Through a Glass Darkly (14 page)

‘I beg your pardon,' Patta said, pausing just outside his door. He looked at Signorina Elettra but pointed a finger at Brunetti and then at the door to his office. ‘If they apply, then they have to be patient. Just like everyone else who deals with a bureaucracy.'

‘Three years?' she inquired.

That stopped him. ‘No, not three years.' He made to continue into his office but then stopped on the threshold and turned back to her. ‘Who's had to wait three years?'

‘The woman who cleans my father's apartment, sir.'

‘Three years?'

She nodded.

‘Why has it taken so long?'

Brunetti wondered if she would make the obvious response and say that this was exactly what she wanted to know, but she opted for moderation and instead answered, ‘I've no idea, sir. She applied three years ago, paid the application fee, and then she heard nothing. She thought that her case would come under the amnesty, but she never heard anything further. So she asked me if I thought she should begin the whole process again and reapply. And pay the fee again.'

‘What did you tell her?'

‘I don't have an answer to give her,
Vice-Questore. It's a lot of money for her – it's a lot of money for anyone – and she doesn't want to go to the expense of applying again if there's any hope that the original application will be successful. That's why I was telling the Commissario that she and her husband were poor, desperate people.'

‘I see,' Patta said, turning from her. He waved the waiting Brunetti ahead of him, then turned to Signorina Elettra and said, ‘Give me her name and, if you can, her file number and I'll see what I can find out about it.'

‘You're very kind, sir,' she said, sounding like she meant it.

Inside, Patta wasted no time: turning to Brunetti, he asked, ‘What's all this business of your going out to Murano?'

Deny that he had? Ask how Patta knew? Repeat the question to give himself more time to think of an answer? De Cal? Fasano? Who on Murano had told Patta?

Brunetti opted to tell Patta the truth about what he was doing. ‘A woman I know on Murano,' he began – suggesting that she was a woman he had known for some time and thus showing himself how incapable he was of telling Patta the real truth about anything – ‘told me her father has been threatening her husband, well, making threatening statements about him. Not to him. She wanted me to see if I thought there was any real reason to fear that her father would do something.'

Brunetti watched Patta weigh this, wondering what his superior's response would be to
this uncharacteristic frankness. The habit of suspicion, as Brunetti feared, triumphed. ‘I suppose this explains why you went out to Murano for some sort of secret meeting in a trattoria, eh?' Patta asked, unable to disguise his satisfaction at the sight of Brunetti's surprise.

Having begun with the truth, not that it seemed to have helped, Brunetti continued that way. ‘He's someone who knows the man who's been making the threats,' Brunetti explained, relieved that Patta appeared to know nothing of Navarro's relationship to Pucetti and even more relieved that his superior had made no mention of Vianello's presence at the meeting. ‘I asked him if he thought there was any real basis in them.'

‘And? What did he say?'

‘He chose not to answer my question.'

‘Have you spoken to anyone else?' Patta demanded.

Since telling the truth to Patta had failed as a strategy, Brunetti decided to return to the tried and true path of deceit and said, ‘No.'

Patta's information had come from someone who had seen them in the restaurant, so perhaps he knew nothing about Brunetti's visits to Bovo and Tassini.

‘So there's no threat?' Patta demanded.

‘I'd say no. The man, Giovanni De Cal, is violent, but I think it's language and nothing more.'

‘And so?' Patta asked.

‘And so I go back to seeing what's to be done
about the gypsies,' Brunetti answered, trying to sound contrite.

‘
Rom
,' Patta corrected him.

‘Exactly,' said Brunetti in acknowledgement of Patta's concession to the language of political correctness, and left his office.

BRUNETTI CALLED PAOLA,
after one, told her he would not be home for lunch and was hurt when she accepted the news with equanimity. When, however, she went on to observe that, since he said he was calling from his office, and he had not called until now, she had already come to that sad conclusion, he felt himself strangely heartened by her disappointment, however sarcastically she might choose to express it.

He dialled the number of Assunta De Cal's
telefonino
and told her he would like to come out to Murano to speak to her. No, he assured her, she had nothing to fear from her father's threats: he believed there was little danger in them. But he would still like to speak to her if that were possible.

She asked him how long it would take him to get there. He asked her to hold on a moment, went to the window and saw Foa standing on the
riva
, talking to another officer. He went back to the phone and told her it would not take him more then twenty minutes, heard her say she would wait for him at the
fornace
, and hung up.

When he emerged from the main entrance of the Questura five minutes later there was no sign of Foa, nor of his boat. He asked the man at the door where the pilot was, only to be told he had taken the Vice-Questore to a meeting. This left Brunetti with no choice but to head back to Fondamenta Nuove and the 41.

Thus it took him more than forty minutes to get to the De Cal factory. When he tried the office, Assunta was not there, nor was there any response when he knocked on the door to what a sign indicated was her father's office. Brunetti left that part of the building and went across the courtyard to the entrance to the
fornace
, hoping to find her there.

The sliding metal doors to the immense brick building had been rolled back sufficiently to allow room for a man to slip in or out. Brunetti stepped inside and found himself in darkness. It took his eyes a moment to adjust, and when they did they were captured by what, for an instant, he thought was an enormous Caravaggio at the other end of the dim room. Six men stood poised for an instant at the doors
of a round furnace, half illuminated by the natural daylight that filtered in through the skylights in the roof and by the light that streamed from the furnace. They moved, and the painting fell apart into the intricate motions that lay deep in Brunetti's memory.

