Earthly Remains

by Donna Leon

  She shook her head, first confused by his question and then confused by her own response.

  He watched as she sent her mind into the past. Her eyes contracted a few times, and then she said, ‘It was the accident. He didn’t have the scars when we were living in Marghera, but then the next summer, when we were out in the boat and going swimming, he had them. I still remember seeing them for the first time. I think I started to cry, they were so awful. But my mother told me not to be silly: if my father could forget about them, then so should I.’

  ‘Did she tell you how your father got them?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘I asked her,’ Federica said, ‘and she told me that they were why he was gone for so long, because he had to get better from them.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what work he did?’ Vianello asked.

  She must have anticipated this question, for she said at once, ‘He was a pilot and moved things from the different parts of the factory.’ She gazed into her childhood years, remembering. ‘He used to draw me pictures of the boats he piloted and tell me about the canals that went around the buildings and out into the laguna.’

  ‘This was before the accident?’ Brunetti specified.

  ‘Yes. He always loved the laguna, even when we lived on terraferma. I remember he told me about the tides – even if I didn’t really understand.’

  Brunetti watched as memory surfaced and she went on. ‘After we came out here, he gave me a book about the birds that lived there.’ She bowed her head and propped her elbow on the table so she could put one hand to her forehead. ‘I still have it: Uccelli della laguna veneta. It was a book for grown-ups, but he read it to me and explained the things I didn’t understand.’ She took a few deep breaths and said, ‘I read it to my children.’

  ‘This was after the accident?’ Brunetti asked.

  Head still lowered and eyes shielded by her hand, she didn’t reply at first. ‘Yes,’ she finally said. ‘He didn’t read to me before. My mother did, but he usually wasn’t there when I went to bed.’

  ‘Do you know where he was?’ Vianello interrupted.

  She lifted her hand and looked at the Inspector, who had spoken softly, as one would to a girl.

  ‘My mother always complained that he was out with his friends.’ She looked back and forth between them, as though to see which of them would be the first to accuse her of disloyalty to her father.

  ‘Sounds like my wife,’ Vianello said with a smile that suggested he was exaggerating.

  ‘He really was,’ she admitted. ‘My mother would get angry, and they’d argue, and then he’d leave and come back after I was asleep.’ That said, she rubbed her hands together and began to pick at one of her fingernails. ‘I think he drank a lot. Then.’

  She looked at the two men, and said, ‘I remember that’s the way he was before we came out here. But then it was as if we’d come to a magic country where people changed into the person you wanted them to be, and all of a sudden my father became quiet and patient and had time to read to me.’

  ‘And your mother?’ Brunetti asked, allowing himself to slip back into the part of good cop.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, dragging out the syllable. ‘She was very happy for a long time. More than ten years. I finished school and found a job on Murano.’

  ‘When was that?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘Oh, when I was nineteen. I took the summer off after school, and then I found a job in a glass factory, in the office there.’ She thought for a moment and added, ‘There was lots of work then. Not like now.’

  ‘And later on, what happened?’ Brunetti inquired.

  ‘My mother was diagnosed with cancer,’ she said flatly.

  Silence settled into the room and forced itself upon them.

  ‘I had just had my daughter when she was diagnosed.’ She took a deep breath, shrugged. Then, with the ease of a schoolgirl pronouncing the name of a foreign classmate, she said, ‘Mesotelioma pleurico polmonare.’

  Vianello broke in to say, ‘How awful for you all.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘My father disappeared after she died.’

  ‘Do you mean he went away?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘No, but he might as well have done that. I’d get up in the morning and come over here – we still lived in Massimo’s house then – with my daughter to at least have coffee with him, and I’d find breakfast ready for me on the table. Coffee made: all I had to do was put it on the stove.’

  ‘And your father?’ the Inspector asked.

  ‘He was gone; so was his boat. After Massimo got home in the afternoon, I’d cook something to eat and come over here and leave some for him, and in the morning it was gone, and the dishes were washed and put away, and breakfast was ready for me. But sometimes I’d go a week without seeing him.’

  ‘And when you did, did you ask him what he was doing?’

  ‘Only once. He said he was in the laguna, looking for a reason not to kill himself.’

  ‘Oddio,’ Vianello exclaimed in a soft voice.

  She got to her feet and went over to stand by the open window. There was no view of the water from there, but the sky was lightened by its reflection. Brunetti didn’t know whether she was tired of talking to them or tired of being observed by them.

  ‘How long did he do this?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Until April,’ she answered. ‘My mother had died in December.’ She gave them some time to consider this, then said, ‘Yes, all winter, and it was a bad one. He was out there, rowing, every day.’

  ‘And in April?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘One morning, when I came over for breakfast, he was sitting at the table, drinking coffee. He got up when I came in and put his hand on my arm and asked if we’d like to come and live with him. All he said to try to persuade me was that we’d have more space here. At the time, I thought it meant he was better, but now I think it meant only that he was lonely.’ She barely managed to speak the last words.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He started going out to fish again and selling the fish to people here and to restaurants in Venice. And then in May, when he opened up the hives after the winter, he began to make honey and sell that.’ She took a few breaths and then continued. ‘He talked less, but it was always my mother he talked to most, not to me.’ Her attention during all of this was directed outside the window, as though she were speaking to the bird that was twittering away in the fig tree near the garden wall.

