Through a Glass Darkly (11 page)

‘You think that's important?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello shrugged. ‘I don't know, not really.
I'm interested because of what I've read in the papers – that Fasano's suddenly discovered ecology, or suddenly discovered his commitment to it.'

Brunetti had a vague memory of having read something along these lines, some months ago, and of having had a similarly cynical response, but he simply asked, ‘That's the way it happens to most people, though, isn't it?' Brunetti left it to Vianello to realize, or not, that it was precisely what had happened to him.

‘Yes,' Vianello admitted, though reluctantly. ‘Maybe it's because of his interest in politics. Once someone says they're thinking about public office, I start to get suspicious of anything they do or say.'

Though he had taken a few steps, Brunetti was not yet this far along the road to total cynicism, and so he said, ‘It's other people who are saying it about him, if I remember correctly.'

‘It's one of the things politicians love the most: popular acclamation,' Vianello replied.

‘Come on, Lorenzo,' Brunetti said, unwilling to continue with this subject. Remembering the other thing he could usefully do while he was on Murano, he explained about Assunta's visit and said he wanted to go and talk to one of the men who had heard her father threaten Ribetti. He told Vianello he would see him back at the Questura. They walked out to the
riva
, and Vianello went down to the Sacca Serenella stop to wait for the 41.

Assunta had told him Bovo lived just on the
other side of the bridge, in Calle drio i Orti, and he found the
calle
with little trouble. He walked as far as Calle Leonarducci without finding the house and turned to go back and check more closely. This time he found the number and Bovo's name among those on the doorbells. He rang and waited, then rang again. He heard a window open above him, stepped back, and looked up. A child, from this vantage point its age and sex unclear, stuck its head out of a third-floor window and called, ‘
Sì
?'

‘I'm looking for your father,' Brunetti called up.

‘He's down at the bar,' the child called back in a voice so high it could have belonged to either a boy or a girl.

‘Which one?'

A tiny hand stuck out the window, pointing to Brunetti's left. ‘Down there,' the voice called, and then the child disappeared.

The window remained open, so Brunetti called his thanks up to it and turned to return to Calle Leonarducci. At the corner he came to a window covered to chest height with curtains that had begun life as a red-and-white check but had moved into a wrinkled, hepatic middle age. He opened the door and walked into a room more filled with smoke than any he could remember having entered in years. He went to the bar and ordered a coffee. He displayed no interest in the barman's tattoos, a pattern of intertwined serpents that encircled both wrists
with their tails and ran up his arms until they disappeared under the sleeves of his T-shirt. When the coffee came, Brunetti said, ‘I'm looking for Paolo Bovo. His kid told me he was here.'

‘Paolo,' the barman called towards a table at the back, where three men sat around a bottle of red wine, talking, ‘the cop wants to talk to you.'

Brunetti smiled and asked, ‘How come everyone always knows?'

The barman's smile was equal in warmth to Brunetti's, though not in the number of teeth exposed. ‘Anyone who talks as good as you do has to be a cop.'

‘A lot of people talk as well as I do,' Brunetti said.

‘Not the ones who want to see Paolo,' he answered, wiping at the counter with an unusually clean cloth.

Brunetti sensed movement to his left and turned to meet a man of his own height, who appeared to have lost not only all of his hair but at least twenty of the kilos Brunetti was carrying. From this distance, Brunetti could see that he had lost his eyebrows and eyelashes as well, which explained the pale greasiness of his skin.

Brunetti extended his hand and said, ‘Signor Bovo?' At the man's nod, Brunetti asked, ‘May I offer you something to drink?'

Bovo declined with a shake of his head. In a deep voice presumably left over from his former body, he said, ‘I've got some wine back
with my friends.' He shook Brunetti's hand and Brunetti read on his face the effort it cost him to make his grip firm. He spoke in Veneziano, with a Muranese accent of the sort that Brunetti and his friends used to imitate for comic effect.

‘What do you want?' Bovo asked. He rested one elbow on the bar, succeeding in making the gesture look casual rather than necessary. Before his illness, Brunetti realized, this situation would have been charged with aggression, perhaps even danger: now the best the man could manage was gruffness.

