They shook hands just outside the main door to the campo, and Rizzardi went off in the direction of Strada Nuova and the vaporetto that would take him home. Dantone said something about going back to the Capitaneria and added that he and his men were available if and when Brunetti wanted to go into the laguna again.
‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said as they lingered in front of the hospital.
‘Thanks for hauling me out of the water.’
Brunetti patted Dantone on the arm and said, ‘Same to you.’ The two men stepped down into the campo and went their separate ways.
Brunetti stopped when he got to the bottom of the bridge in front of the hospital and stared in front of him. How strange and closed-in it looked, this small calle lined with buildings on both sides. His view ahead slammed into a bridge and then another one, and then buildings, more buildings on both sides. Raising his eyes, he saw even more buildings and then rooftops, but there was no long, unobstructed view of anything. This is what it means to be in a city, he thought. This is what living with views to the open sea has done to me.
As he continued on the familiar way home, however, the strange sensation left him, and by the time he turned into his calle his sight had adjusted to a city perspective. He didn’t have his keys, so he phoned Paola to ask her to open the main door. A few seconds later, the large door clicked open. Brunetti, covered with sweat and very conscious of the smell coming from his clothing, started up the stairs to the apartment. When he reached the third floor, he heard the door open above him and Paola’s voice calling, ‘Ciao, Guido. Bentornato.’
Yes, it was good to return to his home, to this safe place they had created over the years. He paused on the last turning and looked up. She stood upright in the doorway, looking down at him, smiling.
‘I’m a bit bedraggled,’ was all Brunetti could think of to say.
‘More than a bit,’ she observed with a smile that failed to hide her surprise.
‘Comes of being away from you for so long,’ he said, starting up the last flight. Without Paola, his life was not only bedraggled, but dull, humourless, cool, joyless. He wanted to tell her this, but instead he said, ‘I need a drink and a shower.’
He arrived on the landing and bent over to give her a kiss, careful to keep his filthy clothing from touching her.
She stepped back and looked him up and down. ‘Could you reverse the order?’
When a scrubbed Brunetti, his clothing stuffed in a plastic bag to go out with the morning’s garbage, came to dinner, only Raffi and Paola were there. Paola explained that Chiara had gone to spend three days at the home of a friend whose parents had a summer place on the Lido and hadn’t returned yet. Brunetti’s first thought was that she’d be in that water, but then it came to him that she’d be kilometres from the place where he had found Casati.
Raffi was happy to see him and spent most of the meal talking about what he’d done, he and his friends, while Brunetti had been away. One of them had been given a topetta for his eighteenth birthday, and he was letting Raffi come along for the lessons his father was giving him.
‘The motor’s tiny, only five horsepower, but it’s great to be out there and go where you want,’ he said, his enthusiasm so high that he forgot to eat for a few minutes, something that did not go unnoticed by his parents.
‘You don’t need a licence for a motor that small, do you?’ Brunetti asked, spearing a piece of roast duck and using it to wipe up the rest of the orange sauce on his plate.
‘No, so there’s nothing illegal about it if they let me take the tiller,’ Raffi said with obvious pride in his casual use of the term. ‘Besides, Danilo’s father’s been with us all the time.’
‘Good,’ Brunetti said, beginning to feel haunted by all this talk of boats and the laguna.
As if she had read his mind, Paola broke in and said, ‘Raffi, will you help me take the plates?’ He got up to do so, and they carried them inside, leaving Brunetti alone on the terrace, where he indulged in an excess of long views. Though they extended over rooftops and were occasionally obstructed by bell towers, they soothed his soul as much as his eyes with their sweet assurance that he had returned to a safe haven.
Paola returned after about twenty minutes, by which time Brunetti had retreated to the sofa in the living room, kicked off his shoes, and put his feet on the low table in front of him. She set down two coffees. Raffi had not seen the state his father was in when he came home, so the subject of Brunetti’s experiences in the laguna had not arisen at dinner, and now Raffi had gone to the cinema with a friend.
‘There’s sugar in it already,’ Paola said, sitting beside him. They drank their coffee silently. Brunetti, after more than a week of drinking only a single glass of wine with dinner, felt no desire for anything other than coffee; he surprised himself by wanting no grappa.
At no particular time in their long silence, Brunetti decided he would tell her everything he knew. Though it took some time, Paola waited until it was clear he had finished, when she asked, ‘It’s a strange thing to happen to someone who spent so much time on the water, isn’t it?’
‘Rizzardi said he must have been battered about by the storm. The anchor rope was twisted around his leg and pulled him in.’
‘Ah,’ Paola said. ‘I’m sorry for his daughter.’
‘Yes,’ he said and pushed his cup and saucer farther back on the table.
He rested his head against the sofa and thought about the carefree days he had spent with Casati. In all of those days, he had not thought about Pucetti’s impulsive gesture during the interview with Ruggieri, just as he had not heard from anyone at the Questura.
‘I told you. He talked about his bees,’ Brunetti said.
‘Bees,’ Paola repeated flatly.
Brunetti nodded. ‘He kept bees out on the barene in the laguna, and we went out to inspect them.’
‘To get honey?’
‘No. It’s too early for that. Not until the end of the summer.’ Then he added, ‘He said they were dying.’
‘Yes,’ Paola said and closed her eyes in thought for a moment. ‘I’ve read about it: it’s happening everywhere and they seem unable to stop it.’ And then she asked, ‘If he wasn’t going to get the honey, what was he going out to inspect?’
‘We went out to see them so that he could take samples.’
‘Samples of what?’
‘Once it was a few dead bees. He put them in a plastic tube, the sort they use for blood samples, to have them tested.’
‘Once?’
‘Another time, he came back to the boat with a vial of mud.’
‘Could the mud have been killing them?’ she asked.
‘I doubt it,’ Brunetti said after a brief pause. ‘He told me people kept the same hives in the same places for generations. If the mud was going to kill them, I suppose it would have done so a long time ago.’
Paola closed her eyes for a time and finally asked, eyes still closed, ‘Who would test them?’
Brunetti, who had been on the island for more than a week, didn’t hesitate to answer. ‘No one on Sant’Erasmo, that’s for sure.’