Earthly Remains

by Donna Leon

  ‘Well, then,’ Signora Segalin said, ‘I’ll leave you alone to talk.’ Then, to Pozzi, in what she tried to make sound like a friendly voice, ‘I hope you have a pleasant visit.’

  The door closed, and the three of them sat, at least two of them beaten down by the heat. Brunetti and Griffoni let a few minutes pass by before she said, ‘Signor Pozzi, we’ve come to talk to you about the events that led to your coming here to Villa Flora. You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?’

  Pozzi nodded, bending his entire torso forward to do it.

  Griffoni smiled her thanks for his answer and said, ‘You were working for GMC Holdings at the time, weren’t you?’

  Pozzi considered her question for a long time and finally said, ‘CM.’

  Brunetti restrained the impulse to look at Griffoni.

  She smiled and said, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘CM,’ Pozzi repeated. ‘GCM.’ His lips barely moved when he pronounced the letters and drew softly closed with the last.

  ‘Of course,’ Griffoni said, raising a hand to her forehead, as if to reprove her offending memory. ‘GCM.’

  Pozzi nodded, again moving his body.

  ‘Were you working for GCM Holdings then? And thank you for the correction, Signor Pozzi.’

  Brunetti watched the other man’s face, keeping a neutral expression on his own, even allowing his attention to appear to drift away. He looked around the room and became fully aware of the bookshelf behind Pozzi’s left shoulder.

  He ran his eyes along the shelves, wondering what sort of books a crippled factory worker would find interesting, though he did not phrase it that way, not even to himself. The first thing he noticed was the height and thickness of most of the books, and then he adjusted his eyes to the distance and started to read the perpendicular titles: Goya, Tiziano, Velázquez, Holbein, Van Dyck, Moroni.

  He moved his eyes back to Pozzi and saw that the man had been watching him as he discovered the titles of the books. Their eyes met, and Brunetti gave a relaxed smile and small nod of approval.

  Griffoni was drawing breath, no doubt to repeat her question, when Brunetti cut her off by saying, ‘I didn’t know the Hughes book had been translated into Italian.’

  Pozzi answered in an entirely conversational voice. ‘It hasn’t been, as far as I know. I read the English text.’ When Brunetti said nothing, Pozzi added, ‘I’ve always liked the way he writes, ever since The Shock of the New.’

  ‘It’s been a long time since I read it,’ Brunetti said, ‘but I still remember my surprise when he explained the change in the way people perceived landscape once they could move through it smoothly in a machine.’

  ‘And fast, without the viewer being joggled along by a carriage or a horse,’ Pozzi added. ‘It’s so obvious, isn’t it? But, as you say, so surprising to realize.’

  ‘It’s nice to see the Moroni,’ Brunetti added. ‘I’ve always liked his work.’

  ‘It must be wonderful to see the real paintings,’ Pozzi said with the wide-eyed wonder of a lover of art and without a hair’s breadth of self-pity. ‘I wish …’

  Brunetti thought a long time before he risked saying, ‘I think there are two or three in Milano, but not in the same museum. And the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo is full of them. Can’t you get them to take you there?’

  ‘It’s not so easy,’ Pozzi said.

  ‘Why?’ Brunetti asked, his question implying something – laziness, perhaps – on the part of the staff or perhaps on Pozzi’s part. ‘They must have some sort of van here, so all they’d have to do is put you in a wheelchair and take you there.’ He smiled as at a sudden revelation. ‘With the handicapped sticker, they can park just about anywhere, so they don’t have to worry about that. And you’d probably be right in front of the building. Nothing’s easier.’

  It came to Brunetti that for this man nothing was easy, so his remark must have seemed a taunt or a provocation. ‘I mean nothing’s easier than to arrange it, Signore; not to do it. Only you know how difficult that is.’

