“You guys don’t really think Janine and Daniel are having an affair?” said Laura, but no one had a chance to answer her because Mary Lou was upon us.
“Ladies,” she said. “Nice to see you on this grand and glorious day.”
“You doing okay?” said Bev, who must have been feeling extra bold on account of the fact that she’d tucked Mary Lou into bed not twelve hours earlier.
“I’m doing great,” said Mary Lou. “Better than great. There’s really nothing a little Alka-Seltzer won’t cure.”
There was general agreement on this point.
“Eileen,” she said slowly, and already I knew I was in trouble. “We missed you at the potluck.”
“I was so sad to miss it,” I offered.
She removed her sunglasses. “What happened?”
I glanced over at Laura, who had buried her head in her towel. “I fell asleep.”
“That’s too bad,” she said. “But I was talking about the sunburn.”
“Oh,” I said as I pressed a finger into the pink of my shoulder. “I was out on my patio at the time.”
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, labeled8/8/1974. 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 bivalvemollusks 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.
