River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) Read online

  “Decimo Tonna, born 1923, formerly a self-employed craftsman, he too was a one-time Fascist activist, fled to South America in the ’50s, came back in ’62, detained in a mental hospital five years ago, clean record to date.”

  Soneri was about to hang up, taking the pause in the delivery for a sign that the report was at an end.

  “Hello? Commissario?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “The two Tonnas are brothers.”

  This time Soneri let the receiver drop on to the cradle as though it had slipped out of his hand.

  “Judging from your expression, the case has turned interesting,” Nanetti said, his own expression mischievous.

  The commissario thought for a moment. Two brothers involved in separate cases a few kilometres apart. One who had somehow gone through a window, the other who had disappeared while his barge was navigating the river in spate. Thinking of the Po reminded him that it had been raining non-stop for five days.

  Nanetti got up with difficulty. The humidity made the pains in his joints more acute.

  “See you tomorrow for the results of the post-mortem.”

  Soneri nodded, but he was deep in consideration of the port, almost hypnotized by the liquid in the glass in his hand. In the whirl of that vintage red, he seemed to see the bargeman Tonna carried along by the current until he was swallowed up by the waters. He drank the port in one gulp and reached for the list of the carabinieri quarters in the province.

  In Torricella, the telephone was left ringing for some time before the officer on duty decided to answer it. The maresciallo listened to Soneri’s account in silence, leaving the commissario with the impression that he was listening with some considerable impatience.

  “One is dead, the other one has disappeared …” Soneri told him.

  The maresciallo then explained in detail how he divided responsibility for everything with his colleagues at Luzzara, and that for the time being the flood was as much as he could handle. “I’ve got to evacuate all the families at risk, and the resources at my disposal are limited,” he said, and cut the commissario off.

  It was the same story at Luzzara, where the barge had been towed into the river dock, moored and sealed off. Soneri’s inclination was to go there straightaway, but he would have to have authorization from a magistrate. And besides, were the cases linked or was it a coincidence?

  Alemanni was nowhere to be found. There was nothing for it but to wait until the results of the post-mortem were available.

  At that moment Juvara arrived. He had obviously come some distance on foot and was breathing heavily. The commissario gave him an amused look. “Middle distance is not your speciality.”

  “Nor are the squad cars the force’s strong point. My battery gave out on me.”

  “Did you find anything of interest at the hospital?”

  “They told me of one patient who knew Tonna well, but right at that moment you called.”

  “Who is the patient?”

  “He’s called Sartori, he has a kidney problem and has to go for dialysis every other day.”

  “In the nephrology unit?”

  “Right. He goes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at around four.”

  It was half past three and Soneri was undecided. He tried Alemanni again, but his telephone rang out and his mobile was switched off. Soneri’s nerves would not allow him to sit, so he got up, walked to the window and looked out over the station yard with its bustle of umbrellas and cars. He put on his duffel coat, not before telling Juvara to telephone the carabinieri at Torricella and Luzzara to check if there were any developments relating to Tonna the bargeman.

  Sartori must once have been a robust man, but now with wrinkled skin the colour of a chicken’s claw, he looked to be no more than surviving.

  “You can ask me all the questions you like. It’s not as if I’m short of time,” he said with an ironic smile, taking his nurse by the arm.

  “I’m here to talk about Tonna.”

  “Poor soul. He didn’t know much happiness.”

  “I have reason to believe …” Soneri was on the brink of revealing conclusions which it would have been premature to share. “I mean to say, by speaking to people who knew him …we might perhaps be able to explain why …” He stammered to a halt.

  The man smiled again as he stretched out on the bed. “Yes, well, he was a bit odd, but he was also a decent man.”

  “Did he ever tell you why he would come here to see the patients?”

  “He never did, but I believe I worked it out. He had a deep need to make himself useful, and he was very lonely. His family weren’t interested in him. His brother spent all his life on the Po.”

  “We have reason to think he may be dead.”

  Sartori’s expression grew dark.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh, many things. He seemed to feel a need to communicate and could find no better way than coming here, being among people in pain. Out of a missionary spirit, I believe.”

  In view of the advanced age of the man, Soneri asked him: “Did you speak about the past?”

  “No, never. If the conversation ever tended in that direction, he was off. He preferred the present. He said that the past was a series of years of misery which he had no wish to revisit. Which said, it was not so easy to avoid these subjects altogether. You can see that nearly everyone here is elderly, and old people talk about their own younger times, the days when they were happier.”

  “Ah, indeed,” the commissario said. Instinctively he thought back to his own days at university, of his first meeting with his wife, of the happy years they had spent before she died and he found himself struggling with a wave of painful memory.

  “He came here regularly, but sometimes he seemed to keep himself to himself,” Sartori was saying. “There were days when he appeared not even to breathe, and was content simply to listen to others. It’s not that the conversation here was particularly deep. Most of the time people here just go on about their medical problems.”

