Through a glass, darkly cgb-15

by Donna Leon

  '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. 1 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.

  1 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.

  'Not unless I think there's reason to do that’ Brunetti answered, which was the truth. He had no desire to speak to De Cal again; further, he did not think her father a man much given to listening to the voice of sweet reason.

  'You want me to tell you their names?' she asked, her voice suddenly softer, as if by making it smaller she could more easily hide from the answer.

  'Yes.'

  She looked at him for a long time. Finally she said, 'Giorgio Tassini, l'uomo di notte. For my father and for the fornace next door. And Paolo Bovo. He doesn't work for us, but he heard him talking.'

  Brunetti asked for their addresses, and she wrote them down on a piece of paper he gave her, asking him if he would try to talk to Tassini away from the fornace. Brunetti was happy to agree, seeing it as an opportunity to stay clear of De Cal for the moment.

  Brunetti had never been good at giving false assurances to people, but he wanted to give her at least some comfort. 'I'll see what they tell me,' he said. 'People tend to say things they don't mean, especially when they're angry, or when they've had too much to drink.' He remembered De Cal's face and asked, 'Does your father drink more than he should?'

  She sighed again. 'A glass of wine is more than he should drink’ she said. 'He's a diabetic and shouldn't drink at all, and certainly not as much as he does.'

  'Does this happen often?'

  'You know how it is, especially with workmen’ she said with the resignation of long familiarity. 'Un'ombra at eleven, and then wine with lunch, then a couple of beers to get through the afternoon, especially in the summer when it's hot, and then a couple more ombre before dinner, and more wine with the meal, and then maybe a grappa before bed. And then the next day you start all over again.'

  It sounded like the kind of drinking he was used to seeing in men of his father's generation: they'd drunk like this most of their adult lives, yet he had never seen one of them behave in a way that would suggest drunkenness. And why on earth should they change just because the professional classes had switched to prosecco and spritz?

  'Has he always been like this?' he asked, then clarified the question by adding, 'I don't mean the drinking: I mean his temper and the violent language.'

  She nodded. 'A few years ago, the police had to come and stop a fight.'

  'Involving him?'

  'Yes.'

  'What happened?'

  'He was in a bar, and someone said something he didn't like—he never told me about it, so I don't know what it was. I know this only from what other people have told me—and he said something back, and then one of them hit the other—I never learned who. And someone called the police, but by the time they got there, the other men had stopped them, and nothing happened. That is, no one was arrested and no one made a denuncia.'

  'Anything else?' Brunetti asked.

  'Not that I know about. No.' She seemed relieved that she could put an end to his questions.

  'Has he ever been violent with you?'

  Her mouth fell open. 'What?'

  'Has he ever hit you?'

  'No’ she said with such force that Brunetti could only believe her. 'He loves me. He'd never hit me. He'd cut off his hand first.' Strangely enough, Brunetti believed this, too.

  'I see,' he said, and then added, "That must make this even more painful for you.'

  She smiled when he said that. 'I'm glad you can understand.'

  There seemed nothing more to ask her, and so Brunetti thanked her for coming to speak to him and asked if she wanted to tell him anything else.

  'Just fix this, please,' she said, sounding decades younger.

  'I'll try,' Brunetti said. He asked for her telefonino number, wrote it down, then got to his feet.

  He walked downstairs with her and out onto the embankment. It was warmer than when he had arrived a few hours before. They shook hands and she turned
towards SS Giovanni e Paolo and the boat that would take her to Murano. Brunetti stood on the riva for a few minutes, looking across at the garden on the other side and running through his memory for personal connections. He went back into the Questura and up to the officers' room, where he found Pucetti.

  The young officer stood when his superior entered. 'Good morning, Commissario’ he said. Was that a tan he saw on Pucetti's face? Brunetti had signed the forms authorizing staff leave during the Easter holiday, but he couldn't recall if Pucetti's name had been on it.

  'Pucetti’ he said as he drew near the desk. 'You have family on Murano, don't you?' Brunetti could not remember why this piece of information had lodged in his memory, but he was fairly certain that it had.

  'Yes, sir. Aunts and uncles and three cousins.'

  'Any of them work at the fornaci?'

