Death in a Strange Country cgb-2

by Donna Leon

  A little after ten, one of the secretaries from downstairs brought the mail around to the offices on the top floor and placed a few letters and a magazine-sized manila envelope on his desk.

  The letters were the usual things: invitations to conferences, attempts to sell him special life insurance, responses to questions he had sent to various police departments in other parts of the country. After he read them, he picked up the envelope and examined it. A narrow band of stamps ran across the top of the envelope; there must have been twenty of them. All the same, they carried a small American flag and were marked with the denomination of twenty-nine cents. The envelope was addressed to him, by his name, but the only address was ‘Questura, Venice, Italy’. He could think of no one in America who would be writing to him. There was no return address.

  He tore the envelope open, reached in, and pulled out a magazine. He glanced at the cover and recognized the medical review Doctor Peters had pulled from his hands when she found him reading it in her office. He leafed through it, paused for a moment at those grotesque photos, then continued through the magazine. Towards the end, he found three sheets of paper, obviously a Xerox copy of some other original, slipped between the pages of the magazine. He took them out and placed them on his desk.

  At the top, he read ‘Medical Report’ and then, below it, saw the boxes meant to hold information about the name, age, and rank of the patient. This one carried the name of Daniel Kayman, whose year of birth was given as 1984. There followed three pages of information about his medical history, starting with measles in 1989, a series of bloody noses in the winter of 1990, a broken finger in 1991, and, on the last two pages, a series of visits, starting two months ago, for a skin rash on his left arm. As Brunetti read, he watched the rash grow larger, deeper, and more confusing to the three doctors who had attempted to deal with it.

  On 8 July, the boy had been seen for the first time by Doctor Peters. Her neat, slanted handwriting said that the rash was ‘of unknown origin’ but had broken out after the boy got home from a picnic with his parents. It covered the underside of his arm from wrist to elbow, was dark purple, but did not itch. The prescribed treatment was a medicated skin cream.

  Three days later, the boy was back, the rash worse. It was now oozing a yellow liquid and had grown painful, and the boy was running a high fever. Doctor Peters suggested a consultation with a dermatologist at the local Vicenza hospital, but the parents refused to let the child see an Italian doctor. She prescribed a new cream, this one with cortisone, and an antibiotic to bring the fever down.

  After only two days, the boy was brought back to the hospital and seen by a different doctor, Girrard, who noted in the record that the boy was in considerable pain. The rash now seemed to be a burn and had moved up his arm, spreading towards his shoulder. His hand was swollen and painful. The fever was unchanged.

  A Doctor Grancheck, apparently a dermatologist, had looked at the boy and suggested he be immediately transferred to the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

  The day after this visit, the boy was sent to Germany on a medical evacuation flights Nothing else was written in the body of the report, but Doctor Peters’ neat script had pencilled a single notation in the margin, next to the remark that the boy’s rash now appeared to be a burn. It read ‘PCB’ and carried after it ‘FPJ, March.’

  He checked the date, but he knew what it would be even before he looked at it. Family Practice Journal, the March issue. He opened the magazine and began to read. He noticed that the editorial board was almost all men, that men had written most of the articles, and that the articles listed in the Table of Contents dealt with everything from the article about feet that had so horrified him to one that dealt with the increase in the incidence of tuberculosis as a result of the AIDS epidemic. There was even an article about the transmission of parasites from domestic pets to children.

  Seeing no help in the Table of Contents, he began to read from the first page, including all the ads and the letters to the editors. It was on page 62, a brief reference to a case that had been reported in Newark, New Jersey, of a young child, a girl, who had been playing in an empty car park and had stepped into what she thought was a puddle of oil leaked from an abandoned car. The liquid had spilled over the top of her shoe and soaked through her sock. The next day, she developed a rash on the foot, which soon changed into something that had every appearance of a burn and which gradually spread up her leg to her knee. The child had a high fever. All treatment proved futile until a public health official went to the car park and took a sample of the liquid, which proved to be heavy in PCBs, which had leaked there from barrels of toxic waste dumped there. Though the burns eventually healed, the child’s doctors were fearful for her future because of the neurological and genetic damage that had often been noted in animal experimentation with substances containing PCBs.

  He set the magazine aside and went back to the medical record, reading it through a second time. The symptoms were identical, though no mention was made of where or how the child had made the original contact with the substance that must have produced the rash. ‘While on a picnic with his family,’ was the only thing the record said. Nor did the record carry any report of the treatment given to the child in Germany.

