Through a Glass Darkly (19 page)

Brunetti looked at his watch and saw that it was after nine; he took out his
telefonino
and dialled the hospital number of Dottor Rizzardi. He recognized the doctor's voice when he answered.

‘It's me, Ettore. I'm out on Murano. Yes, a dead man.' He listened for a while and then said, ‘Venturi.' There was an even longer silence, this time on both sides. Finally Brunetti said, ‘I'd appreciate it if you could arrange to do it.'

Vianello and Bocchese heard the murmur of Rizzardi's voice, but all they could distinguish clearly was that of Brunetti, who said, ‘In a glass factory. He was in front of one of the furnaces.' Another silence, and then Brunetti said, ‘I don't know. Maybe all night.'

Brunetti glanced at the posters at the end of the bar, fixing his attention on the Costiera Amalfitana to keep it away from the words he had just spoken. Houses pitty-patted down the cliffs, holding on to whatever they could, and colours did whatever they pleased, never giving
a thought to harmony. The sun glistened on the sea, and sailboats swept away to what the viewer knew were even more beautiful places.

‘Thanks, Ettore,' Brunetti said and ended the call. He got to his feet, went over and put a ten-Euro bill on the counter, and the three men left.

When they got back to the factory, the ambulance boat from the hospital was just pulling away from the dock. There was no sign of De Cal, though three or four workmen stood outside the door, smoking and talking in low voices. Inside the building, the paper-clad technicians were busy packing up their equipment. Brunetti noticed that one of the long iron rods stood against the wall, its surface covered with grey powder. The floor was very clean: had Tassini swept it before he died?

Bocchese spoke to two of his men, then came back to Vianello and Brunetti. ‘Some prints on that rod,' he said, ‘and lots of smudges.' He allowed a moment to pass and added, ‘Means he could have fallen on it.'

‘On anything else?' Brunetti asked.

Before Bocchese could answer, one of his men pulled something out of his bag and walked over to the rod. The object he held proved to be a long, thin plastic bag, much like one used to wrap a baguette, though it was considerably longer. He slipped it over the top of the rod and pulled it down to the ground. He went back to his bag and got a roll of tape and used it to seal the bottom of what now looked like a plastic sheath. He twisted the tape to create handles on
either end, turning it into a package that could be carried by two men without disturbing the surface where the fingerprints were.

‘Might as well take a closer look,' Bocchese said, and Brunetti thought of the mark on Tassini's forehead.

As the technician turned away, Brunetti said, ‘Let me know, will you?'

Bocchese answered with a noise and a sideways motion of his hand, and then he and the technicians filed out. A few minutes later, two of them came back and used the handles to take the iron rod out of the factory.

‘Let's have a look around,' Brunetti said. Knowing the technicians had checked the floor and surfaces, Brunetti walked towards the back of the factory and a table with its surface covered with glass pieces.

They saw the lines of porpoises and the toreador in his shiny black pants and red jacket.

‘
De gustibus
,' Vianello said, moving along the line of objects. A door led to a cell-like room in which stood a chair and a camp-bed. A copy of the previous day's
Gazzettino
lay open, spread across the chair, as though it had been placed there in haste. At the head of the bed a pillow stood propped against the wall, what looked like the indentation made by a head visible in it.

Brunetti took the newspaper by the two upper corners and lifted the pages on to the bed. Below it on the chair lay two books:
Industrial Illness, the Curse of Our Millennium
and Dante's
Inferno
, a paper-covered school edition whose
worn look suggested it had been often read. Ignoring the first, Brunetti picked up the second book. The corners of many pages were torn and darkened with frequent handling; as he flipped through the pages, he found copious notes in the margins. Tassini had signed the book in red ink on the inside of the front cover, a mannered signature with unnecessary horizontal lines trailing around and away from the dot on the final i. The edition had been published more than twenty years before. Brunetti flipped through the pages again and noticed that there were notes in red and black but that the black handwriting appeared to have grown smaller and less attention-grabbing.

Vianello had moved over to look through a small window that stood behind the head of the bed. It gave a clear view back towards the glaring flames of the open furnaces. ‘What is it?' he asked, nodding at the book in Brunetti's hands.

