by Donna Leon
Brunetti had turned to face the back of the boat, the better to follow their conversation. Dantone acknowledged the news with a shrug, looked at Brunetti and asked, ‘You coming?’
‘Yes.’
Dantone set his hat upside down next to Penna’s feet, slipped off his watch, removed his telefonino from his jacket pocket, and put them inside the hat. Then he removed his jacket with what Brunetti thought was a sigh and placed it beside the hat. As casually as if he were just going to take a dip in the pool, he sat on the side of the boat, lifted his still- shod feet over the side, and lowered himself, fully clothed, into the water. It came, as Penna had predicted, only a bit above his waist.
By the time Dantone turned back towards the boat, Brunetti was leaning forward to place his own watch and phone inside the capsized hat and then just as quickly swung his feet over the side and lowered himself into the water. When he felt the mud shift and squiggle under his feet, Brunetti was glad of his tennis shoes.
The Captain moved off in the direction of the stationary boat floating about ten metres from them.
Brunetti followed, his feet sinking into the mud and resisting his efforts to pull them free, occasionally stepping on hard or – worse – soft objects. All of a sudden, Dantone gasped a loud ‘Oh’ and disappeared. Brunetti lunged and grabbed, but all he found was the Captain’s hair. He pulled and managed to bring the Captain’s head above the water, but his body refused to rise. Dantone’s arms shot up and waved in the air, his body thrashing from side to side in panic.
To try for a better purchase on him, Brunetti stepped forward and stepped into nothing. Instinctively, he released Dantone and hurled himself backwards in the water. His feet scrambled about below him, and again one foot descended into nothingness. He pulled it back until both feet were firm in the soft mud, then leaned forward and grabbed at Dantone again, this time finding an arm. He stepped back, locked both hands on the arm, and shuffled backwards, dragging the Captain with him.
The Captain continued to resist him, rising and then falling as though pulled under by some other force. Finally, in a grotesque imitation of birth, Dantone pulled free and slipped forward into Brunetti’s hands.
Dantone coughed, vomited up water, and coughed some more. When he stopped coughing, he leaned forward, hands on his hips, and breathed in deeply for a long time. ‘A hole,’ he finally said. ‘There’s a hole down there. My feet kept slipping on the sides.’ He took more deep breaths and waited until both their hearts were beating normally. By common consent they locked arms and started moving gingerly, testing every step, towards the boat.
Thus joined, they came near to the upturned shell of a rowing boat, algae and barnacles clinging to the exposed bottom, floating there about three metres from the land. Brunetti’s foot stepped into nothingness and he plunged into a hole, slipping free of Dantone’s arm. He did not think; reason was lost to him. He sank and thought of death. His feet hit the bottom and sank into muck. Panic straightened his body, his head rose above the surface of the water, and he could breathe again.
Dantone had his shoulders in his grip, and yanked Brunetti towards him. He floated free of the hole, he knew not how; Dantone pulled him back and upright. Terror – though Brunetti would later call it instinct – stopped him from moving, filling him with the sensation that he was about to experience something strange and unpleasant and dangerous. But then Dantone pulled him to the left, and they started off again, more carefully, more slowly, this time circling the boat and drawing no closer. Brunetti shook his terror away as they continued around the boat. He stopped and put a restraining hand on Dantone’s shoulder. ‘It’s a puparìn,’ Brunetti said.
‘What do we do?’ Dantone asked. ‘Turn it over?’
The policeman in Brunetti answered. ‘I’d rather not disturb it until we’ve seen more.’ He thought of all the places he’d been where the evidence had been contaminated by too-hasty curiosity, and then he wondered why he was thinking of evidence. Of what?
‘I want to take a look underneath,’ Brunetti said. It made little difference if they were out of the water or in it: they were a pair of filthy amphibians by now. In response to Dantone’s nod, Brunetti sucked in as much air as he could hold and jackknifed in the water, heading under the boat. Eyes open, he slipped beneath the edge, but there was no light and nothing to be seen. He ran his hands over the invisible curve of the inside and worked his way around to the other side, but he felt nothing except the smooth sides and gunwale. He swam back to the other side and out of the entrapping space, up to the surface.
