Through a Glass Darkly (7 page)

The woman came back with four tiny glasses, and things began to look up. What would be served with sweet wine? No sooner had he begun to hope than realism intervened: this
might be another attempt to deceive him, and there might be nothing more than almond cookies, but then the girl turned from the door to the terrace and came towards the table with a dark brown oval resting on a plate in front of her. The detective had time to think of Judith, and Salome, when his suspicions were obliterated by three voices calling in unison, ‘Chocolate mousse. Chocolate mousse', and he glanced aside just in time to see the woman pull an enormous bowl of whipped cream from the refrigerator.

It wasn't until considerably later that a sated Brunetti and a contented Paola sat together on the sofa, he feeling virtuous at having refused the sweet wine and then the grappa that was offered in its place.

‘I had a call from Assunta,' she said, confusing him.

‘Assunta who?' he asked, his feet crossed on the low table in front of them.

‘Assunta De Cal,' she said.

‘Whatever for?' he asked. Then he remembered that it was in her father's
fornace
that the glass panels had been made and wondered if Paola wanted to see more of the artist's work.

‘She's worried about her father.'

Brunetti was tempted to inquire what his involvement in that might be but asked only, ‘Worried about what?'

‘She said he's getting more and more violent towards her husband.'

‘Violent violent or talk violent?'

‘So far, only talk violent, but she's worried – Guido, I really think she is – that the old man will do something.'

‘Marco's at least thirty years younger than De Cal, isn't he?' When she nodded, Brunetti said, ‘Then he can defend himself or he can just run away. Walk away, from what I remember of the old man.'

‘It's not that,' Paola said.

‘Then what is it?' he asked kindly.

‘She's afraid that her father will get in trouble by doing something to him. By hitting him or, oh, I don't know. She says she's never seen him so angry, not ever in her life, and she doesn't know why he is.'

‘What sort of things does he say?' Brunetti asked, knowing from experience that the violent often announce their intentions, sometimes in the hope that they will be prevented from carrying them out.

‘That Ribetti's a troublemaker and that he married her for her money and to get his hands on the
fornace
. But he says that only when he's drunk, Assunta said, about the
fornace
.'

‘Who in their right mind would want to take over a
fornace
in Murano these days?' Brunetti asked in an exasperated voice. ‘Especially someone who has no experience of glass-making?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Why did she call you, then?'

‘To ask if she could come and talk to you,'
Paola said, sounding faintly nervous about passing on the request.

‘Of course, she can come,' Brunetti said and patted her thigh.

‘You'll be nice to her?' Paola asked.

‘Yes, Paola,' he said, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. ‘I'll be nice to her.'

ASSUNTA DE CAL
came to the Questura a little after ten the following morning. An officer called from the entrance to say Brunetti had a visitor, then accompanied her to the Commissario's office. She stopped just inside the door, and Brunetti got to his feet and went over to shake her hand. ‘How nice that we see one another again,' he said, using the plural to avoid addressing her either formally or informally. If she had looked older than her husband at the gallery opening, she looked even more so now. Her skin was sallow, and the lines running from her nose down either side of her mouth were more pronounced. Her hair was freshly washed and she wore makeup, but she had not managed to disguise her
nervousness or the stress she seemed to be under.

She had apparently decided that he was to share in the same grammatical dispensation as Paola and addressed him as
tu
when she thanked him and said it was kind of him to take time to listen to her.

Brunetti led her to the chairs in front of his desk, held one for her, and took the other as soon as she was seated.

‘Paola said you wanted to talk to me about your father,' he began.

She sat upright in the chair, like a schoolchild asked into the office of the
preside
to be reprimanded. She nodded a few times. ‘It's terrible,' she finally said.

‘Why do you say that, Assunta?'

‘I told Paola,' she said, as though she were reluctant or embarrassed and perhaps hoped to learn that Paola had told Brunetti everything.

‘I'd like you to tell me about it, as well,' Brunetti encouraged her.

She took a deep breath, brought her lips together, opened her mouth to sigh, and said, ‘He says that Marco doesn't love me and that he married me for my money.' She did not look at him as she said this.

Brunetti could understand her embarrassment at repeating her father's remarks about her desirability, but these were not the threats Paola had mentioned. ‘
Do
you have any money, Signora?'

‘That's the crazy thing,' she said, turning to him and stretching out a hand. She drew it back
just before it touched his arm, and she said, ‘I don't have any. I own the house my mother left me, but Marco owns his mother's house in Venice, which is bigger.'

‘Who's in that house?' Brunetti asked.

‘We let it,' she said.

‘And the money which comes from that? Is it enough to make you rich?'

She laughed at the idea. ‘No, he lets it to his cousin and her husband. They're paying four hundred Euros a month. That's not going to make anyone rich,' she said.

‘Do you have any savings?' he asked, thinking of the many stories he had heard, over the years, of people who had hoarded away their salaries and become millionaires.

‘No, not at all. I used most of my savings when I inherited the house from my mother and had it restored. I thought I could let it and continue to live in my father's house, but then I met Marco and we decided we wanted our own house.'

‘Why did you decide to live on Murano instead of here in the city?' From what Vianello had told him of Ribetti's work, the engineer would have to spend a lot of time on the mainland, and that would probably be easier from Venice than from Murano.

‘I work in the factory, and sometimes, if there's a problem, I have to go in at night. Marco goes to the terra ferma a few times a week for his work, but he can get to Piazzale Roma easily enough from there, so we decided to stay on
Murano. Besides,' she added, ‘his cousin has been in the house a long time.'

