Suddenly he heard a soft ‘shhhh’ from behind him, and Casati’s oar rose from the water and stopped. Brunetti lifted his own free of the water and turned to the man at the back. Both hands on his oar, Casati raised one finger and pointed to the right. Brunetti looked in that direction but saw nothing. He squinted to cut out some of the sunlight and then he saw them: along the side of the canal floated a duck with five tiny ones behind her, all of them absolutely motionless and, Brunetti assumed, doing their best to look like floating leaves.
The momentum of their last strokes carried them forward, and in no time they were beyond the ducks. Brunetti turned to see what the ducks would do, but the mother must have enjoined silence for not one of them moved, and then they disappeared as perspective hid them behind drooping grass.
Casati’s oar slipped back into the water, and they continued ahead. Brunetti rowed on in the growing heat and light and wished he had thought to bring sunglasses or to put on sunscreen. At least the sleeves of today’s shirt were long, and he was wearing gloves.
How long had they been rowing? Again, he’d left his watch behind, equating timelessness with freedom. A field of cultivated land sprang out of the reeds on their right, but Casati did not slow their rhythm. Brunetti consoled himself with the thought that the slaves in the galleys had not had long-sleeved shirts nor baseball caps. He rowed on, conscious of thirst and his tight shoulders and tighter back and little else.
‘We can pull over here,’ Casati said suddenly. Brunetti stopped rowing, leaving it to the man behind him to decide where to pull in and moor the boat. Casati gave a few more strokes, and the boat slid up to the left bank. Brunetti heard a thud behind him and looked to see Casati sitting on the rowing platform, knotting a rope to one of the corners of the frame of the metal grating. He stood and tossed it on to the land, where it sank into the tall grass and would serve as an anchor.
‘Here. Catch.’ Brunetti turned just as Casati threw him, as he had the day before, a bottle of mineral water. This time Brunetti opened it immediately and began to drink. So immersed in pleasure was he that he heard nothing, and when he looked back, all he saw was Casati’s naked back and short trousers disappearing over the side of the boat. But in that flashing moment Brunetti had seen a broad trail down Casati’s back. Red, darker than red, almost black, covering both his shoulders and running down to his waist, the mark covered most of his back. Scar or birthmark, Brunetti wasn’t sure.
Brunetti watched the other man swim away from the boat. Silence returned; the heat and sun assaulted him. He capped the bottle, set it upright against the planking, and untied his shoes. He stripped and piled his clothing on the board behind him, set the baseball cap on top, and rolled over the side of the boat into the water. He frog-kicked away from the boat into the centre of the channel. He dived, and when he surfaced, he was entirely alone in the laguna. He swam back to the boat.
Brunetti started off the way Casati had gone but stopped after twenty strokes or so and swam back to the boat. Then he did the same distance in the other direction. To his surprise, the motion relaxed his arms and shoulders and allowed him to begin to hope that he would be able to use them again. He went back and forth until, head raised from the water as he turned, he saw Casati swimming towards him with an awkward, one-armed breaststroke, his other hand held above his head.
Brunetti swam to the side of the boat and draped an arm over it, treading water. As Casati approached, Brunetti saw what he held in his hand: a small plastic vial with a green plastic cap like the one he had used to collect the dead bees the day before.
Casati swam up to the stern and leaned over to set the vial on the top of his folded shirt, then draped both arms over the side, visibly winded from the swim.
Brunetti pointed his chin at the vial. ‘What’s that – more bees?’
Still breathing deeply, Casati answered, ‘No, it’s mud.’
‘No bees?’
‘They’re all dead,’ Casati said, and pushed himself abruptly away from the boat. He swam to the side of the grass island and pulled himself up on to it, then walked gingerly to the back of the boat. He stopped to remove his trousers and wring them out, shake water from them a few times, and put them back on. He stepped into the boat, reached under the horizontal board at the back, and pulled out two towels, tossed one on to Brunetti’s place, and began to dry his calves and chest with the other. Brunetti saw only flashes of dark red when the other man turned round.
Seeing no easier way to get back into the boat, Brunetti swam around to the front and climbed on to the island. Stubbly grass poked at his feet, and he looked down to avoid the sharpest patches. He stepped into the boat and used the towel to dry himself, then put his clothes back on, leaving his feet to the sun.
When he looked at Casati, the older man was dressed and sitting on the towel folded on the back bench, staring off into the distance. There was no sign of the vial. Casati bent and began to wipe his feet, then slipped them into his frayed old sneakers. He stood and spent an inordinate amount of time folding and unfolding his towel and then draping it neatly over the side of the boat. ‘It took a long time, but we finally killed them,’ Casati surprised Brunetti by saying, sounding as if he included Brunetti in the crime by virtue of his humanity. ‘First we killed her, and now we’re killing the bees. Next it will be Federica and her children, and your children, too.’ He nodded a few times to emphasize his certainties.
Brunetti sat, wondering if too much sun had driven the older man beyond strength and patience. He said nothing and tried to remain motionless, telling himself to become part of the wooden board he was sitting on, to turn himself into one of the planks on the bottom of the boat. Brunetti tried to imagine what it would be like to become a piece of wood. What did Daphne feel as her limbs became branches, her toes roots? She was soon invisible in the forest, just as he now half hoped to become invisible out here in the laguna. Flotsam? Jetsam? Brunetti didn’t care which, just so long as Casati stopped raving.
Suddenly Casati leaned towards him, but Brunetti, protected by his now-treelike nature, did not move. In the sort of speculative voice in which Brunetti’s moral theology professor had posed the rhetorical questions that always preceded his lectures, he asked, ‘Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?’
Brunetti looked down at his dry feet. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered calmly, as he had so often done in class, hoping it would force the professor to make things clearer. Then, reluctant to do so, he said, ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
Casati gave this long consideration and finally said, ‘Let me ask Franca if she thinks I should tell you.’ To hear Casati refer so casually to his wife in the present tense made the hair on the back of Brunetti’s hands rise, but before he could say anything, they were surprised by the sound of flapping wings, and three herons rose from the water ahead of them.