  Soneri fell silent and must have assumed a strange, self-absorbed expression because when he looked up again, he saw the man staring pointedly at him, with just the suggestion of a grin. “Who knows why he came here instead of going to the park to play bocce? Or to the bar? There are so many clubs …”

  “I have wondered that myself,” Sartori said. “What I think is that he was not at ease with himself. I mean, some people are like that. Here, on the other hand, he would meet suffering people to whom he could bring a measure of comfort and even, sometimes, practical help. Or maybe he just came for the pleasure of being in company. He used to sit in that seat,” he said, pointing to a chair in the corner. “He would watch the patients coming in and out. Whenever someone he recognized came in, he would raise his hand shyly to greet them, but he never took the lead in conversation.”

  “Did he stay for long?”

  “He did. Until the last person had left. The nurses would find him alone in the waiting room and had to more or less throw him out.”

  “‘This was not the only unit he came to, I gather.”

  “No. He would turn up at other consulting rooms and surgeries. It depended on who was doing the consultancy and on their shifts. He would arrive in the morning, and still be here in the evening. Ten hours without a break. For meals, well, he had become friendly with the nurses, and they would put a tray aside for him at lunchtime and for supper.”

  “Did he tell you which departments he went to?”

  “This one and the surgical wards, of which there are four, all in the same building. There might have been other places too …”

  The dialysis machine buzzed in the background, purifying Sartori’s blood drop by drop. Other patients gathered round to listen in to the discussion with the commissario, just as Tonna had done.

  “Little by little,” the man said, “we had become friends, those of us who come here three times a week. We’ve known each other for years now.
The difference was” – he paused – “that Tonna was not ill, anything but.”

  “So that was what you talked about, only your health?”

  Sartori raised the arm which was free of needles and waved it as though displeased. “When the conversation moved to other topics, Tonna would fall silent. It was not obvious how to get him involved. Sometimes he would pretend not to hear, or he would get up and go to the toilet.”

  “Some years back, he was ill himself. A mental illness, I mean,” Soneri said.

  “We knew that. We didn’t know each other then. Somebody told me something about a depressive fit and the risk of self-harming. Perhaps,” Sartori said, alluding to the fall from the window, “it was all down to a return of that illness.”

  “Possibly,” the commissario said.

  “Had anyone seen the two of us together, they would certainly have said that I was the one nearer to death. But instead …”

  “Death walks side by side with all of us and sometimes assumes the most innocent of guises,” Soneri said, rising to his feet. “Who could know that better than I do, I whose job it is to deal with crime?”

  Sartori smiled. “Who indeed, commissario?”

  In the hospital yard, it was turning dark and the only sound was the incessant rain falling on the withered leaves. One large drop made a direct hit on the tip of Soneri’s cigar, extinguishing it with a hiss. Only at that point did he decide to put up his umbrella. As he walked, he wondered why Tonna had thought to spend his time in a hospital. What did he find there that he could not have found elsewhere? Alternatively, what did he not find there?

  His mobile rang. He had, as always, to rummage in his pockets. He never had any memory of where he had put the thing.

  “My sense is that our friends the carabinieri are not unduly concerned about the disappearance of the bargeman,” Juvara said. “At Torricella, they sounded exasperated even being asked. I thought at one point they were going to invite me to get lost.”

  “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

  “Commissario, are you going to launch into a sermon?”

  “Not at all, I just think that this business is turning ugly and that our good friends the carabinieri don’t seem to be getting it.”

  He turned a corner into the old town. The houses had lost the pale, straw-coloured joy of their sun-lit days and seemed drenched in a sticky sweat, as though they were newly beached from the swollen torrent that flowed nearby. The streets seemed to him to have taken on the appearance of a soaked sponge.

  Back in the police station he found the administrators scurrying about preparing for a meeting on the river emergency. No-one stopped to ask about Tonna, and Alemanni could still not be found.

  “It won’t be long before the carabinieri turn up here to evacuate us too,” Soneri thought, as he looked at the river, now almost over the columns of the city’s bridges. And then the mangled snippet of Verdi’s opera rang out once more.

  “You were supposed to call me, remember?”

  “That opening was not quite tuneful. You came in at least three notes too high.”

  “One of these days you’re going to be in big trouble! You haven’t forgotten about this evening?”

  “Certainly not. It’s all fixed, isn’t it?”

  “Has no-one ever told you that appointments should be confirmed?”

  “I’m sure that’s the way it is with lawyers, but in the police everything is always subject to …” He got no further before the connection was abruptly terminated.

  He hated scenes, but he was only telling the truth. He never could plan his days, and when he tried he invariably found his plans come crashing down around him. Who would have guessed that the Tonna case, for instance, would turn into a murder inquiry? He thought of the call he had taken that morning: a suicide at the hospital, could they send along a police officer, routine investigation. And now …

  He had just decided that it would be a waste of time to call Angela back when she was in a rage – she would switch off all the telephones – when he bumped into Juvara at the door.

  “Two dyed-in-the-wool Fascists, real fanatics,” his assistant said with no preamble.

