Valerio Varesi - River of Shadows

“And that’s the only detail she can remember?”

“That’s what stuck in her mind. There must be some reason, mustn’t there?”

Soneri said nothing for a few moments. “Has Decimo’s apartment been sealed off?”

“Yes, but if you want to get in, all you have to do is advise the magistrate.”

Decimo Tonna had lived in a block of flats with a faded facade not too far from the hospital. Two rooms and a bathroom, and the all-pervasive smell of rotting food. The coffee pot had been left on the cooker, and the rooms were in a state of some disorder as though Decimo had had to rush off for an appointment. In the bedroom, Soneri’s attention was drawn to the photograph of an elderly couple who must have been his parents and of a young woman, perhaps his niece. On the sideboard stood a picture of him as a young man, in a black shirt.

Soneri opened the drawers and started to go through them. One was filled with bills arranged year by year in an elastic band. The second contained pension documents, medical certificates and receipts. The apartment gave off the idea of a life lived barely above subsistence level. And the objects in the apartment, even if conserved with great care, were shabby. The mirrors, grown dark with age, the discoloured table covers, the threadbare curtains and the damp corners of the walls which were now the colour of a mountain hare, all spoke of poverty borne with dignity.

As he was going through the wardrobe, in which he found pairs of knickerbockers and a black shirt, the ringing of his mobile startled him. He ignored it for a while before answering.

“So whose house have you broken into this time?” Angela wanted to know, picking up on the absence of background noise.

“I’m engaged on a house search.”

“More likely you’re searching up the skirt of some lady, one of those who adore uniforms and men of action.”

“I do not have a uniform, nor do I have any love of action.”

“There’s no doubting that, and no-one knows it better than I do.”

“I’m in the house of Decimo Tonna, and I have not the faintest idea what I’m looking for.”

“What a coincidence! I’m right downstairs!”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I’ve always been able to get round Juvara. Anyway, I’m coming up to join you.”

The news caused him no little anxiety, in part caused by the fear of breaking regulations and in part by the arousal of desire. When Angela appeared before him a few moments later, it was the second which prevailed, and overwhelmingly. She tossed her coat on to a chair with studied nonchalance, approached Soneri and took hold of his collar. In her face, the commissario saw the same excitement which he too felt as he came into contact with his partner’s body.

“Where?” he said, his imagination telling him where it would all end.

“In the living room. I don’t trust sheets that other people have slept in,” she said, casting a glance at the bed in the room they were in.

Soneri got to his feet feeling a little bruised. The excitement had passed, leaving him so relaxed and yielding that it required an effort to recapture the thoughts that had been in his mind before Angela made her appearance. It was she who brought him back to the investigation once they had their clothes on again, “Have you really no idea what you’re looking for?”

“No,” he said, combing his hair. “Maybe a letter containing some kind of threat.”

“A recent threat?”

“I believe so, judging from Decimo’s anxiety in his last couple of days.”

Together they went over every piece of paper in the sideboard. They searched the clothes which seemed to have been worn in the recent past, examined a dressing gown left hanging behind the bedroom door, but they failed to turn up anything of any interest. They went back to the living room and it occurred to Soneri that if Alemanni had had any idea he was in Decimo’s house with a woman, he would have mobilized every policeman in the city.

“There’s nothing here,” he said with unconcealed irritation, sticking the burned-out cigar back in his mouth.

“Either there’s nothing here or else the thing we are looking for has been left in such an obvious place that it hasn’t occurred to us to look there,” Angela said.

He sat down, leaning his elbows on the table and remembered doing the same thing the previous evening in the half-light of his own kitchen. As he grew older, he tended to resemble his father more and more, a thought which made him more mellow. With a touch of nostalgia, he recalled getting up before sunrise on dark mornings in winter to do his homework, and his father greeting him as he picked up his wallet from the porcelain dish on the top of the fridge. He remembered that dish perfectly. It had a picture of the Mole Antonelliana in Turin on it, and was always full of papers. There was a porcelain dish on the fridge in Decimo Tonna’s house too. In it, along with laundry receipts and bus tickets, he found an envelope without stamp or address but which had been torn roughly open and had the words “Decimo Tonna” scrawled on it in blue ink. He opened it and found a sheet of lined paper taken out of a notebook: “57th anniversary”, and underneath, “San Pellegrino section, square E, 3rd row, number 32.”

“Would you feel threatened by a note like this?” Angela wondered aloud.

He had no idea how to reply. The two phrases belonged to a code he could not break, but the reference to the anniversary was unequivocal.

“The Tonna brothers were the object of virulent hatred by many people.”

“Because-” But she could not finish the sentence before he interrupted her.

“Yes, they were Fascists. The boatman in particular must have been involved in some really nasty business down the valley. But these are old stories…”

“Well, all these things can hardly be considered faults nowadays, seeing that ‘that lot’ are back in power.”

“Memory is not completely dead. Along the Po some species survive that are long extinct everywhere else,” Soneri said with bitter irony.

After seeing Angela out, he thought again of the river and the flood. Perhaps the water had now gone down far enough to reveal the rims of the embankments over the floodplain. The case still seemed to him most amenable to solution if it were approached from the riverbanks, always provided that the killing of Decimo and the disappearance of Anteo were linked. But might they not be? He could not fathom Decimo. It seemed that his life had been enclosed in an impenetrable shell. None of his neighbours had had any relationship with him beyond casual greetings. No-one ever stopped to exchange two words with him at a street corner. He did not drop into bars. Decimo’s day consisted of getting up early in the morning, leaving the house and making his way to the hospital where he would spend the whole day talking to patients, moving from one ward to another. He was given lunch and dinner by the orderlies, who were so used to seeing him around that they regarded him as a relative or a carer. Every evening he went home where he shut himself away in his gloomy apartment. That was his life, year after year, ever since he had returned from abroad. It might be that in this way he had sought to conceal his very existence. In the hospital, where people think only of present illness and future uncertainty, he had found himself so much at ease that he had come to consider it his real home. He had been a man on the run long before the delivery of that note which had seemed to him like a death sentence. Or perhaps he was fleeing only from that message? The oddest thing was that it had come to him at a point when life would soon in any case be presenting him with the final reckoning.

In the police station, Juvara looked long and hard at the sheet of lined paper. “San Pellegrino section…sounds like a graveyard. Considering how he ended up, and the various threats…”