Free Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon Page A

my life is on the laguna, not here at the Questura; at least it won't be two years from now.'
    Brunetti found it a reasonable enough stance. But he tried, nevertheless. 'But if these fish are contaminated in some way, then isn't it dangerous for people to eat them?'
    'Does that mean what I think it does, sir?' Bonsuan asked quietly.
    'What?'
    "That you're appealing to my duty as a citizen to help get rid of a public danger? It sounds to me like you're asking me to act like I'm Greenpeace and tell you who these people are so that you can stop them from doing something that's dangerous to people and the environment.'
    Though there was not a hint of sarcasm in the way he spoke, Brunetti could not help but feel that Bonsuan's remark made a fool of him. 'Yes, I suppose it's something like that,' he admitted unwillingly.
    Bonsuan moved around in the chair, pulled himself upright, and placed his palms flat on his knees, though his feet were still firmly braced in anticipation of a sudden wave. 'I'm not an educated man, sir,' he began, 'so I'm sure my thinking on this isn't very clear, but I don't see what difference it makes.' Brunetti chose not to interrupt, so the pilot went on. 'Remember when there was talk of closing the chemical plants because of the pollution they caused?' He glanced across at Brunetti and waited for an answer.
    'Yes.' Of course he remembered. Investigators had, a few years ago, found all manner of toxic material seeping, pouring, flooding into the laguna from the various chemical and petrochemical plants on the mainland. There'd even been a list in the papers of the workers who had died from cancer during the last ten years, a number so high as to soar off the charts of all probability. A judge had ordered the plants closed, declaring them a danger to the health of the people who worked there, leaving moot the question of the damage they did to the people who lived around them. And within a day there had been a mass protest and the threat of violence from the workers themselves, the very men who handled, breathed in, got splashed by the toxins that were said to be killing them. They demanded that the factories be kept open, that they continue to be allowed to work, and insisted that the long-term possibility of disease was less dangerous than the immediate one of unemployment. And so the plants remained open, the men continued to work, and very little more was said or written about this other tide that flowed into the laguna.
    Bonsuan had gone silent, and so Brunetti prompted him. 'What about it?'
    'Clara has a patient,' Bonsuan began, naming his daughter, a doctor with an office in Castello. 'He's got some rare form of lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. His wife doesn't smoke, either.' He waved his right hand in the general direction of the mainland. 'But he's worked out there for twenty years.'
    Bonsuan stopped; Brunetti asked, 'And?'
    'And though Clara's got statistics that say this form of cancer is found only in people who have had long exposure to one of the chemicals they use out there, he still refuses to believe it could have been caused by the place where he works. His wife says it's God's will, and he says it's just bad luck. Clara gave up talking to him about it when she saw that it didn't make any difference to them what it was that was going to kill him. She says there's no way she could make him believe his work had anything to do with it.'
    This time, Bonsuan didn't bother to wait for Brunetti to ask for clarification. 'So I don't think it makes any difference if someone warns people that the clams are dangerous, or the fish or the shrimp. They're going to say that their parents always ate them and they lived to be ninety or they're going to say that you can't worry about everything. Or they're going to get angry that you're trying to take people's jobs away from them. But the one thing you're not going to do is stop people from doing what they want to do, whether it's eat fish