Earthly Remains

by Donna Leon

  As if serving as the voice of Brunetti’s conscience, the Inspector observed, ‘You weren’t very hard on her, were you?’

  ‘No,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘She seemed an honest person.’

  Vianello wiped his brow with his handkerchief but said nothing.

  Brunetti missed his baseball cap, regardless of how much it would have made him look like a tourist lost on the island. ‘Is this what it’s been like in the city?’ he asked Vianello, hoping that last night’s heat was not to be a constant.

  ‘Yes,’ Vianello answered. ‘Worse. Here, at least there’s a breeze off the laguna. There, nothing.’

  They reached the embarcadero and went inside the covered platform to escape the sun. The air was close and humid and it seemed hotter than outside, but at least the roof had put an end to the sun’s flagellations. They sat on one of the benches, leaving a space between them to encourage the reluctant air to circulate.

  How had he managed to stay outside and row with Casati all day in this heat? Had effort and concentration transformed light into a caress and driven heat from his mind? Here, inside this airless trap, he found it impossible to imagine that other world of endless space and limitless horizons.

  ‘She never said anything about the results from the soil samples, only about the bees,’ Brunetti said aloud. ‘She talked about the diseases the bees have, and then she wandered away and talked about Uzbekistan. When she started to say something about the soil again, she stopped herself.’

  Vianello nodded. ‘When I asked her, she went all mystic on us and said she was talking about the whole Earth. Which I don’t believe for a minute.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Brunetti said, though he made himself sound reluctant.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some people think that way, that it’s all a unit, a whole, all connected together.’

  Vianello turned to him and asked, ‘So?’

  Brunetti suspected that little was to be gained from a discussion of the nature of the universe and answered, ‘So we ask Signorina Elettra to call the University of Lausanne.’ He took his telefonino from his pocket. That was quickly done. First, Brunetti told her when Casati was likely to have sent the parcel, then he explained Casati’s strange remarks in the days before his death and his unending grief for his wife, although he stopped himself from saying anything about where this might have led.

  ‘I’ll call the university and ask about the parcel and the replies.’ There was a pause, that, even over the phone, Brunetti sensed was important. ‘What about the Vice-Questore? Should I speak to him?’ Signorina Elettra finally inquired.

  So long as the Vice-Questore was made to believe that Brunetti was doing no more than taking advantage of the fact that he was already on Sant’Erasmo to speak to the dead man’s family and ascertain his state of mind before his death, Patta would cause no trouble. He might even be pleased to have time to prepare some glittering prevarication for the press about the concern the police took over every citizen’s death.

  ‘It might be better to say nothing to him at the moment,’ Brunetti decided at last. ‘After all, it’s being treated as an accident.’

  ‘“Boat accident during the storm”,’ she affirmed, and then she was gone.

  When he turned to look at Vianello, he saw that his friend was leaning forward, his head in his hands, moaning.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Brunetti asked, fearing the heat had struck Vianello down.

  The Inspector shook his head from side to side, then sat up and rested it against the partition behind him. Eyes closed, he said, ‘The more I hear, the more I begin to believe that you are giving serious thought to the possibility that a man killed himself because his bees were dying.’

  Sweat covered Vianello’s face, and sweat had plastered his shirt to his chest. Brunetti looked around the embarcadero, but they were still the only people in it. ‘The boat’s coming, Lorenzo.’

  Vianello opened his eyes and pushed himself to his feet. ‘It’s like trying to save Pucetti, only I can’t explain how it is. It doesn’t make any sense.’ He glanced sideways at Brunetti and threw his hands up. ‘But maybe it does.’

  The boat pulled up and they got on. They moved to the shade and chose to remain outside to catch what breeze there was. Neither spoke during the trip to Sant’Erasmo.

  As the engine shifted down, Brunetti said, ‘I’d like you to come with me to talk to Casati’s daughter.’ When Vianello didn’t answer, Brunetti said, ‘She’s the only person who might be able to tell me what he was really like.’

  ‘But you just spent ten days with him, didn’t you?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘Yes. He taught me a lot about bees and made me see how wonderful they are, he showed me how to be a better rower, and he told me about the fish and birds in the laguna and the tides, but he never told me much about himself. Sometimes he’d say things that weren’t clear to me, terrible things about death and destruction that I didn’t understand.’

  Brunetti took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, using it almost as if it were a towel. ‘But I never really felt that I understood him,’ he admitted, folded his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

  The sailor pulled back the metal bars, and the passengers began to file off the boat, all of them involuntarily flinching away from the sun as they stepped into its rays. Vianello stood with his arms folded, looking off in the direction of Venice.

  Saying nothing more, Brunetti walked past Vianello, following the others, his hearing and sense of space searching for Vianello behind him. When he heard the Inspector’s footsteps and sensed his closeness, he felt relieved that he would not be alone when speaking with Federica and assessing whatever it was she said.

  As they walked away from the dock, the sun did its best to pound them into the ground but managed only to exhaust and irritate them. After what seemed a long time, Brunetti turned into the path that led to the villa and held the door for Vianello. Inside, he led his friend towards the back of the house and into the kitchen.