‘You know Giovanni De Cal,' Brunetti said and stopped.

Bovo said nothing for some time. He looked at the barman, who was pretending to take no interest in their conversation; then he glanced back at the men he had left at the table. Brunetti watched him weighing the chances that, reduced to no power except words, he could still impress his friends with his toughness. ‘The bastard wouldn't give me a job.'

‘When was that?'

‘When that bastard at the other
fornace
fired me,' he said but offered no further information.

‘Why did he fire you?' Brunetti asked.

Brunetti watched his question register with Bovo, saw in his eyes the confusion it caused him, as if he had never given the matter any thought.

Finally Bovo said, ‘Because I couldn't lift things any more.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘Bags of sand, the chemicals, the barrels we have to move. How was I supposed to lift them if I couldn't even bend down to tie my shoes?'

Brunetti said, ‘I don't know.' He waited some time before asking, ‘And then what happened?'

‘Then I left. What else could I do?' Bovo moved a bit closer to the bar and put his other elbow on it, shifting his weight as he changed arms.

This conversation seemed not to be going anywhere, so Brunetti decided to return to his original point. ‘I'd like to know what you heard De Cal say about Ribetti and if you could tell me the circumstances.'

Bovo called the barman over and asked for a glass of mineral water. When it came, he lifted it to salute Brunetti and drank some of it. He put the glass back on the bar and said, ‘He was in here one night after work. He usually doesn't come in here: got his own bar he goes to, down towards Colonna, but they were closed or something, so he came in here.' He looked at Brunetti to see that he was following, and Brunetti nodded.

‘So he was sitting there, in the back, when I came in. He was being the big man with his friends, drinking and talking about how many orders he had, and how people always wanted his glass pieces, and how someone from the museum asked if they could have a piece for a show.' He looked at Brunetti and pursed his
lips, as if to ask him if he had ever heard anything so ridiculous.

‘Did he see you?'

‘Of course he saw me,' Bovo said. ‘This was six months ago.' He said it with pride, as though boasting of some other person whose every entrance was sure to be noted by everyone in the place.

‘What happened?'

‘Some friends of mine were at another table, so I went back to have a drink with them. No, we weren't close: there was a table between us. I sat down and I guess he sort of forgot about me. And after a while he started to talk about his son-in-law: the usual shit he always says, that he's crazy and married Assunta for her money and doesn't know anything and just cares about animals. We've all heard it a thousand times, ever since Assunta married him.'

‘Do you know Ribetti?' Brunetti asked.

‘Yeah, sort of,' Bovo answered. It appeared he was going to leave it at that, but as Brunetti started to ask for an explanation Bovo went on. ‘She's a good person, Assunta, and it's obvious the guy loves her. Younger than she is, and he's an engineer, but he's still a good enough guy.'

‘What was it that De Cal said about him?' Brunetti asked.

‘That he'd like to open the
Gazzettino
one morning and read that he'd been killed in an accident. On the road, at work, in his house: the
old bastard didn't care, just so long as he was dead.'

Brunetti waited to see if this was all, then said, ‘I'm not sure that's a threat, Signor Bovo.' He added a smile to soften his observation.

‘You going to let me finish?' Bovo asked.

‘Sorry.'

‘Then he said that if he didn't die in an accident, he might have to kill him himself.'

‘Do you think he was serious?' Brunetti asked, when it seemed that Bovo had indeed finished.

‘I don't know. It's the sort of thing you say, isn't it?' Bovo asked, and Brunetti nodded. The sort of thing you say.

‘But I had the feeling he'd really do it, the old bastard.' He took a few more small sips of the water. ‘He can't stand it that Assunta's happy.'

‘Is that the reason he hates Ribetti so much?'

‘I suppose. And that he'll have a say in the
fornace
when the old bastard dies. I think that's what makes him crazy. He keeps saying Ribetti will ruin everything.'

‘You mean if he leaves it to his daughter?'

‘Who else can he leave it to?' Bovo asked.

