up bags of garbage from the streets of Paris and Berlin.’
Guarino shook his head.
‘Industrial, chemical, or . . .’ Brunetti began.
Guarino finished the list for him. ‘. . . or medical, often radiological.’
‘And took it where?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Some of it went to the ports, and from there to whatever Third World country would take it.’
‘And the rest?’
Before answering, Guarino pushed himself upright in his chair. ‘The garbage gets left on the streets in Naples. There’s no more room for it in the landfills or the incinerators down there because they’re busy burning what comes down from the North. Not only from Lombardia and the Veneto, but from any factory that’s willing to pay to have it taken away and no questions asked.’
‘How many shipments like this did Ranzato make?’
‘I told you, he wasn’t very good at keeping records.’
‘And you couldn’t . . .’ Brunetti began. He shied away from using the word ‘force’ and settled for ‘. . . encourage him to tell you?’
‘No.’
Brunetti remained silent. Guarino spoke again. ‘One of the last times I spoke to him, he said he almost wished I could arrest him so he could stop doing what he was doing.’
‘Stories were all over the papers by then, weren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’
Guarino’s voice softened. ‘By then we’d become, well, not friends, not really, but something like friends, and he talked to me openly. In the beginning, he was afraid of me, but towards the end he was afraid of them and what they would do to him if they found out that he was talking to us.’
‘It seems they did.’
Either his words or his tone stopped Guarino, who gave Brunetti a sharp look. ‘Unless it was a robbery,’ he said, dead level, signalling that the best measure of their friendship was in seeming trust.
‘Of course.’
Brunetti, though by disposition a compassionate man, had little patience with retrospective protestations of remorse: most people – however much they might deny it – had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it. ‘He must have known from the beginning who, or at least what, they were,’ Brunetti said. ‘And what they wanted him to do for them.’ Despite all of Guarino’s assurances, Brunetti judged that Ranzato had known perfectly well what was being carried on his trucks. Besides, all this talk of regret was exactly what people wanted to hear. Brunetti had always been bemused by people’s willingness to be charmed by the penitent sinner.
‘That might be true, but he didn’t tell me that,’ the Maggiore answered, reminding Brunetti how protective he had himself become of some of the people he used as – and had forced into becoming – informants.
Guarino continued. ‘He said he wanted to stop working for them. He didn’t tell me what made him decide, but whatever it was, it was clear – at least to me – that it disturbed him.’ He added, ‘That’s when he spoke about wanting to be arrested. So it could stop.’
Brunetti forbore to suggest that it did stop. Nor did he bother to observe that the perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue. Only an anchorite could have remained ignorant of the ‘emergenza spazzatura’ that had captured the nation’s attention in the last weeks of Ranzato’s life.
Did Guarino look embarrassed? Or was he perhaps irritated at Brunetti’s hard-heartedness? To keep the conversation going, Brunetti asked, ‘What was the date when you last spoke to him?’
The Major shifted to one side, and took out a small black notebook. He opened it and licked his right forefinger, then flipped quickly through its pages. ‘It was the seventh of December. I remember because he said his wife wanted him to go to Mass with her the next day.’ Suddenly, Guarino’s hand fell away and the notebook slapped against his thigh. ‘Oddio,’ he whispered.
Guarino suddenly grew pale. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together. For an instant, Brunetti thought the man might faint. Or weep. ‘What is it, Filippo?’ he asked, pulling his feet back and putting them on the floor, leaning forward, one hand half-raised.
Guarino closed the notebook. He rested it on his knees and kept his eyes on it. ‘I remember. He said his wife’s name was Immacolata, and she always went to Mass on the eighth, her name-day.’
Brunetti had no idea why this information should prove so upsetting to Guarino until the other man said, ‘He told me it was the one day of the year she asked