  Pozzi raised his eyebrows, as though in appreciation of Brunetti’s frankness, and returned his attention to Griffoni. ‘You asked me if I was working for GCM Holdings, Signorina. May I ask you the reason for your curiosity?’ How had Pozzi learned to speak like that? Brunetti wondered. A factory worker certainly had not learned it from the people with whom he had worked, and Signorina Segalin said he spoke very little here. Brunetti glanced around and saw no television, nor was there sign of a radio; not that either provided much in the way of an example of how to speak. Books, then?

  ‘Because we are not from the social services, Signor Pozzi,’ Griffoni said, speaking in her normal voice and not that of the fresh-faced woman from the social services she had been impersonating until now. ‘Signora Segalin has confused things. We’re from the police.’

  Pozzi watched Griffoni for a long time, his now indisputably intelligent face changing, as though he were considering the possibility of returning to the listless creature he had been when they came in. Brunetti saw the man’s attention appear to go in and out of focus, his expression dull-witted and then astute, only to lapse again into complete apathy. Finally Pozzi asked, ‘Are you here about the fire?’ in a voice so neutral it could have been that of a machine.

  Surprised, Griffoni asked, ‘Did Signor Bianchi tell you?’

  Surprised in his turn, Pozzi asked, ‘You spoke to him?’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  Griffoni turned and gave Brunetti an inquisitive look: it was his investigation, after all.

  The man liked Moroni, Brunetti reflected. He nodded to Griffoni.

  ‘He told us what happened in the fire,’ she said.

  ‘Ah,’ Pozzi said, prolonging his response until it was a sustained, low noise. ‘That he tried to stop Casati from lighting a cigarette?’

  ‘Yes,’ Griffoni answered.

  ‘And Casati carried him from the building?’ Pozzi asked, as though he were now the person conducting the investigation.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, at least that’s true,’ Pozzi said.

  ‘What isn’t?’ Griffoni asked.

  Pozzi gave a weak smile. ‘I probably spoke too soon. It’s more likely that he asked Casati for a light: they both smoked in places where it was prohibited. I caught them a number of times.’

  ‘And reported it?’ Griffoni broke in to ask.

  ‘Yes. Always.’

  ‘Did it stop them?’ she asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Pozzi said with the air of someone explaining a simple human truth to an even more simple-minded person. ‘But I wasn’t with them when the fire started, and one should never jump to conclusions, should one?’

  ‘If they didn’t start it, what could have caused the fire?’ Brunetti asked.

  Pozzi appeared to think about this before he said, ‘Carelessness, neglect, negligence, contempt for safety standards and for the workers.’ He saw their surprise. ‘But above all, a desire to spend less money: always and ever. That was their goal.’

  ‘Of the company?’ Griffoni asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yet you worked for them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pozzi said, looking down at the blanket and pulling it closer to his chest, as though eager for the warmth it provided. The gesture made Brunetti suddenly conscious of the sweat soaking into the back of his jacket and under his arms.

  ‘What were you doing for them?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘We had a contract to dispose of some of the materials used in the petrochemical plants,’ Pozzi began. ‘Once the materials were collected and put into barrels, they were shipped to the various plants that would treat them. I was the logistical engineer in charge of the project.’

  ‘Contaminating materials?’ Brunetti asked.

  Pozzi looked at the back of his right hand and carefully spread out the fingers, as though he’d been asked to prove that they were all there and was proud to be able to sho
w that they were. Looking back at Brunetti, he added, ‘Whatever was on the list of what had to be removed.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Molybdenum, chrome, dioxin, arsenic, mercury,’ he said, banging down on each word as though his voice were a hammer. ‘Many more, I’m sure; those are the ones that come to mind after all these years. And, of course, a great deal of highly flammable liquids.’

  Brunetti, struck by the ease with which he pronounced the last two words, asked, ‘You don’t think about it any more?’

  Pozzi tilted his head to one side as he considered this, then said, ‘No, I suppose I don’t; not any more. I try to think about paintings and lines and colours and how objects are placed to create perspective and how difficult it is to paint eyes.’

  ‘And where did these materials go?’ Brunetti asked, not interested in the problems of perspective.

