‘Why are you sure of that?’ she asked.
‘Signora Minati interpreted the lab results for him, so he knew – maybe for the first time – the names of what they’d put in the water and dumped in the laguna.’ Brunetti saw that he had her attention, so he went on, telling her what he’d thought about in the last days. ‘His wife died of a rare form of cancer. When we were near some of his beehives,’ he said, choosing not to tell her he had been swimming near them, ‘I saw a sheet of metal under the water. It could have been the lid of a barrel.’
Griffoni was silent for a long time and then said, ‘You spent time with him. Did he seem like someone who would do that?’
‘What?’
‘Poison the laguna,’ she said, mincing no words.
‘The man I knew wouldn’t do that,’ Brunetti said, defending a friend.
‘And the one you didn’t know?’
Brunetti had only heard about him, a normal working man, who wanted to keep his job. The words broke from him, unconsidered, unwanted. ‘Probably. I told you that.’
Griffoni looked out of the window on her side of the car. Fresh growth lurked everywhere, as if in hiding from the buildings that had stolen its place. Nettles slipped through cracks in cement, vines crawled up electric poles and along the wires; the earth had been ploughed and bulldozed, but it had covered itself with green shoots after the first rain. Raw nature quickly encircled, then covered, abandoned tyres and paint cans, piles of dumped building materials, milk crates, bicycle carcasses. Like people, it suffered, changed, and found survival.
Brunetti remembered the sight of Casati’s dead hand, the frond-like undulation of his fingers and his hair. At least he had been discovered by a friend and not some unknown diver who would not care what Casati had done and why he had had to do it.
They said little after that. At Piazzale Roma, Foa was waiting with a boat, but he must have sensed their mood, for he did no more than greet them and open one side of the swinging doors to the cabin at the back.
As they travelled up the Grand Canal, Brunetti was assaulted by beauty and looked around him, as he sometimes did, with eyes he tried to make new, as though he were seeing this for the first time. He sneaked a glance at Griffoni, who was sitting on the left side of the back seat, facing that side of the canal, the one she preferred.
They passed the train station, then under the bridge, Brunetti moving his head easily from side to side. Parched garden on the right, its roses visibly in pain from lack of water; the Casinò that had lured so many people to their ruin, the palazzo where his last professor of Greek had lived; another bridge, the restoration said finally to be finished.
Again he glanced at Griffoni, but she seemed no longer to be there. He thought for a moment that he could push her sideways and she’d fall over without knowing it.
Another bridge, then open water on one side. On the other was the Basilica and the Palazzo, and Brunetti had the sudden realization that, though none of this belonged to him, he belonged to all of it.
By the time they got to the Questura, Brunetti had left those thoughts behind and was planning to call Signora Minati to ask for the name of the chemical that had been found in Casati’s earth to see if it was the one repeatedly named in the articles about the clean-up of Marghera. His reluctance to upset Federica again made him want to speak to Massimo about Casati’s state of mind in the weeks or days before his death, to learn – even to invent if necessary – something he had said that spoke of hope or plans for the future. Massimo, he believed, was a man who would gladly lie to save his wife’s peace of mind. It came to him then that there was little purpose, and some risk, in asking these painful questions. If Casati’s death continued to be considered an accident, Federica would be spared the inevitable guilt of suspecting she had failed to save him from despair and somehow prevent his death.
Inside the door, the officer at the desk got to his feet as they came in and addressed Brunetti. ‘There’s a man here to see you, Commissario.’
Brunetti raised his chin in silent interrogation.
The man looked at his feet then up again, as though he had a mistake to confess. ‘I know him, sir, so I put him in that small room next to the pilots’ office.’ He waited for Brunetti to inquire about the man, and when he did not, the officer said, ‘He said he has to talk to you.’
‘Has he been here long?’ Brunetti asked.
‘About half an hour.’
‘I’m going up to my office. Could you send someone up with him in about five minutes?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the officer said and returned to the cubbyhole by the door and to his desk.
Brunetti and Griffoni started up the steps. He waited for her to ask him what he was going to do. He had no idea; he had no answer.
At the landing where she would turn off to her tiny office, she said, ‘I think I’ll go home.’
Brunetti smiled. ‘I’ll talk to this man and do the same.’
She moved off to the left; halfway down the corridor, without turning round, she raised an arm in the air and gave a wave.
Brunetti entered his office and went to look out the window. The roses on the wall across the canal clambered every which way and showed no sign of thirst. Brunetti wondered if the earth somehow filtered out the salt in the waters of the canal and allowed the roses to flourish.
Behind him, a man coughed, and when he turned, he saw Massimo, Federica’s husband. He stood in the doorway, his shoulders seeming to touch both sides. ‘Ah, Massimo,’ Brunetti said with real pleasure. ‘Come in, come in. Please sit down.’ He had spoken in the familiar ‘tu’ on the island, and he saw no reason to change it because they were in the Questura.
Massimo came quickly across the room to take Brunetti’s hand, but to do so he had to switch the leather briefcase he was carrying from his right hand to his left. They shook hands and Massimo sat in one of the two chairs facing Brunetti.
‘I’m glad you came,’ Brunetti began without introduction, then caught himself short and asked, ‘How’s Federica?’
‘I want,’ he began in a voice cramped with nervousness. ‘I want to bring this back to you. A police boat delivered it to the house yesterday. I didn’t bother to look at the name on it, so I opened it and took a look at what was inside, but it’s yours.’
He opened the briefcase, a thick old leather thing with a dark plastic handle. He pulled out a manila envelope and showed it to Brunetti, who saw his own name on the front, c/o the address of the villa.
Massimo looked away, cleared his throat, looked back. ‘She’s thought about how much he loved us,’ he began. ‘So she accepts that it must have been an accident.’ His face and his voice tightened. ‘She mustn’t know.’