Valerio Varesi - River of Shadows

“When you get down from your roost, they’ll take you straight off to the treatment room and case you in plaster,” Soneri said, mildly mocking the ispettore’s less than agile figure.

“I’ve been here all morning,” Juvara said, “and I haven’t broken a single bone yet. But something or someone is breaking my balls.”

“It goes with the job. Who else could I annoy if I want to find out about the worries of the townee Tonna?”

“The sister’s name is Luisa. She finishes her shift at two.”

She was a pleasant woman, solid inside and out. “Was what I told your colleague not enough?” she said with a laugh.

She had received him in the off-duty room, where the odour of disinfectant hung heavy in the air.

“Did he seem anxious recently?”

The sister stared at him a few moments before replying.

“I would have said so, yes.”

“What gave you that impression?”

“Normally,” she said, “he stayed the whole morning but in the last couple of days he came and went as though in a state of distress. He spoke less than ever.”

“Did you form any idea of what was on his mind?”

“I asked around. They told me there was some anniversary, some date looming, but they didn’t know what it was for. Not even if that was what was bothering him.”

“They didn’t tell you anything else?”

“No,” the sister said, “I would have preferred to go into it a bit more deeply, but the man who knew most about it died a few days ago.”

“Was there any explanation of all that popping in and out several times a day?”

She stretched out her arms. “He would go away then come back. I don’t know why. I got the impression he felt someone was pursuing him and that he was keeping on the move all the time so as not to be caught up with.”

“Whereas normally, how did he behave?”

“He was much more calm. They’ll have told you that he would stay here until the last patient had left, and sometimes he even waited till we were all leaving the consulting rooms and he would go out with us. We would often find him in the waiting room reading magazines, and it would take the cleaning ladies to persuade him it was time to go. The nursing staff thought of him as one of the family.”

“What did he talk to the patients about?”

“He comforted them, he listened to them and at times took a real interest in them, taking advantage of the fact that the doctors all knew him. There are a lot of elderly folk who come here and they never have anyone to talk to, but with Signor Tonna they were quite at ease.”

“You say he had an anniversary coming up?”

“So it seems, but it might not have had anything to do with him.”

As he took his leave of the sister, the commissario remembered Sartori. He walked along the wards in the direction of the nephrology unit, where he found the man he was looking for half asleep, needles in his arm and the machine buzzing. He appeared even more yellowish and wizened than before, but he turned a tired smile on Soneri.

“Any news?” he said, opening his eyes wide.

“Your friend Decimo didn’t throw himself from the window. He was pushed.”

Sartori, although plainly moved by the news, did not stir. He lay there in silence, staring at the ceiling.

“Is it true that he’s been highly agitated recently? I mean in the last few days,” the commissario said, in an attempt to rouse Sartori from his silence.

He watched as the old man moved his head very slightly in a sign of assent. Then, just as Soneri had resigned himself to not receiving an answer, he made out a feeble voice. “Forgive me, but I am deeply troubled.”

“Did you know that there was some anniversary coming up for him?”

“He had spoken to me about it, but when I tried to discover more, he found a way, as he always did, of avoiding giving an answer to my questions. He was like that. If he didn’t speak of his own accord, there was no way of getting anything out of him.”

“What did he tell you about this anniversary?”

“It was plainly not something he was looking forward to. He referred to it with fear. All he told me was that he had received a letter.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know. I do know that it had shaken him to the core. He became gloomy. The last time I set eyes on him, he asked if I had noticed any new faces around the ward. I told him that in addition to us long-term cases, there were always new faces in a hospital. I was joking, but he took it the wrong way. He didn’t say anything, he went and sat beside the exit, where he could see anyone coming down the corridor.”

The following day, Tonna had been defenestrated from the General Medical section on the third floor. Everything pointed to the likelihood that someone, perhaps the murderer, had been tailing him from department to department. Soneri was lost in his own train of thought, heedless of Sartori stretched out on his bed, and when he turned back to him, he found he had drifted off to sleep. He got out of the room just in time to avoid waking him with the triumphal march from “Aida”.

“You still away fishing?” Nanetti began.

“You caught me on the hop with that news about the townee Tonna.”

“So you’re feeling pleased with yourself? What kind of face did Alemanni make?”

“He wanted to bawl me out for having gone searching for the river Tonna, but he had to hold back in case I had something up my sleeve.”

“You missed your chance. Never let him get away with a single thing. Anyway, there’s something new about the brother who fell out the window.”

“What?”

“You remember the dent on the cupboard? Well, I can confirm that it came from one of Tonna’s shoes, but it wasn’t a strong blow. The steel is only a couple of millimetres thick, so it doesn’t take much to leave a mark. Then the wound on the head. The doctor said it was caused by a heavy object, such as a club, but one with a pointed tip. More likely, something metal. Between the blow and the fall from the window, no more than two or three seconds elapsed, which is why there was no blood of Tonna’s on the floor or on the windowsill.”

“He was being hunted,” Soneri said, translating his thoughts into words. “Someone had been following him from department to department. Someone who was very smart and discreet, who managed to remain unobserved by everyone. Perhaps the same person who had delivered to him a letter capable of unnerving him.”

“That’s your business, Commissario,” Nanetti cut in.

A short time later, Soneri dialled Juvara’s number. “Have you got Decimo’s file to hand? Look up when he was born. Check his brother’s dates as well.” He heard the ispettore’s keyboard click. Juvara’s silence was eloquent testimony to his astonishment over the request. “In your opinion, was there some anniversary of Decimo’s which could fall on one of the days leading up to his death?”

Juvara sighed, a sign that he had finally understood. “It’s not his birthday, that’s in September. Not the boatman’s either. His is in June.”

“I wish we knew what he was talking about…” the commissario muttered.

“The ward sister was able to report only one thing Tonna had said one of the last times he ate in the department, but she had no idea what he was referring to.”

“What did he say?”

“They were talking about his health, about how he was the healthy one among all those sick people, but for some reason he took it the wrong way, got all upset, started mumbling that perhaps he would soon be going to ‘the angels’. The sister said they all burst out laughing, but later, when she thought about it again, she couldn’t make head nor tail of what he had been on about. Was it that all of our lives hang by a thread? Or something else?”