  ‘They were supposed to go to Germany and Sweden, and Austria, all countries which had, and have, far better facilities for processing them than we do.’

  ‘“Supposed to go”?’ Griffoni asked, joining the conversation again.

  Pozzi smiled for the first time, and Brunetti saw that he must have been a handsome man, before the accident that had reduced him so. ‘Very good, Signorina,’ he said, his delight audible. Brunetti suddenly found himself annoyed at Pozzi’s condescension, as though he believed his knowledge combined with his handicap conveyed some special merit and thus put him in charge here.

  Griffoni replied coolly, ‘You said it in such a way that I was compelled to ask, don’t you think, Signore?’

  Pozzi’s smile evaporated and he said, ‘But so few people pay serious attention to what is said to them, Signorina, that you deserve the compliment.’ Brunetti wondered if Pozzi had so little interaction with people that he believed this.

  ‘And did they go to those countries?’ Brunetti asked.

  Pozzi turned the upper part of his body towards Brunetti and answered, ‘That was not part of our mandate, Signore. We delivered the barrels to the trucks or, in some cases, to the boats; the people to whom we delivered them signed off on our invoices and took possession of the shipment.’ In case they did not understand, he went on, ‘We had no involvement beyond that. And no interest.’

  Saying nothing, Brunetti waited for Griffoni to take charge again. She did by asking, ‘Do you remember the names of any of these companies?’

  ‘No; not after all these years.’

  ‘Did you ever learn where any of the shipments were going?’

  ‘As I told you, I don’t remember the invoices.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m asking, Signor Pozzi,’ she said with the first hint of impatience. ‘I’m asking if you ever learned where they were going.’

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ Pozzi replied.

  She leaned forward and spoke with exaggerated emphasis. ‘Again, you seem to be misinterpreting my question. Did you ever learn where they went?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever hear speculation about where they might be going?’

  ‘Speculation?’

  ‘Among the people with whom you worked.’

  His answering smile was soft and pleased with itself; Brunetti didn’t like the sight of it.

  ‘There’s always speculation, isn’t there?’ Pozzi asked. How many witnesses had Brunetti listened to who spoke in the same way? Thinking themselves so much cleverer than the person who questioned them, they would answer with rhetorical questions, try to split hairs that would have been invisible to a Jesuit.

  Brunetti saw it now: Pozzi was a cat, who saw them as two small mice. Swat, swat, keep the claws in at the beginning, perhaps all the time. But swat and have what fun you could with them. ‘Did you believe any of the stories you heard?’ Griffoni asked.

  ‘Shall we say I found some of them interesting?’ Pozzi answered.

  Griffoni said nothing. Brunetti studied her profile and saw her tongue moisten her lips before she asked, ‘Which ones were they?’

  ‘I heard that some of it went to Nigeria, that some went to Campania.’

  ‘I’ve heard about those,’ she said with a lack of interest.

  As if to goad her into being interested, Pozzi said, ‘And some of them were like the little piggy in the English nursery rhyme. “This little piggy stayed home”,’ he said, his pronunciation showing that his knowledge of English was confined to reading.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Not your English,’ she quickly added, which Brunetti saw as a wise sop to her listener’s vanity, ‘but the meaning.’

  ‘Some of it stayed home, Signorina,’ he said with an enigmatic smile, the sort an attractive woman used when her answer could have been a yes as readily as a no.

  Pozzi had said that some of the barrels had been delivered to boats. Brunetti suddenly pictured the many landing stages and docks with which the petrochemical area of Marghera was studded, all with easy access to the vastness of the laguna. And then he remembered diving into the water of the laguna and swimming back and forth to cool himself while waiting for Casati to return from collecting his last sample. He had dived down like a cormorant and swum underwater for as long as he could, holding his breath until compelled to plunge through the surface and draw in deep gulps of the life-saving air.

  And then Casati had arrived, swimming with one arm raised, holding the vial safe from the water so that the soil inside could be sent for examination to see if it contained what was killing his bees.

  ‘Oddio,’ Brunetti whispered under his breath. ‘They dumped it in the laguna.’

