Death in a Strange Country (29 page)

This had to be the
connecting link between the two deaths or else she would not have sent the
envelope to him, then tried to call. The child had been her patient, but then
he had been taken away and sent up to Germany, and there the medical record
ended. He had the child’s last name, and Ambrogiani would certainly have access
to a list of all the Americans stationed at the base, so it would be easy
enough to learn if the boy’s family was still there. And if they weren’t?

He picked up the phone
and asked the operator to get him Maggiore Ambrogiani at the American base in
Vicenza. While he waited for the call to go through, he tried to think of a way
all of this could be made to connect, hoping that it would lead him to whoever
it was had pushed the needle into the doctor’s arm.

Ambrogiani answered by
giving his name. He showed no surprise when Brunetti told him who it was,
merely held the line and allowed the silence to lengthen.

‘Has there been any
progress there?’ Brunetti asked.
               
                     
   

‘They seem to have
instituted a whole new series of drug tests. Everyone is subject to it, even
the commander of the hospital. The rumour is he had to go into the men’s room
and give a urine sample while one of the doctors waited outside. Apparently,
they’ve done more than a hundred this week.’

‘With what results?’

‘Oh, none yet. All of the
samples have to be sent up to Germany, to the hospitals there, to be tested.
Then the results come down after a month or so.’

‘And they’re accurate?’
Brunetti asked, amazed that any organization could or would trust results that
passed through so many hands, over so long a period of time.

‘They seem to believe so.
If the test is positive, they simply throw you out.’

‘Who’s being tested?’

‘There’s no pattern. The
only ones they’re leaving alone are the ones who keep coming back from the
Middle East.’

‘Because they’re heroes?’
Brunetti asked.

‘No, because they’re
afraid too many of them will test positive. Drugs are as easy to get in that
part of the world as they were in Vietnam, and apparently they’re afraid it
will create too much bad publicity if all of their heroes come back with
souvenirs in their bloodstreams.’

‘Is it still given out
that it was an overdose?’

‘Absolutely. One of my
men told me her family wouldn’t even come to accompany the body back to America.’

‘So what happened?’

‘They sent it back. But
it went back alone.’

Brunetti told himself it
didn’t matter. The dead didn’t care about such things; it made no difference to
them how they were treated or what the living thought of them. But he didn’t
believe this.

‘I’d like you to try to
get some information for me, Maggiore.’

‘If I can. Gladly.’

‘I’d like to know if
there’s a soldier stationed there named Kayman.’ He spelled the name for Ambrogiani.
‘He has a son, nine years old, who was a patient of Doctor Peters. The boy was
sent up to a hospital in Germany, at Landstuhl. I’d like to know if the parents
are still there, and if they are, I’d like to be able to speak to them.’

‘Unofficial, all of this?’

‘Very.’

‘Can you tell me what it’s
about?’

‘I’m not sure. She sent
me a copy of the boy’s medical file, and an article about PCBs.’

‘About what?’

‘Toxic chemicals. I’m not
sure what they’re made of or what they do, but I know disposing of them is
difficult. And they’re corrosive. The child had a rash on his arm, probably
caused by exposure to them.’

‘What’s that got to do
with the Americans?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why
I want to speak to the boy’s parents.’

‘All right. I’ll get busy
with this now and call you this afternoon.’
         
             

‘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,
Global Suicide.
He hoped that the treatment of the
subject would be more serious than either the title or the cover promised.

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.’

‘No. I don’t want that,’
Brunetti said. ‘But I want to be able to talk to him, away from there.’

‘Give me a day. I’ll have
one of my men go into the office where he works and find out who he is.
Luckily, they all wear those name tags on their uniforms. Then I’ll see about
having him followed. It shouldn’t be too difficult. I’ll call you tomorrow, and
then you can think about setting up a meeting with him. Most of them live off the
base. In fact, if he’s got children, he’s certain to. I’ll call you tomorrow
and let you know what I manage, all right?’

Brunetti could see no
better way. He realized how much he wanted to get on a train to Vicenza
immediately, speak to the boy’s father, and begin to piece together the puzzle
of how the picnic and the rash and that pencilled notation in the margin of the
medical record had led to the murder of those two young people. He had some of
the pieces; the boy’s father must have another one; sooner or later, by putting
them together and examining them, switching them to new positions, he would be
sure to see the pattern that now lay hidden.

Seeing no other solution,
he agreed to Ambrogiani’s suggestion that he wait for his call the following day.
He opened the third book again, drew a piece of paper from his desk, and began
to make a list of all of the companies which were suspected of hauling or
shipping toxic wastes without the proper authorization and another of all of
the companies which were named as having already been formally accused of
illegal dumping. Most of them were located in the North and most of those in
Lombardy, me manufacturing heart of the country.