by Donna Leon
‘I’m Commissario Brunetti, Signora,’ he said, and gestured towards Vianello, saying, ‘This is Ispettore Vianello, my assistant.’
‘Brunetti?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, stepping back so that looking up at her would be easier on his neck. ‘Are you Signora Minati?’
She confirmed this and asked, ‘Police?’ sounding uncomfortable. Brunetti nodded, although he thought she might not have seen the gesture from above.
‘Why have you come?’ she asked with nervous curiosity.
‘I’d prefer to tell you that inside, Signora.’
‘Ah,’ she said, lifted her hands, and pulled halfway back inside the window. She ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, which she wore in a curly cloud around her head. Finally she asked, ‘And if I don’t want to let you in, Signore?’ She asked it as a real question, one that required an answer.
‘We could continue to talk like this,’ Brunetti said mildly, glancing around at the other buildings, although there seemed to be no life in any of them. He backed across the street and propped his shoulders against the wall of the house opposite. This would be fine for him, he thought, though holding his neck at such an angle was already uncomfortable and would, he was sure, very soon begin to hurt.
‘All right,’ she said and disappeared from the window. A moment later, the door snapped open and they went in. The stairs were narrow and well-worn, a single window at the top of the first flight. They turned and continued up the second ramp, where the woman stood at an open door.
‘Do you have identification, gentlemen?’ she asked; it was only then that Brunetti heard the tremor in her voice. From outside, the angle and distance had prevented him from seeing her clearly. As he reached the landing in front of her apartment, he saw reflected in her face the tension he’d heard in her voice. She was very thin and almost as tall as he was. She had dark eyes surrounded by the deep wrinkles left by long periods under the sun.
Remaining in the hallway, they handed her their warrant cards; she looked at them carefully, glancing up to study their faces and compare them with the photos. Then she handed the cards back, thanking them in a calmer voice. She stepped back through the door and waved them into the apartment.
Brunetti saw four white easy chairs around a thick- legged low table made out of what looked like a carved shutter that must have come from the Middle East. On one wall were rows of tall, narrow framed pieces of Arabic calligraphy, two with what looked like a flamboyant signature at the bottom. Two other walls held framed pages in different sizes, all in a variety of Arabic handwriting. On the last wall were books, leaving the Arab conquest to the other three.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Brunetti said, moving closer to take a look at one of the framed documents. ‘What are they?’
‘Land registry documents,’ she said. ‘The others are pages from the Koran.’
‘Where did you find them?’
‘I lived in Uzbekistan for some years. The municipal office in the village where I worked had records from past centuries. When they decided to get rid of them, no one was interested, so I asked for a box of them and they were happy to give them to me.’ She looked across the room and observed, ‘I’ve always found the calligraphy beautiful.’
‘Where you worked?’ Brunetti asked, ignoring her comment. Vianello, he saw, was walking from one to another of the framed pieces, studying the calligraphy, shifting back and forth to bring it into closer focus.
‘For FAO,’ she said, naming the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN but not giving any further explanation.
‘What were you doing for them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I was an edaphologist.’
‘What does that mean?’ Vianello interrupted with real curiosity, looking away from the pages towards her.
If she was surprised that this had now become a double inquisition, she gave no sign of it and said, ‘It means I tested the soil to see what nutrients were in it. Or were lacking. And the salt content.’
‘In the soil?’ the Inspector asked.
‘Yes.’ She looked at Vianello. At his nod, she continued. ‘When we found out what there was too much of or too little of, FAO tried to find a natural way to rebalance the soil by rotating crops or planting something that would fix the nitrogen in the soil. Or encouraging the farmers to rely less on pesticides and chemical fertilizers.’ She smiled, and Brunetti could see her relax even more. Straight-faced, she explained, ‘I tried to convince them that cow-shit’s the best.’
Vianello laughed and said right back, ‘My great-uncle always said horse was better.’
