Through a Glass Darkly (15 page)

‘Tassini's the
uomo di notte
, isn't he?'

‘You spoke to him?'

‘Yes, and he thought there would be no danger unless your husband were to come to the
fornace
,' Brunetti said, and then at her look of fear, he added, ‘But he never comes here, does he?'

‘No, not at all,' she said, voice rich with disappointment. Brunetti could well understand this. He had observed her passion for her work and for her husband. To have one excluded from the other, either by choice or decree, was understandably a difficult thing for her to bear.

‘Did he once?' he asked.

‘Before we were married, yes. He's an engineer, remember, so he's interested in the process of mixing and making glass and working it, everything about it.' As if to remind herself of one of those passions, she looked over at the men, the rhythm of whose work continued undisturbed by their talk: the first one was already working on an entirely different piece. Brunetti looked at them and saw the
servente
to the first
maestro
touch a pendulant drop of red glass onto one side of the top of what appeared to be a vase. The
maestro
's pliers smoothed the
tip of the drop on to the vase, then pulled it, as though it were a piece of chewing gum, and attached the other end lower down on the vase. A quick snip, smooth the sides, and the first handle was made.

‘They make it look so easy,' Brunetti said, his wonder audible.

‘For them, I suppose it is. After all, Gianni's been working glass all his life. He could probably make some pieces in his sleep by now.'

‘Do you ever get tired of it?' Brunetti asked.

She turned and looked at him, trying to assess how serious a question this was. Apparently she concluded that Brunetti meant it, for she said, ‘Not of watching it. No. Never. But the paper part of it, if I can call it that, yes, I'm tired of that, tired of the endless laws and taxes and regulations.'

‘Which laws do you mean?' Brunetti asked, wondering if she would refer again to the ecological laws her husband seemed so to favour.

‘The ones that specify how many copies of each receipt I have to make and who I have to send them to, and the ones about the forms I have to fill in for every kilo of raw material we buy.' She shrugged them off. ‘And that's not even to mention the taxes.'

If he had known her better, Brunetti would have said that she must still manage to evade a great deal, but their friendship had not advanced to the stage of having the taxman as a common enemy, at least not as an openly declared one, so he contented himself with
saying, ‘I hope you find someone to do the paper part so you can keep the part you like for yourself.'

‘Yes,' she said absently, ‘that would be nice.' Then, shaking off whatever the effect of his words had been, she asked, ‘Would you like to see the rest?'

‘Yes,' he admitted with a smile. ‘I'd like to see how much it's changed since I was a kid.'

‘How old were you when you first came out?'

Brunetti had to think about this for a while, running the years and paging through the list of the jobs his father had held in the last decade of his life. ‘I must have been about twelve.'

She laughed and said, ‘That's the perfect age for you to have become a
garzon
.'

Brunetti laughed outright. ‘That's all I wanted to be,' he said. ‘And to grow up and become a
maestro
and make those beautiful things.'

‘But?' she asked, turning towards the main doors.

Though she could not see him, Brunetti shrugged as he said, ‘But it didn't happen.'

Something in his tone must have sounded in a particular way, for she stopped and turned towards him. ‘Are you sorry?'

He smiled and shook his head. ‘I don't think that way,' he said. ‘Besides, I like the way things went.'

She smiled in response and said, ‘How
pleasant to hear someone say that.' She led him through the doors and out into the courtyard, then immediately towards a door on the right. Inside, he found the
molatura
, where a low wooden trough ran along one entire wall, numerous taps lined up above it. Two young men with rubber aprons stood at the trough, each holding a piece of glass, one a bowl and one a plate that looked very much like the one the
maestro
had been making a little earlier.