He bobbed up not far from Dantone and said, ‘Nothing to see. No light.’
‘What now?’ the Captain asked.
‘If we pulled it up on shore, maybe we could turn it over and see if it’s his,’ Brunetti said, wondering why he refused to believe that it was. He latched his fingers under the edge of the capsized boat and started walking towards the shore.
Dantone moved to the other side, and together they hauled the boat nearer to the land, where they found no easy access but a sudden, sharp drop-off of almost a metre. Abandoning his hold on the boat, Brunetti climbed up on land, followed by Dantone. Both of them leaned over and pulled in deep, rasping breaths, then turned back to the boat.
It was easy enough to drag the prow up on to the land and haul it forward for a quarter of the boat’s length, but they quickly realized there was no way they could turn it over or drag it entirely free of the water. There, on the left side of the prow, Brunetti saw the long streak of blue: Casati had told him about his close call some weeks before with a delivery boat’s drunken pilot. ‘It’s his,’ he said.
He walked around to the other side of the boat and saw that a rope was hanging taut from the ring at the back. He bent and pulled on it, hoping to free the anchor and bring it on to land, for surely the boat would have to be taken back to Sant’Erasmo. He pulled on it a few times, but it must have been caught on something on the bottom.
‘Could you give me a hand, Capitano,’ he called, surprised that he still didn’t know Dantone’s first name.
‘Andrea,’ Dantone said as he walked over. ‘And you’re Guido, right?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, then, ‘There’s a metal grating on the end of the rope: it must be stuck on the bottom.’ He passed the rope to Dantone, who moved to stand opposite him.
Together they pulled at the anchor. Brunetti felt it come loose from below the surface and looked across at Dantone in satisfaction.
They pulled together, slipping hand over hand as the anchor moved along the bottom and the rope that they pulled ashore coiled once upon itself at their feet.
Brunetti looked at the place where the rope entered the water, wondering if Casati had decided to use something heavier, more secure than the grating he knew. He bent over and peered into the water, and that’s when he saw the hand.
15
Perhaps he lost his balance; perhaps a loop of the rope had caught around his ankle and pulled at one side; or perhaps it was the sight of the hand that brought Brunetti to his knees. Whatever the cause, he found himself in the mud, his knees poked and scraped by stones and tile shards, still holding the rope but afraid to put his hand in the water with that other hand.
Dantone, standing behind him, looked to see what had happened. ‘Guido, what is it?’ he asked.
‘In the water,’ was the best Brunetti could manage. ‘Look.’ He was kneeling with his hands propped on the ground in front of him, fighting the impulse to be sick.
Dantone ran his eye down to where the rope entered the water. And saw it. ‘Maria Vergine,’ he whispered – an expression Brunetti’s mother had used – his hands frozen on the rope.
The time that passed seemed endless, though it couldn’t have been even a minute. Finally Brunetti got to his feet and looked across at Dantone. ‘We have to get him out of there,’ he said.
Dantone nodded, as though there were no words he could find.
Together, hand over hand, they return
ed to hauling up this new, horrible, anchor. At first, Brunetti looked to one side of the rope, then steeled himself and looked at it and what was below: the top of a head, a shoulder, the other, and then the chest of the man that a quick glance down his face had told him was Casati, bobbing and turning in the water.
When he saw Casati’s head float to the surface of the water, Brunetti said, ‘I’ll pull him out.’ He looked at Dantone, who nodded and braced one leg behind him, his hands gripping the rope.
Brunetti let go of the rope and knelt at the edge of the water. He leaned down, grabbed Casati’s body under the shoulders, and guided him to the place where the land dropped quickly into the water, but it proved impossible to lift the body.
