‘“Supposed to go”?’ Griffoni asked, joining the conversation again.
Pozzi smiled for the first time, and Brunetti saw that he must have been a handsome man, before the accident that had reduced him so. ‘Very good, Signorina,’ he said, his delight audible. Brunetti suddenly found himself annoyed at Pozzi’s condescension, as though he believed his knowledge combined with his handicap conveyed some special merit and thus put him in charge here.
Griffoni replied coolly, ‘You said it in such a way that I was compelled to ask, don’t you think, Signore?’
Pozzi’s smile evaporated and he said, ‘But so few people pay serious attention to what is said to them, Signorina, that you deserve the compliment.’ Brunetti wondered if Pozzi had so little interaction with people that he believed this.
‘And did they go to those countries?’ Brunetti asked.
Pozzi turned the upper part of his body towards Brunetti and answered, ‘That was not part of our mandate, Signore. We delivered the barrels to the trucks or, in some cases, to the boats; the people to whom we delivered them signed off on our invoices and took possession of the shipment.’ In case they did not understand, he went on, ‘We had no involvement beyond that. And no interest.’
Saying nothing, Brunetti waited for Griffoni to take charge again. She did by asking, ‘Do you remember the names of any of these companies?’
‘No; not after all these years.’
‘Did you ever learn where any of the shipments were going?’
‘As I told you, I don’t remember the invoices.’
‘That’s not what I’m asking, Signor Pozzi,’ she said with the first hint of impatience. ‘I’m asking if you ever learned where they were going.’
‘I didn’t ask,’ Pozzi replied.
She leaned forward and spoke with exaggerated emphasis. ‘Again, you seem to be misinterpreting my question. Did you ever learn where they went?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever hear speculation about where they might be going?’
‘Speculation?’
‘Among the people with whom you worked.’
His answering smile was soft and pleased with itself; Brunetti didn’t like the sight of it.
‘There’s always speculation, isn’t there?’ Pozzi asked. How many witnesses had Brunetti listened to who spoke in the same way? Thinking themselves so much cleverer than the person who questioned them, they would answer with rhetorical questions, try to split hairs that would have been invisible to a Jesuit.
Brunetti saw it now: Pozzi was a cat, who saw them as two small mice. Swat, swat, keep the claws in at the beginning, perhaps all the time. But swat and have what fun you could with them. ‘Did you believe any of the stories you heard?’ Griffoni asked.
‘Shall we say I found some of them interesting?’ Pozzi answered.
Griffoni said nothing. Brunetti studied her profile and saw her tongue moisten her lips before she asked, ‘Which ones were they?’
‘I heard that some of it went to Nigeria, that some went to Campania.’
‘I’ve heard about those,’ she said with a lack of interest.
As if to goad her into being interested, Pozzi said, ‘And some of them were like the little piggy in the English nursery rhyme. “This little piggy stayed home”,’ he said, his pronunciation showing that his knowledge of English was confined to reading.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Not your English,’ she quickly added, which Brunetti saw as a wise sop to her listener’s vanity, ‘but the meaning.’
‘Some of it stayed home, Signorina,’ he said with an enigmatic smile, the sort an attractive woman used when her answer could have been a yes as readily as a no.
Pozzi had said that some of the barrels had been delivered to boats. Brunetti suddenly pictured the many landing stages and docks with which the petrochemical area of Marghera was studded, all with easy access to the vastness of the laguna. And then he remembered diving into the water of the laguna and swimming back and forth to cool himself while waiting for Casati to return from collecting his last sample. He had dived down like a cormorant and swum underwater for as long as he could, holding his breath until compelled to plunge through the surface and draw in deep gulps of the life-saving air.
And then Casati had arrived, swimming with one arm raised, holding the vial safe from the water so that the soil inside could be sent for examination to see if it contained what was killing his bees.
‘Oddio,’ Brunetti whispered under his breath. ‘They dumped it in the laguna.’
28
Years later, Brunetti would remember the smile that appeared on Pozzi’s face as he savoured Brunetti’s last words. It began with his lips, which closed together, pressure from the centre forcing the corners up very slowly. His expression softened; tension disappeared from his face for a fleeting moment. His hints and ambiguous answers had finally registered with the police officials, and at least one of them now understood what had happened all those years before.
Brunetti turned to look at Griffoni, and he saw her face when she understood his words: there was no smile. Brunetti saw that Pozzi was also watching Griffoni. Her effect on him was evident: he squeezed his eyes together minimally to bring her face into sharper focus, the better to enjoy her expression, the result of her growing awareness of what he knew. The muscles of Pozzi’s lower face relaxed again, and the lines from his nose to his mouth disappeared. Years fled from him, and the young man he might well have been, before the flesh of his legs had been cauterized, made a brief appearance in the room. And then that man dissolved, still able to run from the room, leaving behind this other person. His shell? His lesser self? His remains.
Something horrid had slipped into the room with Pozzi’s words, carried ever closer by years of rumour and suggestion and half-understood remarks. Brunetti had been listening to stories for years: when the trees in the park of San Giuliano, near Marghera, died within a year of being planted, it was said that the barrels of toxic waste on which the park was built had begun to leak. He’d heard endless jokes about the clams from the laguna and how much easier it was to find them at night because they glowed in the dark. Fact existed as well: he had read the statistical tables of the tumours that had laid waste a generation of workers in the factories from which GCM Holdings and companies like them had been paid to remove toxic materials.
Yet here was Pozzi talking about nursery rhymes, as though he found humour, not horror, in what was still befalling others, the pollution of the laguna no more than a piece to be used in a game only he knew how to enjoy. It came to Brunetti that Pozzi wanted them to be surprised but was incapable of understanding why they might be shocked.
‘Ah,’ Brunetti said, ‘so all we’ve been hearing for years is true?’