‘Was he a farmer?’
‘When he was a young man, that’s what most people in Friuli did.’
‘I see,’ she answered.
While the two of them were speaking, Brunetti had moved behind one of the chairs. When she saw this, Signora Minati said, ‘I suppose we’d all better sit down.’
‘When were you in Uzbekistan, Signora, if I might ask?’ Brunetti said when they were seated.
‘Until ten years ago. I was there a total of three years, at the ends of the earth; near the Aral Sea, in a small town called Moynaq,’ she said with a small smile. ‘We had electricity but little more, and even that wasn’t very reliable.’
‘How did you test soil?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Did you have a laboratory?’
She sat with her hands folded in her lap, paying careful attention to his questions. Instead of answering this one, however, she said, ‘Before we continue with this, I’d like you to tell me why you’re asking me these questions.’ When Brunetti failed to answer for some time, she added, ‘The only people who’ve been this curious about my work there were men from the Uzbeki Secret Service. They came to Moynaq to question me.’
‘I should have begun by asking you if you knew Davide Casati,’ Brunetti said and watched her response to the mention of his name.
She showed no surprise at all. In fact, she looked at him and smiled, deepening the wrinkles around her eyes, then said, ‘I was waiting for you to ask about him.’ She glanced away and, looking at the quiet motion in her curtains, said, ‘He was a good man.’
‘Did you know him well?’ Brunetti asked.
‘At least well enough to know that much about him. As I assume you did, as well, Commissario, if you spent much of the last two weeks rowing with him, unless Brunetti is a more common name than I thought.’ She had the grace to smile again after saying this, removing Brunetti’s suspicion that he had unknowingly had a computer chip placed in his ear.
Brunetti let a moment pass before asking, ‘Could you tell me the nature of your relationship with him?’
‘“Relationship with him”?’ she repeated, putting ironic emphasis on the first word.
‘Yes.’
‘I did him favours and he gave me fish,’ she said, showing the first sign of exasperation with Brunetti’s questions.
‘What sort of favours did you do for him?’
‘You should know that, Commissario,’ she said sharply. ‘You saw him collecting the samples of his bees.’
‘Yes, I did. The ones he took last week, of bees and soil.’
‘He’d sent others.’
‘I’d assumed as much,’ Brunetti said. He thought of the vial of mud Casati had carried back to the boat. ‘Did he want you to read the reports when they came back?’ he asked, thinking it better not to mention their visit to the post office.
‘Yes. And interpret them.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘The usual things: varroa, nosema, lack of nutrition, pesticides, chemicals. It’s what’s killing them everywhere.’ Her voice changed and she asked, ‘Why do you want to know this, Commissario?’
‘Because he seemed troubled by what he found: the bees and the soil. So I’d like to know what the reports told him, if only to put my mind at rest.’
She appeared to think about this and then said, ‘Davide came here a few months ago. He’d heard about me. This is a small island, and
Sant’Erasmo is even smaller. In population, that is. There are no secrets on the islands. He knew that I’d worked for FAO examining soil, and he knew that I’d come back here after Uzbekistan, and he knew the rumours that I’d been fired but still had a pension from FAO. My guess,’ she said with a resigned sigh, ‘is that everyone on the island knows that, and some might even know how much the pension is.’
‘Are the rumours correct?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Were you fired?’
‘Yes.’
‘What for?’
‘For causing trouble.’ She pushed herself up straight in the chair, then returned her hands to the way she had been holding them in her lap.
‘This was more than ten years ago. I went to Uzbekistan to study what the death of the Aral Sea was doing to the soil. Not to the people, or the animals, or the climate; only to the soil. For the first few months, I made myself ignore anything other than the soil: I didn’t see the skin cancers, the dead animals lying in the fields, and I ignored the dust and salt storms. I dug up soil samples, before and after storms, and I ran some tests on them and sent carefully labelled tubes of earth back to the laboratory in Rome, describing the increased salinity.’ She looked at the backs of her hands, as he had seen many guilty people do during questioning. Many innocent ones, as well, he reminded himself.