Two rectangular ovens stood against the right wall, but the
forno di lavoro
stood free at the center of the room. There appeared to be only two
piazze
at work, for he saw only two men twirling the blobs of molten glass at the ends of their
canne
. One seemed to be working on what would become a platter, for as he spun the
canna
, centrifugal force transformed the blob first into a saucer and then into a pizza. Memory took Brunetti back to the factory where his father had worked – not as a
maestro
but as a
servente
– decades ago. As he watched, this
maestro
became the
maestro
for whom his father had worked. And as Brunetti continued to watch, he became every
maestro
who had worked the glass for more than a thousand years. Except for his jeans and his Nike trainers, he could have stepped out of any of the centuries when such men had done this work.

Ballet was not an art for which Brunetti had much affection, but in the motions of these men he saw the beauty others saw in dance. Still spinning the
canna
, the
maestro
glided over to the door of the furnace. He turned to keep his left side towards it, and Brunetti noticed the thick glove and the sleeve
protector he wore against the savage heat. In went the
canna
, one side of the platter passing no more than a centimetre from the solid edge of the door.

Brunetti drew closer and looked beyond him and into the flame, where he saw the inferno of his youth, the Hell to which the good sisters had assured him and all his classmates they would be consigned for any infraction, no matter how minor. He saw white, yellow, red, and in the midst of it he saw the plate spinning, changing colour, growing.

The
maestro
pulled it out, again missing the side by a hair, and this time went back and sat at his
banco
and resumed spinning the plate. Without needing to look for them, he picked up an enormous pair of pincers, nor did he seem to have to look at the platter as he pressed the point of one blade up to its surface and, spinning, spinning, still spinning, cut a groove in the surface of one side. A sliver of wet glass peeled off the plate and slithered to the floor.

The
servente
responded to a signal too subtle for Brunetti to see and came over and carried the
canna
to the furnace while the
maestro
picked up a bottle that stood under his chair and took a long drink. He set it down one second before the
servente
came back and passed him the
canna
with the freshly heated plate suspended from the end. Their motions were as liquid as the glass itself.

Brunetti heard his name and turned to see Assunta standing at the door. He realized that
his shirt was stuck to his body and his face beaded with sweat. He had no idea how long he had stood, transfixed by the beauty of the men at work.

He walked towards her, conscious of the sudden chill of the perspiration on his back. ‘I was delayed,' Brunetti said, offering no explanation. ‘So I came to look for you in here.'

She smiled and waved this aside. ‘It's all right. I was down at the dock. Today's the day they collect the acid and the mud, and I like to be there to see that the numbers and weights are right.'

Brunetti's confusion was no doubt apparent – he had never heard of such things in his father's time – for she explained: ‘The laws are clear about what we can use and what we must do with it after we use it. They have to be.' Her smile grew softer and she added, ‘I know I must sound like Marco when I say these things, but he's right about them.'

‘What acid?' Brunetti asked.

‘Nitric and fluoric,' she said. She saw that Brunetti was no less confused and so went on. ‘When we make beads, we drill a copper wire through the centre to make the hole, then the copper has to be dissolved in nitric acid. Every now and then, we have to change the acid.' Brunetti did not want to know what had been done with the acid in the past.

‘Same with the fluoric. We need it to smooth the surfaces on the big pieces. Well, it's the same in that we have to pay to get rid of it.'

‘And mud, did you say?' he asked.

‘From the grinding, when they do the final polishing,' she said, then asked, ‘Would you like to see?'

‘My father worked out here, but that was decades ago,' Brunetti said, in an attempt not to appear completely ignorant. ‘Things have changed, I suppose.'

‘Less than you'd think,' she answered. She stepped past him and waved an arm at the men who continued undisturbed in their ritual movements in front of the furnaces. ‘It's one of the things I love about this,' she said, her voice warmer. ‘No one's found a better way to do what we've been doing for hundreds of years.'

She leaned towards Brunetti and put her hand on his arm to capture his attention fully. ‘See what he's doing?' she asked, pointing to the second of the
maestri
, who was just returning from the furnace. He took his place behind a small wooden bucket on the floor. As they watched, he blew into one end of the iron
canna
, inflating the blob of glass at the other end. Quickly, with the grace of a baton twirler, he swung the glowing mass until it was just above the bucket and squeezed it carefully into the cylindrical tub, moving it up and down and slipping it around until it slid inside. He blew repeatedly into the end of the pipe, each puff forcing a halo of sparks to fly from the top of the tub.

When he pulled the
canna
out, the blob was a
perfect cylinder, now recognizable as the flat-bottomed vase it would become. ‘Same raw materials, same tools, same technique as we were using here centuries ago,' she said.

He glanced aside at her and their smiles met, reflecting one another. ‘It's wonderful, isn't it, something so permanent?' Brunetti said, not quite certain if that last word was the one he sought, but she nodded, understanding him.

‘The only change we've made is to switch to gas,' she said. ‘Aside from that, nothing's changed.'

‘Except these laws Marco supports?' Brunetti asked.

Her expression changed and became serious. ‘Is that meant as a joke?'

He had not intended to offend her. ‘No, not at all,' he protested quickly. ‘I assure you. I don't know what laws you mean, but what I know about your husband tells me they're probably ecological laws, in which case I'm sure they were necessary and well past time.'

‘Marco says it's too little, too late,' she said, but she said it quietly.

This was not the place for a conversation like this, Brunetti knew, so he took a step away from her and closer to the workers, hoping to break the mood created by her last words. He pointed at the men near the furnaces and turned back to ask her, ‘How many workers do you have here?'

She seemed relieved by the change of subject and began to count them off on her fingers. ‘Two
piazze
, that's six; then the two men down
at the dock and who do the packing and delivery; then three who do the final
molatura
, that's eleven, and then
l'uomo di notte
: that makes twelve, I think.'

He watched her tally the men again on her fingers. ‘Yes, twelve, and my father and I.'