Earthly Remains

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti sat quietly for a long time, trying to think of something to say or ask and fighting the temptation to refer to thirty pieces of silver.

  In ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would have assaulted Bianchi with sarcasm, but the flashing sight of Bianchi’s face had made that impossible.

  ‘I warned Davide,’ Bianchi said in a firm voice. ‘I told him not even to think about telling anyone.’ He raised a hand and waved it in the general direction of Brunetti and Griffoni. ‘Especially the police.’

  ‘Who else would he tell?’

  Bianchi tossed up his hands in exasperation. ‘For all I knew, he’d go and tell his wife.’ The words were no sooner said than Bianchi stopped, stunned, hands still raised. He slowly lowered them to the arms of his chair, careful not to disturb the sleeping dog.

  Brunetti glanced at Griffoni but said nothing. She raised her eyebrows faintly, unable to overcome the habit of making no evident response to whatever a witness said. Brunetti patted the air with his right hand, enjoining her to patience.

  Moments passed and all of them were silent until Bianchi finally said, ‘That’s what he’d do, go and talk things over with her. It’s crazy, but he did it all the time.’ He nodded in affirmation and then went on, his voice slowing, as though his words were feet, growing heavier as each step took him up a long staircase. Exhausted, he reached the top. ‘And she’d tell him what to do.’

  He turned his face towards where they were sitting; his mouth remained open, as if only this way could he find enough air to breathe.

  When the sound of his heavy breathing became unbearable, Griffoni asked with perfect timing and oh, so casually, ‘Did you know her?’

  Bianchi pulled his lips into his mouth and took a few deep breaths through his nose. ‘I met her a few times over the years.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Griffoni asked.

  Bianchi thought about this, then answered, ‘All I remember is that she was small and I thought at the time that she was very pretty. I have another memory of very big, dark eyes. But it’s only a verbal memory.’ A long time passed before he said, ‘Davide loved her. From the first time he saw her, he was lost for her. And it stayed like that all the time they were married. I think he forgot there were other women in the world.’

  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.’

  ‘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.’

  Brunetti had no idea what the other man meant, no idea of what might be hidden in the envelope. Some relic of her father? Some evidence that would prove he had taken his own life?

  ‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked.

  His question startled Massimo. ‘Didn’t you send it? They said they were returning your photos to you.’

  ‘The police sent it?’ Brunetti asked
.

  ‘I don’t know who sent it, but a police boat delivered it.’

  Brunetti opened the envelope and pulled out a pile of photos. He set them on the table. On top was one of the upside-down puparìn, then one in which he recognized his sneaker-clad foot beside the boat, and he realized they were the photos he had taken and asked Signorina Elettra to send to Rizzardi.

  Massimo cleared his throat again. Brunetti moved the photos aside one by one with the tip of his finger and saw Casati’s left hand, the skin puffy and white, the ring and watch visible, the ring cutting into the white flesh. Brunetti slid the photo aside after looking at it. There followed the photos of Casati’s swollen face from every angle. As he looked at them, Brunetti’s mind clouded over with horror, as it had when he had taken them. He glanced quickly through them and looked up at Massimo. ‘Yes, I took them,’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand why they sent them back to me.’

  Massimo tapped insistently at one of them. Brunetti saw the familiar iron grating that Casati had used as an anchor, the rope that had circled and trapped Casati’s leg snaking towards and tied to it.

  ‘Don’t you see it?’ Massimo demanded.

  What in God’s name had he come for? Brunetti wondered. Was he going to claim they’d sent back the wrong ring, the wrong watch, the outlines of both of which he could see at the bottom of the envelope?

  ‘I don’t understand, Massimo,’ Brunetti said, striving for calm. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘But you row, don’t you? You’ve been on boats.’

  Brunetti looked at the photo again and saw what he had seen the first time: the grating, the knot, the rope. He moved the photo a few centimetres closer. ‘I’m sorry, Massimo. I still don’t understand.’

  Massimo poked at the photo again. ‘Look at that.’ He left his finger on it, obscuring whatever it was Brunetti was meant to see. When he removed his hand and put it in his lap, Brunetti saw that the other man had been pointing at the knot that tied the rope to the grating.