‘But after a while, I couldn’t pretend any more not to see what was going on. I started to add into my reports comments about the people and the way they were dying – the sea was already dead, so there was no use commenting on that – and the animals, and the crops that didn’t grow, except for the cotton that was growing everywhere and that had killed the sea.’
Brunetti looked at Vianello and saw that he was listening to her story with rapt attention.
‘I suppose my reports became somewhat uncontrolled, but death was all around me and in the salt that blew in everywhere and was on my body and in my eyes. And all this so that they could grow cotton,’ she added.
Neither Brunetti nor Vianello spoke, so she went on. ‘But then someone in Rome must have let them know – the people in Tashkent, or the people in Moscow – what was in my reports, or perhaps they quite innocently passed the information on to them. Or, more likely, everything was being read as I sent it. What I wrote was common knowledge to anyone living there, and to many scientists in the West, but the government wanted to be able to deny it.’ Her voice suddenly tightened and grew impassioned. ‘There are satellite photographs that let you see how much the sea has shrunk in the last years, but the government denies it’s happening.’
She looked at them, one after the other, and gave an uneasy smile. ‘Sorry, but it makes me wild that this can happen, that they can destroy a sea, for God’s sake.’ She stopped speaking for some time and then went on in a calmer voice. ‘There must have been some sort of complaint from the government, so first the men from the Secret Service came to talk to me, and then the people in Rome decided that it was time for me to take early retirement. I understood what was going on, of course, so I decided to accept their offer. I couldn’t stand to be there any more and was happy to leave. I’m not a particularly brave person. So I packed up my things and left. But I left the tiny laboratory there, with all the instruments, so the person who replaced me could do the same tests and see the same results.’
‘And then what did you do?’ Vianello asked, like one of the old men of Ithaca asking Ulysses to tell them what happened next …
‘I travelled for a while and tried to find another job. But the word was out, I think, and I couldn’t find one, at least not in my profession. So I travelled some more.’ Again she looked at each of them in turn and said, ‘They gave me a very generous pension.
‘And then I came here and moved into this apartment; an aunt left it to me, ages ago. And here I live, a retired woman who putters around in the laguna in her boat or paddles around in her kayak, but who is known as the scientist who knows about nature.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. Then, impressed but not diverted by the ease with which she’d led them away from the reports on the samples Casati had sent to Lausanne, he asked, ‘And Davide Casati?’
Her mouth tightened, as if in disapproval of his tenacity. ‘We were almost friends, and beyond that, it’s none of your business.’ When she saw the effect her brusqueness had on them, she added, almost as an apology, ‘Besides – if I might set your perfervid minds at rest – he was still in love with his wife, who died four years ago, a very ugly death from a very ugly disease.’ Brunetti watched her debate whether to continue and decide to do so. ‘He felt guilty that he couldn’t save her. Many men do. When their wives die.’
After a long silence, she went on, only studied patience in her voice now, ‘To me, he was a man from Sant’Erasmo who wanted to know why his bees were dying, and someone had told him to ask the woman on Burano who knows about science things.’ Then, with what sounded like irritation but might as easily have been the truth, she added, ‘I’m sure some of them think I’m a witch. I know spells and secrets and go into the laguna in my own little boat and don’t tell anyone what I’m doing there.’ Again, Brunetti noted, she had pulled the conversation away from the reports she had read and interpreted.
‘What are you doing there?’ Vianello asked, surprising them both.
‘I’m seeing how peaceful and beautiful it is, how lovely the birds are, how perfectly it has evolved,’ she answered. And then, after a moment, she added, speaking far more slowly and in a lower voice, ‘And I’m watching it die.’
‘Could you explain this to me, Signora?’ Vianello asked.