Brunetti realized that this was a coded way of explaining that the cousin either would not get out of the house without a court order forcing her to do so or that Ribetti was unwilling to ask her to leave. It was not important to Brunetti which of these was true, so he abandoned the subject and asked, searching for the proper way to refer to future inheritance, ‘Do you have prospects?'

‘You mean the
fornace
? When my father dies?' she asked: so much for Brunetti's attempts at delicacy.

‘Yes.'

‘I think I'll inherit it. My father has never said anything, and I've never asked. But what else would he do with it?'

‘Have you any idea what a
fornace
like your father's would be worth?'

He watched her calculate, and then she said, ‘I'd guess somewhere around a million Euros.'

‘Are you sure of that sum?' he asked.

‘Not exactly, no, but it's a good estimate, I think. You see, I've kept the accounts for years, and I listen to what the other owners say, so I know what the other
fornaci
are worth, or at least what their owners think they're worth.' She looked at him, then away for an instant and then back, and Brunetti sensed that he was finally getting close to what she had come to talk about. ‘But that's another thing that bothers me.'

‘What?'

‘I think my father might be trying to sell it.'

‘Why do you say that?'

She looked away for a long time, perhaps formulating an answer, then back at him before she said, ‘It's nothing, really. Well, nothing I can describe or be sure of. It's the way he acts, and some of the things he says.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘Once, I told one of the men to do something, and he – my father, that is – asked me what it would be like if I couldn't order men around any more.' She paused to see how Brunetti reacted to this and then went on. ‘And another time, when we were ordering sand, I told him we should double the order so we could save on the transport, and he said it would be best to order enough only for the next six months. But the way he said it was strange, as if he thought . . . oh, I don't know, as if we weren't going to be there in six months. Something like that.'

‘How long ago was this?'

‘About six weeks, maybe less.'

Brunetti thought about asking her if she would like something to drink, but he knew better than to break the rhythm into which their conversation had fallen. ‘I'd like to go back to the things your father has said about Marco. Has he ever talked about wanting to do anything to him?' Obviously, she must realize that Paola would have repeated to him what she had said but perhaps it helped her to pretend she
had not revealed family secrets and let him coax the story out of her.

‘You mean threaten him?'

‘Yes.'

She considered this for some time, perhaps trying to find a way to continue denying it. Finally she said, ‘I've heard him say what he hopes will happen to him.' It was an evasive answer, Brunetti knew, but at least she had begun to talk.

‘But that's not exactly a threat, is it?' Brunetti asked.

‘No, not really,' she surprised him by agreeing. ‘I know how men talk, especially men who work in the
fornaci
. They're always saying that they'll break someone's head or break his leg. It's just the way they talk.'

‘Do you think that's the case with your father?' Brunetti asked.

‘I wouldn't be here if I thought that,' she said in a voice that had suddenly grown serious, almost reproving him that he could ask such a thing or treat her visit so lightly.

‘Of course,' Brunetti agreed. ‘Then has your father made real threats?' When she made no move to answer, he asked, ‘Did Marco tell you?' He thought it would be best to speak of Marco familiarly and thus make the atmosphere more friendly again, if only to induce her to speak more openly.

‘No, he'd never repeat things like that.'

‘Then how did you learn about it?'

‘Men at the
fornace
,' she said. ‘They heard him – my father – talking.'

‘Who?'

‘Workers.'

‘And they told you?'

‘Yes. And another man I know.'

‘Would you tell me their names?'

This time she did put a hand on his arm and asked, her concern audible, ‘Is this going to get them into trouble?'

‘If you tell me their names or if I talk to them?'

‘Both.'

‘I don't see any way that it could. As you said, men talk like this, and most often it's nothing, just talk. But before I can know if that's all it is, I need to talk to the men who heard your father say these things. That is,' he added, ‘if they'll talk to me.'

‘I don't know that they will,' she said.

‘Neither do I,' Brunetti said with a small, resigned grin. ‘Not until I ask them.' He waited for her to volunteer the names; when she didn't, he asked, ‘What did they tell you?'

‘He told one of them that he'd like to kill Marco,' she said, her voice unsteady.

Brunetti did not waste time trying to explain that a remark like this depended on context and tone for its meaning. He hardly wanted to begin to sound like an apologist for De Cal, but the little he had seen of the man led him to suspect that he would be prone to say such things without any serious intent.

‘What else?'

‘That he'd see him dead before he'd let him
have the
fornace
. The man who told me this said my father was drunk when he said it and was talking about the history of the family and not wanting it to be destroyed by some outsider.' She looked at Brunetti and tried to smile but didn't make a very good job of it. ‘Anyone who's not from Murano is an outsider for him.'

Trying to lighten the mood, Brunetti said, ‘My father felt that way about anyone who wasn't from Castello.'

She smiled at this but returned immediately to what she had been saying. ‘It doesn't make any sense for him to say that, no sense at all. The last thing in the world Marco wants is to have anything to do with the
fornace
. He listens to me when I talk about work, but that's politeness. He has no interest in it.'

‘Then why would your father think he did?'

She shook her head. ‘I don't know. Believe me, I don't know.'

He waited a while and then said, ‘Assunta, I'd like to tell you that people who talk about violence never do it, but that's not true. Usually they don't. But sometimes they do. Often all they want to do is complain and get people to listen to them. But I don't know your father well enough to be able to tell if that's true about him.'

He spoke slowly and without judgement or criticism. ‘I'd like very much to speak to these men and get a clearer idea of what he said and how he said it.' She started to ask a question but he went on, ‘I'm not asking you as a policeman, because there's no question of a crime here,
nothing at all. I'd simply like to go and talk to these people and settle this, if I can.'

‘And to my father?' she said fearfully.