Chapter 96
IN EARLY MARCH, Luca invited me to come see him give a talk at an ecology conference hosted by the Region of Sardinia in La Maddalena’s municipal building.
The conference, which had been hastily assembled, was on La Maddalena’s “pollution” problem, and while no one would go so far as to use the phrase nuclear pollution, that’s clearly what they meant.
Technically, it was Bruno who’d been invited to present CNEN’s early findings, but he’d told the organizers that since Luca had taken the lead on the environmental survey and the latest round of testing, he should get the experience defending his data to a roomful of strangers.
Luca was excited and also very nervous, particularly when it became clear that the conference was going to be well attended, not just by local bureaucrats and politicians but by radioecologists from across Italy and beyond.
I registered to attend the conference, then spent a week working up the nerve to tell Paul, whom I assumed was also planning to go.
He knew about Luca and Bruno, but I had never told him about going out on the Alessandra or that Bruno sometimes slipped me cash for cleaning the current meters and doing other odd jobs.
In November, the team had acquired several big jugs of Rhodamine B, and we’d traveled all over the archipelago, dumping it in various embayments.
The places where the viscous red liquid quickly dissipated had high flushing rates, which meant that radionuclides were unlikely to hang around for long; the places where the Rhodamine B dissipated more slowly had low flushing rates, and these were the ideal spots to test for radionuclides going forward.
I had expected Paul to be combative about my plan to attend the conference, but when, over dinner, I finally got around to telling him that I’d registered, he didn’t say a thing.
The silence was uncomfortable, so I kept talking. “I thought it’d be nice to support Luca.”
Paul nodded, slowly, and when I pushed—trying to ascertain whether he was really all right with my going—he told me it was a free country.
Noted.
I was going to the conference to support Luca, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also hopeful I’d run into Teo.
I suspected he’d be covering it, and I hadn’t seen him since before Christmas, when he’d come to town and taken Luca, Bruno, and me for drinks.
In the intervening months, I’d missed him—more than I cared to admit, and I think if I’m being honest, part of the reason I was taking classes and cleaning current meters had to do with putting him out of my mind, or at least trying to.
As fate would have it, I ran into him on my way to the conference. I had stopped at Café Gargiulo for a coffee, and he was sitting at an indoor table, drinking an espresso and reading over some notes.
“Can I join you?” I asked.
He looked up at me and smiled. “Of course.”
He stood, and we greeted each other properly, then I took my seat. “You’re here for the conference?”
“Yes,” he said, and moved some of his papers out of the way. “Are you going?”
I nodded, then told the waiter I’d have a cappuccino. “Luca’s very nervous.”
“He should be,” said Teo. “He’s going to cause quite a stir.”
I tilted my head a little. “Why do you say that?”
“Between us?” said Teo as he offered me a cigarette, which I declined. “There are elevated levels of cobalt-60 and manganese-54 in the water.”
“You’re serious?”
He nodded, then lit his own cigarette. “It sounds like it was easier to find once they knew where to look.”
“You’re talking about the preliminary survey?”
“Right.”
I was a tiny bit hurt that Luca and Bruno hadn’t shared these results with me, but I reasoned that, with the exception of a week they’d spent on the island in January taking samples, I hadn’t seen much of them since they’d wrapped up the preliminary survey in December.
“When did they find out?” I asked.
“Recently,” said Teo, who must have sensed I didn’t like being the last to know. “You can understand why they couldn’t tell you?”
“What, because of Paul?”
He nodded.
“He doesn’t know?”
Teo exhaled. “He doesn’t know what Luca’s going to say this morning. But I suspect he knows what’s in the water. Assuming it’s true the navy conducts its own testing.”
“So, wait, how bad are these numbers of Luca’s?” I asked.
“They’re not good,” he said. “But they won’t kill anyone. At least not right away. I think the term your husband and his friends like to use is below minimum threshold values.”
“He’s always talking about how it’s all the granite on the island that throws off the results.”
Teo knew where I was going. “Granite emits uranium and radium, which become radon. So we’d expect to find that, certainly. But this is different.”
“Nuclear fallout wouldn’t explain it?”
Teo tapped his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray in front of him. “If it were fallout, you’d expect to find the same by-products in every body of water between here and Lake Como.”
“And that’s not what they’re finding?”
He shook his head.
“So, it’s the subs?”
“Probably.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “It could be a lot of small leaks, or it could be that something went really wrong sometime in the last six months.”
“Like an accident?”
“Right,” said Teo.
Just the other day, Paul had told me a story in passing about a crane operator who’d been pulling a missile out of a sub.
The area around the tender was a no-wake zone, but an Italian fishing boat had passed too close without reducing its speed, and the next thing they knew, the whole crane was rocking back and forth, missile included.
I guess there were guys on tie-lines trying to stabilize it, but it didn’t do any good, and when the missile dropped a couple of feet to the ground, everyone hit the deck, thinking they were about to bite the big one.
Thankfully, the missile just rolled to a stop.
“What happens if something really does go wrong?” I asked, softly.
He looked up at the ceiling and let out a low laugh. “Apparently, your clinic’s got eleven thousand iodine tablets in a box somewhere, and they’ll distribute them to every man, woman, and child on the island.”
“You don’t believe them?”
“Oh, I believe they’ve got them,” he said.
“You don’t think they’ll use them?”
He looked at me. “Using them would mean admitting there’s a problem.”
I scrunched up my face. “We Americans don’t love doing that.”
“No, you don’t.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out some lire, which he placed on the table. “Let’s go.”