t live on her own in the cabin any more. When she was younger, she was a kind of savage who spoke only dialect,” Ghezzi said. “Now the island’s not there any more. With all the dredging, they diverted the course of the stream and the river ate it up bit by bit.”