  ‘Did he stay like that?’ Brunetti asked.

  He saw her nod her head and then shake it before she said, ‘Until about six months ago,’ and nothing else.

  ‘What happened?’

  She turned to face them and said, ‘His bees started to die. At first he said it was part of the natural cycle, and then he brought home some medicine against something that sounded like “Verona”. After about a month, he came home one day and told me he’d burned four of the hives he had at one place. He was shaking, like someone confessing to a terrible crime. He told me it’s what some beekeepers do when the hives are infected and they can’t get rid of the parasites,’ she explained.

  ‘Did it work?’

  She shook her head again. ‘Nothing did. They kept dying, all except three other hives he kept – I think they were out in the laguna, too. He didn’t have any trouble with those, but all the other bees, he said, were sick with something he couldn’t understand, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. They kept dying.’

  ‘Is there anyone who could have helped him, anyone he might have told?’

  ‘Not that I know of. No. He had some friends here, but he was the only one who kept bees. Besides, he never talked a lot.’

  Brunetti thought back over his days in the boat with Casati and realized how little interchange there had been. He’d been told about bees and fish and birds, and how to build a boat, and how to navigate by the stars, but Casati had never explained why he had built his own boat, nor why he had chosen to live out there on Sant’Erasmo.


  ‘Did he talk to you about the bees?’ he asked. ‘And what was happening to them?’

  ‘I suppose he did,’ she admitted. ‘But I didn’t pay much attention.’ She bowed her head, and he feared she was about to make some confession of bad feelings between them. Then she admitted, ‘We didn’t talk much. I still missed my mother. It’s been four years, but I still miss her every day. And I didn’t want to tell him that.’

  ‘I imagine he did, as well,’ Vianello interjected.

  ‘Of course he did,’ she said, her voice unsteady. ‘He didn’t show he missed her,’ she added, sounding angry. ‘Except by going to the cemetery. But then he found someone else to talk to.’ The last sentence could have been spoken by a different person.

  ‘Do you mean Signora Minati?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Did you see her? Talk to her?’ she demanded, the words tumbling from her mouth.

  ‘Yes.’

  Her look was fierce but strangely childlike: he had seen it on Chiara’s face many times when she thought she had been unfairly treated. ‘What did she tell you?’ Federica asked.

  ‘That your father asked her to interpret some laboratory reports for him,’ Brunetti explained calmly.

  ‘“Laboratory reports?”’ she repeated, as though they were words from some other language.

  Brunetti nodded; so did Vianello. ‘He sent samples to a laboratory at the University of Lausanne, and when the analysis came back, he asked her to explain it to him.’ Coming from Brunetti, and in that tone, it sounded like the most normal thing in the world.

  ‘Is she a doctor?’ Federica asked. ‘Was something wrong with him?’

  Brunetti smiled at this. ‘Yes, I think she’s a doctor, but not a medical doctor. She studies soil and what’s in it and what can be done to change it. At least that’s what I gathered from what she told us.’ Vianello nodded again, but nothing could change the look of complete bafflement on Federica’s face.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He’d sent some of his dead bees to the lab, and some time later he sent a vial of soil. I was with him when he collected samples, but he’d been doing it for quite a while,’ Brunetti said, then changed the subject. ‘We had a drink in a bar on Burano. The men there seemed to know him. Do you know who they might have been?’

  She shrugged. ‘He knew a lot of people, but I don’t think they were friends. You know how men are.’

  ‘What do you mean, Signora?’ Vianello broke in to ask.

  ‘Men – you – don’t have friends,’ she said with quiet certainty. ‘You have companions and pals and colleagues, but very few men have friends. If they do, it’s usually women, sometimes their wife.’

  When he heard her say this, Brunetti’s masculinity took offence and he asked, ‘That’s something of a generalization, wouldn’t you say, Federica?’

  ‘Who’s your best friend?’ she asked right back. Then, turning to Vianello, she said, ‘And yours?’

  Brunetti was stunned by the audacity of the question and the prejudice that stood behind it. He was about to explain that Vianello was far more than a colleague when he chose the path of greater wisdom and turned her question into one of his own. ‘Was your father still in touch with any of his old friends from Marghera?’

  After a moment’s surprise, Federica accepted what was obviously his offer of peace and answered, ‘Zio Zeno. Zeno Bianchi.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti said.

  ‘He’s my godfather,’ she explained. ‘He was my father’s best friend at work.’

  ‘Ah,’ exclaimed Brunetti. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He’s in Mira.’

  ‘Do you mean he lives there?’ he asked. It was close enough, no more than twenty minutes away from Piazzale Roma.

  ‘Yes. Sort of,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Federica,’ Brunetti said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He’s living in a kind of nursing home.’ Then, in a slower voice, ‘He’s been there for a long time.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘Because he’s old, and he’s blind and has nowhere else to go.’