  Without bothering to ask permission, Vianello went to the refrigerator and pulled out a large bottle of mineral water. He opened a cabinet, closed it, opened another, and pulled down two tall glasses. He filled them both and handed one to Brunetti. After they’d emptied the glasses and set them on the counter, the Inspector asked, ‘Where can I wash my face and hands?’

  Brunetti pointed down the corridor. The sound of a door opening and closing drifted back into the kitchen. Brunetti poured two more full glasses and carried them back to the sitting room where he had taken to reading and sat in the chair he thought of as his. He saw Pliny lying face down on the table beside him and left him there. He crossed his legs, leaned his head against the back of the chair, and waited for his friend to join him.

  When Vianello did, he handed him one of the glasses, and the two men sat silently for a few minutes before Brunetti said, ‘He had terrible scars down his back. I saw them when we went swimming: horrible things. Burns. Rizzardi said it was chemicals, not a fire. I’ve never seen anything like them.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about them?’ Vianello asked.

  Brunetti shook his head. ‘No, and I couldn’t ask. I acted as if they weren’t there.’

  ‘Of course,’ Vianello said but didn’t ask anything.

  They sat silently, safe from the heat and sun, hearing nothing but the occasional buzz of a far-off motor or the squawk of a gull.

  ‘You really think he could have killed himself?’ Vianello finally asked.

  Brunetti remembered the strange sensation that had overcome him as he first approached the capsized boat, although the nameless, formless sense of danger had burned away once he began to study the boat. Perhaps he was inventing the feeling, and it had been no more than the effect of hours under the sun and the delayed shock of having fallen into the sinkhole.

  ‘He might have,’ he said. ‘He knew too much grief.’

  Vianello looked around this room as if to savour the peace of it.
‘He could walk out his front door and dive into the laguna. Where it’s clean. He had his boat in front of his house. He lived with his family.’ That was all he said, and Brunetti realized that, in modern times, these things probably didn’t count for very much any more. But on Sant’Erasmo, they did.

  ‘We should talk to his daughter,’ Brunetti said. It wasn’t an answer, but it might provide one.

  They walked down the path to the little house, saw the fishing nets draped in the sun on both sides and, behind them on the right, a large trellis of grapes running towards the end of the garden, a small bicycle lying on its side beneath it.

  Brunetti knocked on the screen door, and after a time Federica opened it. ‘Come in,’ she said in an empty voice and turned towards the back of the house. ‘In here,’ she said, opening a door at the end of the corridor. Chairs stood around a long wooden table with elephantine legs, probably used only for large family meals. There were three dark velvet easy chairs arranged in a circle near the window, but they wore plastic coverings and were thus unavailable for use.

  Brunetti and Vianello sat on one side of the table, Federica on the other, facing Brunetti. ‘What is it you’d like to know?’ she asked. She was the same woman he had met almost two weeks ago, who had brought him his breakfast and prepared meals for him, with whom he had often spoken, the same woman he’d seen going into and leaving her home and then at the hospital the day before, but the light was gone: her eyes were sombre, her movements slow, her voice level and without inflection. He realized that her eyes reminded him, now, of something he had seen in Casati’s, and the thought chilled him.

  ‘Federica,’ he began, ‘my sorrow is nothing like yours. I know that. But I want to speak to you as a friend, as a man who thinks of your father as a friend. I say that because I want you – and need you – to trust me.’ He spoke without thinking, with no anticipation of how she would react.

  ‘What do I have to trust you about?’ she asked in an uninterested voice.

  ‘I want to know more about your father,’ he said.

  Her eyes shot to his, and her expression changed to the one he had seen on his own children’s faces when he or Paola had to talk to them about something wrong they had done. He saw something stronger than the shifty trace of unspoken guilt in Federica’s eyes. Her voice grew soft, almost fearful, and she asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘He wasn’t the same, not with me, during the last days we went rowing together,’ Brunetti said.

  Federica looked at the surface of the table. After a moment, she swept her hand across it in a cleaning motion, as though there were dust or something dirty on the surface. Then she wiped it again, this time in an arc that reached farther from her body, then she folded her hands in front of her. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked the surface of the table.

  ‘Because I want to understand what happened,’ Brunetti said.

  Beside him, Vianello nodded but said nothing.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ she asked, glanced up at him, then down at her hands. When Brunetti didn’t answer, she said, ‘You have to say it, Guido. I can’t.’

  ‘I think he might have given up on life, Federica. I’ve seen it in people before. They give up from sickness or from trouble, or from things other people can’t understand.’

  She closed her eyes and sat motionless for a long time. Finally she looked up at him and said, ‘We tried. All of us. Massimo, the kids. But it wasn’t enough, no matter what we did.’

  Brunetti waited, leaving her to tell it as she could. ‘When Mamma died, he went inside himself and didn’t talk about it or about her. At first, I thought it would get better, but it didn’t. All he said was that he was guilty for what happened to her. He watched her die – it took more than three years – and then when she was dead, all he’d say was that he killed her. Nothing more. Then, when his bees began to die, he said he was killing them, too. Nothing anyone said to him made any difference.’

