Valerio Varesi - River of Shadows

“I work in the voluntary sector,” he joked. “For people who cannot afford the fat fees demanded by my more grasping colleagues,” he added, in a more serious tone.

He was of little use to Soneri, who had no way of establishing whether he was sincere or merely a gifted liar. He explained that Melegari had asked for a prescription for a drug for high blood pressure and that he had written it out without giving much thought to the matter, since he knew that Dinon suffered from hypertension.

“He eats and drinks too much,” he said.

The commissario got up, taking a good look at the professor as he did so, but he could not make him out. He was well dressed and lived in a house furnished with taste. In the courtyard below, Soneri had noted a big Mercedes with a recent number plate. As he opened the gate, he thought how much he had always disliked Mercedes communists, for whom being left-wing was no more than a snobbish affectation.

Walking along with his cigar in his mouth, he became aware of a restlessness, a bothersome itch like a nettle sting all over his arm. He felt an old feeling hovering over him but he could not identify what it was. It occurred to him that he was like a hunting dog with the scent of game in his nostrils, but who has no idea which direction to take because the same smells are all around him. Perhaps that was why he set off towards San Quirico. Certain stray thoughts had taken possession of his mind. He sat at the wheel of his car with no real intention of driving off, but then, mechanically, he started the engine and turned on to a side road, more a makeshift track in the countryside, which veered away from the embankment and the river. He had not gone far before “Aida” rang out and he had to stop in a clearing where the grey curtain of the mist had lifted a little.

“Do you remember Maria of the sands?” It was Arico, sounding unduly serious.

“Of course. Anteo Tonna’s woman.”

“Something odd has occurred. Last night, somebody tried to force the window on the ground floor in the hospice where she now is. Fortunately, the window bars did their job.”

“Were they after her?” Soneri said. He knew the reply in advance.

“In my view, yes, but they didn’t get very far. They gave up, partly because the grille was strong enough and partly because one of the night nurses looked out of the upper floor.”

“Did they see anything?”

“Only a shadow. But we found footprints in the frost. A man with large feet.”

In the commissario’s head various ideas formed, superimposing themselves on those which were already there and reinforcing them. A lorry narrowly missed him as he was coming out of the clearing where he had stopped. For a few seconds, with no roadside verge to keep him right, he lost his bearings, and when he got back on to the road he realized it was a different one, a narrower road which cut across the plain, it too heading away from the Po embankment. In the thick fog, it took him some time to realize that, like the other, this road too led to San Quirico. Fate must have been taking him there.

He drove around a dozen or so houses sunk in the clay of the Plain, before finally making out the veranda of the old man’s home. From the half-closed garden gate, he saw him behind the windows, staring into the grey emptiness ahead of him, still crouched over his walking stick. When Soneri was no more than a few feet away, the old man gave a start and began searching him out, turning his eyes this way and that, like a torch. Soneri spoke, allowing the man to locate him and to calm himself. On this occasion, he had his legs wrapped in a blanket and had a soft hat on his head.

“Is it iced over already?” he said straight off, avid for news.

“Yes, around the riverbanks.”

“Tonight it will get thicker and will reach a few metres further out. They’re all blocked, aren’t they?”

“For normal boats, there’s no way they can sail,” Soneri said.

The old man looked disappointed. He would rather have been on the banks to see for himself the Po turn to ice, but even if they had taken him there, he would not have been able to see a thing.

“You’ve been down?”

“I have.”

The man remained closed in a painful silence for a moment or two, then said: “It’s been a good twenty years since it iced over.”

His wife appeared at the doorway, looked over in the direction of the veranda and then, recognizing Soneri, withdrew.

“The last time it happened,” he started up again, “I was still out and about with my boat.”

He seemed on the point of giving way to the onset of melancholy, but then he stared keenly at the fog outside with an urgency which continued to surprise Soneri. At that point, a car could be heard passing beyond the garden, beyond the dark spot that was all that could be seen of the hedge. The old man raised a hand and pointed to some imprecise spot among the white wisps of mist floating about. Soneri remained silent until that gesture pregnant with meaning found expression in words.

“That…that noise,” he repeated, like a man with a stutter. “I’ve never heard it before.”

“I thought you were a bit hard of hearing,” the commissario said, taken aback.

“I can make out certain noises very clearly and others less so. The doorbell, for example.”

“But you were very sure about that one?” Soneri insisted.

“Yes, it’s new. Last night and then now. I know the sound of all the cars from around here, and I can tell you that one is new.”

“A foreigner?”

“There have never been any here.”

“Could one of your neighbours have changed cars?”

“There are only old folk with no licence here.”

“A relative…”

The old man shook his head. “Nobody comes here on weekdays. Not in this season…only the baker or door-to-door salesmen.”

Something unusual about the sound had made a deep impression on the old man, and it was now beginning to intrigue the commissario as well.

“When it comes to engines, I know what I’m talking about,” the old man said, in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “On the river, I could tell who was coming and going from the pitch of the outboard motor, long before they were in sight. Sometimes I would greet another craft as it passed without my even seeing the outline of its hull.”

They stood in silence, broken by Soneri saying: “Have you heard other unusual noises lately?”

“No, there’s never anything out of the ordinary here. I could draw up a list of all the noises you hear by day and by night. I don’t sleep much. I live in darkness nowadays.”

“Who could it be?” the commissario said, thinking aloud.

The old man stretched out his arms. “Sometimes people go off the road in the fog and end up in this God-forsaken place, but that never happens twice in a row. The second time, they must be coming here deliberately.”

The commissario thought back to the road: a narrow, raised track running from the main road and ending at San Quirico. Someone must have known his way to one of the summer residences scattered here and there in that tangle of a village, but it could not have been, in the old man’s view, someone who came regularly. Soneri walked along the path to the road on the other side of the hedge where the car had passed. On the thin white of the frost, he saw the treads left by the tyres and followed them. They led to a low villa, with chubby, plaster-cast angels in the garden. The house seemed completely shut up. The lower part of the door was even barred with a metal guard. At the side of the house, under an overhanging roof, a camper van had been parked.

Soneri made his way back, being careful to tread on patches of the roadway free of frost to avoid leaving any footprints. He was back in front of the house with the veranda when his mobile struck up with its laboured version of the triumphal march.