  He picked up the envelope and examined it. The stamps were cancelled by a circular imprint that bore, within it, the words ‘Army Postal System’ and Saturday’s date. So, sometime on Friday or Saturday, she had put this in the mail for him, then tried to call him. It hadn’t been ‘Basta’ or ‘Pasta’, but ‘Posta’, to alert him to its arrival in the mail. What had happened to warn her? To make her send these papers off to him?

  He remembered something Butterworth had said about Foster; it was his job to see that used X-rays were taken away from the hospital. He had said something about other objects and substances, but he had said nothing about what they were or where they were dumped. Surely, the Americans would have to know.

  This had to be the connecting link between the two deaths or else she would not have sent the envelope to him, then tried to call. The child had been her patient, but then he had been taken away and sent up to Germany, and there the medical record ended. He had the child’s last name, and Ambrogiani would certainly have access to a list of all the Americans stationed at the base, so it would be easy enough to learn if the boy’s family was still there. And if they weren’t?

  He picked up the phone and asked the operator to get him Maggiore Ambrogiani at the American base in Vicenza. While he waited for the call to go through, he tried to think of a way all of this could be made to connect, hoping that it would lead him to whoever it was had pushed the needle into the doctor’s arm.

  Ambrogiani answered by giving his name. He showed no surprise when Brunetti told him who it was, merely held the line and allowed the silence to lengthen.

  ‘Has there been any progress there?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘They seem to have instituted a whole new series of drug tests. Everyone is subject to it, even the commander of the hospital. The rumour is he had to go into the men’s room and give a urine sample while one of the doctors waited outside. Apparently, they’ve done more than a hundred this week.’

  ‘With what results?’

  ‘Oh, none yet. All of the samples have to be sent up to Germany, to the hospitals there, to be tested. Then the results come down after a month or so.’

  ‘And they’re accurate?’ Brunetti asked, amazed that any organization could or would trust results that passed through so many hands, over so long a period of time.

  ‘They seem to believe so. If the test is positive, they simply throw you out.’

  ‘Who’s being tested?’

  ‘There’s no pattern. The only ones they’re leaving alone are the ones who keep coming back from the Middle East.’

  ‘Because they’re heroes?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘No, because they’re afraid too many of them will test positive. Drugs are as easy to get in that part of
the world as they were in Vietnam, and apparently they’re afraid it will create too much bad publicity if all of their heroes come back with souvenirs in their bloodstreams.’

  ‘Is it still given out that it was an overdose?’

  ‘Absolutely. One of my men told me her family wouldn’t even come to accompany the body back to America.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘They sent it back. But it went back alone.’

  Brunetti told himself it didn’t matter. The dead didn’t care about such things; it made no difference to them how they were treated or what the living thought of them. But he didn’t believe this.

  ‘I’d like you to try to get some information for me, Maggiore.’

  ‘If I can. Gladly.’

  ‘I’d like to know if there’s a soldier stationed there named Kayman.’ He spelled the name for Ambrogiani. ‘He has a son, nine years old, who was a patient of Doctor Peters. The boy was sent up to a hospital in Germany, at Landstuhl. I’d like to know if the parents are still there, and if they are, I’d like to be able to speak to them.’

  ‘Unofficial, all of this?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Can you tell me what it’s about?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She sent me a copy of the boy’s medical file, and an article about PCBs.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Toxic chemicals. I’m not sure what they’re made of or what they do, but I know disposing of them is difficult. And they’re corrosive. The child had a rash on his arm, probably caused by exposure to them.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the Americans?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s why I want to speak to the boy’s parents.’

  ‘All right. I’ll get busy with this now and call you this afternoon.’

  ‘Can you find him without the Americans finding out?’

  ‘I think so,’ Ambrogiani answered. ‘We have copies of the vehicle registrations, and almost all of them have cars, so I can find out if he’s still here without having to ask them any questions.’

  ‘Good,’ Brunetti said. ‘I think it would be best if this stayed with us.’

  ‘You mean, as opposed to the Americans?’

  ‘For now, yes.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll call you after I check the records.’

  ‘Thanks, Maggiore.’

  ‘Giancarlo,’ the Carabiniere said. ‘I think we can call one another by our first names if we’re going to do something like this.’

  ‘I agree,’ Brunetti said, glad to find an ally. ‘Guido.’

  When he hung up, Brunetti found himself wishing he were in America. One of the great revelations to him when he was there was the system of public libraries: a person could simply walk in and ask questions, read any book he wanted, easily find a catalogue of magazines. Here in Italy, either one bought the book or found it in a university library, and even there it was difficult to gain access without the proper cards, permissions, identification. And so how to find out about PCBs, what they were, where they came from, and what they did to a human body that came in contact with them?

