‘Yes. And interpret them.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘The usual things: varroa, nosema, lack of nutrition, pesticides, chemicals. It’s what’s killing them everywhere.’ Her voice changed and she asked, ‘Why do you want to know this, Commissario?’
‘Because he seemed troubled by what he found: the bees and the soil. So I’d like to know what the reports told him, if only to put my mind at rest.’
She appeared to think about this and then said, ‘Davide came here a few months ago. He’d heard about me. This is a small island, and Sant’Erasmo is even smaller. In population, that is. There are no secrets on the islands. He knew that I’d worked for FAO examining soil, and he knew that I’d come back here after Uzbekistan, and he knew the rumours that I’d been fired but still had a pension from FAO. My guess,’ she said with a resigned sigh, ‘is that everyone on the island knows that, and some might even know how much the pension is.’
‘Are the rumours correct?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Were you fired?’
‘Yes.’
‘What for?’
‘For causing trouble.’ She pushed herself up straight in the chair, then returned her hands to the way she had been holding them in her lap.
‘This was more than ten years ago. I went to Uzbekistan to study what the death of the Aral Sea was doing to the soil. Not to the people, or the animals, or the climate; only to the soil. For the first few months, I made myself ignore anything other than the soil: I didn’t see the skin cancers, the dead animals lying in the fields, and I ignored the dust and salt storms. I dug up soil samples, before and after storms, and I ran some tests on them and sent carefully labelled tubes of earth back to the laboratory in Rome, describing the increased salinity.’ She looked at the backs of her hands, as he had seen many guilty people do during questioning. Many innocent ones, as well, he reminded himself.
‘But after a while, I couldn’t pretend any more not to see what was going on. I started to add into my reports comments about the people and the way they were dying – the sea was already dead, so there was no use commenting on that – and the animals, and the crops that didn’t grow, except for the cotton that was growing everywhere and that had killed the sea.’
Brunetti looked at Vianello and saw that he was listening to her story with rapt attention.
‘I suppose my reports became somewhat uncontrolled, but death was all around me and in the salt that blew in everywhere and was on my body and in my eyes. And all this so that they could grow cotton,’ she added.
Neither Brunetti nor Vianello spoke, so she went on. ‘But then someone in Rome must have let them know – the people in Tashkent, or the people in Moscow – what was in my reports, or perhaps they quite innocently passed the information on to them. Or, more likely, everything was being read as I sent it. What I wrote was common knowledge to anyone living there, and to many scientists in the West, but the government wanted to be able to deny it.’ Her voice suddenly tightened and grew impassioned. ‘There are satellite photographs that let you see how much the sea has shrunk in the last years, but the government denies it’s happening.’
She looked at them, one after the other, and gave an uneasy smile. ‘Sorry, but it makes me wild that this can happen, that they can destroy a sea, for God’s sake.’ She stopped speaking for some time and then went on in a calmer voice. ‘There must have been some sort of complaint from the government, so first the men from the Secret Service came to talk to me, and then the people in Rome decided that it was time for me to take early retirement. I understood what was going on, of course, so I decided to accept their offer. I couldn’t stand to be there any more and was happy to leave. I’m not a particularly brave person. So I packed up my things and left. But I left the tiny laboratory there, with all the instruments, so the person who replaced me could do the same tests and see the same results.’
‘And then what did you do?’ Vianello asked, like one of the old men of Ithaca asking Ulysses to tell them what happened next …
‘I travelled for a while and tried to find another job. But the word was out, I think, and I couldn’t find one, at least not in my profession. So I travelled some more.’ Again she looked at each of them in turn and said, ‘They gave me a very generous pension.
‘And then I came here and moved into this apartment; an aunt left it to me, ages ago. And here I live, a retired woman who putters around in the laguna in her boat or paddles around in her kayak, but who is known as the scientist who knows about nature.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. Then, impressed but not diverted by the ease with which she’d led them away from the reports on the samples Casati had sent to Lausanne, he asked, ‘And Davide Casati?’
Her mouth tightened, as if in disapproval of his tenacity. ‘We were almost friends, and beyond that, it’s none of your business.’ When she saw the effect her brusqueness had on them, she added, almost as an apology, ‘Besides – if I might set your perfervid minds at rest – he was still in love with his wife, who died four years ago, a very ugly death from a very ugly disease.’ Brunetti watched her debate whether to continue and decide to do so. ‘He felt guilty that he couldn’t save her. Many men do. When their wives die.’
After a long silence, she went on, only studied patience in her voice now, ‘To me, he was a man from Sant’Erasmo who wanted to know why his bees were dying, and someone had told him to ask the woman on Burano who knows about science things.’ Then, with what sounded like irritation but might as easily have been the truth, she added, ‘I’m sure some of them think I’m a witch. I know spells and secrets and go into the laguna in my own little boat and don’t tell anyone what I’m doing there.’ Again, Brunetti noted, she had pulled the conversation away from the reports she had read and interpreted.
‘What are you doing there?’ Vianello asked, surprising them both.
‘I’m seeing how peaceful and beautiful it is, how lovely the birds are, how perfectly it has evolved,’ she answered. And then, after a moment, she added, speaking far more slowly and in a lower voice, ‘And I’m watching it die.’
‘Could you explain this to me, Signora?’ Vianello asked.
She raised a hand and waved in the direction of the water, then forgot about the gesture and her hand fell back into her lap. ‘There are fewer birds – some species no longer come here to nest – there are fewer fish. I seldom see a crab in the water. The frogs are gone. The tides don’t make any sense any more. And …’ she began. A sudden tightness came into her voice as she said, ‘the earth itself …’ She stopped, appeared to play back what she had started to say, and turned her head to look out the window.
‘What is it, Signora?’ Vianello asked.