A Sea of Troubles

pieces of wood fell below into the engine room where one fell on to a pile of oil-damp rags, which flared instantly into life and passed the fire gracefully towards the fuel line.

Slowly, the fire worked at the area around the narrow tube; slowly it burned away the surrounding wood and then, as the wood turned to ash and fell away, a small piece of solder melted, opening a gap that allowed the flame to enter the pipe and move with blinding speed down towards the engines and to the dual fuel tanks which supplied them.

None of the people sleeping in Pellestrina that night had any idea of the motion of the flames, but all of them were rocked awake when the fuel tanks on the Squallus exploded, filling the night air with a glaring burst of light and, seconds later, with a thud so loud that, the next day, people as far away as Chioggia claimed they heard it.

Fire is terrifying anywhere, but for some reason it seems more so at sea or, at least, on the water. The first people who looked out of their bedroom windows said later that they saw the boat shrouded in heavy, oily smoke that rose up as the fire was extinguished by the water. But by then the flames had had time to slip through the Squallus to the boats moored on either side of it and set them smouldering, and the exploding fuel had splashed in deadly arcs, not only to the decks of the boats moored beside it, but out on to the levee in front, where it set three wooden benches ablaze.

After the blast from the Squallus's fuel tanks, there followed a moment of stunned silence, then Pellestrina exploded into noise and action. Doors flew open and men ran out into the night; some of them wore trousers pulled on over pyjamas, some wore only pyjamas, some had taken the time to dress, two were entirely naked, though no one paid any attention to that fact, so urgent was the need to save the boats. The owners of the boats moored alongside the Squallus jumped from the dock on to the decks at almost the same instant, though one had had to pull himself from the bed of his cousin's wife and had come twice as far as the other. Both of them yanked fire extinguishers from their stanchions on the deck and began to spray at the flames that had followed the burning oil.

The owners of boats moored further from the now empty space where the Squallus had once floated churned their engines to life and began frantically backing away from the burning boats. One of them, in his panic, forgot to cast off the mooring rope and yanked a metre-long strip of wood from the railing of his boat. But even as he looked back and saw the splintered wood floating where he had been moored, he didn't stop until his boat was a hundred metres from land and safe from the flames. .

As he watched, those flames gradually lessened on the decks of the other boats. Two more men, each carrying a fire extinguisher, arrived from the nearby houses. Jumping on to the deck of one of the boats, they began spraying the flames, which were quickly controlled and then finally quelled. At about the same time the owner of the other boat, which had not been as heavily sprayed with fuel, managed to get the flames under control and then extinguished them with the thick white froth. Long after there was no more sign of fire, he continued spraying back and forth, back and forth, until the froth was gone and he lowered the empty fire extinguisher to the deck.

By then, more than a hundred people were clustered along the levee, shouting to the men on the boats that had managed to back out into the harbour, to one another, and to the men who had conquered the flames on their boats. Expressions of shock and concern flew from every lip, anxious questions about what had been seen, what could have started the fire.

The first to ask the question that was to silence them all, the silence slowly rippling out from her like infection from a uncleaned wound, was Chiara Petulli, the next-door neighbour of Giulio Bottin. She was standing at the front of the crowd, not more than two metres from the large metal stanchion from which dangled the scorched cable that had once held the Squallus safely in place. She turned to the woman next to her, the widow of a fisherman who had died in an accident only the year before, and asked, 'Where's Giulio?'

The widow looked around. She repeated the question. The person next to her picked it up and passed it on until, in a matter of moments the question had been passed through the entire crowd, asked but not answered.

'Arid Marco?' Chiara Petulli added. This time everyone heard her question. Though his boat lay in the shallow waters, its scorched masts just breaking the surface, Giulio Bottin was not there, nor was his son Marco, eighteen years old and already part owner of the Squallus, which lay burnt and dead at the bottom of the harbour of Pellestrina on this suddenly chill springtime morning.

2

The whispers started then, as people tried to remember when they had last seen Giulio or Marco. Giulio usually played cards in the bar after dinner; had anyone seen him last night? Marco had a girlfriend down in S. Pietro in Volta, but the girl's brother was in the crowd and said she'd gone to the movies on the Lido with her sisters. No one could think of a woman who would be with Giulio Bottin. Someone thought to look in the courtyard beside the Bottin house; both their cars were there, though the house was dark.

A curious reluctance, a kind of delicacy in the face of possibility, kept the people in the crowd from speculating where they might be. Renzo Marolo, who had lived next door for more than thirty years, found the courage to do what no one else was willing to do and took the spare key from where everyone in the village knew it to be, under the pot of pink geraniums on the windowsill to the right of the front door. Calling ahead of him, he opened the door and stepped into the familiar house. He switched on the lights in the small living room and, seeing no one there, went and looked in the kitchen, though he couldn't have explained why he did so, as the room was dark, and he didn't bother to turn the light on. Then, still calling out the names of the two men in a kind of unmusical voluntary, he went up the single flight of steps to the upper floor and down the hall to the larger of the two bedrooms.

'Giulio, it's me, Renzo,' he called, paused a moment, then stepped into the bedroom and switched on the light. The bed was empty and unslept in. Unsettled by this, he went across the hall and turned on the light in Marco's room. Here, too, though a pair of jeans and a light sweater lay folded on a chair, both bed and room were empty.

Marolo went back downstairs and outside, closing the door quietly behind him and replacing the key. To the waiting people, he said, 'They aren't here.'

As a group, somehow comforted by the fact that there were a number of them, they moved back towards the water, where most of the inhabitants of Pellestrina were gathered on the edge of the pier. Some of the boats that had found safety in the deeper water pulled slowly back, taking their accustomed places. When all of them were again moored to the riva, the single empty space left by the sunken Squallus seemed larger than it had when there had been only the two damaged boats on either side. From the middle of the empty slot, the masts of the Squallus poked through the water at a crazy angle.

Marolo's son, sixteen-year-old Luciano, came and stood beside his father. Off in the distance, a waterfowl cried out. 'Well, Papa?' the boy asked.

Renzo had watched his son grow up in the shadow or, to use a more nautical metaphor, in the wake of Marco Bottin, who had always been two years ahead of him at school and was thus to be admired and emulated.

Luciano had thrown on a pair of cut-off jeans when his father's shouts woke him but had had no time to put on a shirt. He stepped closer to the water, turned and signalled to his cousin Franco, who stood at the front of the crowd, an enormous flashlight in his left hand. Franco stepped forward reluctantly, shy about putting himself so conspicuously under the scrutiny of the assembled Pellestrinotti.

Luciano kicked off his sandals and knifed into the water just to the left of the sunken prow of the Squallus. Franco stepped forward and played the light into the water below, where his cousin's body moved with fishlike ease. A woman stepped forward, then another, and then the entire first rank of people moved to the edge of the pier and stared down. Two men holding flashlights pushed their way through and added their beams to Franco's.

After what was little more than a minute but seemed an eternity, Luciano's head broke the surface of the water. Shaking his hair back out of his eyes, he shouted up to his cousin, 'Shine it back towards the cabin,' and was gone, ducking under the water as quickly as a seal.

All three lights moved along the hulk of the Squallus. Occasionally they caught a flash of white from one of the soles of Luciano's feet, the only part of his body that was not tanned to near- blackness. They lost him for an instant, then his head and shoulders burst from the water, and he was gone again. Twice more he shot up and filled his lungs, diving back towards the wreck. At last he surfaced and lay on his back