White Death (11 page)

‘Or murderer?’

He ignored me. ‘All you would be doing is tipping off the big players, telling them all that they should run for cover. Believe me, if you want to build a case, you have to build it, you can’t take the first brick you find and throw it to the crowd. That just draws attention to yourself and hurts the wrong people.’

I was shaking my head angrily. I felt like I was pumping the accelerator of a car in neutral. I was desperate to do something, but I felt impotent and here was the man I trusted more than any other telling me to stay like that. To go with the flow. He was almost double my age and half my speed and I suddenly felt there was a gulf between us. I felt the old furies rising up. I tried to douse them with a swig of the wine but, as always, that only gave them strength.

Giacomo could see what was happening and put a hand on my forearm. ‘Casta,’ he said gently, ‘Casta, look at me.’

It took an effort to aim my stare in his direction.

‘I hate what goes on here as much as you do,’ he said. ‘I’ve dedicated my life to trying to change the system, you know I have. But you can’t just stand up and denounce the lot. You’d
have every part of the establishment on your back. You’d have their usual attack dogs let off the lead and pointed in your direction. You don’t even know what went on yet.’

I was almost dizzy with anger. Shaking my head in frustration, I felt him squeeze my arm. ‘You’ve got an idea.’ I heard his voice. ‘You’ve got a circle of corruption. Politician to businessman and back to politician’s family. I see it all the time. But you’ve got to get inside that circle. It’s no good pointing at it and shouting for people to come and have a look. It’s like pointing at a child’s bubble: as soon as you touch it it disappears.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘You’ve got to assume they’re more worried about losing a business opportunity than losing a twenty-two-year-old boy. They still want that land. They don’t care whether it’s got blood on it.’

I looked up at him. It was the first time he had suggested there was something positive that could be done. He patted my arm as if to emphasise the point. He was giving me the same advice I had given Bragantini: that he should pretend he wanted to sell. Only that way could we see who stepped forward.

‘The carrot rather than the stick?’

He nodded, grimacing slightly as if it went against his instincts as much as mine. ‘You have to deal with them to know who they are. You have to get close to them.’

I stared at the table, hearing his words as if they were coming from miles away. Most people who got sucked into the system started that way. Justifying their presence inside it by saying they just wanted to understand it. They wanted to
know how it worked, so they could know how to bring it down. Only most of them eventually got sucked in. They started doing deals themselves. They got too close and couldn’t pull out the knife or slip off the cuffs any more.

I breathed deeply and recovered my composure.

‘You OK?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Can you do me a favour?’

He nodded quickly like it was obvious.

‘Tell me who’s pushing the “Bragantini Assassino” slogan in your party. I want to know if someone your end is stirring up the campaign against him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It suits everyone to paint my client as the fall guy, as the evil padrone. It suits your side because your followers love nothing better than proof that the landowning classes are ruthless profiteers.’

He winced at my parody of his politics, but said nothing.

‘And the ruling party will be happy because they want all the heat on him, not themselves. Someone in the giunta wants that land sold and they’ll be happy to see Bragantini under as much pressure as possible.’

‘And you think someone is puppeteering?’

‘Someone’s pulling the strings. Someone from Italia Fiera will be making your lot dance to their tune.’

‘I hope you’re wrong.’

‘You’ll let me know?’

He nodded wearily, staring into his glass before draining it. He put it down slowly and we looked at each other without saying anything. I left my wine unfinished and we headed out into the warm night air.

The demonstration was breaking up and Giacomo and I shook hands on the corner of the square. ‘Mi raccomando,’ he said, before walking off to join his comrades.

It was another beautiful spring evening. As I walked towards the river, I could just see the black outline of the Apennines in the distance. I leant over the balustrades and stared at the river, at all the water that had washed down from those mountains as the snow had melted. It glistened in the last light of the sun.

Everything looked stunning: there was just a trace of blue light left on the horizon and above it the sky went orange and black. I could see young couples walking towards the Parco Ducale, the dimming light adding intimacy to their stroll. I looked back at the Pilotta and saw its familiar bricks looking august and defiant. Bats were pirouetting above the line of mopeds that were making their way home.

