Casati surprised him by asking, ‘You’re a policeman, aren’t you?’
Usually, when asked this, Brunetti tried to make a joke of it, but Casati was very much in earnest, and so Brunetti answered, ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Does that mean you don’t talk about what you do?’
‘Usually.’
‘And if I ask you not to?’
Immediately worried that he was going to be caught up in semi-legal activity of some sort, Brunetti answered, ‘Then I don’t tell anyone,’ but thought it more honest to be frank with him and added, ‘so long as it isn’t against the law.’
Casati shook the idea away with his head. ‘No, it’s perfectly legal. I just don’t want people to know about it.’ That, Brunetti thought, could cover a wide range of actions.
Casati looked at his watch and must have calculated something, for he said, ‘It’s almost twelve-thirty. There’s some lunch for you in the kitchen. If you eat now, we could leave in an hour, and we’d be back before five. You want to come?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, and went down to the kitchen to look for his lunch.
At one-thirty promptly, Brunetti, now wearing his tennis shoes, left the house, telling himself not to worry about leaving the door unlocked, and walked down to the mooring place where Casati had tied up the boat. He heard the older man before he saw him, shifting something around in the bottom of the boat.
He noticed that the water was higher than when they had arrived. He stepped easily into the boat, saw a second oar lying on the gunwale, the second fórcola in place on the left side of the boat. ‘Rub some of this on you,’ Casati said, handing him a metal tin. The label said it was dark brown shoe polish, and he wondered if this was some sort of miracle suncream known only to sailors: Paola would be amazed. He prised up the lid and saw that the label had got the colour wrong: the goo inside was beige.
‘It’s for the mosquitoes. Rub it on, and they won’t bother you.’ When Brunetti hesitated, Casati said. ‘My daughter made it: it works.’
Brunetti did as told and rubbed it on his hands, arms, ankles, and neck: he could smell camphor, lemon, and something sharp and acid. He handed the tin back to Casati, who put it in a wooden box under the platform at the back of the boat and pulled out a pair of leather gloves.
‘Put these on,’ Casati said, tossing them to Brunetti. When Brunetti hesitated, Casati added, ‘I shook your hand. You’ll need gloves the first few days.’
‘First few days. First few days.’ Brunetti repeated the words to himself like an incantation while Casati cast off and pushed the boat away from the wall. Brunetti pulled on the gloves, a size too large for him. He picked up the oar and slipped it into the fórcola, tilted it and ran it knife-like through the water. The length and weight were familiar; without conscious effort on his part, his feet and knees adjusted to the boat. He turned to see where Casati was in his stroke, waited until Casati lifted his oar from the water for the next stroke and did the same. It took Brunetti a few strokes to adjust to the rhythm set by the other man, but when he found it, he relaxed and entered into the steady rhythm set by the man behind him.
Brunetti looked forward, lining his sight with a distant object and aiming for that so as to keep in a straight line. ‘Bit to the left,’ Casati said, and the boat followed the words. Brunetti didn’t have to be told when the curve was finished; his whole being sensed when it was time to sight another object and row straight for it.
As he rowed on, he began to feel the muscles in his legs and back react to the strain. As his hands ground against the wood of the oar, he felt a roughness inside the glove just at the bottom of his right thumb. To smooth it out – and he wasn’t sure whether it was the stitching or the beginning of a blister – he would have to take his hand off the oar. He rowed on.
Bend forward, pushing the oar to the back, twirl it out of the water and bring the blade forward while straightening a bit, cut the oar into the water again, bend into the forward thrust, twirl the oar and lift it out.
He thought of Levin in Anna Karenina, the scene where the city slicker goes out to cut hay with the peasants. Urban, out of shape, body howling with pain, but on and on Levin went, swathe after swathe, hands covered with blisters, seeing how effortless it is for the peasants, and when, dear God, can I have a drink of water?
Levin had been harvesting hay, so the work he did made a visible difference. Brunetti, instead, saw only water, sky, marshland, more water, the occasional cloud. No colour, no sound, just a flat, dull horizon and endless water, always the same.
Behind him, Casati said, ‘I think I’d like something to drink. How about you?’ He felt the slowing of the boat and heard the thump of Casati’s oar being set in the gunwale. He did the same, took the opportunity to look down at the shirt that clung to his body, and saw that the front was a darker grey all the way to the bottom. He stood up straight but was careful to do it very slowly, warning his spine what he was doing.
He turned and looked at the other rower, and when he saw how small what he took to be Sant’Erasmo seemed, off in the distance behind Casati, Brunetti realized how far they had come. The older man pulled something from a wicker basket beside his feet and tossed a bottle of mineral water to Brunetti. He forced himself to open it slowly and gazed around before taking his first sip. How enormous the laguna was. No safe pavements, streets, places with names: only the veins and arteries of the laguna, disappearing with the tide, returning when it withdrew.
The sun was his only sure way to tell direction: if it beat down on his left shoulder, they were heading north. He tried to remember the excursions he had made with his father, but his memories – not only of the geography – were no longer to be trusted.
Burano had to be off to the left, he thought. He turned to look and, indeed, it was there, but farther off than he thought it would be.
He tried to take small sips, but thirst overcame him and he finished the water, put the top back on the bottle and wedged it into the space in the gunwale. If that was Burano and they were heading north …
‘Are we in the Canale di San Felice?’ he asked Casati, hoping his memory was right.
‘Very close. It’s the next one to the east,’ Casati answered, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his brow. He wore no hat. Real men. ‘This is Canale Gaggian.’
Brunetti shook his head to show he didn’t know it.
‘It goes north, too.’
Brunetti shrugged his shoulders to show he still didn’t know the canal, then smiled to say it didn’t make any difference to him.
‘It goes to l’Isola di Santa Cristina.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti exclaimed, recognizing the name. ‘It’s private, isn’t it?’ he asked without thinking.