Through a Glass Darkly (21 page)

‘Thank you,' he said, reaching across to the paper. Because of the sudden shadow of formality, even reprimand, that had fallen, Brunetti decided not to show her the three sheets of paper from Tassini's file, and she did not linger to ask if there was anything else she might do for him.

AFTER SIGNORINA ELETTRA
left, Brunetti asked himself, as would someone from the Disease Control Centre, in which direction the arc of ecological infection was now likely to be passing: whether from her to Vianello or from the Inspector to her. His imagination was seized for a moment by this image, and he found himself wondering what risk of contagion he experienced by working in such proximity to them and when he might begin to feel the first symptoms.

Brunetti believed that his concern for the environment and for the ecological future was stronger than that of the average citizen – only a statue could have resisted the constant harassment of his children – but he obviously must
have been judged to have failed to live up to the standards established by his two colleagues. Given the sincerity of their beliefs, why then did Vianello and Signorina Elettra work for the police force, when they could be working for some sort of environmental protection office?

For that matter, why did any of them continue to work for the police? Brunetti wondered. He and Vianello had most reason, for it was a job they had done for decades. But what about someone like Pucetti? He was young, bright, ambitious. So why would he opt to wear a uniform, walk the streets of the city at all hours, and dedicate himself to the maintenance of public order? Even more confusing and enigmatic, however, was Signorina Elettra. Over the years, Brunetti had stopped discussing her with Paola, not so much because of any response he had observed in Paola as because of the way it registered in his own ears to hear himself praise or display such curiosity about a woman other than his wife. She had been at the Questura how long? Five years? Six? Brunetti had to confess he knew little more about her than he had when she first started working there: knew little more, that is, than that he could trust both her abilities and her discretion and that her mask of wry amusement at human foibles was just that, a mask.

He lifted his feet on to the desk, folded his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his chair. He studied the middle distance as he considered everything that had happened since
Vianello asked him to go out to Mestre. He ran the events through his mind like the beads of a rosary, each one a separate entity but each leading to and from another, until they led to Tassini's body lying in front of the burning furnace.

He had eaten nothing all day save two panini and now regretted it. The sandwiches had done little more than remind him about food without satisfying his desire for it, and it was now too late to get anything to eat at a restaurant while it was still too early to go home.

He leaned forward and picked up the three sheets of paper and looked at them, then let them float, one by one, back to the surface of his desk. He felt his left knee growing stiff, so he crossed his feet, which allowed him to bend the knee. As he turned in the chair to do so, he felt one of the books in his pockets strike against the back of his chair, reminding him of their presence.

He pulled them out, looked at the ecological frightener and tossed it on to the desk. That left him with Dante, an old friend he had heard nothing from for more than a year. By nature an optimist, Brunetti would have preferred to find
Purgatorio
, the only book in which hope was a possibility, but given the fact that the alternative was
Industrial Illness
, he chose the black misery of Hell.

As he had fallen into the habit of doing in recent decades, he opened the book at random, thinking that this might well be the way other people read religious texts: letting fate lead them to some new illumination.

He dipped in just as Dante, still new to Hell and still capable of pity, tried to leave a message for Cavalcante that his son was still alive, then followed his Guide deeper into the abyss, already sickened by the stench. He flipped quickly on and found Vanni Fucci's obscene gesture to God, and flipped on again. He read of Dante's violence toward Bocca Degli Abbati and felt a moment's pleasure that such a traitor was so viciously treated.

He turned back and found himself reading one of the passages bordered by the notes Tassini had made in red. Canto XIV, the burning sand and horrid stream and fiery rain, that whole grotesque parody of nature that Dante thought so well suited to those who sinned against it: the usurers and sodomites. Brunetti followed them as, beneath the flaming snow that fell all around them, Dante and Virgil moved deeper into Hell. There appeared the company of shades, one of whom Brunetti recognized, or remembered, as Brunetto Latini, Dante's respected teacher. Though Brunetti had never much liked the passages that followed – the praise of Dante's genius that he puts into Ser Brunetto's mouth and the outing of public figures – he read on to the end of the next canto. He flipped back to Tassini's heavy red lines under ‘. . . the plain whose soil rejects all roots . . . The wood itself is ringed with the red stream.' In the margin, Tassini had written, ‘No roots. No life. Nothing.' In black ink, he had written ‘The
grey
stream.'