  22

  ‘My mother told me he got sick at about the same time my father had his accident,’ Federica began. ‘Some terrible eye disease they couldn’t do anything about.’ She called back her memory of those events, then continued. ‘He used to come to dinner at the house in Marghera.’ Finding something she was glad to remember, she added, ‘Zio Zeno never married. He always told me he’d wait for me to grow up and then he’d marry me.’ She smiled, as people always do at the thought of happy families and happy times.

  ‘He was in a hospital – I think it was in Padova – for a long time, but it didn’t help. And then some place for rehabilitation. My mother said he wasn’t the same after it happened because he hated to be helpless, always needing other people.’

  ‘But what could he do, poor devil?’ Vianello said, his voice rich with concern. ‘He couldn’t work. You said he had no family.’

  Federica interrupted in her turn and went on. ‘And the state certainly wouldn’t take care of him: they’d give him a miserable pension and put him in a nursing home somewhere and forget about him.’ Shaking herself free of this reality, she continued. ‘It was a long time ago, and things were bad then.’ She looked from one to the other and added, ‘Maybe they’re better now,’ although her scepticism was clear.

  ‘Why did he go to Mira?’ Brunetti asked, as though it were the end of the world.

  ‘I don’t know. No one ever said why.’

  ‘Has he been in the nursing home all this time?’ Brunetti asked. A nursing home in Mira, of all places.

  Federica took a long time to answer, and Brunetti was afraid she was going to object to his continuing questioning, but she was merely trying to remember. ‘I really don’t know too much,’ she said. ‘My father called him once a month or so, always on Sunday afternoon. And he was always sad after they talked.’

  ‘Did your father ever go to see him?’ Brunetti asked.

  She shook her head a few times, absolute negation reflected in the speed with which she did it. ‘No. Zio wouldn’t let him come because the place was so terrible. My mother told me he once said that sometimes there wasn’t even enough to eat. He couldn’t stand to have my father see him there.’ She looked to make sure they understood a man’s dignity, and then added, ‘My mother told me he said he could hear Zio crying when he said that.’ They sat in silence, thinking of the state-run nursing homes in which they had seen their relatives, perhaps their friends, put.

  She started to speak, coughed, started again.

  Brunetti heard the whish of cloth on cloth as she uncrossed her legs under the table. ‘I never understood why he kept calling him. They hadn’t seen one another for years, and still they talked once a month. What could they tell one another?’

  Neither man tried to answer this question.

  ‘Would you know how to get in touch with him?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Your Uncle Zeno?’

  ‘I’m sure I have his phone number somewhere, and his address. ‘I’ll look for it. I know I have it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said and studied her face, which seemed less troubled than it had when they started talking. ‘I have to go into the city again, but I’d like to come back and stay a bit longer. Would that be all right with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Federica was surprised into answering. ‘I’m glad you’re here. With my father gone, it gives me someone to talk to.’ While the thought ran through his mind that this was a strange thing for a married woman to say, Federica added, ‘During the day, that is. Massimo’s gone by four and doesn’t get back for twelve hours. That’s a lot of time to spend by myself.’

  ‘Have you stopped working?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. With two children, you know … Besides, there’s much less work at the factory, so they don’t need me any more. Most of
the glass comes from China now: no one can compete – not when they put “Made in Murano” on it.’

  ‘Can’t you stop them?’ Vianello asked.

  She gave a resigned smile in which there was anything but humour. ‘It’s like trying to stop acqua alta,’ she said.

  They sat in silence for a moment, three Venetians, relatives at the wake of a city that had been an empire and was now selling off the coffee spoons to try to pay the heating bill.

  Brunetti saw Federica prepare to say something, but then stop. He waited. She opened her mouth and this time she found the words, or the courage, to ask, ‘Why do you want to know about Zio Zeno? He’s blind and in a nursing home out on the mainland.’

  ‘You said he was a close friend of your father’s and spoke to him regularly for years.’ Brunetti remembered what she had said about the friendships of men, then continued, ‘So I’d …’

  She started to interrupt him, and again stopped.

  Putting on his softest voice, Brunetti said, ‘What were you going to say, Federica?’

  ‘I don’t know if they were still talking to one another.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Recently, I asked my father how Zio Zeno was, and he said he didn’t know. I asked him to say hello to Zio when they spoke, and he said he wouldn’t be speaking to him again.’ She glanced at them, and when neither of them commented, she said, ‘They’ve spoken to one another once a month for ages, and suddenly they weren’t speaking.’

  ‘Did you ask him why?’ Brunetti wanted to know.

  She shook the idea away. ‘When my father spoke in a certain way, I knew there was no use insisting or asking him questions. He’d made up his mind, and that was that.’

  ‘No idea?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘None. You can ask Zio Zeno when you speak to him,’ she said. ‘I’ll go upstairs and get you the number.’

  After Federica’s footsteps had receded into silence, Brunetti looked across at Vianello and asked, ‘Well? What do you think? If they both spent months in the hospital, it would be in their employment and medical records, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Even if it was so long ago?’ Vianello asked.