Standing there, with the sound of the strong river beneath my feet, I could understand why people didn’t want to hear about any more scandals. There are just so many already. We’ve all got scandal-fatigue in this country. It’s got to the stage where it’s repetitive and predictable. A politician suspected of this. A businessman suspected of that. It’s only ever a suspicion anyway. There’s no certainty in scandal, just supposition and guess-work and paranoia. It drives people insane after a while. There are people who have lost their bearings completely, who have lost the ability to be able to believe anything they’re told. They end up driven mad by doubt and suspicion. It’s so much easier to take everything at face value, to believe what they tell you. To go to the beach
and swim in the sea. Go to the mountains and enjoy the slopes. Order tortelli and crack open the Sangiovese.

But then I thought about Tommy Mbora. Thought about his blackened body, lying there rigid and flakey like a
half-charred
log. That was reality. No amount of Arcadian langour could remove those images from my mind. I didn’t want to live in a fairytale. Didn’t want to swallow all that bull about the bel paese.

I walked home along the river feeling melancholic. I felt the need for company, the need to spend time with my bees. I wanted to be hypnotised by nature outside the city. I drove to the supermarket on the way to Mauro’s house. I put twelve kilos of sugar in my basket and headed to the check-out.

‘Sweet tooth?’ smiled the woman at the counter as she fired a line of red light onto the barcodes.

I smiled and passed her a note but didn’t say anything. I was too tired to explain what it was for. I headed out to Mauro’s place in the country where I kept the hives and parked in the drive. The lights were on inside, but I didn’t want to disturb him. I went into his garage and found an axe. I sharpened it on his stone. Within a few minutes I had enough logs and kindling. I took them out to the corner of his yard and lit a small fire. I went to get a pan and filled it half full of icy water from the outside tap. By the time I had done, the wood was hissing and spitting nicely. I put the water on and stood close to get warmer. I opened all the packets and poured them into the large pan.

As I stirred with a thick stick I could slowly feel the gritty sugar dissolving. The water was thickening into a
mother-of-pearl
syrup. I kept stirring, doing figures of eight with the spoon until I was almost hypnotised.

I always come back to the hives as a respite. Once you’ve
seen all the chaos and bloodshed of the city, you long for the busy serenity of tiny insects, each one performing a precise task for the colony. The bees seem, at first, to embody randomness, but the more you study them and watch them, the more you realise that every movement has a meaning. After a while that frenetic, throbbing hum of thousands of bodies appears beautifully ordered. Every dance
communicates
the distance and direction of nectar. Every determined bee is doing its duty, performing its allotted task for the benefit of queen and colony. I can understand why beekeeping has often been the task of monks, why the modern hive was designed by a priest: the hive is like a monastery where obedience and patience and sacrifice are rewarded. It’s where the beekeeper can renew his sense of awe and wonder at the natural world.

But now even that is threatened. Disease and pollution and climate chaos are threatening the honey bee. My only form of relaxation is under threat, and no one knows the solution. All we know is that the problem is getting worse: there’s less forage, less pollination, fewer flowers, less honey, dying bees. It’s another, much deeper, dissolution of the monasteries. Suddenly, almost without warning, an entire way of life is under threat. The blissful, natural order of the world has been brushed aside and bees are dying and disappearing. The produce I used to get from a hive was about the weight of a sizeable child, enough to fill seventy or eighty jars. Now I’m lucky if I get two dozen jars. My only retreat from the relentless misery of the city has been taken away, and I don’t even know why or how. It’s as if nature itself is giving up on us.

I took the pans of syrup off the fire and put them on the floor to cool. I wandered up to Mauro’s front door and knocked. A year ago he had been unhappily married and then unhappily divorced. For a while all he did was try and drown the memories and I was his preferred drinking partner. But then he met a hippie chick called Giovanna and she had done something to him. For the first time in years he had become sober and cheerful and fun.

He opened the door, looked at me, and grinned. ‘It’s the police,’ he said over his shoulder.

‘Who?’ I heard Giovanna’s voice.

‘Coffee?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, thanks.’ We wandered inside. ‘Ciao Giovanna.’

He went over to the other side of the kitchen and put the water and coffee in the machine. ‘Giovanna doesn’t drink coffee,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘she only drinks strange teas. They all smell like fruit salad to me.’

‘Lemon and ginger,’ she said, smiling, ‘or rosehip and honey.’

‘See what I mean?’

‘You should drink them one day,’ she said. ‘Might calm you down.’

‘That’s what sleep and exercise and sex are for.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll stick with lemon and ginger thanks.’

