Well, it was done, and at least the air had a whiff of the sea. He passed one set of papers to Griffoni and went behind his desk, removed his jacket, and sat.
It felt to him a bit like being back at university, two classmates sitting in a small space, reading together. It was all standard fare: the company named Romina Rimozione was established more than forty years before, only nine employees at the beginning, now more than a hundred, with offices in Padova, Treviso, and Marghera. The first business was transport: quick delivery anywhere in Europe. The company had expanded into building: houses and schools, then office buildings and even a part of the airport. One early success was a contract to transport materials from the Marghera industrial area, soon followed by another to remove waste metal from a factory complex in the same area. Construction of a shopping centre outside Pordenone, sub-contract for the laying of track for the new tram between Mestre and Venice. Somewhere in the middle of the expansion, Romina disappeared, as did the idea of removals, and the name of the company was changed to ‘GCM Holdings’.
He checked the articles and saw that Signorina Elettra had arranged them in chronological order, as though wanting them to feel participant in the continuing success of the company.
There was only one article of any length about the owner and guiding spirit of the company. Gianclaudio Maschietto, 83, was born in Piove di Sacco and currently divided his time between his birthplace and Venice. The article had photos of the church he had built and donated to his birthplace and quoted him as saying, ‘It is my duty to God and my fellow citizens that I do this.’ Presumably, he meant building the church, which Brunetti thought grotesque, a cement box with a sharply slanted tile roof and stained-glass windows that looked like scenes from religious comic books.
There had been a spurt of articles six years before, when Maschietto had withdrawn from the daily running of the company, passing control to his son, Francesco, who became CEO, his father retaining only a non-voting position on the board.
Finished reading the articles, Brunetti looked across at Griffoni, who was studying the photos of the stained-glass windows. She looked at him and sighed. ‘It looks frighteningly like the new church in the village my mother comes from.’
Griffoni tapped the sheets of paper on her knees, forcing them back into order. ‘To build the new church in my village, they tore down a small chapel from the sixteenth century.’ When she saw his startled look, she said, ‘That was fifty years ago.’
Brunetti wondered if this were meant to make it less awful. It didn’t.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I’d like to know why his company is paying for Bianchi.’
Brunetti turned a few pages and found what he was looking for. ‘It says here that the original company was working in Marghera from the early eighties.’
‘Umm,’ she said. ‘I read that.’ She flipped a few pages, then lowered the papers. ‘Do you think the accident would have been reported in the press? Two men were badly injured.’
‘If the damage was big enough or people were killed, it would be,’ Brunetti observed.
Griffoni thought about this for a moment, pulled her lips together and nodded a few times. ‘Of course, we believed what he told us, didn’t we? Because he’s handicapped. There could have been more people involved.’
Brunetti flirted with the idea of adding, ‘And because he’s good to his dog,’ but good sense prevailed. ‘Shall we go and see what else she’s found?’ he asked, instead.
Together they went down to Signorina Elettra’s office, where they found her still at her computer. As they entered, Brunetti saw a new pile of papers lying in the tray of the printer and asked, ‘Are those for us?’
‘Yes,’ Signorina Elettra said without bothering to look up from the screen. ‘They’re about the fire.’
Brunetti went and picked up the papers, and again there were two copies of each page. He went to the windowsill and sorted them into two piles, handed one to Griffoni. She leaned back beside him and started with the top page, instantly intent.
Brunetti remained where he was and started to read his copy.
The Gazzettino carried a story about a fire in a warehouse at a complex of offices and factories in Marghera in which at least two workers were killed, three injured, and two others reported as missing. The fire – for which no cause was given - had started in the warehouse in the late afternoon. Four brigades of firefighters had responded to the call and fought the fire until it was extinguished in the early morning.
The following day, La Nuova di Venezia confirmed the number of injured and killed but reported that the two missing workers had been on assignment in another part of the industrial complex and had not been involved in the fire. The captain of the firefighters was quoted as saying that the likely cause of the fire was a short circuit in the electrical system.
There was the usual comment on the large numbers of ‘white deaths’, on-the-job deaths of workers, and the standard interviews with the friends and family members of the two dead men, whom they remembered as serious, careful workers whose loss would be mourned by their colleagues and loved ones. The injured workers, Zeno Bianchi, Davide Casati, and Leonardo Pozzi, had been transported to hospitals in Padova and Venice and were all reported in ‘condizione riservata’.
By the third day, the story had moved farther back in the papers, and on the fourth there was a photo of the then-mayor visiting the site, surrounded by firefighters and various unnamed officials, all of them wearing coveralls, boots, and helmets, the mayor turned in half-profile, the better to be recognizable in the photo. After that, nothing, although Brunetti could still hear the thuh, thuh, thuh of the printer.
Without asking, he went and collected the pages, separated them, and handed one copy to Griffoni.
These dealt, though not until a year had passed, with Gianclaudio Maschietto, who had given an interview to Famiglia Cristiana, in which he declared that the events at his warehouse in Marghera, still fresh in his mind, as well as the recent death of his wife, had so burned into his soul – perhaps not the most opportune choice of word, Brunetti reflected – that his thoughts had turned to God, in whose name he would devote some of his wealth to aid the spiritual and physical welfare of his fellow citizens. Thus the construction of the church and the endowment of three beds in perpetuity at a casa di cura, to be given to workers who suffered crippling injuries in on-the-job accidents.
Years passed before Maschietto appeared again, this time, only six months ago, named among the forty people – almost all men – put forward as possible candidates for the state honour of Cavaliere del lavoro, to be awarded later in the year to twenty-five of them.
The printer was silent, the tray empty, and they had learned very little that would aid them in understanding the circumstances of Davide Casati’s death.