  He watched Pucetti run through the list of his relatives. Finally he said, 'Two.'

  'They people you can ask things?' Brunetti asked, not having to specify that the question referred to their discretion more than to the information they might possess.

  'One of them is,' Pucetti said.

  'Good. I'd like you to ask about Giovanni De Cal. He owns a fornace out there.'

  'I know it, sir. It's on Sacca Serenella.'

  'Do you know him?' Brunetti asked.

  'No, sir. I don't. But I've heard about him. Is there anything specific you'd like to know?'

  'Yes. He's got a son-in-law he hates and whom he may have threatened. I'd like to know if anyone thinks he'd actually do anything or if it's just talk. And I'd like to know if there's any word that he's thinking of selling his fornace.'

  Brunetti watched Pucetti suppress the impulse to salute as he said, 'Yes, sir.' Then the younger man asked, 'Is there any hurry? Should I call him now?'

  'No, I'd like to keep this as casual as possible. Why don't you go home and change and go out and talk to him? I don't want it to seem like ...' Brunetti let his voice trail off.

  'Seem like it is what it is?' Pucetti asked with a smile.

  'Exactly,' Brunetti said, 'though I'm not sure I know what that is.'

  7

  L'uomo di notte, Brunetti considered, by definition worked nights, which would have him home during the day. It was only a little after eleven, one of the sweetest times of day in springtime, and so Brunetti decided to walk down to Castello to talk to Giorgio Tassini and see if he would be willing to repeat what De Cal had told him. It occurred to Brunetti that he was perhaps engaging in that portmanteau offence, abuso d'ufficio, for he was certainly using the powers of his office to look into something that was of interest to him personally and had no official interest to the forces of order. The thought that the alternative to a walk in the sunshine down to Via Garibaldi was to return to his office to begin reading through the personnel files of the officers due for promotion was more than enough to propel Brunetti out onto Riva degli Schiavoni.

  He turned left and started down towards Sant'-Elena. His strides grew longer as he felt the sun begin to work the winter stiffness out of him. Days like these reminded him of what a filthy climate the city really had: cold and damp in the winter; hot and damp in the summer. He banished this thought as the remains of winter gloom and looked around him, his smile as bright as the day itself.

  He turned into Via Garibaldi, leaving the warmth of the sun behind him. According to Assunta, Tassini lived opposite the church of San Francesco di Paola, and he slowed as he saw the church on his left. He found the number he sought, read the names on the three bells and pressed the one at the top with 'Tassini' written below it. When there was no response, he rang the bell again, this time keeping his finger on it long enough to wake the sleeping man. Suddenly he heard a loud squawk from the speaker phone and then the low hiss of a loose connection. Silence. He rang a third time, and this time a low-pitched voice asked what he wanted.

  I'd like to speak to Signor Tassini’ he said, his voice unnaturally loud in an attempt to penetrate the hiss and the static that didn't stop.

  'What?' the voice asked through another roar of static.

  'Signor Tassini,' he shouted.

  '... trouble ... who? ... enough...' the voice said.

  Brunetti decided communication was useless, so he pressed his finger against the bell and kept it there until the door snapped open.

  He climbed the stairs to the third floor, where he found a white-haired woman standing in a doorway on the top landing. She had the papery skin of a heavy smoker and short, badly permed white hair that fell in a jagged fringe across her eyebrows. Below it, her eyes were deep green and held in a perpetual squint, as though forced into it by decades of rising smoke. She was short, and her squat rotundity spoke of endurance and strength. She did not smile, but her face relaxed, and a thin tracery of wrinkles softened around her eyes and mouth. 'What can I do for you?' she asked in purest Castello, her voice almost as deep as his own.

  Brunetti answered in dialect, as seemed only polite. 'I'd like to speak to Signor Tassini if he's here’ he said.

  'Signor Tassini is it, now?' she asked with an inquisitive tilt of her chin. 'What could my son-in-law have done that the cops are interested in him?' She seemed curious rattier than fearful.

  'Is it that obvious, Signora?' Brunetti asked, waving his right hand at his own body. 'Couldn't I be the gasman?'