As Brunetti watched, they turned the objects, holding first one surface, then another, to the grinding wheels in front of them. Streams of water flowed down from the taps over the grinding wheels and then over the pieces of glass: Brunetti remembered that the water would keep the temperature down and prevent the heat shattering the glass as well as prevent the glass particles from filling the air and the lungs of the worker. Water splashed down the aprons and over the boots of the workers on to the floor, but the bulk of it was washed into the trough and flowed to the end, where, grey with glass dust, it disappeared down a pipe.

Just inside the door Brunetti saw vases, cups, platters, and statues standing on a wooden table, waiting their turn at the wheels. He could see the marks left by the clippers and by the straight edges used to fuse two colours of glass together: the grinding would quickly erase all imperfections, he knew.

Raising his voice over the noise of the wheel and running water, Brunetti said, ‘It's not as exciting as the other.'

She nodded but said, ‘But it's just as necessary.'

‘I know.'

He looked over at the two workers, back at Assunta, and asked, ‘Masks?'

This time she shrugged but said nothing until she had led him out of the room and back into the courtyard. ‘They're given two fresh masks every day: that's what the law says. But it doesn't tell me how to make them wear them.' Before Brunetti could comment, she said, ‘If I could, I would. But they see it as some compromise of their masculinity, and they won't wear them.'

‘The men who worked with my father never did, either,' Brunetti said.

She tossed her hands up in the air and walked away from him towards the front of the building. Brunetti joined her there and asked, ‘I didn't see your father in his office. Isn't he here today?'

‘He had a doctor's appointment,' she explained. ‘But I hope he'll be back before the end of the afternoon.'

‘Nothing serious, I hope,' Brunetti said, making a note to ask Signorina Elettra to see what she could find out about De Cal's health.

She nodded her thanks for his wishes but said nothing.

‘Well,' Brunetti said, ‘I'll go back now.
Thanks for the tour. It brings back a lot of memories.'

‘And thank you for going to the trouble of coming out here to tell me.'

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘Your father's not likely to do anything rash.'

‘I hope not,' she said, shaking his hand and turning back towards the office and her world.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING,
Brunetti arrived at the Questura after nine and went into Signorina Elettra's office, having forgotten that this was the day when she did not come in until after lunch. He started to write her a message, asking her if she could find De Cal's hospital records, but the thought that either Patta or Scarpa could read anything left on her desk made him change it to a simple request that she call him in his office when she could.

Upstairs, he read through the reports on his desk, had a look at the list of proposed promotions, and then started to read his way through a thick folder of papers from the Ministry of the Interior relating to new laws regarding the
arrest and detention of suspected terrorists. National law did not accord with European law, it seemed, and that in its turn failed to conform to international law. Brunetti read with mounting interest as the confusions and contradictions became increasingly evident.

The section on interrogation was brief, as though the person commissioned to write it wanted to get through the assignment as quickly as possible without taking a stand of any sort. The document repeated something Brunetti had read elsewhere, that some foreign authorities – left unnamed – believed that the infliction of pain during interrogation was permissible up ‘to the level of serious illness'. Brunetti turned from these words to a consideration of the doors of his wardrobe. ‘Diabetes or bone cancer?' he asked the doors, but they made no response.

He read the report until the end, closed it, and pushed it to one side of his desk. During his early years as a policeman, he remembered, people still argued about whether it was right or wrong to use force during an interrogation, and he had heard all of the arguments from both sides. Now they argued about how much pain they could inflict.

Euclid came to mind: was it he who had claimed that, given a lever long enough, he could move the Earth itself? Brunetti's experience and his reading of history had led him to believe that, given the right pressure, almost
anyone could be moved to confess to anything. So it had always seemed to him that the important question to be asked about interrogation was not how far the subject had to be pushed in order to confess, so much as how far the questioner was willing to go in order to get the inevitable confession.

These melancholy thoughts remained with him for some time, after which he decided to go downstairs to see if Vianello was in. As he went down the stairs, he encountered Lieutenant Scarpa, coming up them. They nodded but did not speak as they registered one another's presence. But Brunetti was brought up short when Scarpa moved to the left, effectively blocking his descent.

