Casati slapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. ‘Well,’ he said amiably. ‘We should start back, I think.’ He reached over and pulled the improvised anchor across the rough grass, hauled it in and set it on the bottom of the boat.
He picked up his oar, obviously waiting for Brunetti to do the same. When Brunetti did, Casati poked his oar into the embankment and shoved them out into the channel again, and then they were off.
To his own surprise, Brunetti felt refreshed, either by the swim or by Casati’s sudden return to reality. He was ready to row to Trieste if Casati asked him to.
Brunetti rowed, musing on what Casati had said but failing to make sense of it. In the distance, planes continued to take off and land, so far away that Brunetti was never certain it was the planes he could hear and not the motors of far closer boats. He glanced to the west and saw what he thought was Santa Cristina.
His oar hit something submerged in the water and he pitched forward, but before he could fall over the oar, it slipped free and tore itself loose from the fórcola and from his hands and slid into the water. Brunetti danced around in the bottom of the boat until he regained his balance, then lowered himself to sit on the gunwale until his heart stopped pounding.
Eyes closed, Brunetti could feel the boat slow and stop, and then he heard a solid, banging noise from Casati’s direction. When he opened his eyes, Brunetti saw the older man leaning over the side of the boat, poking his oar in the water.
‘What did I hit?’ Brunetti asked in what he struggled to make sound like a normal voice.
Casati remained bent over the side for some time, gazing into the water. He sat back on his heels, one hand wrapped around his oar, and looked at Brunetti. He muttered something that, to Brunetti, sounded like ‘my past’, but that made no sense. After a moment, Casati stood, looked into the water again and said, in an entirely natural voice, ‘Out here, it could be a submerged root, or a piece of rotten wood that got carried out by the tide.’ Setting his oar on the bottom of the boat, he reached to grab Brunetti’s, which was floating in the water, and placed it beside his own. He looked at his watch, glanced at the sun, then turned and looked back to where they had come from. Casati pulled up the top of the storage box to rummage around in the space below it. His hand emerged with what looked like a telefonino, the old type, with the cover that had to be opened. Casati pushed a button, then another one, then closed the device and placed it back in the box before shutting the lid.
‘What was that?’ asked Brunetti.
‘A GPS,’ Casati told him. ‘Tells me exactly where we are.’
‘Why?’
He stared at Brunetti for a long time before he said, ‘No special reason. But I always like to know where I’ve been.’
Without comment, Brunetti pushed himself to his feet and bent to slide his oar closer. As he did so, he looked into the shallow water at the side of the canal and saw something that looked like a metal circle, about the diameter of an inner tube.
‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked, pointing at the object.
Casati leaned in the direction Brunetti indicated. ‘Could be something that came loose from a boat. Lots of things wash up around here.’ He straightened and put his oar in the fórcola. ‘Let’s start back,’ he said.
Brunetti had no idea how much time passed before they stopped again: it could have been twenty minutes as easily as forty, and they could have been anywhere in the waters between raised patches of tall grasses.
‘One more visit, and then we can have lunch,’ Casati said, reaching into the box under the platform but this time pulling out the by now familiar leather case.
‘Bees?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, I want to check them. These are the farthest out up in this part of the laguna.’
‘May I come along?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Certainly. There’s nothing illegal about what I’m doing,’ Casati said, sounding unnecessarily defensive.
‘I’d hardly think that,’ Brunetti said with a laugh to show how absurd the idea was.
‘Only secret,’ Casati went on.
He tossed the makeshift anchor up on to the grass, and they climbed out of the boat. There was no trace of a path to follow in the rough grass, but Casati set off purposefully, heading due north. Brunetti, glad that he was wearing long trousers, followed him through the grass, which in places was sometimes high enough to rub itself aggressively across the back of his hands.
The earth seemed softer out here. It offered little or no resistance and seemed to provide his feet with a cushion at every step. The first squelch explained all of this to him: the rising tide had permeated the sandy soil.
Casati quickened his pace. ‘The water normally rises to two centimetres here,’ he said. Brunetti hurried to keep up as Casati led him across the grass, directly towards a large, sloppy-looking bush beside which stood a raised wooden platform holding three beehives, each with a different-coloured stripe on the front.
As they approached the hives, Casati stopped to set fire to a chip of wood and handed it to Brunetti; then they set off again. The bees surrounded them in fact and sound: they flew at them and around them, occasionally landing on a hand or shoulder to explore a bit. But then they left and went back to their peaceful business; the buzzing soared and lowered, now absolutely unthreatening to Brunetti.
The older man removed the top of the first hive and set it against one of the legs of the platform on which the three hives rested. Carefully, moving like a man under water, Casati checked all three hives and seemed pleased with what he found. When he was finished, he took the still-burning piece of wood from Brunetti and tossed it to the ground, then carefully ground it into the wet earth with his toe. Brunetti turned to leave, but when he failed to hear Casati’s steps behind him, he stopped and looked back, only to see Casati stoop down to pick up the piece of charred wood and place it in a plastic ziplock bag he pulled from the leather case. He stooped and shoved some of the wet grass over the place where it had been, removing all trace.
They walked back side by side; Brunetti watched the rising water devour their footprints the instant they lifted their feet. When they got to the boat, Brunetti looked back to where they had been. He saw nothing but a meaningless hump in the middle of the barena.
10