He was about to ask Dantone for help when the other man was beside him, lifting, lifting. Together, they pulled the dead man from the water and laid him, face up, on the ground. Water ran from Casati’s hair and clothing and quickly disappeared into the mud around him. His old shirt and loose trousers were slick to his body; one shoe was gone. The rope, like the body of a python, had coiled itself around Casati’s leg, just below the knee, then moved down to dig a circle in the flesh above his ankle before being pulled straight into the water by whatever it was tied to. Dantone grabbed the rope and pulled until the metal grating broke the surface. He hauled it out and let it drop on the earth, not far from Casati’s feet.
Brunetti leaned over the dead man and, not caring whether he was destroying more evidence, covered Casati’s eyes with his hands and pressed the eyelids closed. They remained that way for an instant, but then opened again. Brunetti pulled a cotton handkerchief, soaked and shapeless, from his back pocket; he shook it open and placed it, still dripping, over the dead man’s face, then he sat back on his knees and closed his eyes.
Suddenly they heard footsteps, and soon after that one of the sailors from Dantone’s boat appeared, slogging across the broken dirt and piled rocks, looking strangely out of place in his clean, white uniform. When he saw the dead man, he stopped. Dantone held up a hand to warn him to come no closer.
Brunetti pushed himself to his feet and looked down at Casati’s body. How small he looked, this old man who had seemed so young, so vital.
‘Where’s the boat?’ Dantone surprised him by asking, but he was speaking to the young sailor.
‘Back there, Capitano,’ the young man answered, turning to point behind him, where the angle of the cemetery wall cut off any chance of seeing beyond it. ‘There’s a dock.’
‘You walked?’ Dantone asked.
‘The chart said the water’s too shallow for the boat.’
Dantone, who had just pulled himself, and a man’s body, from more than a metre of water, made an exasperated noise and got to his feet. He walked over to Brunetti. ‘I’ll bring the boat,’ he said and started off in the direction from which the sailor had come. When the young man moved to follow him, Dantone stopped and said, ‘Do you have your phone?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Call the Carabinieri and tell them we’ve found him. They can tell the helicopter to go back.’ The officer nodded and started walking again, away from Brunetti and the dead man.
Brunetti looked out across the water, failing to find anything there but emptiness. He bent over the grating but didn’t touch it. Had Casati been trying to toss it overboard in the storm to stop the boat from being carried into deeper water by wind and tide? Had the boat started to move away from shore? If it had happened during the storm, he would have been blinded by wind and rain, perhaps not seen where he put his foot, not seen the rope, coiling around his leg.
It would have happened quickly, but Casati was a fish: surely he would have tried to free himself by uncoiling the rope, even pulling up the anchor? It weighed no more than a few kilos.
Brunetti stared down at his friend, trying to work it out, and failing. All speculation ended there, at that coiling rope.
Brunetti looked over at the wall of the cemetery, where Casati had gone so often to speak with his wife, thinking of possibilities. After speaking with her, he had always returned to their daughter. But what if this time she had asked him to stay?
Dantone’s shout interrupted his thoughts. ‘Guido, Guido. We’re here.’
Brunetti turned towards the voice and saw something that reminded him of a painting he had liked when he was a boy, of the Volga boatmen pulling a barge along a broad canal, a score of them on the shore, all hauling the same length of rope. This time, it was two uniformed sailors, in their long white buttoned jackets and black boots, pulling their boat slowly along the edge of the cemetery island, towards Brunetti and what was soon to be their cargo. The covering at the back of their boat was open, the motor tilted back free of the water. Dantone lay on his stomach on the prow, looking into the water and calling out orders to the two sailors.
When the boat stopped abreast of him, not far from the shore, Brunetti called to Dantone, ‘Could you give me my phone?’
Dantone scrambled back and retrieved Brunetti’s telefonino. He leaned far over the side with the phone in his hand, and Brunetti stepped without thinking into the water to lean out to take it from him. The phone was new, bought for him by Signorina Elettra out of the account for office supplies that she had been pillaging for years. She had spent some time showing him how to use the camera, and he thought he could do it.