‘
Inferno
.'

‘Perfect place for it, I'd say,' the Inspector replied.

BRUNETTI TOOK TASSINI'S
books; he and Vianello left the little bedroom and walked back through the factory. Since one book was a paperback edition and the other a small schoolbook, he slipped them easily into the pockets of his jacket. He had just done this when De Cal catapulted himself through the main doors and directly towards them.

‘I spend two thousand Euros a week on gas for the furnaces, for God's sake,' he began, quite as if he were reaching the end of a long explanation they had been resisting. ‘Two thousand Euros. If I lose a day of production, who's going to pay me for the gas? It's not like these furnaces can be turned on and off like a radio, you know,' he said, waving distractedly
towards the three furnaces, all of them open now.

‘And I still have to pay the workers. I'm paying for them now. Your men are gone, and all you're doing is standing around, doing nothing. Which is exactly what the workers are doing, only I'm paying them to do it.'

Vianello and Brunetti approached him and stopped. De Cal continued. ‘I saw them leave,' he said, pointing in the direction of the canal. ‘I saw their boat go back to the city. I want to open my factory and get my men back to work. I don't want to pay them to stand around and talk while the gas burns and I have nothing to show for it.'

Brunetti could not prevent himself from saying, ‘A man died here this morning.'

With apparent difficulty, De Cal prevented himself from spitting. ‘He died this morn-ing. He died yesterday. He died two days ago. What difference does it make? He's not here any more.' As he spoke, De Cal's voice grew increasingly out of control. ‘It costs me
money
,' he shouted, the emphasis heavy on the last word, ‘to keep my furnaces burning, and I pay my workers whether they're in here, working, or whether they're standing outside, convincing themselves what a nice fellow Tassini really was, after all.' He moved closer and stared up at Brunetti's face, then at Vianello's, as if searching for the reason they could not understand something so simple. ‘I'm losing money.'

Neither Vianello nor Brunetti looked at the other. Finally Brunetti said, ‘Your workers can come back in, Signor De Cal.'

Without bothering to thank him, De Cal wheeled around and went out the door. From inside, they could hear him calling to the workers, telling one of them to go and summon some others. Time to go back to work. Business as usual. Life goes on.

Suddenly Brunetti realized what he would have to do now, and was taken aback to think that he had so successfully ignored it. Tassini's wife, Tassini's family: someone had to go and tell them that things would never be the same again. Someone would have to go and tell them that their life, as they knew it, was over, that an event had come hurtling at them and destroyed it. He fought the urge to call the Questura and ask them to send a woman officer. He did not know the widow, had spoken only once with the mother-in-law, and his meeting with Tassini had lasted no more than a quarter of an hour, yet there was nothing for it but for him to go.

He turned to Vianello and explained what he was going to do and asked him to stay and talk to the workers and, if he could manage it, to De Cal. Had Tassini any enemies? Who else might have come to the factory at night? Was Tassini as clumsy as Grassi said?

Saying that he would see Vianello back at the Questura, Brunetti went out to the
riva
and headed for the police launch. Foa was in the
cabin, one of the wooden doors to the control panel open as he wrapped electrical tape around a wire. When he heard Brunetti's steps on the dock, the pilot looked up and nodded a greeting, shoved the wire into place and closed the panel. He switched on the engine.

‘I'd like to go to the Arsenale stop,' Brunetti said. He started to go down into the cabin, but as the boat swung out into the canal, he was stopped by the feel of the morning's softness on his face and decided to remain on deck. Though he tried to keep his mind blank, he was conscious of the way the breeze, and then the wind as they picked up speed, tugged at his jacket, at all his clothing, blowing away whatever still clung to him.

‘We in a hurry, Commissario?' Foa asked as they approached Fondamenta Nuove.

Brunetti wanted this trip to last as long as possible; he wanted never to have to deliver this news. But he answered, ‘Yes.'

