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 for a moment, pulling in great, rasping lungfuls of air. When they saw this, the people holding the flashlights moved the beams away from him, letting him float there illuminated only by the curiosity of the onlookers and the faint paling of the sky.
Luciano suddenly slipped over on to his stomach and paddled like a dog, a motion strangely awkward in such a powerful swimmer, to the edge of the embankment. He reached the ladder nailed to the wooden embankment wall, and started to pull himself up the rungs.
The crowd parted in front of the ladder and at just that instant the sun emerged from the waters of the Adriatic. Its first rays, rising above the sea wall and cutting across the narrow peninsula, caught Luciano as he paused at the top of the ladder, transforming this fisherman's son into a godlike presence that had arisen gleaming from the waters. There was a collective intake of breath, as in the presence of the numinous.
Luciano shook his head, and water spattered to both sides. Then, looking at his father, he said, 'They're both in the cabin.'
3
The boy's announcement caused little surprise among the people standing at the side of the pier. Someone not of that place might have responded differently to the revelation that two people were lying dead in the waters below them, but the people of Pellestrina had known Giulio Bottin for fifty-three years; many of them had known his father; still others had known his grandfather. The men of the Bottin family had, and had always, been hard, merciless men, whose characters had perhaps been formed, surely influenced, by the brutality of the sea. If violence befell Giulio, there were few who would be surprised to learn of it.
Some had noticed a difference in Marco, perhaps caused by the fact that he was the only one of the Bottin who had ever remained in school more than a few years or who had ever learned from books more than to read a few words or set down a crabbed signature. There had also been the influence of his mother, dead now for five years. Originally from Murano, she had been a soft, loving woman who had married Giulio twenty years ago, some said because she had been involved with her cousin Maurizio, who had left her to go to Argentina, others because her father, a gambler, had borrowed heavily from Giulio and had repaid the loan by giving away his daughter in marriage. The events leading to their marriage had never been made clear, or perhaps there simply was no story to tell. But what had always been evident to everyone in the village was the almost total lack of love or sympathy between husband and wife, so perhaps the stories were merely a way of making sense of that absence of feeling.
Regardless of how she may have felt about her husband, Bianca had adored her son, and people, always quick to gossip, had said that this was the reason for Giulio's behaviour towards him: cold, hard, unforgiving, but completely in the tradition of the Bottin men towards their sons. At this point in the story, most people threw up their hands and said those two should never have married, but then someone else was sure to say that then there would have been no Marco and remember how happy he had made Bianca, and just one look at him and you'd know what a good boy he is.
No one would say that in the present tense again, not now, not with Marco lying dead at the bottom of the harbour in the burnt-out wreckage of his father's boat.
Gradually, as there came to be more light, there came to be fewer people, as they slipped back to their homes. Soon most of them had disappeared, but then the men returned and were seen briefly crossing the square towards their boats. Bottin and his son were dead, but that was no reason to miss a day's clam harvest. The season was already short enough, what with the laws controlling what they could do, and where, and when.
Within half an hour, the only boat remaining at the pier was the one to the left of the sunken Squallus: the gas tank had exploded with such force that a metal stanchion had been blown through the side of the Anna Maria, about a metre above the waterline. The captain, Ottavio Rusponi, had at first thought he would risk it and follow the other boats to the clam beds, but when he studied the clouds and held his left hand up to sense the wind, he decided not to, not with the rising wind from the east.
It wasn't until eight that morning, when Captain Rusponi called his insurance agent to report the damage to his boat, that anyone thought of calling the police, and it was the agent, not the captain, who did so. Later, those questioned about their failure to notify the authorities would claim that they thought someone else had done it. The failure to report the deaths of the two Bottin men would be taken by many as a suggestion of the esteem in which the family was held by the rest of the citizens of Pellestrina.
The Carabinieri were slow in getting there, coming down in a launch from their station on the Lido. There obviously had been some confusion when the deaths were reported, for the Carabinieri who came were in uniform, and no provision had been made to bring along anyone who could dive down to the wreckage, for no one had explained to them where the bodies were. The subsequent discussion was juridical as well as jurisdictional, no one being quite sure which arm of the law was meant to deal with a suspicious death in water. At last it was decided that the city police should be summoned to investigate, along with divers from the Vigili del Fuoco. Not the least of the reasons for this decision was the fact that the two Carabinieri who worked as divers were that day engaged in the illegal underwater collection of pottery shards from a newly discovered dumping ground behind Murano, a place where unsuccessful or badly fired pottery had been dumped during the sixteenth century. The passage of centuries had transformed junk into potsherds; by the same alchemy, the worthless had been rendered valuable. The site had been discovered two months before and reported to the Sopraitendenza ai I Beni Culturali, which had added it to the list of sites of archaeological value where diving was prohibited. By night, watch was meant to be kept on it, as well as on the other places in the laguna where the waters covered relics of the past. By day, however, it was not unknown for a boat bearing the markings of some agency of the law to anchor in the area. And who would question the presence of the industrious divers who gave every appearance of being there on official business?
The Carabinieri returned in their boat to the Lido, and after more than an hour, a police launch pulled into the waters behind the fleet of Pellestrina, now all safely berthed along the pier and all the captains home.