anything but float in the wake of whatever hand it was that pulled at him. Something hit against his feet, and he felt mild irritation at the sensation. He was comforted by weightlessness, which removed the pain in his side; he didn't want to have to swim or stand, when floating was so much easier, so painless.
But the hand pulled at him, and he was powerless to resist it. When his feet touched bottom for an instant, the pain took this as a sign that it was safe to return. Stabbing, jabbing, cutting, it filled his side, bending him over until his feet floated free and his face plunged into the water. But the hand, relentless, grabbed at his hair again, jerking him sideways and forward, away from the pleasant safety of the deep water, the ease and weightless comfort it offered. He allowed himself to be pulled a metre forward through the water and then another, and then suddenly he could go no farther. Quite reasonably, he thought, he reached to place his right hand on the fingers that still tugged at him. He patted them once, twice, and then in his most reasonable voice, he said, 'Thank you, but that's enough.' Like the tree in the uninhabited forest, his words went unheard, and then an enormous wave rolled across him.
25
Like a beached whale, Brunetti lay on the sand, unable to move. He'd swallowed a great deal of water, and fierce coughing had exhausted him. He lay in the rain as waves came and flirted with his feet and legs, as if to suggest he stop lying there on the sand and come in and have a proper swim. Their solicitations went unheeded. Occasionally, and entirely without conscious thought, he clawed and pushed himself forward a few centimetres, away from the frolicsome waves.
His panic diminished, then slowly left him as he lay there. The howling of the wind was no less fierce, the lash of the rain no less severe, but somehow the solidity beneath him, the safety of beach, sand, mother earth, lulled him into a sense of protected calm. His mind began to drift, and he found himself thinking that his jacket would have to be taken to the cleaners, was perhaps ruined entirely, and he minded that, for it was his best jacket, one he'd treated himself to when sent to Milan last year to testify, finally, in a court case concerning a murder that had been committed twelve years before. The thought passed through his mind that these were indeed strange thoughts to be entertaining in his present circumstances, and then he reflected upon his own ability to find these particular thoughts strange. How proud Paola, who always accused him of having a simple mind, would be when he told her of how very convoluted his thoughts had become, becalmed on a beach somewhere beyond Pellestrina. She'd mind about the jacket, too, he was sure; she'd always said it was the nicest one he had.
He lay prone in the rain and thought of his wife, and after a time that thought led him to pull one knee, and then the other, under him, and then it helped prod him to his feet. He looked around and saw nothing; his hearing was still dulled by the wind and rain. He turned in the direction from which he thought he must have come, searching for some sign of the boat or the single spotlight that had still been ablaze when he leaped from the deck, but darkness was everywhere.
He put his head back and yelled into the tempest, 'Bonsuan, Bonsuan!' When only the wind replied, he called again, 'Danilo, Danilo!' but still he heard no answer. He walked ahead a few steps, his hands stretched out in front of him like a blind man's calling as he went. After a few moments, his left hand hit against something: a flat surface rising up in front of him. This must be the wall of the abandoned fort of Ca' Roman, known to him only as a mark and a name on a map.
He moved closer until his chest touched the wall, then he spread his arms to explore outwards on both sides. Sticking close to the wall, he moved slowly to the right, turning to the side so that he could use both hands to feel ahead of him.
He heard a noise behind him and stopped, surprised, not by the noise itself so much as by the fact that he could hear it. He tried to empty his mind and listened afresh to the sound of the storm; after a time he grew certain that its sound was diminishing. Clearly, there, he heard what must be the crashing of a wave, the thunderous pelting of water on hard sand. As he listened, it seemed that the wind became still milder; as it decreased in intensity, he grew colder, though that might be nothing more than the passing of the dullness of shock. He untied the life jacket and let it fall to the ground.
He took a few more steps, reaching ahead of him, fingers delicate as a snail's antennae. Suddenly the surface disappeared beneath his left hand, and when he reached into the nothingness, he could feel the hard rectangularity surrounding a lintel or passageway. He outlined it, still unseeing, with the fingers of both hands and then placed a tentative foot into its centre, hunting for a step or stairway, either up or down.
A low step carried his foot down. Propping both hands on what seemed to be the sides of a narrow passageway, he went down one, two, three steps until he felt a wider area beneath his carefully exploring foot.
In the silence, cut off from the sound of the wind, his other senses sprang to life, and he was overwhelmed by the stink of urine and mould and he knew not what else. Inside, away from the buffeting wind, he should have grown warmer, but if anything, he now felt far colder than he had outside, as though the silence gave penetrating force to both cold and humidity.
He stood there, listening, focusing ahead of him on wherever this void would lead him, and backwards, up the steps and out into the diminishing storm. He moved to the right until he touched a wall, then turned and braced his back against it, comforted by stability. He stood like that for a long time until, glancing in what he thought was the direction of the opening, he saw light filtering in from the outside. He walked towards it, and when he stood in the glow it cast, he held his watch up to his face. Astonished to see that it was still only early evening, he moved closer to the now-illumined steps, drawn by the promise of light and by the silence that spilled down the steps.
He emerged into splendour: to the west, the sun made its languorous way towards the horizon, dipping behind the scattered clouds the passing storm had forgotten to sweep away and dappling the still waters of the
Brunetti was racked with a sudden chill as hunger, stress and the slow drop in temperature had their way with his body. He wrapped his arms around himself and moved forward. Again, he called Bonsuan's name, and again he heard nothing in response. From what he could see, the land around him was surrounded on three sides by water with a thin trail of narrow beach leading off to the north. His recent study of the map of the
He turned and saw the ruined fort behind him. He went back to it: perhaps there were other doors or other entrances in which the pilot might have taken shelter. To the left of the doorway he'd used there was another one, leading up. He climbed up a single flight of stairs, hoping that the movement would bring some relief to his chilling body, but he found neither warmth nor Bonsuan. He went back outside and returned to where he had started, seeing nothing. Still farther along to the left, he found another door, also leading down.
At the entrance he called the pilot's name. A noise, perhaps a voice, answered him, and he went down the steps. Bonsuan sat against the wall just at the bottom, his head leaning back against it, his huddled body illuminated by the sun that cascaded down the steps. When he reached the older man, Brunetti could make out the paleness of his face, but he could see that the cut on his head had stopped bleeding. Bonsuan, too, had discarded his life jacket.
'Come on, Bonsuan,' he said, making himself sound hearty and in charge. 'Let's get out of here and back to Pellestrina.'
Bonsuan smiled agreement and started to get to his feet. Brunetti helped him up; once he was upright, the older man seemed fairly steady.
'How are you?' Brunetti asked.
'Got a terrible headache,' the pilot said, smiling, 'but at least I've still got a head to ache.' He freed himself from Brunetti's arm and started up the stairs. At the top, he turned and called back down, 'God, what a storm. Nothing like it since 1927.'
Because the shadow cast by Bonsuan's body fell down the stairway, blocking the light, Brunetti looked down at the first step to see where to set his foot. When he looked up, he saw that Bonsuan had sprouted a branch. Even before he registered the impossibility of this, the panic he'd felt during the storm leaped at him.
Men don't grow branches; pieces of wood do not grow out of the chests of men. Not unless they have been pushed in from the other side.
