A Sea of Troubles

'But?'

'But two of my nephews are fishermen, have their own boats. And I retire in two years.'

When Brunetti realized that was all the answer Bonsuan was willing to volunteer, he asked, 'What does that mean?'

'It means my life is on the laguna, not here at the Questura; at least it won't be two years from now.'

Brunetti found it a reasonable enough stance. But he tried, nevertheless. 'But if these fish are contaminated in some way, then isn't it dangerous for people to eat them?'

'Does that mean what I think it does, sir?' Bonsuan asked quietly.

'What?'

'That you're appealing to my duty as a citizen to help get rid of a public danger? It sounds to me like you're asking me to act like I'm Greenpeace and tell you who these people are so that you can stop them from doing something that's dangerous to people and the environment.'

Though there was not a hint of sarcasm in the way he spoke, Brunetti could not help but feel that Bonsuan's remark made a fool of him. 'Yes, I suppose it's something like that,' he admitted unwillingly.

Bonsuan moved around in the chair, pulled himself upright, and placed his palms flat on his knees, though his feet were still firmly braced in anticipation of a sudden wave. 'I'm not an educated man, sir,' he began, 'so I'm sure my thinking on this isn't very clear, but I don't see what difference it makes.' Brunetti chose not to interrupt, so the pilot went on. 'Remember when there was talk of closing the chemical plants because of the pollution they caused?' He glanced across at Brunetti and waited for an answer.

'Yes.' Of course he remembered. Investigators had, a few years ago, found all manner of toxic material seeping, pouring, flooding into the laguna from the various chemical and petrochemical plants on the mainland. There'd even been a list in the papers of the workers who had died from cancer during the last ten years, a number so high as to soar off the charts of all probability. A judge had ordered the plants closed, declaring them a danger to the health of the people who worked there, leaving moot the question of the damage they did to the people who lived around them. And within a day there had been a mass protest and the threat of violence from the workers themselves, the very men who handled, breathed in, got splashed by the toxins that were said to be killing them. They demanded that the factories be kept open, that they continue to be allowed to work, and insisted that the long-term possibility of disease was less dangerous than the immediate one of unemployment. And so the plants remained open, the men continued to work, and very little more was said or written about this other tide that flowed into the laguna.

Bonsuan had gone silent, and so Brunetti prompted him. 'What about it?'

'Clara has a patient,' Bonsuan began, naming his daughter, a doctor with an office in Castello. 'He's got some rare form of lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. His wife doesn't smoke, either.' He waved his right hand in the general direction of the mainland. 'But he's worked out there for twenty years.'

Bonsuan stopped; Brunetti asked, 'And?'

'And though Clara's got statistics that say this form of cancer is found only in people who have had long exposure to one of the chemicals they use out there, he still refuses to believe it could have been caused by the place where he works. His wife says it's God's will, and he says it's just bad luck. Clara gave up talking to him about it when she saw that it didn't make any difference to them what it was that was going to kill him. She says there's no way she could make him believe his work had anything to do with it.'

This time, Bonsuan didn't bother to wait for Brunetti to ask for clarification. 'So I don't think it makes any difference if someone warns people that the clams are dangerous, or the fish or the shrimp. They're going to say that their parents always ate them and they lived to be ninety or they're going to say that you can't worry about everything. Or they're going to get angry that you're trying to take people's jobs away from them. But the one thing you're not going to do is stop people from doing what they want to do, whether it's eat fish that glows in the dark or pay a bribe so they can go on catching and selling it.'

This, Brunetti realized, was the longest speech he'd heard Bonsuan give in all the years he'd known him. Because the pilot had begun it by mentioning his nephews and the fact of his imminent retirement, Brunetti refused to believe that his explanation was completely truthful.

'When you retire,' Brunetti began, 'are you going to work with your nephews?'

'I've got a pilot's licence,' Bonsuan answered. 'I can't afford to buy a taxi. I don't think I'd like the work, anyway. They're another bunch of greedy bastards.'

'And you know the laguna,' Brunetti suggested.

'And I know the laguna.'

Resigned, Brunetti asked, 'Is there anything you can tell me?'

Bonsuan, he knew, was not as tough as he appeared to be. Over the years, Brunetti had occasionally seen him discard the carapace he wore, abandon the disguise of dour old sea dog who was never surprised by the crimes of men. 'It might help, you know,' Brunetti added, doing his best to make it sound as if he was suggesting, rather than pleading.

Bonsuan pushed himself to his feet. Before he turned to the door, he said, 'It's not a question of which fishermen do this, sir; it's more a question of which ones don't.' He aimed his right hand in the general direction of his forehead in what Brunetti supposed was meant to be a salute, then added, 'It's too big for you, and it's too big for us.' He said good morning and left the office.

This left Brunetti little wiser than before he asked the pilot to come up. He realized now how foolish he had been to hope that appeals to loyalty to the police or the public good would have any effect when in competition with tribe or, worse, family. He supposed it was a step towards civilization, the ability to think of tribe or family rather than of the self, but it seemed such a tiny step. As always, when he caught himself making these sweeping generalizations about human behaviour, usually when he needed some justification for criticizing the behaviour of someone he knew, he ended up asking himself if, in the same circumstances, he'd behave any differently. The usual conclusion he came to, that he probably would not, put an end to his reflections and left him feeling slightly uncomfortable with an ever-judgmental self. After all, there was very little evidence that public institutions or government took even the least interest in the public good.

He reflected on his brief conversation with Bonsuan. Certainly, over the years, he'd read numerous accounts of the violence in those waters: boats running aground or into one another; men fallen or knocked overboard and then either saved or drowned; shots fired from boats that were not seen, coming from men whose identity was never discovered. For the most part, however, the laguna was generally perceived as a benign presence by the people who lived their lives surrounded by it, many of whom owed their lives and fortunes to it.

In the face of his growing curiosity, he abandoned the superstitious idea that he could somehow influence Signorina Elettra's decision and called down to her to ask if she would check the files of the Gazzettino for the last three years and see what she could find about the laguna, fishermen, and the vongolari, specifically anything that had to do with acts of violence among the fishermen themselves and between them and the police. He knew he'd read more than one article, but because reports of violence on the water often were made to the harbour police or the Carabinieri, he had paid little attention to them.

Child of its waters, Brunetti still idealized the laguna as a peaceful place. Did people in India, he wondered, think of Mother Ganges in this manner, as the liquid source of all life, the giver of food and bringer of peace? He'd recently read an article in one of Paola's English magazines on the pollution of the Ganges and the way it was now, in many places, irreversibly fouled, sure to carry disease, if not death, to the people who bathed in or drank its waters, while a lethargic government concerned itself with posturing and empty phrases. He contemplated this but before he could begin to bask in a sense of European superiority, he recalled Vianello's refusal to eat molluscs and Bonsuan's explanation of the forces that allowed them to be dredged from the bottom of the laguna.

From his lower drawer he took out the phone book. Feeling not a little foolish, he opened it at the Ps and, quickly turning the pages, found 'Police'. The sub-listings, for San Polo, Railway and Frontier, were not very promising. Nor did he think there would be much joy on offer from the Postal Police or the Highway Police. He shut the directory, dialled the switchboard downstairs, and asked the operator to whom calls about trouble in the laguna were directed. The man on duty explained that it depended what sort of problem