  'As easily as I could be the Queen of Sheba’ she said and laughed from somewhere deep behind her stomach. When she stopped, both of them heard what sounded like the yipping of a puppy from inside the apartment. She turned her head towards it, still speaking to Brunetti as she did so. 'You better come in, then, so you can talk to me. Besides, I've got to keep an eye on them while Sonia does the shopping, isn't it true?'

  As he gave her his name and shook her hand, it occurred to Brunetti to wonder how much of what she said would be comprehensible to a person from, say, Bologna. A number of the teeth on the top left side of her mouth were missing, so her speech was slurred, but it was the Veneziano stretto that was sure to defeat any ear not born within a hundred kilometres of the laguna. Yet how sweet it was to hear that dialect, so much like the one his grandmother had spoken all her life, never bothering to have anything to do with Italian, which she had always dismissed as a foreign language and not worthy of her attention.

  The woman, who might have been fifty as easily as sixty, led him into a meticulously clean living room at the end of which stood a bookcase out of which books pretty well did whatever they wanted to do—hung, leaned, fell, tilted. Facing the sofa where the woman must have been sitting was a small television with a hothouse cyclamen in a plastic pot on top of it. On the television, pastel-coloured cartoon creatures danced around silently, for the sound had been turned down or off.

  The sofa was draped with a plaid blanket and might once have been white, though it was now the colour of oatmeal. In the middle of the sofa sat a young boy, perhaps two years old. He was the source of the noise, a piping cry of wordless joy with which he kept time to the jumps and steps of the pastel creatures. At the approach of the adults, the little boy smiled at his grandmother and patted the place beside him.

  She plumped herself down next to him, grabbed him up, and pulled him onto her lap. She bent and kissed the top of his head, provoking ecstatic wriggles. He turned away from the screen, hiked himself up on his feet, and planted a wet kiss on her nose. She looked up at Brunetti, smiled, then put her face up to the little boy's. Then she buried her face in his neck and whispered, 'More, xe beo, xe propio beo.' She looked at Brunetti, face bright, and asked, 'E xe beo, me puteo?'

  Brunetti grinned in agreement and praised the boy's sunlike radiance, his obvious superiority to any child he'd ever seen, his remarkable resemblance to his grandmother. Her eyes narrowed momentarily, and she gave Brunetti a long, speculative glance.

  'Mine are older now’ he said, 'but I still remember when they were his age. I used to invent some excuse to leave and go home from work just to be with them. I'd s
ay I was going out to question someone, and I'd go home and play with my babies.'

  Her smile widened in approval. From the back of the apartment there came a muffled noise, the unmistakable cry of a baby, and Brunetti looked at her in confusion. 'It's Emma,' she said. She bounced the boy on her lap and added, 'His twin sister.' She sized up Brunetti with astute eyes and asked, 'You think you could go and get her? He'll cry if I leave him now, even for a minute.'

  Brunetti looked towards the back of the apartment.

  'Just follow the noise,' she said and went back to bouncing the boy on her lap.

  He did as he was told and went into a bedroom on the right side of the corridor, where he found two cribs that stood head to head. Bright-coloured mobiles floated from the ceiling, and a small zoo of stuffed animals stood behind the bars of the cribs. A little girl lay in one of them, beside her a furry elephant just as big as she. He walked over to her, saying, 'Emma, how are you? Aren't you a pretty girl? Come on, now, we're going out to see your nonna, eh?'

  He bent and picked her up, surprised to find that she lay limp in his hands, like a frightened animal. Not-quite-forgotten habit slipped into operation and he put her over his shoulder, noticing the insubstantiality of her, patting her warm back with his right hand, saying nonsense things to her all the way back to the living room.

  'Just put her here, next to me’ the woman said when he came in. He seated the little girl next to her grandmother, whereupon she tilted to the right and fell over. She made a low noise but did not move.

  Before Brunetti could reach down and set her upright, the woman said, 'No, leave her. She can't sit up yet.'

  At two, both of his children were walking, even running, and Raffi had declared war on any object within his reach. Brunetti made himself respond as if he found her remark in no way surprising.

  'Has she seen a doctor?'

  'Ah, doctors,' she said, the way Venetians always spoke of doctors.