Through a glass, darkly cgb-15

by Donna Leon

  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 As-sunta 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 I'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.'

  '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 onto 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 or 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 onto 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.

  13

  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 polic
eman, 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.