Chapter 83
WHEN I HAD ASKED brUNO, out on the boat, what became of the nacchere after we collected them, he invited me to pop by the rooms CNEN had rented, over a mechanic’s shop on the Via Primo Longobardo, and see for myself.
So, the following afternoon, that’s what I did.
“We send the nacchere to a lab in Rome,” said Bruno as he showed me their setup, “but the issue is that the Poste Italiane is not reliable enough for us to put them in the mail.”
“Not even in coolers?” I asked.
He shook his head. “There’s too big a risk that the samples won’t keep.”
Luca was there, and he gave me a quick “Buon pomeriggio” before pulling a baking sheet of what looked like walnuts out of the oven. There was a table in the center of the room, and he set the baking sheet down on it, then returned to the oven for another one.
Bruno plucked one of the walnuts from the baking sheet, tossing it back and forth in his hands until it had cooled off, then gave it to me. “Do you know what this is?”
“There’s no way it’s a nacchera,” I said.
Bruno laughed, then went to a deep freezer they’d installed in a corner of the room and returned carrying a bag of frozen nacchere, labeled 8/8/1974.
It was the date I’d gone out on the boat with them.
He pulled another bag from the refrigerator.
These nacchere had been thawed, and he fished in the bag for a single mollusk, which he pried open with a knife.
“Look,” he said.
Inside the shell, the mollusk’s gelatinous body shone pinky white.
He pointed out its head, which wasn’t really a head at all, and its muscular foot, which was good only for burrowing.
“We can look for radionuclides in water, sediment, even fish,” he said, “but the reason we like bivalve mollusks is because they filter everything they eat, and anything that’s not food accumulates in their tissue. ”
“You mean it never goes away?”
“Right,” said Bruno. “Which might be bad for them, but it’s good for us, because the bioaccumulation provides us with a history of radioactive contamination in their environment.”
“You just look at it under a microscope?”
He laughed. “It’s a little more complicated than that. We use gamma spectrometry if we’re looking for gamma rays, and these special scintillation detectors if we’re looking for alpha- and beta-emitting radionuclides.”
“I don’t know most of the words you just said.”
“That’s okay,” he said, then showed me how they separated the mollusk’s tissue from the shell and laid it out on the baking sheet.
The oven could accommodate only three baking sheets at a time, and the cook time was seventy-two hours at eighty degrees Celsius, which was why he and Luca had such a backlog.
“We’ve collected everything we need, but we’re not done until all of this is processed. ”
“Can I help?” I asked, and Bruno swept a handful of the newly dried nacchere into a glass mortar and handed it to me, along with a pestle. The whole thing seemed so antiquated, I wanted to laugh.
“You have to grind them into a very fine powder,” said Bruno as he retrieved a clear plastic vial from a cardboard box.
The vial was filled with a translucent, almost pearly powder, and on a small sticker affixed to the vial’s exterior, Bruno or maybe Luca had written the date the specimen had been collected and the location.
“We want it to look like this when we’re done. ”
Pummeling the mollusks into powder wasn’t as easy as I’d expected it to be.
The dried tissue crumbled under the least amount of pressure, but it was impossible to get the bits and pieces half as small as Bruno’s sample.
He watched me for a few minutes before he stepped in and took the pestle from me.
“You’re better off if you press and rotate it,” he said as he demonstrated the technique, then handed the pestle back.
Once I had the hang of it, Luca showed me how to funnel the final product into the empty vials. Bruno insisted that Luca do the labeling because he was convinced I’d accidentally invert my months and days—Americans had so many things backward, I was learning—and screw up their whole system.
When the vials were neatly labeled, Bruno packed them away in the cardboard box.
“How long will it take for the box to arrive in Rome?” I asked.
“A week? Maybe two?”
“And how long will you wait for the lab in Rome to run the tests and read the results?”
He chuckled, then repeated the question in Italian for Luca’s benefit. Luca rolled his eyes.
“A month?” said Bruno, returning his attention to me. “Maybe a little longer?”
I did the math in my head. A week or so to dry, compound, and package the nacchere. Another week for transit. A month to process everything in Rome. “So, if a sub had a leak,” I said slowly, “is it possible it’d be six weeks before anyone knew?”
Bruno gave me a sad smile. “I think maybe you are beginning to understand the problem.”