Careful now to look where he put his feet, Brunetti went back to shore and approached the boat. He moved around it in a U, taking photos. He knelt and took close-ups from both sides of the rope coiled around Casati’s leg.
Then he had no choice. He bent and removed the handkerchief and photographed Casati’s open-eyed face from both sides and from straight above, then replaced the handkerchief and turned his back on the body to take photos of the disturbed earth, the abandoned grating tied to the end of the rope twisted around Casati’s leg and ankle, the cemetery wall, and the horizon, anything to put new images into the camera and into his mind. He slipped the phone into the pocket of his shirt and looked off at the horizon.
The sailors helped Brunetti lift Casati’s body; with no hesitation, they all stepped into the water and passed the body up to Dantone and the pilot, who lowered it slowly to the deck. Casati weighed far less than Brunetti had expected, as though death had removed something from him other than his life.
Then Brunetti climbed on board. The pilot disappeared into the cabin for a moment and returned with a woollen blanket, then lowered it slowly over Casati’s body, careful to cover his face, from which the handkerchief had fallen. Brunetti nodded his thanks, and the pilot raised his hand to his forehead in salute, either to Brunetti or to the dead man.
Dantone said something to the sailors; Brunetti, standing beside him, heard the words but didn’t know what they meant. The sailors picked up the ends of the tow ropes they’d abandoned on the shore and, after struggling for some time to turn the bobbing police boat around, began to haul it back the way they had come. Brunetti and Dantone remained on board with the pilot.
‘I’ll call the hospital,’ Brunetti said.
Dantone and the pilot exchanged glances, and the pilot said, ‘About ten minutes. Perhaps less. We just have to get back to deep water.’
Brunetti called Foa, the Questura’s chief pilot, and told him what had happened, then asked him to organize a boat to come out to the back of the cemetery island. He described the boat that was dragged up on the shore, told him to bring plastic sheeting with him and, after turning the boat upright, to cover it and tow it back to the Questura, then find a place to keep it until the family could claim it.
‘Are you on duty again, sir?’ the pilot asked.
‘Not really,’ Brunetti answered shortly, repeated his instructions, and told Foa to get to it immediately.
‘Yes, sir,’ the younger man answered, sounding almost happy to be given a job, and was gone.
All this time, the two sailors had been towing the boat, but the scene was now deprived of charm. When they reached a
point where the pilot said it would be deep enough for the motor, the men on shore walked to the boat and climbed on board. They lowered the engine into the water. The pilot turned the boat around and headed for the Ospedale Civile.
Brunetti reached over to Dantone’s upturned hat, picked up his watch, and was surprised to see that it was almost six. What a strange thought to have, he told himself: Casati was lying dead at his feet, and he was worried about what time it was.
He found that the phone was still in his hand, found Federica’s number, and called her. The motor drowned out her voice until he went down into the cabin and closed the door. He told her they’d found her father, and he was dead, killed in the storm. He was on the boat that was taking him to the hospital. Yes, he’d wait for her there. Reluctant to tell her that the body would be in the morgue, he told her to ask for Dottor Rizzardi when she got there, and he’d come and find her and take her to her father.
Her voice had fought off tears during their conversation, but at Brunetti’s last words, she lost control and started to sob. ‘Federica, can you hear me?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Come when you can. Come with your husband. I’ll be there.’
‘What happened?’ she asked with false calm.
‘I don’t know. Your father drowned.’
‘Because of the storm?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered, and promised again that he’d be at the hospital when she came.
She started to say something, stopped, and said only, ‘No, no, he couldn’t …’ before hanging up.
He dialled the home number of Ettore Rizzardi, the chief pathologist.
After only three rings, Rizzardi said, with his usual dangerous politeness, ‘Ah, Guido, how good to hear from you. In what way may I be useful?’