1
A man and a woman deep in conversation approached the steps of Ponte dei Lustraferi, both looking hot and uncomfortable on this late July afternoon. The broad riva gave no quarter to anyone walking along it; the white surface of the stone worked in consort with the sun, flashing back into their faces the same sunlight that hammered down on their backs.
The man had refused to wear his jacket; instead, he carried it over his shoulder, one finger latched in the loop at the collar. The woman, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail to keep it off her back, wore beige linen trousers and a white linen shirt with long sleeves against the sun. They stopped in their tracks at the foot of the bridge, staring at the enormous boat moored in the Rio della Misericordia, blocking other boats from entering Rio dei Lustraferi, which ran perpendicularly to the right. A wall of interlocking corrugated metal panels stretched from side to side of the smaller canal, creating a dam beyond which the water level had shrunk by half.
The disappearing water had exposed slopes of mud and nastylooking black matter on both sides of a wide channel of oily black liquid that extended down the centre of the blocked canal. At the far end, perhaps fifty metres away, another wall of metal panels had been pounded into the mud, sealing off the canal. A boat with a yellow-bodied crane on a platform at the centre floated behind the far barrier, in front of it a hulk into which the crane emptied the sludge it dredged from the canal. A sudden gust of wind coming from the laguna dragged the smell of the mud ahead of it without disturbing the surface of the viscous fluid. A diesel motor on the boat whined as it sucked the remaining water through an enormous plastic hose draped over the metal panels and spewed it into the canal on the other side of the barrier.
‘Oddio,’ said Commissario Claudia Griffoni. ‘I’ve never seen this before.’
Guido Brunetti, her friend and colleague, stood motionless, his right foot poised above the first step of the bridge, transfixed, like stout Cortez staring at the Pacific. With wild surmise, he exclaimed, ‘I haven’t seen this for years.’
Griffoni laughed and waved at the sight before them. ‘I had no idea how it was done.’ She walked to the top of the bridge to get a better look at the metal barrier.
Brunetti followed and stood beside her. ‘Where’d they find the money for this?’ he asked, as though speaking to himself. That morning’s Gazzettino had printed a long article about the infrastructure projects diminished or cancelled for lack of funding. It listed the usual victims: the old, the young, residents who wanted to live in peace and quiet, students, teachers, even the firemen. Recalling it, Brunetti wondered how the mayor of the city, deus ex machina, had found the necessary funds in the city budget to begin the cleaning of the canals.
‘How kind of the mayor to toss the city some table scraps,’ Griffoni observed.
Brunetti ran his eyes down the slopes of the canal, where the mud and detritus of decades had been exposed. The black slime began just below the high-water mark, growing thicker as it slithered into deeper water. Dark, rotten, its smell strongly unpleasant, slippery and slick, it resembled nothing so much as human waste; it filled Brunetti with disgust almost as strong as horror. ‘How fitting that it would come from him,’ he said.
Despite the smell, they made no attempt to leave. Brunetti remembered how scenes like this had been a part of his youth, when cleaning had been done primarily by hand and with far greater frequency. He recalled the wooden walkways built on both sides of the canals and the cat-like ease of the workers moving about on them with their shovels and buckets.
Thunder pealed beyond them, and they raised their hands to protect their ears. It was the motor of the crane on the boat. A black metal jaw stood in the centre of the deck, neck bent, giant mouth closed and resting.
They saw, inside a glass booth towards the prow, a man in dark blue overalls, a cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth, both hands busy with the knobs and levers before him. Returned to childhood glee, Brunetti stood transfixed by the wonder of it and by the desire for a job like that, so very close to play, but with oh, such power. Griffoni seemed equally rapt, though Brunetti doubted she longed for the job. Besides, it was unlikely that the city would hire a Neapolitan, a far greater handicap than being a woman.
Without speaking, they walked to the other side of the bridge and watched, silent, as the clenched steel teeth of the crane rose from the deck and angled out over the water. They opened, creating a hideous black maw of jagged teeth, then slowly sank to the surface of the water and disappeared below.
The man’s hands moved, and the long steel arm shifted minimally to the right, paused and seemed to shake about under the water, then began to rise. As it broke the greasy surface, Brunetti saw pieces of plastic, rubber, and metal hanging from the teeth: it looked like a particularly large Rottweiler eating a bowl of spaghetti. The long arm lifted and held the jaws in the air while water cascaded back into the canal, then swung to the front of the boat, already heaped with mud-smeared rubbish. It stopped just above the pile of trash and sludge. Slowly the jaws pulled open, and the junk inside crashed and clanged down on to the pile. A few small motions of the worker’s hands shook the last fragments free, and then the jaws swung back and sank again into the water.
They had not noticed a second worker standing on the riva with a shovel in his hands. As soon as the metal jaws moved away, he stepped on to a board running across the boat and smoothed out the pile of debris, shifting rotting plastic bags filled with bottles to the sides, shoving at a decomposing radio, the wheel of a bicycle, and some other objects too decayed to be identifiable.
They watched in companionable silence for a long time, neither wanting to start walking again, each convinced that only the other person could understand the joint pleasure to be had in watching the machine at work. Neither spoke, united in a strange intimacy.
After ten minutes, the crane operator got to his feet suddenly, climbed down the short ladder from his chair to the deck, and hurried to the side of the boat. He leaned over the water and stared down, then put his hands above his forehead to block the glare of the sun and moved slightly to the right, still looking intently into the water. He went back up to the control panel and touched something that made the hum of the motor diminish. He called to the man with the shovel, then summoned him with a wave. Brunetti and Griffoni watched the man with the shovel jump on to the traverse board, almost immediately to be joined by the crane operator, who directed his attention to the same place in the water. The sound of the motor drowned out their voices; the urgency of what the first one said was evident in his gestures.
Brunetti was struck by how stiff the two men’s stance and motions had become. The man running the machine had been entirely at ease, but when he returned to his seat, he seemed awkward, and Brunetti had the strong sense that he was reluctant to continue.
Let it not be what I think it might be, Brunetti said to himself, unwilling to say anything to Griffoni for fear that he would seem foolish or be proven foolish by whatever the jaws might pull out of the water. He glanced down at his hands, grasping at the metal handrail attached to the edge of the bridge, and saw that his knuckles were white. He looked to his right and saw that Griffoni’s were, as well. He turned minimally to his friend and saw her rigid profile, the stiffness in the line of her jaw.
Brunetti looked back at the metal arm of the crane. At a certain point, the mechanic took his hands from the controls and jumped down again to the deck to peer over the side of the boat. He exchanged a look with his colleague, who had returned to stand on the riva, shrugged and walked back to his place at the controls.