  She looked at them, as if to ask if they could understand such madness, but neither seemed capable of answering.

  ‘Over the last few weeks, he became worse.’ Her voice had changed, Brunetti noted: a rancorous note had come into it. ‘It’s that woman on Burano, I’m sure. Ever since he started spending time with her, he got worse. It was like she poisoned his life.’ Gathering momentum, she went on. ‘Every time he came back from seeing her …’ she began, and before he could ask, she said, ‘I have friends there, and they told me when he went to see her.’ She closed her lips and pulled them inwards, as though she wanted to prevent them from speaking.

  ‘I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. Massimo wouldn’t say anything to him; told me I was being foolish.’ Suddenly her face softened as she said, ‘Then you came and went out rowing with him, and he seemed his old self for a while, even though he kept seeing her. But then it stopped. And then this happened.’

  She forced her hands to embrace one another in some sign of peace, and stopped talking, hands folded in front of her.

  ‘Did he ever say anything that would lead you to think …?’ Brunetti asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘He seemed very wise to me,’ Brunetti heard himself say. ‘But I always had the feeling that he had struggled or suffered to earn that wisdom.’ He watched her face as he said this, realizing only now that this was indeed the opinion he had formed. ‘I think he had to learn how to be good.’

  Federica looked from him to Vianello and back. Then she turned and looked out the window that gave on to the garden and the trees, and, far beyond them, to the Dolomites, invisible now and waiting for the next rain to sweep the air clean enough to bring them back to visibility.

  ‘My mother was much younger than my father,’ she said. ‘More than twenty years. He was forty when they married, and she was only eighteen. I was born when my mother was nineteen.’

  Neither man acknowledged in any way what she was saying: they’d learned that this was the best way to behave once a person began to speak.

  ‘When I was a little girl, we lived in Marghera because they both worked there. He worked in a factory and she worked in a warehouse. Then, when I was about nine, he was in an accident – he never wanted to talk about it, and my mother wouldn’t tell me anything – and he was in the hospital for a long time. Months, I think. But I don’t really remember because … well, I was a child, and children have strange memories. I remember that I went to live with my mother’s brother then, in Castello, and went to school there.’ Then, as though surprised at the realization, she said, ‘I must have spent a long time there. Because I went at the beginning of school, and I stayed. When school finished, I didn’t go back to Marghera but came out here to live. I remember because the day I came here from my uncle’s was my birthday.’

  ‘Were you happy to move out here to the island?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘My uncle’s wife …’ she began, and Brunetti found it interesting that she did not refer to her as ‘my aunt’. Then, leaving that to stand alone, her face softened towards a smile and she continued. ‘I liked having my parents again.’ Did she sound hesitant when she said that? ‘Yes,’ she added, suddenly decisive, ‘I did: I had my mother back, too. She’d stayed there and been with my father in the hospital. But then we all came here and could live together again.’ It sounded to Brunetti like a child’s recitation of a fairy tale.

  ‘I had my mamma and papà back again, and I could go swimming all the time. And my father, when he came back from the hospital, started to fish and got the bees, and he didn’t have to go to the factory any more and come home angry all the time.’

  Because she was still concentrating on the garden, Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a quick glance but remained silent until eventually Vianello said, ‘That’s a big change.’

  ‘Yes, it was. He was happier. Well, I thought he was happier. My mother was, too.’ She continued to think about this and added, ‘He was quieter, too; he never got angry any more, and that was wonderful.’r />
  Brunetti broke in here to say, ‘It’s hard for me to imagine your father being angry at anything.’

  ‘No, not after we came here, he wasn’t.’

  ‘And his bees?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Oh, he got them when he came here. First my parents rented a house, and then my father got the job as caretaker here, so we moved to this house and there were bees here already.’ She stopped for a moment and then said, ‘They’re still there.’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Who’ll take care of them?’

  21

  Silence descended until Brunetti thought to ask, ‘Do they need much taking care of?’

  His question seemed to trouble Federica, who took her hand away and closed her eyes. Brunetti noticed her left hand, gripped into a fist. He was afraid she was going to cry.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said in a broken voice. ‘I never learned what to do. All these years, watching him and going out with him to see them, and I don’t know what to do with them or when, or what to feed them in the winter. I never really paid any attention to what he was doing. He tried to explain, but I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to eat the honey.’ She took a deep breath.

  It’s always the odd, unpredictable things that set us off, Brunetti thought. Grief lies inside us like a land mine: heavy footsteps will pass by it safely, while others, even those as light as air, will cause it to explode.

  When at last she looked at Brunetti, she said, ‘Maybe I was jealous of them. Is that possible?’ She tried to shake the idea away. ‘Of bees?’

  Brunetti smiled to show he understood what she meant. ‘If they took his attention away from you, then it makes sense that you’d be jealous, especially when you were a child.’

  She nodded, wanting to believe him. Then she sat straighter in her chair and folded her hands in front of her. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I went swimming with your father, and I saw the scars on his back. Do you know anything about them?’