Brunetti flipped forward and came upon the hypocrites. He recognized them, with their voluminous cloaks, like the Benedictines of Cluny, all dazzle and golden and fair on the outside, leaden and heavy and dull on the inside, the perfect physical manifestation of their deceit, doomed to carry it and measure out their steps until the end of time.

The lines describing their cloaks were circled in green and linked by a line to the text on the facing page, Virgil saying, ‘Were I a pane of leaden glass, I could no more instantly imitate your look.'

The phone rang, dragging Brunetti away from Hell. He let his chair fall forward and answered with his name.

‘I thought I'd call,' Elio Pelusso said. An old classmate of Brunetti's, Pelusso now worked on the newsdesk of the
Gazzettino
and had in the past been both informative and helpful. Brunetti had no idea why Pelusso would call him, which meant he could not figure out what sort of favour Pelusso would be after.

‘Indeed,' Brunetti said. ‘It's good to hear your voice.'

Pelusso laughed outright. ‘Have they been making you all take sensitivity classes so you'll know how to deal with the press?' he asked.

‘It's that obvious, eh?' Brunetti asked.

‘To hear a policeman saying he's glad to hear my voice gives me goose-flesh.'

‘And if a friend says it?' Brunetti asked, making himself sound offended.

‘Then it's different,' Pelusso said in a warmer tone. ‘Do you want me to call again and we can start over?'

Brunetti laughed. ‘No, Elio, not at all. Just tell me what you'd like to know.'

‘This time I'm calling to tell, not to ask.'

Brunetti bit back the remark that he was going to write the date down so he would be sure to remember it and, instead, asked, ‘Tell me what?'

‘Someone I spoke to said that your boss has had a bug put in his ear by a certain Gianluca Fasano.'

‘What sort of bug?'

‘The sort that comes from people who don't like hearing that questions are being asked about their friends.'

‘I suppose you wouldn't want to tell me who told you that, would you?' Brunetti asked.

‘You're right. I wouldn't.'

‘Is he reliable?'

‘Yes.'

Brunetti considered this for some time. The waiter, either the waiter or Navarro. ‘I was out at the glass factory next to his,' he volunteered to Pelusso.

‘De Cal's?' the reporter asked.

‘Yes. You know him?'

‘Enough to know he's a bastard and enough to know he's a very sick man.'

‘How sick?' Brunetti asked. ‘And how do you know it?'

‘I've met him a few times over the years, but
a friend of mine was in a room in the hospital with him, so I saw him there when I went to visit my friend.'

‘And?' Brunetti asked.

‘You know how it is in oncology,' Pelusso said. ‘No one ever tells anyone what they think they don't want to hear. But my friend heard the word “pancreas” enough times to suspect it didn't make any difference what else they said.'

‘How long ago was this?'

‘About a month. De Cal was in there for tests. Not treatment, but they still kept him in for two days – long enough for my friend to come to hate him as much as he seems to hate his son-in-law,' the reporter said. Then, perhaps because he felt he had given enough information and had no return on his investment, he asked, ‘Why are you interested in Fasano?'

‘I didn't know I was,' Brunetti said. ‘But now maybe I am.'

‘And De Cal?'

‘He's threatened the husband of someone I know.'

‘Sounds like something he'd do,' Pelusso said.

‘Anything else?' Brunetti asked, though he knew it was greedy to do so.

‘No.'

‘Thanks for calling,' Brunetti said. ‘I have to think about this for a while.'

‘It's my single hope in life, to be of help to the forces of order,' Pelusso said in his most unctuous voice, waited for Brunetti's
answering laugh, and when he heard it, hung up.

