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

were only two of them left on duty.
    “Every year around All Souls the river swells up,” Barigazzi told him. “It too wants to remember its dead, and goes to pay them a visit in the cemeteries. It caresses the tombstones for a few days, shows the funeral chapels their reflections in the waters it has brought up from the riverbed. It stops off inside the graveyard walls, before settling back, leaving everything clean and sparkling.”
    The maresciallo listened in silence to that unpolished elder, who could turn poetical when he was talking about his own world. He observed for a moment those hard-headed men whose lives had been spent on the banks of the Po and decided it would be a waste of his time talking to them or attempting to lay down the law. They reminded him of the fishermen in his own land, in Sicily. He set off in his jeep.
    The clock above the bar struck midnight and Barigazzi continued travelling in his mind along the route taken by the barge. The current would flow more slowly where the river spreads out into the floodplain. Tractors and lorries had begun to move along the embankment road. There were carts loaded with furniture covered roughly with tarpaulin to protect them from the wind and rain. The leafless poplar trees were blowing about wildly at the wide curve in the embankment, behind the stone-crushing plant, where once the stables for the cart horses had stood.
    “The partisans’ monument will be well and truly underwater by now,” Vernizzi said.
    “Like a sea-wall at high tide.”
    “The time will come when no-one will remember it any more and the river will carry it all away. Then the stone-crusher will crush it as well,” Torelli said bitterly.
    “Tonna’s being carried off by the current right now,” Barigazzi said, as though talking to himself. He reckoned that, with the current as strong as it was, he would be just about at the mouth of the Crostolo.
    Meantime the radio provided an accompaniment to their talk. “It went under the arches at Boretto quite smoothly? … As though Tonna were himself at the helm?”
    “It’s done that so often it could manage by itself,” Ghezzi murmured.
    The telephone rang, and Gianna repeated aloud what she was hearing.
    “There’s not a soul to be seen in the cabin … The light is still on. It’s much weaker now? … The barge has swung round and started listing. It ran into a whirlpool? … And now has righted itself.”
    “A marvel of a hull, that one,” Barigazzi said. “It can hold the current without anyone working the helm.”
    “Once you clear the Becca bridge, you can go to sleep until Porto Tolle,” Vernizzi said.
    Another silence, heads nodding in wonderment. Then Barigazzi said: “I don’t believe Tonna’s piloting that boat.”
    He got to his feet and went out to check the midnight level on the stakes.
    On the road on top of the embankment, there was more traffic than on a Sunday. The carabinieri, blue light flashing, drove up and down several times, escorting lorries and tractors. Inside the misted-up vehicles, there seemed to be mothers holding in their arms babies wrapped in brightly coloured blankets, and men with bags over their shoulders. Voices on the radio were recommending that some kind of surveillance of the empty houses in the villages should be organized.
    “Another eight centimetres,” Barigazzi told them as he came back.
    The radio operator asked for a line and communicated immediately the news that the river was a good three metres above low-water level.
    “Did they say anything about Tonna?” Barigazzi said.
    “He’s still midstream.”
    “If that’s the case, by three he’ll run into the bend at Luzzara. Once he’s passed the bridge at Viadana, there’s no way he can move towards the Mantua bank without rudder and engine.”
    “If he’s dead, it’d be better if he went down with the barge. It’s what he would have wanted,” Gianna said.
    It was the first time anyone had voiced the notion of