  He glanced at his watch. There was still time to get to the bookshop at San Luca if he hurried; it was likely to have the sort of book that might be useful to him.

  He got there fifteen minutes before it closed and explained what he wanted to the sales assistant. He said that there were two basic books on toxic substances and pollution, though one had more to do with emissions that went directly into the atmosphere. There was a third book, a sort of general guide to chemistry for the layman. After glancing through them, Brunetti bought the first and the third, then added a rather strident-looking text, published by the Green party, that bore the title, Global Suicide. He hoped that the treatment of the subject would be more serious than either the title or the cover promised.

  He stopped at a restaurant and had a proper lunch, then went back to the office and opened the first book. Three hours later, he had begun to see, with mounting shock and horror, the extent of the problem that industrial man had created for himself and, worse, for those who would follow him on the planet.

  These chemicals, it seemed, were essential in many of the processes necessary to modern man, among them refrigeration, for they served as the coolant in domestic refrigerators and air conditioners. They were also used in the oil for transformers, but the PCBs were only a single flower in the deadly bouquet industry had presented to mankind. He read the chemical names with difficulty, the formulae with incomprehension. What remained were the numbers given for the half-life of the substances involved. He thought this was the time it took the substance to become half as deadly as it was when measured. In some cases, the number was hundreds of years; in some it was thousands. And it was these substances which were produced in enormous quantities by the industrialized world as it hurtled towards the future.

  For decades, the Third World had been the rubbish dump of the industrialized nations; taking in shiploads of toxic substances, which were scattered around on their pampas, savannahs, and plateaux, placed there in exchange for current wealth, no thought given to the future price that would come due and be paid by future generations. And now, with some of the countries in the Third World refusing any longer to serve as the dumping ground of the First, the industrial countries were constrained to devise systems of disposal, many of them ruinously expensive. As a result, fleets of phantom trucks with false manifests travelled up and down the Italian peninsula, seeking and finding places to unload their lethal cargoes. Or boats sailed from Genoa or Taranto, holds filled with barrels of solvents, chemicals, God alone knew what, and when they arrived at their final ports, those barrels were no longer on board, as though the god who knew their contents had decided to take them to his bosom. Occasionally, they washed ashore in North Africa or Calabria, but no one, of course, had any idea where they might have come from, nor did anyone notice when they were delivered back to the waves that had brought them to the beaches.

  The tone of the book published by the Green party irritated him; the facts terrified him. They named the shippers, named the companies that paid them, and, worst, showed photos of the places where these illegal dumps had been found. The rhetoric was accusatory, and the culprit, according to the authors, was the entire government, hand in glove with the companies which produced these products and were not constrained by law to account for their disposal. The last chapter of the book dealt with Vietnam and the results that were just now beginning to be seen of the genetic cost of the tons of dioxin that had been dumped on that country during its war with the United States. The descriptions of birth defects, elevated rates of miscarriage, and the lingering presence of dioxin in fish, water, the very land itself were clear and, even allowing for the inevitable exaggerations of the writers, staggering. These same chemicals, the authors maintained, were being dumped all over Italy on a day-to-day, business-as-usual basis.

  When Brunetti stopped reading, he realized that he had been manipulated, that the books all had enormous flaws in their reasoning, that they assumed connections where none could be shown, placed guilt where the evidence didn’t. But he realized as well that one of the basic assumptions made in all of the books was probably true: a violation of the law this widespread and unpunished - and the refusal of the government to pass more stringent laws - argued for a strong link between the offenders and the government whose job it was to prevent or prosecute them. Was it into this vortex that those two innocents at the base had stepped, brought there by a child with a rash on his arm?

  * * * *

  18

  Ambrogiani called him back about five to tell him that the boy’s father, a sergeant who worked in the contracting office, was still stationed at Vicenza; at least his car was still there and had had its registration renewed only two weeks before, and since that process required the signature of the owner of the vehicle, it was safe to assume that he was still in Vicenza.

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘I don’t know,�
� answered Ambrogiani. ‘The papers have only his mailing address, a postbox here at the base, but not his home address.’

  ‘Can you get it?’

  ‘Not without their learning that I’m interested in him.’

  ‘No. I don’t want that,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I want to be able to talk to him, away from there.’

  ‘Give me a day. I’ll have one of my men go into the office where he works and find out who he is. Luckily, they all wear those name tags on their uniforms. Then I’ll see about having him followed. It shouldn’t be too difficult. I’ll call you tomorrow, and then you can think about setting up a meeting with him. Most of them live off the base. In fact, if he’s got children, he’s certain to. I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know what I manage, all right?’