‘He was gone; so was his boat. After Massimo got home in the afternoon, I’d cook something to eat and come over here and leave some for him, and in the morning it was gone, and the dishes were washed and put away, and breakfast was ready for me. But sometimes I’d go a week without seeing him.’
‘And when you did, did you ask him what he was doing?’
‘Only once. He said he was in the laguna, looking for a reason not to kill himself.’
‘Oddio,’ Vianello exclaimed in a soft voice.
She got to her feet and went over to stand by the open window. There was no view of the water from there, but the sky was lightened by its reflection. Brunetti didn’t know whether she was tired of talking to them or tired of being observed by them.
‘How long did he do this?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Until April,’ she answered. ‘My mother had died in December.’ She gave them some time to consider this, then said, ‘Yes, all winter, and it was a bad one. He was out there, rowing, every day.’
‘And in April?’ Brunetti asked.
‘One morning, when I came over for breakfast, he was sitting at the table, drinking coffee. He got up when I came in and put his hand on my arm and asked if we’d like to come and live with him. All he said to try to persuade me was that we’d have more space here. At the time, I thought it meant he was better, but now I think it meant only that he was lonely.’ She barely managed to speak the last words.
‘What happened then?’
‘He started going out to fish again and selling the fish to people here and to restaurants in Venice. And then in May, when he opened up the hives after the winter, he began to make honey and sell that.’ She took a few breaths and then continued. ‘He talked less, but it was always my mother he talked to most, not to me.’ Her attention during all of this was directed outside the window, as though she were speaking to the bird that was twittering away in the fig tree near the garden wall.
‘Did he stay like that?’ Brunetti asked.
He saw her nod her head and then shake it before she said, ‘Until about six months ago,’ and nothing else.
‘What happened?’
She turned to face them and said, ‘His bees started to die. At first he said it was part of the natural cycle, and then he brought home some medicine against something that sounded like “Verona”. After about a month, he came home one day and told me he’d burned four of the hives he had at one place. He was shaking, like someone confessing to a terrible crime. He told me it’s what some beekeepers do when the hives are infected and they can’t get rid of the parasites,’ she explained.
‘Did it work?’
She shook her head again. ‘Nothing did. They kept dying, all except three other hives he kept – I think they were out in the laguna, too. He didn’t have any trouble with those, but all the other bees, he said, were sick with something he couldn’t understand, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. They kept dying.’
‘Is there anyone who could have helped him, anyone he might have told?’
‘Not that I know of. No. He had some friends here, but he was the only one who kept bees. Besides, he never talked a lot.’
Brunetti thought back over his days in the boat with Casati and realized how little interchange there had been. He’d been told about bees and fish and birds, and how to build a boat, and how to navigate by the stars, but Casati had never explained why he had built his own boat, nor why he had chosen to live out there on Sant’Erasmo.
‘Did he talk to you about the bees?’ he asked. ‘And what was happening to them?’
‘I suppose he did,’ she admitted. ‘But I didn’t pay much attention.’ She bowed her head, and he feared she was about to make some confession of bad feelings between them. Then she admitted, ‘We didn’t talk much. I still missed my mother. It’s been four years, but I still miss her every day. And I didn’t want to tell him that.’
‘I imagine he did, as well,’ Vianello interjected.
‘Of course he did,’ she said, her voice unsteady. ‘He didn’t show he missed her,’ she added, sounding angry. ‘Except by going to the cemetery. But then he found someone else to talk to.’ The last sentence could have been spoken by a different person.
‘Do you mean Signora Minati?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Did you see her? Talk to her?’ she demanded, the words tumbling from her mouth.
‘Yes.’
Her look was fierce but strangely childlike: he had seen it on Chiara’s face many times when she thought she had been unfairly treated. ‘What did she tell you?’ Federica asked.
‘That your father asked her to interpret some laboratory reports for him,’ Brunetti explained calmly.
‘“Laboratory reports?”’ she repeated, as though they were words from some other language.
Brunetti nodded; so did Vianello. ‘He sent samples to a laboratory at the University of Lausanne, and when the analysis came back, he asked her to explain it to him.’ Coming from Brunetti, and in that tone, it sounded like the most normal thing in the world.
‘Is she a doctor?’ Federica asked. ‘Was something wrong with him?’
Brunetti smiled at this. ‘Yes, I think she’s a doctor, but not a medical doctor. She studies soil and what’s in it and what can be done to change it. At least that’s what I gathered from what she told us.’ Vianello nodded again, but nothing could change the look of complete bafflement on Federica’s face.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘He’d sent some of his dead bees to the lab, and some time later he sent a vial of soil. I was with him when he collected samples, but he’d been doing it for quite a while,’ Brunetti said, then changed the subject. ‘We had a drink in a bar on Burano. The men there seemed to know him. Do you know who they might have been?’
She shrugged. ‘He knew a lot of people, but I don’t think they were friends. You know how men are.’
‘What do you mean, Signora?’ Vianello broke in to ask.
‘Men – you – don’t have friends,’ she said with quiet certainty. ‘You have companions and pals and colleagues, but very few men have friends. If they do, it’s usually women, sometimes their wife.’
When he heard her say this, Brunetti’s masculinity took offence and he asked, ‘That’s something of a generalization, wouldn’t you say, Federica?’
‘Who’s your best friend?’ she asked right back. Then, turning to Vianello, she said, ‘And yours?’
Brunetti was stunned by the audacity of the question and the prejudice that stood behind it. He was about to explain that Vianello was far more than a colleague when he chose the path of greater wisdom and turned her question into one of his own. ‘Was your father still in touch with any of his old friends from Marghera?’
After a moment’s surprise, Federica accepted what was obviously his offer of peace and answered, ‘Zio Zeno. Zeno Bianchi.’
‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti said.
‘He’s my godfather,’ she explained. ‘He was my father’s best friend at work.’
‘Ah,’ exclaimed Brunetti. ‘Where is he now?’