‘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,
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.’
