The policeman in Brunetti answered. ‘I’d rather not disturb it until we’ve seen more.’ He thought of all the places he’d been where the evidence had been contaminated by too-hasty curiosity, and then he wondered why he was thinking of evidence. Of what?
‘I want to take a look underneath,’ Brunetti said. It made little difference if they were out of the water or in it: they were a pair of filthy amphibians by now. In response to Dantone’s nod, Brunetti sucked in as much air as he could hold and jackknifed in the water, heading under the boat. Eyes open, he slipped beneath the edge, but there was no light and nothing to be seen. He ran his hands over the invisible curve of the inside and worked his way around to the other side, but he felt nothing except the smooth sides and gunwale. He swam back to the other side and out of the entrapping space, up to the surface.
He bobbed up not far from Dantone and said, ‘Nothing to see. No light.’
‘What now?’ the Captain asked.
‘If we pulled it up on shore, maybe we could turn it over and see if it’s his,’ Brunetti said, wondering why he refused to believe that it was. He latched his fingers under the edge of the capsized boat and started walking towards the shore.
Dantone moved to the other side, and together they hauled the boat nearer to the land, where they found no easy access but a sudden, sharp drop-off of almost a metre. Abandoning his hold on the boat, Brunetti climbed up on land, followed by Dantone. Both of them leaned over and pulled in deep, rasping breaths, then turned back to the boat.
It was easy enough to drag the prow up on to the land and haul it forward for a quarter of the boat’s length, but they quickly realized there was no way they could turn it over or drag it entirely free of the water. There, on the left side of the prow, Brunetti saw the long streak of blue: Casati had told him about his close call some weeks before with a delivery boat’s drunken pilot. ‘It’s his,’ he said.
He walked around to the other side of the boat and saw that a rope was hanging taut from the ring at the back. He bent and pulled on it, hoping to free the anchor and bring it on to land, for surely the boat would have to be taken back to Sant’Erasmo. He pulled on it a few times, but it must have been caught on something on the bottom.
‘Could you give me a hand, Capitano,’ he called, surprised that he still didn’t know Dantone’s first name.
‘Andrea,’ Dantone said as he walked over. ‘And you’re Guido, right?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, then, ‘There’s a metal grating on the end of the rope: it must be stuck on the bottom.’ He passed the rope to Dantone, who moved to stand opposite him.
Together they pulled at the anchor. Brunetti felt it come loose from below the surface and looked across at Dantone in satisfaction.
They pulled together, slipping hand over hand as the anchor moved along the bottom and the rope that they pulled ashore coiled once upon itself at their feet.
Brunetti looked at the place where the rope entered the water, wondering if Casati had decided to use something heavier, more secure than the grating he knew. He bent over and peered into the water, and that’s when he saw the hand.
15
Perhaps he lost his balance; perhaps a loop of the rope had caught around his ankle and pulled at one side; or perhaps it was the sight of the hand that brought Brunetti to his knees. Whatever the cause, he found himself in the mud, his knees poked and scraped by stones and tile shards, still holding the rope but afraid to put his hand in the water with that other hand.
Dantone, standing behind him, looked to see what had happened. ‘Guido, what is it?’ he asked.
‘In the water,’ was the best Brunetti could manage. ‘Look.’ He was kneeling with his hands propped on the ground in front of him, fighting the impulse to be sick.
Dantone ran his eye down to where the rope entered the water. And saw it. ‘Maria Vergine,’ he whispered – an expression Brunetti’s mother had used – his hands frozen on the rope.
The time that passed seemed endless, though it couldn’t have been even a minute. Finally Brunetti got to his feet and looked across at Dantone. ‘We have to get him out of there,’ he said.
Dantone nodded, as though there were no words he could find.
Together, hand over hand, they returned to hauling up this new, horrible, anchor. At first, Brunetti looked to one side of the rope, then steeled himself and looked at it and what was below: the top of a head, a shoulder, the other, and then the chest of the man that a quick glance down his face had told him was Casati, bobbing and turning in the water.
When he saw Casati’s head float to the surface of the water, Brunetti said, ‘I’ll pull him out.’ He looked at Dantone, who nodded and braced one leg behind him, his hands gripping the rope.
Brunetti let go of the rope and knelt at the edge of the water. He leaned down, grabbed Casati’s body under the shoulders, and guided him to the place where the land dropped quickly into the water, but it proved impossible to lift the body.
He was about to ask Dantone for help when the other man was beside him, lifting, lifting. Together, they pulled the dead man from the water and laid him, face up, on the ground. Water ran from Casati’s hair and clothing and quickly disappeared into the mud around him. His old shirt and loose trousers were slick to his body; one shoe was gone. The rope, like the body of a python, had coiled itself around Casati’s leg, just below the knee, then moved down to dig a circle in the flesh above his ankle before being pulled straight into the water by whatever it was tied to. Dantone grabbed the rope and pulled until the metal grating broke the surface. He hauled it out and let it drop on the earth, not far from Casati’s feet.
Brunetti leaned over the dead man and, not caring whether he was destroying more evidence, covered Casati’s eyes with his hands and pressed the eyelids closed. They remained that way for an instant, but then opened again. Brunetti pulled a cotton handkerchief, soaked and shapeless, from his back pocket; he shook it open and placed it, still dripping, over the dead man’s face, then he sat back on his knees and closed his eyes.
Suddenly they heard footsteps, and soon after that one of the sailors from Dantone’s boat appeared, slogging across the broken dirt and piled rocks, looking strangely out of place in his clean, white uniform. When he saw the dead man, he stopped. Dantone held up a hand to warn him to come no closer.
Brunetti pushed himself to his feet and looked down at Casati’s body. How small he looked, this old man who had seemed so young, so vital.
‘Where’s the boat?’ Dantone surprised him by asking, but he was speaking to the young sailor.
‘Back there, Capitano,’ the young man answered, turning to point behind him, where the angle of the cemetery wall cut off any chance of seeing beyond it. ‘There’s a dock.’
‘You walked?’ Dantone asked.