  The commissario picked up the reference, but he made no comment. He felt very much alone in the face of a mystery which instinctively attracted him but which at the same time appeared to carry the threat and promise of deeper trouble. “Did you come up with anything else?”

  “They lived completely isolated lives, cocooned away from everybody else.”

  “I knew that already.”

  “I did an internet search to see if in those years …”

  The commissario felt a surge of irritation. He seriously disliked Juvara’s weakness for technology, even if he perfectly knew that the younger generation of policeman had to spend more time confronting a computer screen than confronting criminals.

  “Do you really think you’re going to get anything worthwhile out of that gadget?”

  Juvara watched silently while Soneri once again dialled Alemanni’s number, once again to no avail. He had at all costs to get authorization to extend his inquiries to the banks of the Po. When he looked up, the ispettore had gone. Their personalities fitted impeccably. Juvara knew at once when it was time to leave Soneri alone.

  He was thinking of the Po, of the flooding, of Tonna the bargeman who had left his barge in the care of an unskilled accomplice so as to slip off into the city to murder his brother for who knows what motive. Could it have gone that way? Or had the two men both been murdered a short time apart by a single assassin? Or then again, was it pure chance, mere coincidence? He ran over a catalogue of possibilities in his mind, that catalogue which every time confronted him with the anxiety of choice and changed the routine of his days. He had an instant illustration of this very point when Angela appeared menacingly before him.

  “Get your things together, commissario, and follow me.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “You should be so lucky … It’s much worse.”

  In the courtyard, Angela put up her umbrella and Soneri took her by the elbow to keep himself dry. She made a show of pushing him away. “What an uncommon display of affection! That it should take a downpour to persuade you to get so close to me.”

  Soneri made to turn back, but Angela took hold of the hem of his duffel coat. He tried to tug himself free under the startled gaze of a returning patrol, but gave up. Any such skirmishing, more playful than angry, would have made him look ridiculous.

  “I’m not letting go, don’t imagine that I will …”

  Soneri grinned in his turn. “A pity, I had so deluded myself.”

  She took his arm, elbowing him in the ribs as she did so. “You’re going to see stars, even in this weather.”

  When they reached the Milord, Angela glowered at Alceste, as she always did. He returned the look when he received her usual order for grilled vegetables and a bottle of mineral water.

  Soneri, however, had noticed a pencilled-in addition to the menu. “Fried polenta with wild boar sauce,” he said, as he heard his mobile ring.

  It was Alemanni, in his customary strained tones. “I have been tied up all afternoon in meetings about rivers. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

  “I have, and to say that I no longer think we are dealing with a case of suicide. I think our inquiries will have to be extended.”

  “Could you spell that out a bit more clearly?” Alemanni said, after a lengthy pause.

  “In the first place – and my colleagues in the forensic unit agree – we have identified some factors which lead us to believe that there were two people involved and that there was some kind of struggle before the victim fell from the window. Furthermore, there is a second Tonna who has disappeared while his barge went zig-zagging down the Po, the brother of the dead man.”

  This second fact seemed to make a deeper impression on the magistrate than the first. “So you are requesting that we join up the in
vestigation into the barge with the inquiry relating to the death at the hospital?”

  “You know better than me that it is highly probable there’s a connection.”

  There followed a long pause covered by noises which resembled those produced by a slack set of dentures.

  “Very well,” Alemanni said at last. “You understand that if you are wrong about these conjectures, we will have to abandon the investigation, and I will retire leaving behind me the memory of this failure? However, permit me to await the results of the post-mortem which will be made known to us tomorrow morning before proceeding to issue the authorization now requested.”

  That final statement troubled the commissario. Twenty years’ experience had made him bitterly aware of the difficulties of dealing with an elderly magistrate. He hung up in a foul mood, and out of pique switched off his mobile altogether.

  “Do I have to remind you, commissario, that you ought to be reachable at all times?” was Angela’s ironic observation.

  He threw her a hostile look. “You always know where to find me, and you always come in person.”

  “Would you prefer a telephone call from a magistrate?” she teased him.

  “When you set your mind to it, you can be a lot worse than any magistrate,” he said, moving his legs to one side in case she aimed a kick at his shins under the table.

  In fact nothing happened, and she looked at him contentedly. “Don’t get upset. Zealots never get along with the complacent.” But soon she turned rancorous once more as she thought back to that near kidnap in his office. “It’s a dismal state of affairs that the only thing that really gets your attention is your work.”

  3

  HIS AGITATION HAD him awake well before the alarm clock did. He sat up in bed to the sound of the relentless rain on the roof. It was still dark and the weight of the clouds seemed to be pressing down on the air below. The volume of water now flowing along the gutters had washed all colour from the city, and left it as pale as a body recovering from a haemorrhage. He groped about for the coffee pot without switching on the light. The blue flame of the gas hypnotized him, setting his thoughts racing once again. The prospect of visiting the barge held greater appeal for him than did the post-mortem scheduled for that morning. Perhaps it was all that rain.