She raised a hand and waved in the direction of the water, then forgot about the gesture and her hand fell back into her lap. ‘There are fewer birds – some species no longer come here to nest – there are fewer fish. I seldom see a crab in the water. The frogs are gone. The tides don’t make any sense any more. And …’ she began. A sudden tightness came into her voice as she said, ‘the earth itself …’ She stopped, appeared to play back what she had started to say, and turned her head to look out the window.
‘What is it, Signora?’ Vianello asked.
‘Nothing, nothing. I tend to get carried away.’
Brunetti noticed her suddenly casual tone, as though all of this were happening far away and did not concern her. Like most honest people, she was a bad liar.
‘“The earth itself” is what, Signora?’ the inspector asked.
‘Excuse me?’ she asked, trying to sound confused but not managing to.
‘It’s what you began to say: “The earth itself”, and then you stopped. I’m curious about what you were going to say.’
‘Oh, I don’t remember,’ she said distractedly. ‘It was nothing.’
‘I thought, since you work with the soil, that you meant it literally, Signora, about the soil.’
Her face lost all expression, and he watched her repeat in her mind what he had just said. Then she smiled, as if she’d seen an open window through which she could fly. ‘No, I meant the Earth, the planet. I suppose I was going to say it’s gone mad.’ She gave a self-effacing laugh and added, ‘I often say that.’
‘I think we all do, Signora,’ Vianello said and gave her a broad smile. ‘I try not to say it in front of my children, though. They’re too young for that sort of thing.’ Brunetti listened to his friend sounding forthright and honest, pulling her away from the scent that had alarmed her.
‘How old are they, officer?’ she asked, while Brunetti watched her hands.
‘Seven and nine,’ Vianello lied. What’s more trustworthy than a man with two young children?
‘Still so little?’ she asked before she thought.
‘Yes, I married late,’ he lied again. ‘I wanted to be sure.’
‘And are you?’ she inquired.
‘Yes, absolutely,’ the Inspector said and pasted a broad smile on his face.
Obviously at a loss for what to say, Signora Minati looked down at her hands and saw them, claw-like, gras
ping one another in a death grip. She stretched out her fingers and pressed her open hands against her thighs.
She looked at Brunetti. ‘Will there be anything else?’ she asked.
Brunetti got to his feet, quickly followed by Vianello. ‘No, Signora, I think that’s all. You’ve been very generous with your time.’
She preceded them to the door and opened it. Brunetti took his notebook from his jacket pocket and wrote in it. He passed her the slip of paper and said, ‘This is my telefonino number.’
She took it and studied it as though she’d found it in her hand at the end of a magician’s trick and had no idea what to do with it. She folded it in half and then again and put it into the pocket of her skirt, saying nothing.
Brunetti offered his hand. She shook it, and then Vianello’s, then the two men descended the steps and left the building.
20
Outside, both of them aware that they would be visible from the window, they walked away from the building at a normal pace. As they did so, Vianello said, ‘I wonder what she’s frightened of. She’s been away from Uzbekistan for ten years, so we can forget that.’ He sounded certain, and Brunetti thought he was right.
‘That leaves the reports that were sent to her,’ Brunetti said. He continued walking, looking down at his feet. He stopped and turned to the Inspector. ‘Or it could simply be that she’s afraid of having two policemen come to talk to her.’ Many people would be, he knew but didn’t want to say.
They reached the campo that led to the boat stop, and as they stepped from the shadow the narrow streets provided, the sun pounded down on them, reminding them that it was July, the worst month. Both of them removed their jackets, Brunetti regretting his concession to respectability by having abandoned last week’s cotton Bermudas and tennis shoes.
His thoughts veered towards Paola, and he found himself remembering that she’d once told him how gullible he tended to be about women, abandoning his normal suspiciousness and always willing to believe their moral superiority to men. He defended his normal suspiciousness, if only to himself, with the fact that he had asked Signorina Elettra to see what she could find out about Signora Minati.