“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 isbelow 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 missiledropped 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.”
97.
WHEN TEO AND I ARRIVEDat the municipal building, we stopped at a registration table and gave one of the women working the event our particulars. She handed us name tags and folders, which contained a schedule of events, a pad of paper, and a pen. “The plenary session starts at nine,” she said in Italian, and pointed us in the direction of the large meeting room on the second floor.
I had no idea what the wordplenarymeant. “Is that Luca?” I asked Teo as he perused the schedule, but he explained that Luca’s talk would follow a little later in the morning.
