Valerio Varesi - River of Shadows

The frost had made the floodplain rock hard underfoot and the undergrowth bristling and sharp-edged. He made his way down the embankment and when he was in front of the small monument, he noticed that someone had tied a bouquet of roses around it. The blooms were already fading in the cold, but that spot was assuming some indecipherable significance. Three partisans and much later one old Fascist had perished there, perhaps the Fascist who had been in command at the battle and was responsible for the slaughter. The story had taken a strange turn, one not easy to comprehend.

He climbed back up to the road, wondering who the roses were for. Probably for the partisans, but who could have put them there? There would have been roses on the monument on April 25, for as long as there was some old person determined not to forget.

The commissario hurried into Il Sordo and ate his fill of spalla cotta, salame and culatello. He was going to need a lot of energy that night. He called Angela again, but to no avail. Back on the street, the wind cut through him as it went whistling through the colonnades. He crossed the road, leaving footprints on the frosty surface, came on to the piazza and then turned into the back lanes, passing in front of Melegari’s house, where the shutters were still open. When he was in sight of the Italia, a form emerged from the shadows and barred his way.

“How on earth did you manage to find me?”

“All anyone has to do is hang about near an osteria and sooner or later you’ll turn up,” Angela said.

The commissario looked at her with great delight. She was looking very pretty and he was glad to see her, but this thought was followed by the realization that that night he had a great deal of work to do.

“I can’t let up this evening,” he said, looking at her in the hope of seeing some sign of understanding.

“What makes you think I would have anything to do with men that want to let up?” she said, coming up close to him.

A few moments later, Soneri found himself leading her along the road in the darkness which had fallen suddenly over the river. They skirted the yard before turning on to the pathway that led to the cottages. When they came to Vaeven’s, he went ahead, taking great care to leave no footprints, and then ushered her up the staircase to the balcony. When they got to the doorway, he told her to wait while he made his way round the back and went in as he had done on the previous occasion. He opened the door for her and invited her in with a little bow: “Delighted to welcome you.”

Angela loved surprises of this sort, and wanted to know all about the house, but halfway through his account, she pushed him into the bedroom which had the heater. Being in the cottage would be more pleasant than lying in wait on the grass slopes of the embankment, and from there the moorings were in clear view. At around eleven o’clock, the commissario began to show signs of impatience as it became clearer that the magano could have put in somewhere else to avoid being caught by the ice, but half an hour later he noticed a light coming steadily upstream in the direction of the riverbank. When it was no more than about ten metres from the quay, it slowed right down. Seconds later, he was aware of a thud, like a bag falling. Soneri kept his eyes on the hawsers curving in the air as they were tossed ashore and on the gangplank being set up between the deck and the landing stage.

A man came ashore and started hauling in the ends of the cables and wrapping them round the bollards. From his build, it had to be Vaeven, as was confirmed for the commissario when he saw the gangplank sag under the weight of Melegari. The two seemed to exchange a few words before setting off along the pathway. Since they were on their own, Soneri wondered where the other man was. He had prepared his plan with Angela. They would hide in the room with the plants and when the mysterious friend of Dinon and Vaeven was safely in bed and under the covers, they would come rapidly into his room and take him by surprise. However, the two men did not stop at the cottage but walked straight on towards the yard, bypassing the embankment and making their way towards the houses. They gave every impression of coming home from an ordinary trip, as relaxed as any two fishermen after a day on the river.

During the night, a light wind got up and for a few hours cleared the clouds from the sky, allowing some stars to appear, but with the dawn everything closed in again and the customary grey made its return. Soneri felt like a mole in the darkness. He left the cottage very early to accompany Angela to her car, but got back in time to see Melegari and his companion making their way down to the jetty. The ice had already taken over a strip of water stretching two metres out from the bank and almost surrounding the hull of the vessel. He heard one of the men cursing, then they both set to work to get the winch and crane into action.

The boat freed itself from the ice floe, and a ripping sound like an organ being torn from flesh could be heard as the craft emerged, dripping. Sheets of ice were clinging to the hull, whose underwater sections appeared very dark, very wide and almost flat. This was not a boat which did much fishing. Once the boat was on the land, Melegari slowly climbed the ladder he had placed against its side and walked along the short deck, closing down the hatches which led below. He stretched out a green tarpaulin which he tied down with a rope, leaving only the cabin exposed. From below, Vaeven did the rest.

Soneri had hoped that the ice might have held up the magano and made everything easier, but in fact it had only complicated things. Once again he had to draw on all his resources of patience and keep alert for every tiny signal. These were the virtues of fishermen and of those who lived on the river.

He decided to call Arico for further information on the recorded movements of the boat.

“I’ve given up on sending telexes,” the maresciallo told him. “In this weather, all sailings are suspended. Let’s hope it doesn’t last too long.” And in this wish the commissario detected more exasperation with the cold than enthusiasm for the investigation.

“Did they report the final movements of the magano before the freeze set in?” he said.

“Yes, but in the most random order, with no exact chronology,” Arico replied, in an apologetic tone.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Viadana, Pomponesco, Polesine, Casalmaggiore, Sacca and then Stagno,” he read out. “As for the dates, the one thing certain is that the boat made one last stop at Stagno before being dragged ashore here at Torricella.”

“When did it put in at Stagno?”

“Yesterday at nightfall, around six.”

Soneri thought of the moorings exposed to the east wind and so perhaps at that time about to freeze over, but then he remembered Barigazzi explaining how the tributaries flowed into the stream, delaying the formation of the ice. At Stagno the Taro flowed into the Po. The place was redolent of some symbolism which, without his being able to pin it down precisely, came dimly to the commissario’s mind. He remembered Stagno as being the site of great battles between man and water, of trench warfare fought with sandbags to bar the way to a slime-covered horde which had slipped through breaches in the embankments, of resistance along the unsupported line on the plain, of battles in streets and ditches, of house-to-house fighting. He even recalled a photograph published many years previously in a local paper depicting a group of bewhiskered gentlemen, the habitues of bars and sophisticated topers of the local wines, who demonstrated their spirit of sacrifice by stating that in order to restrain the waters of the Po they would drink every last drop. The headline above the photograph read: THE HEROES OF STAGNO.