‘Yes, Lieutenant?'

Without introduction, Scarpa asked, ‘This Hungarian, Mary Dox, is she your doing?'

‘I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?'

Scarpa held up a folder, as if the sight of it would make things clear to Brunetti. ‘Is she yours?' the lieutenant asked again, his voice neutral.

‘I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, Lieutenant,' Brunetti said.

In an intentionally melodramatic gesture, Scarpa raised the hand with the folder in the air between them, as if he had suddenly decided to auction it off, and asked, ‘You don't know what I'm talking about? You don't know anything about Mary Dox?'

‘No.'

Just as Assunta De Cal had done when confronted with evidence of knuckle-headed masculinity, Scarpa threw his hands up in the air, then stepped to the right and continued on up the stairs without saying anything further.

Brunetti went to the officers' room in search of Vianello. He found, instead, Pucetti, hunched over his desk and deeply engrossed in what looked like the same report Brunetti had just finished. The young officer was so engrossed in what he was reading that he did not hear Brunetti approach.

‘Pucetti,' Brunetti said as he reached the desk, ‘have you seen Vianello?'

At the sound of his name, Pucetti looked up from the papers, but it took him a few seconds to tear his attention away from them; he pushed his chair back and got to his feet. ‘Excuse me, Commissario, I didn't hear you,' he said. His right hand still grasped the papers, so he was prevented from saluting. To compensate, he stood as straight as he could.

‘Vianello,' Brunetti said and smiled. ‘I'm looking for him.'

He watched Pucetti's eyes and saw him force himself to recall who Vianello was. Then Pucetti said, ‘He was here before.' He looked around the office, as if curious to discover where he found himself. ‘But he must have gone out.'

Brunetti let almost a full minute pass, and during that time he watched Pucetti return
from the land where interrogation techniques were discussed with cold dispassion – if, in fact, that was the subject that had so fully captured the attention of the young man.

When he had Pucetti's full attention, Brunetti said, ‘Lieutenant Scarpa asked me about a folder he had, dealing with a Hungarian woman named Mary Dox. Do you have any idea what this is about?'

Pucetti's face registered comprehension and he said, ‘He came in here this morning, sir, asking about the same woman. He wanted to know if any of us knew about her case.'

‘And?'

‘And no one did.'

Aware of the uniformed staff's opinion of the lieutenant, Brunetti asked, ‘No one did or no one said they did?'

‘No one did, sir. We talked about it after he left, and no one knew what he was talking about.'

‘Is this where Vianello's gone?'

‘I don't think so. He didn't know anything, either. My guess is that he's just gone down to get a coffee.'

Brunetti thanked him and told him to continue with his reading, to which Pucetti did not respond.

At the bar near Ponte dei Greci, Brunetti found Vianello at the counter, a glass of wine in front of him as he leafed through that day's paper.

‘What did Scarpa want?' Brunetti asked as
he came in. He asked the barman for a coffee.

Vianello folded the newspaper and moved it to one side of the bar. ‘I've no idea,' he answered. ‘Whatever it is, or whoever she is, it's trouble. I've never seen him so angry.'

‘No idea?' Brunetti asked, nodding his thanks to the barman as he set down the coffee.

‘None,' Vianello answered.

Brunetti stirred in sugar and drank half the coffee, then finished it. ‘You read these regulations from the Ministry of the Interior?' he asked Vianello.

‘I never read their directives,' Vianello said and took a sip of his wine. ‘I used to, but I don't care about them any more.'

‘Why?'

‘They never say anything much: just words, words all tortured so as to sound good while justifying the fact that they really don't want to achieve anything.'

‘Anything about what?' Brunetti asked.

‘You ever been sent to ask one of the Chinese where the cash came from to buy his bar? You ever been asked to check the work permits of the people who work in those bars? You ever been sent out to close down a factory that got caught dumping its garbage in a national forest?'