‘You see,’ he said to me. ‘The passion’s already gone after only a few months.’ He looked over at her and smiled.

I liked Giovanna. She was some kind of
alternative-medicine
guru. She was gentle. She was taking propolis off my hands. It’s one of those by-products of a hive which get in
the way, but she said it was useful for her remedies. Mauro called her a witch-doctor. More witch than doctor, he said.

The coffee came to the boil and he poured it into two tiny cups. He put some water on the flame for Giovanna’s tea.

‘You didn’t come all this way just to get a coffee?’

‘I came round to feed the bees actually.’

‘You already done them?’

‘I’ve made up the syrup. I’m just waiting for it to cool.’

‘Where did you heat it up?’

‘Outside in the yard. I used a couple of logs. Hope you don’t mind.’

He pulled a fake frown. ‘They don’t grow on trees you know.’

We laughed. I hadn’t seen him this cheerful for years. Giovanna took her tea and left us alone.

I told Mauro, without specifics, about the case. I let off steam and, as always when letting off steam, my bitterness became apparent. I criticised the political class, the entrepreneurial class, every aspect of our local racket.

‘The trouble with you’, Mauro said, throwing his thumb backwards at me like he was hitch-hiking, ‘is that you’ve got no pride in your country, no sense,’ he was beating his fist on his heart now, ‘no sense of what makes this country so great.’

I looked at him and raised my eyebrows. ‘Bullshit.’

‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘What’s good about this place?’

‘You want me to prove I’m patriotic?’ The challenge seemed stupid to me, but I didn’t like losing a challenge however stupid. Mauro was hardly patriotic, but he had served his country, or someone’s country, in various war zones: in Kosovo and Sicily and Afghanistan. He could point to his
past and say he had served our weird and wonderful democracy. I thought he probably issued this challenge just to get one up on me, to show that I had never put my life on the line, which wasn’t quite true. I was almost always in the firing line, it’s just that I didn’t have a uniform or an army to protect me. I didn’t know much about history or wars or sport, the usual places patriotism comes from. I wasn’t educated like Mauro. I tried to think of the last time I had been proud of my country.

‘You know why eight millimetres is important in my world?’ I asked him.

He looked at me and frowned. ‘Something to do with firearms?’

‘No. It’s the measurement of the beespace. It’s the distance bees always, in the wild, leave between one comb and the next.’

‘So?’

‘Who do you think discovered that?’

He shrugged.

‘There are two kinds of people’, I said, ‘who have traditionally been pioneering beekeepers. Monks and Italians. The guy who discovered the beespace was both. Almost. He was a churchman called Lorenzo.’

He looked vaguely interested now.

‘The guy revolutionised beekeeping. It meant we no longer had those conical wicker hives where we had to evict or kill the bees to get at their honey. We could now lift out the combs …’

‘And steal their honey?’ Mauro laughed. ‘Sounds just like a priest.’

‘He was American really,’ I said. ‘Called Langstroth. But
his first name was Lorenzo, so you can bet that his mother or grandmother was Italian. That’s where the genius came from. He wrote a manual which is still used today.’

Mauro rolled his head like he was almost impressed.

‘And you know who wrote the first, and still the best, poem about bees, having studied them using a concave mirror in the sixteenth century?’ I waited for him to answer, and raised my eyebrows in sarcastic surprise at his ignorance. ‘Giovanni Rucellai.

‘And who first made detailed drawings of the anatomy of a bee and actually, along with a few others, coined the word “telescope”?’

He shrugged again.

‘A guy called Cesi, Prince Federico Cesi. Know where he was from?’

He threw me a palm to say it was obvious.

‘I-ta-lia,’ I said, imitating the football chant by emphasising each syllable. ‘And which are the most popular bees in the world? Which bees produce most new bees and honey? Which was the kind of bee that Lorenzo Langstroth bred, because it was so beautiful, almost blond, and docile?
Apis
mellifera ligustica
, better known as the Italian bee.’

Mauro grunted.

‘See, I’m proud that my little hobby has been improved and perfected by Italians. It makes me think we’ve got good eyes and brains, that we can improve the world for the better, and that makes me patriotic. You see, in my line …’

‘Your line is crime,’ he interrupted.

I shut my eyes. ‘I wish it wasn’t. If I’m jaundiced, that’s the reason. All I ever see is the worst of this place.’