Inferno
open in his lap, Brunetti wondered where Dante would have placed someone like De Cal. With the thieves? No, Brunetti had no reason to suspect he had ever stolen anything, save what the ordinary businessman was obliged to steal from the taxman in order to survive, and that was hardly to be considered a sin. Among the grafters? But how else to run a business? Brunetti remembered the man, his face red with anger, and realized that he would be among the wrathful and be torn limb from limb, like Filippo Argenti, by his fellow sinners. Yet, if De Cal knew himself to be a dying man but still bent his mind to profit, then Dante might have put him among the hoarders and condemned him to push his heavy stone, for all eternity, against the stones of other men like himself.

Brunetti had once read in the science column of
La Repubblica
a report on experiments done with people suffering from Alzheimer's. Many of them lost the use of the brain mechanism that told them when they were hungry or full, and if given food repeatedly, would eat again and again, unconscious of the fact that they had just eaten and should no longer be hungry. He sometimes thought it was the same with people afflicted with the disease of greed: the concept of ‘enough' had been eliminated from their minds.

He folded the papers in three and slipped them into the pocket of his jacket. Downstairs he left a note on Vianello's desk, telling the
Inspector he had left for the day but would like to talk to him the following morning. Outside the Questura he gave himself over to what was left of the day. He went out to Riva degli Schiavoni and took the Number One to Salute, then headed west with no destination in mind, turning that decision over to his memory and his mood. He cut through the underpass by the abbey, down past building site after building site then left, down towards the Incurabili. Only a fragment of Bobo's fresco remained, glassed in now in order to save what was left from the elements. Had it been warmer, he would have had his first ice-cream of the year, not at Nico's but at the little place down by Ai Schiavi. He passed the Giustinian, crossed over to Fondamenta Foscarini and then went down to Tonolo for a coffee and a pastry. Because he had had no lunch to speak of, he had two: a cream-filled swan and a tiny chocolate éclair as light as silk.

In the window of a shop where he had once bought a grey sweater, he saw what might be its twin, but in green. The size was his and soon, without his bothering to try it on, so was the sweater. As he stepped out into the
calle
, he realized how happy he was, much in the way he had been as a boy to be out of school when the others were still inside, and no one to know where he was or what he was doing.

He went into a wine shop not far from San Pantalon and bought a bottle of Nebbiolo, a Sangiovese, and a very young Barbera. By then
it was almost seven, and he decided to go home. As he turned into the
calle
, he noticed Raffi opening the front door of their building and called out to him, but his son didn't hear him and closed the door. Brunetti shifted packages, looking for his keys, and by the time he got inside it was too late to shout up the steps after his son.

As he turned into the final flight of stairs, he heard Raffi's voice, though he had seen him come in alone. This confusion was resolved halfway up the steps, when he saw Raffi, slouched against the wall outside the door,
telefonino
in hand. ‘No, not tonight. I've got that calculus to do. You know how much homework he gives us.'

Brunetti smiled at his son, who held up a hand and, in a gesture of unmistakable male solidarity, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, saying, ‘Of course I want to see you.'

Brunetti let himself into the apartment, abandoning Raffi to what he assumed were the tender solicitations of Sara Paganuzzi. Inside, he found himself surrounded by the aroma of artichokes. The scent floated down the hallway from the kitchen, filling the house. The penetrating odour sent Brunetti's mind flashing back to the stench that had surrounded him twelve hours before. He set the packages on the floor and went down the corridor, away from the kitchen, and into the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later, showered, his hair still wet, and wearing a pair of light cotton pants
and a T-shirt, he went back down the hallway to get his sweater. Both packages were gone. He went down to the kitchen, where he saw the three bottles lined up on the counter, Paola at the stove, and Chiara setting the table.

Paola turned and made a kissing gesture towards him; Chiara said hello and smiled. ‘Aren't you cold?' Paola asked.