  28

  Years later, Brunetti would remember the smile that appeared on Pozzi’s face as he savoured Brunetti’s last words. It began with his lips, which closed together, pressure from the centre forcing the corners up very slowly. His expression softened; tension disappeared from his face for a fleeting moment. His hints and ambiguous answers had finally registered with the police officials, and at least one of them now understood what had happened all those years before.

  Brunetti turned to look at Griffoni, and he saw her face when she understood his words: there was no smile. Brunetti saw that Pozzi was also watching Griffoni. Her effect on him was evident: he squeezed his eyes together minimally to bring her face into sharper focus, the better to enjoy her expression, the result of her growing awareness of what he knew. The muscles of Pozzi’s lower face relaxed again, and the lines from his nose to his mouth disappeared. Years fled from him, and the young man he might well have been, before the flesh of his legs had been cauterized, made a brief appearance in the room. And then that man dissolved, still able to run from the room, leaving behind this other person. His shell? His lesser self? His remains.

  Something horrid had slipped into the room with Pozzi’s words, carried ever closer by years of rumour and suggestion and half-understood remarks. Brunetti had been listening to stories for years: when the trees in the park of San Giuliano, near Marghera, died within a year of being planted, it was said that the barrels of toxic waste on which the park was built had begun to leak. He’d heard endless jokes about the clams from the laguna and how much easier it was to find them at night because they glowed in the dark. Fact existed as well: he had read the statistical tables of the tumours that had laid waste a generation of workers in the factories from which GCM Holdings and companies like them had been paid to remove toxic materials.

  Yet here was Pozzi talking about nursery rhymes, as though he found humour, not horror, in what was still befalling others, the pollution of the laguna no more than a piece to be used in a game only he knew how to enjoy. It came to Brunetti that Pozzi wanted them to be surprised but was incapable of understanding why they might be shocked.

  ‘Ah,’ Brunetti said, ‘so all we’ve been hearing for years is true?’

  Pozzi was transformed into the teacher proud of his student. ‘All of it, I don’t know, Signore. But some of it, yes.’

  ‘If you’ve known about it for all of this tim
e, why haven’t you ever said anything?’ Brunetti asked, as though he were piqued by curiosity, not by indignation; no, never that.

  Griffoni had herself become a clam, stuck to something hard under metres of murky water and thus invisible, barely breathing. Brunetti kept his eyes on Pozzi, as though they were alone in the room.

  ‘Because, as you know from the Bible, it is far better to invest a talent than to bury it,’ Pozzi said, then smiled in anticipation of Brunetti’s response.

  Brunetti forced himself to produce a grin and then cite the same passage in a discreet compliment to Pozzi. ‘What is it that you’ve done, you good and faithful servant?’

  ‘I did as the first servant did: I invested the talent wisely.’

  ‘And how did you do that?’ Brunetti asked, telling himself to behave as though he were being told another story, another nursery rhyme.

  Pozzi looked off into a corner of the ceiling, and Brunetti could all but see him putting his words in order, shifting them around so as to put the hero in the right place at the right time, where he was sure to do the one right thing. Brunetti noticed that Pozzi actually looked bigger than he had when they entered the room.

  ‘I invested it in my future,’ Pozzi finally said with a very small smile.

  Brunetti allowed his eyes to travel appreciatively around the entire room, his gaze lingering longer than necessary on the bookcase, consciously avoiding the place where Griffoni sat, before he returned it to Pozzi. He thought of complimenting him on the room, but, much as he tried, he could not bring himself to speak those words. Instead, he indicated the room with a wave, and nodded.

  Taking Brunetti’s gaze as a compliment, Pozzi continued. ‘It took me some time to realize that I had something to sell and had a buyer.’

  ‘You make it sound easy,’ Brunetti said, relieved to find the words sounding normal.

  ‘I was in the hospital for months, you know?’ Pozzi asked, and Brunetti responded with a shake of his head meant to suggest ignorance of and sympathy for this fact.