He nodded, like he knew what I was talking about. And, knowing what he had seen, he probably did. Mauro could be provocative but he could listen when he needed to.

‘All these deaths just stay with you. I met a boy yesterday who was in the bloom of life and today all that was left of him were teeth and bones. You can’t wash that thought away, you can’t drown it with drink or sleep it off. It’s there in your mind like an open wound, a memory that says life can be ended as simply as switching off a light. All you need to do is press a button, pull a trigger, and life is gone. One minute it’s here, the next it’s not. And that thought starts to paralyse you. Starts to make you think it’s not worth doing anything. It’s like trying to persuade yourself to start a game of chess even though the board will be overturned long before the end. If that’s the case, it’s hardly worth starting. You might as well not bother. You become paralysed by inertia and indolence. There doesn’t seem to be any point getting out of the chair, let alone the house. I spend half my life sunk in that chair in the middle of the night, freezing cold but too tired to go and get a pair of socks. Those deaths live with me, haunt me. They seem so pointless.’

I looked up at Mauro. I hadn’t expected to say so much, but it was just coming out.

‘And the only thing’, I went on, ‘that gets me out of that chair at night is the thought that I might be the only person who can make those deaths less pointless. That the only way that any of those deaths has meaning is if I find out who’s responsible, if I make it less of a random act and find out why it happened. If I can place it in the chain of cause and effect. It doesn’t help those grieving for the stiff, but it helps me. It
makes me hope that there’s a reason, however wrong, for what happened.’

He closed his eyes and looked pained. ‘I’m not sure that looking for a reason really helps.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I spent ages looking for the reason my marriage fell apart. And when I found it, it was hard to take.’ He looked at me with sadness. ‘My marriage fell apart because I was always drunk.’

‘I thought it was because you were always away.’

‘That too. But I was sober when I was away, so I was drunk when I was home. You can’t really blame Marta for finding someone else.’

‘You can.’

He shrugged. ‘I never thought it would happen again, that I would ever get together with another woman. But now I’m with Giovanna and I don’t want to lose her just because I suck bottles like a new-born baby.’

‘She’s told you to cut it out?’

‘Not at all. She wouldn’t do that. She’s not like that. If she were, I probably wouldn’t listen, if you see what I mean. That was the problem with Marta. The more she nagged, the more I drank.’

‘And boy could she nag.’

He looked and me and smiled at the solidarity. ‘And I could drink. I’m not saying it was her fault, but you know.’

‘I know,’ I said.

We went outside and started feeding the syrup to the bees. Mauro lifted off the roofs, the zinc sheeting catching the moonlight as he did so. The feeder was a shallow, square
bucket inside the hive with slots cut into one side so that the syrup could seep into a trough for the bees. I slopped a load into the feeder and then we put the hive back together. We worked along the line like that, taking off the roof, pouring in syrup, putting it back together. It always amazed me the quantities they could consume. Within a couple of days it would all be gone.

The local news was on the TV when I got back home. The fire at Bragantini’s factory was the lead item.

‘Yet another terrible white death has blighted our city,’ the newscaster intoned. Politicians from all parties vied with each other to express their outrage. It was another case of a tragic death in the workplace. Bragantini, as employer, was directly responsible for a young man’s death. The words ‘manslaughter’ and ‘prosecution’ were mentioned. There was footage from the evening’s protest vigil in the piazza. The general public were interviewed and they, too, expressed disgust. The whole report managed to make it look black and white: Bragantini was a pantomime villain, the person the popolo should boo and hiss. He was the reason poor Tommy had died. No mention of arson, of construction contracts and corrupt politicians. The whole charade infuriated me. People’s sincere indignation was being manipulated. They were being told that Bragantini was responsible for a young immigrant’s death and being encouraged to give it to him with both barrels.

There was a brief report about Tommy Mbora. It said he was a recent immigrant from Cameroon. There was a photograph of him smiling in his Inter top. They were playing music over the report just in case the heartstrings weren’t being tugged sufficiently hard. Poor Tommy, who had been
anonymous in life, was becoming an icon in death. Another one of those names that stood for the injustice of the system, that would be repeated whenever someone wanted to make a political point about the padroni and the little people.

I switched it off and just sat in the chair. I don’t know what time I got up and crawled into bed, but it was black, quiet and cold by then.