Brunetti paused to acknowledge the truth of that and then said, ‘She knows the business. And Ribetti's an engineer; besides, they've been married long enough for him to have learned something about running the place.'

Bovo gave him a long look. ‘Maybe that's why the old man thinks he'll ruin everything.'

‘I don't understand,' Brunetti confessed.

‘If she inherits it, then he'll want to take over, won't he?' Bovo asked. Brunetti maintained a neutral expression and waited for an answer. ‘She's a woman, isn't she?' Bovo asked. ‘So she'll let him.'

Brunetti smiled. ‘I hadn't thought of that,' he said.

Bovo looked satisfied at having successfully explained things to the policeman. ‘I'm sorry for Assunta,' he said.

‘Why?'

‘She's a good person.'

‘Is she a friend of yours?' Brunetti asked, curious as to whether there might have been some history between them. They were of an age, and he must once have been a very impressive man.

‘No, no, nothing like that,' Bovo said. ‘It's that she tried to keep that other bastard from firing me. And when he did, she tried to give me a job, but her father wouldn't let her.' He finished the water and put the glass on the counter. ‘So now I don't have a job. My wife does – she goes out and cleans houses – and I'm supposed to stay home with the kids.'

Brunetti thanked him, put two Euros on the counter, and held out his hand. He shook Bovo's hand carefully, thanked him again, and left.

Deciding it would be quicker, Brunetti walked down to the Faro stop and took the 41 back to Fondamenta Nuove, then switched to the 42 that would take him down to the hospital stop. From there, it was a quick walk back to the Questura.

As he walked inside, Brunetti was forced to accept the fact that he had spent almost an entire working day on something that could in no way be justified as a legitimate use of his time. Further, he had involved both an inspector and a junior officer, and some days ago he had commandeered both a police launch and a police car in the same matter. In the absence of a crime, it could not be called an investigation: it was nothing more than indulgence in the sort of curiosity he should have abandoned years before.

Conscious of this, he went to Signorina Elettra's office and was happy to find her at her desk, wrapped in spring. A pink scarf was tied around her head, gypsy fashion, and she wore a green shirt and severe black slacks. Her lipstick matched the scarf, prompting Brunetti to wonder when it would start matching the shirt.

‘Are you very busy, Signorina?' he asked after they had exchanged greetings.

‘No more so than usual,' she said. ‘What can I do for you?'

‘I'd like you to take a look and see what you can find about two men,' he began and saw her slide a notebook closer. ‘Giovanni De Cal, who owns a
fornace
on Murano, and Giorgio Tassini, the night-watchman at De Cal's factory.'

‘Everything?' she asked.

‘Whatever you can find, please.'

Idly, driven only by the same sort of curiosity Brunetti felt propelling him, she asked, ‘Is this for anything?'

‘No, not really,' Brunetti had to admit. He was about to leave, when he added, ‘And Marco Ribetti, who works for a French company, but is Venetian. An engineer. His speciality is garbage disposal, I think, or building garbage dumps.'

‘I'll see what I can find.'

He thought of adding Fasano's name but stopped himself. It was only a fishing expedition, not an investigation, and she had better things to do. He thanked her and left.

A DAY PASSED,
and then another. Brunetti heard nothing from Assunta De Cal and gave her little thought, nor did he spend time thinking about Murano and the threats made by a drunken old man. He had young men, instead, to keep him occupied, young men – though legally they were still children – who were repeatedly arrested, processed, then identified and collected by people claiming to be their parents or guardians, though because they were gypsies, few of them had documents which could prove this.

And then came the shock story in one of the weekly newspaper inserts about the fate of such young boys in more than one South American city, where they were reportedly being executed by squads of off-duty policemen. ‘Well, we
aren't there yet,' Brunetti muttered to himself as he finished reading the article. There were many qualities in his fellow citizens that Brunetti, as a policeman, abhorred: their willingness to accommodate crime; their failure to trust the law; their lack of rage at the inefficiency of the legal system. But we don't shoot children in the street because they steal oranges, he said, though he was not at all sure if this was sufficient reason for civic pride.