‘I'll ask if we can go through the Arsenale, then,' Foa said, taking out his
telefonino
. He found a number programmed into the phone and spoke for no more than a moment. He put the phone in his pocket and cut hard to the left, and then arched around to the right, under the footbridge and straight through the centre of the Arsenale.

How many years had it been since the Number Five did this every ten minutes? Brunetti asked himself. Ordinarily Brunetti would have enjoyed the sight of the shipyard
that had fuelled Venice's greatness, but at this moment he could think of little save the cleansing wind.

Foa pulled into one of the taxi slots beside the Arsenale stop and paused long enough for Brunetti to leap on to the dock. Brunetti waved his thanks to the pilot but said nothing about what Foa should do now: return to the Questura, go fishing – it was all the same to Brunetti.

He walked up Via Garibaldi, resisting, as he passed every bar, the desire to go in and have a coffee, a glass of water. He rang the doorbell to Tassini's home, saw that it was almost eleven, and rang again. ‘Who . . .' he heard what he thought was a woman's voice ask, but then it was obliterated by a blast of static from the loose wires. ‘Giorgio?' the same voice asked, ending on the rising note of hope.

He rang again and the door snapped open.

As he climbed the stairs, he heard quick footsteps above him, and when he turned into the last flight a woman appeared on the steps above him. She was taller than her mother and had the same green eyes. Her hair came down below her shoulders: there was a great deal of grey in it, and it aged her beyond her years. She wore a brown skirt and flat shoes, held a beige cardigan closed with her hands, as much for protection as for warmth.

‘What is it?' she asked when she saw him on the stairs. ‘What's wrong?' Her voice broke off, as if the sight of him – or, for one horrified
moment Brunetti wondered, the smell of him – were enough to crucify hope.

He continued up the stairs, trying to banish pity from his face. ‘Signora Tassini,' he began.

‘What's happened to him?' she asked, her voice breaking on the last word.

From behind her, Brunetti heard what he did not immediately recognize as a familiar voice. ‘What's wrong?' it called, then became familiar when she said, ‘Sonia, come back up.' A moment passed, and the older woman's voice became more urgent. ‘Sonia, Emma's crying.'

Caught between the perceived threat of Brunetti's presence and the real threat of her mother's warning, she turned and hurried up the stairs. Before she reached the door, she glanced back at Brunetti twice before disappearing into the apartment.

Her mother waited for him outside the door. ‘What's wrong?' she demanded when she saw him.

‘There was an accident at the factory,' he thought it best to say, though he no more believed in an accident than he believed in the Second Coming.

Those green eyes pierced him, and he wondered at how he had underestimated the intelligence in them. ‘He's dead, isn't he?' she asked.

Brunetti nodded. From behind the woman came the sound of her daughter's voice, words mixed with noises as she crooned to her own daughter.

‘What happened?' the older woman asked in a softer voice.

‘We don't know yet,' he answered, seeing no reason to lie to her. ‘He collapsed in the factory and wasn't found until this morning.' It was not a lie, though it was hardly the truth.

‘What was it?' she asked.

‘We don't know yet, Signora,' Brunetti said. ‘That will be established by the autopsy, I hope.' He spoke of it as though it were a normal procedure.

‘
Maria santissima
,' she said and pulled out her battered packet of
Nazionale blu
. Brunetti had time only to read the enormous letters that promised death before she had a cigarette lit and the packet back in her pocket. ‘Go inside,' she said. ‘I'll come when I've finished this.'

Brunetti moved around her and went into the apartment. Tassini's wife sat on the stained sofa, the whimpering child cradled in her arms. She smiled and bent down to kiss the little girl's face. There was no sign of the boy, though he heard a semi-singing from the back of the apartment.

He went to the window and pushed aside the curtain to look out at the house across the
calle
. He saw bricks and windows and thought of nothing.

The first sign of the older woman's return was her voice, saying, ‘I think you better tell her, Commissario.' When Brunetti turned back to the room, she was sitting on the sofa beside her daughter.

‘I'm sorry, Signora,' he began. ‘But I have bad news. The worst news.' The woman looked up from her child but said nothing. She sat, looking at him, and waited for this worst of news, though she must have known what it was.