As he spoke, Bianchi’s voice had grown incantational, the voice of a person telling a fairy tale. Casati was the prince, his wife the princess. But where was the dragon?
‘When she died,’ Bianchi began, not bothering to name the kind of dragon that had killed her, ‘– and she was sick a long time – he was lost. At the beginning he said it didn’t make any sense to be alive except to help his daughter and her family because they needed him. He said the same thing about the bees, that they were a reason to live for because they needed him, too.’ Bianchi lowered his head as he spoke. ‘That’s crazy isn’t it?’
He nodded a few times to enforce the strangeness of this. Then he repeated, ‘Bees.’
It came to Brunetti to ask Bianchi why bees were different from Bardo, but he said nothing, true to his mother’s injunction and certain that it was not his business to ask people to see things as he did.
There seemed little more they could do or learn here. He got to his feet; Griffoni did the same. Unable to shake the habit of sighted life, Bianchi raised his head to face them.
‘I didn’t have a choice,’ he said in a voice he struggled to keep calm.
Brunetti wanted to tell him that, although he had not had an easy choice, he had had a choice, but he said nothing, unable to free himself of his pity for this man.
‘We have to go now, Signore,’ he said.
Bianchi stood up so quickly that Bardo was forced to make a heavy landing in front of him. With great scraping of nails on the wooden floor, the dog scuttled aside and took refuge under Brunetti’s chair, planted himself there and looked up at his master.
Bianchi put out his good hand, but he had turned away from them instead of towards them when he stood, so they both chose the option of not seeing it.
They left as stealthily as they had come: no one questioning their presence nor their departure.
Outside, they walked silently to the waiting car and got into the back seat. The driver, saying nothing, started towards Venice.
When the villa was behind them, Griffoni turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘What happened?’
He shrugged and looked out the window as the car made its way down the highway leading back to the city. When had things become so ugly? Brunetti wondered. When had all these horrible buildings and factories and parking lots, these endless discount stores and shopping malls, sprung up like monsters spawned from dragon’s teeth?
He waited a long time to answer Griffoni’s question, and when he did, he said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe his wife told him what to do. It looked like an accident.’
‘But before the fire? How could he just take that stuff out and dump it?’
The answer seemed simple enough to Brunetti. ‘Because he wasn’t living there and he was younger. His wife was healthy and he didn’t have any bees, so it didn’t matter to him.’
‘You said he was a good man.’
‘He became a good man,’ Brunetti corrected her.
‘People don’t change,’ she answered, voicing the wisdom Neapolitans had learned over centuries.
‘If they suffer enough, they do,’ Brunetti said, then quickly amended it to ‘or can.’
Brunetti’s attention drifted from Griffoni and back to Casati, that solitary and often silent man. He had been a married man and a father when he worked on the clean-up and all that entailed. He had surely known what was being shipped south and what was being taken out to be dumped willy-nilly into the laguna, and he might even have helped move more toxic waste to what was now a park with a view across to the beautiful profile of the city. And it hadn’t bothered him one whit.
People seldom consider the consequences of their behaviour, Brunetti knew. Desire justified all. He had no idea of what Casati could have desired all those years ago, before he became the man he was when he died. Nor did he know what he had desired just before he died.
31
When the car entered the state highway, Griffoni turned to him and said, ‘Well?’
‘Did he fall or did he jump?’ Brunetti asked rhetorically, distressed by his uncertainty.
Griffoni’s face showed her surprise, even something stronger. ‘Is that a joke?’
This was the first time she’d responded to his words and not his tone, and her failure disappointed Brunetti. ‘Hardly,’ he answered, sober now at the thought that both possibilities led equally to death. In the face of that, speculation seemed pointless.
Brunetti had been considering possibilities for days, altering them to conform to each new piece of information. ‘He must have gone to talk to his wife.’
‘To tell her what?’
‘I’m sure he’d already confessed that what he’d done had helped to kill her, and now he went to tell her he was killing his bees.’
‘Don’t you think that’s a bit melodramatic, Guido?’ she asked, making no attempt to disguise her exasperation. ‘Men don’t kill themselves because their bees die.’
Brunetti had recently read a book that said a goshawk could see the veins in the wings of a butterfly: who knew what could be seen? Or felt. Possibility was limitless, each of us a separate universe of choice and capacity.
‘Most people don’t, I know,’ he agreed, to content her.
A car was suddenly in front of them, though neither of them knew how it had got there. Their driver swore aloud and braked sharply, avoiding contact and managing to fight his way out of a skid that pulled them to the right. The other car slipped into the left lane and sped past two more cars and then two more, and then was blocked from their sight by the cars in front of them.
‘There was a child in the seat beside him,’ the driver said in a shaken voice, then added, ‘Excuse me for cursing, Signori.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Griffoni answered for them both, as if a woman would be more offended by profanity than a man and thus in charge of accepting the apology. She turned to Brunetti and said, ‘I’m becoming a Venetian. My heart’s still pounding.’ At his puzzled glance, she explained, ‘That’s how people in Naples drive all the time, but now it terrifies me.’ She smiled, then laughed, then shook her head to express her wonder.
‘I’ve changed,’ she said, and he sensed it was not a joke.
Their fear had somehow united them, and at last Griffoni asked, ‘You knew him. What do you think?’
Brunetti waved a hand back towards where they had been. ‘You heard what Bianchi said: he didn’t see any sense in living after she died. Except for his daughter and his bees. And now,’ he went on, ‘his daughter is married, has a family, and no longer needs his protection, and his bees are dying. Because of what he did.’