“Of course, you don’t have to tell me anything.”
“No, no. It’s okay,” he said quickly. “The thing with Nina, it just wasn’t…” He trailed off, and I swallowed, waiting. “It just wasn’t…”
He looked like he was at a total loss for words, so I finished the sentence for him. “Just wasn’t meant to be?”
“Right,” he said and shoved his hands in his pockets.
I started to ask about the job Nina had taken in Venice, but I was cut off by Daniel Bornemann, who was at the mic, asking everyone to take their seats. When I looked over at the lectern, Paul was standing next to him, staring at Teo and me.
“I guess we should sit,” I said, and Teo followed me toward the sea of folding chairs. I found a seat in the back row, and he moved to take the chair next to me.
“You should get a good seat,” I said, gesturing toward the front.
“I’d rather sit with you, if it’s okay.”
I glanced at Paul, but he was talking to Daniel. “Of course it’s okay,” I said, because what was I going to do?
Soon Luca and Bruno had joined us, taking the two chairs directly in front of ours. They started asking me about our move-out date, which had been scheduled for June 26, and about Giovanni’s house, which would soon be coming available.
“So you really are leaving?” Teo asked.
I gave him a sad smile. “I guess I always knew I was, but the whole thing sort of snuck up on me.”
Luca started making a list of everything he was going to have me send him from the United States. Blue jeans and sneakers and a transistor radio. Bruno asked why he didn’t have me go shopping for him at the Navy Exchange before I left, and Teo—maybe a little protective of me—reminded them it was against the rules. It was easy banter, and I started to relax, but when Paul went to the mic and announced that the program would begin in a few minutes, I felt my whole body tense.
134.
THE PLAN WAS FOR THEtender’s new captain, a guy named Chuck Wilkinson, to welcome everyone aboard and tell the crowd a little something about theGilmore. Then Jenkins would give a brief history of the U.S. Navy’s presence in the archipelago, and Vice Admiral Vaughan would address the Sixth Fleet’s mission, which was to promote regional security and stability by maintaining a strong naval presence in the Med. Ambassador Volpe would go last, highlighting the strength of the United States’ diplomatic relationship with Italy postwar, and the risk of allowing the U.S.S.R. to go unchecked. Only when all this was done and the crowd was utterly exhausted would Paul take the stage and walk everyone through the nuts and bolts of the navy’s environmental testing program. Afterward, there’d be a brief question-and-answer period, and then a group of machinist’s mates would be waiting to take journalists, in groups of five, down to the repair and maintenance facilities, where RADCON was staging a couple of demonstrations.
“They’ve thought of everything,” whispered Teo as he reviewed the morning’s agenda.
Bruno turned around in his seat. “The only thing missing is the actual test results.”
Teo laughed, which got the attention of Mary Lou, who was sitting a few seats away. She shot me a look.
I trained my eyes on the lectern, but as Jenkins and Vaughan droned on, I allowed myself to be distracted. Teo was tapping his fingers against his knee, and when he saw me watching, he used his pointer finger to trace out the letters C-I-A-O, one at a time, on his linen pants. I smiled, then recrossed my legs so I could write H-E-L-L-O on my own knee. We played this game for a little while, and I tuned back in only when Volpe started talking about the results of the recent local elections and what they might mean for the national elections in June.
Finally, Paul returned to the lectern.
He started with the samples his team collected from Santo Stefano Bay on a quarterly basis. “We collect between ten and a hundred samples per quarter, and what we’re looking for in those samples is cobalt-60 and other gamma-emitting radionuclides.”
Bruno turned around in his chair again. “Would be nice if he’d tell us what those gamma-emitting radionuclides are.”
“You’re going to get me in trouble,” I whispered, and he gave me a wink.
Paul referred everyone to a handout in their packet, which included a table of quarterly readings going back to the summer of 1974—the first time he oversaw testing. “You’ll see low levels of cobalt-60, less than three picocuries per gram, which is well below what we get from natural background radiation, so absolutely nothing to worry about.”
Bruno raised his hand, and Paul had to remind him that he’d take questions at the end of the presentation. He continued, “In figure three, you’ll see that we have also detected low levels of cesium-137 in some sediment samples; however, we can say with certainty that this is the result of nuclear fallout and not naval nuclear reactor operations.”
“Is cesium-137 bad?” I whispered to Teo, who was taking notes.
“Yes, it’s terrible,” he said. “And while it may be in fallout, it’s also a fission product.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s produced when uranium or plutonium atoms are split inside a nuclear reactor.”
Someone in the front raised a hand, but Paul ignored him, then went on to outline the manner in which they took water samples and what they used to analyze them.
