Through a Glass, Darkly

Praise for Donna Leon's

Internationally Bestselling

COMMISSARIO GUIDO BRUNETTI

Mysteries

"The appeal of Guido Brunetti, the hero of Donna Leon's long-running Venetian crime series, comes not from his shrewdness, though he is plenty shrewd, nor from his quick wit. It comes, instead, from his role as an everyman ... not so different from our own days at the office or nights around the dinner table. Crime fiction for those willing to grapple with, rather than escape, the uncertainties of daily life." —Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)

"The evocative Venetian setting and the warmth and humanity of the Brunetti family add considerable pleasure to this nuanced, intelligent mystery; another winner from the Venice-based Leon. Highly recommended."

—Michele Laber, Library Journal (starred review)

"Another of her fabulous Italian mysteries.... She has her finger on the pulse." —Bookseller

"Gives the reader a feel for life in Venice. . . . The story is filled with the average citizen's cynicism, knowledge of corruption, and deep distrust and fear of government and police. Characters are brilliantly portrayed. Even bit players become real and individual and Brunetti and his family are multifaceted and layered." —Sally Fellows, Mystery News

"The sophisticated but still moral Brunetti, with his love of food and his loving family, proves a worthy custodian of timeless values and verities." —The Wall Street Journal

"In her classy, literate, atmospheric Commissario Guido Brunetti series, Donna Leon takes readers ... to a Venice that tourists rarely see." —Bookpage

"Brunetti ... is the most humane sleuth since Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret... he is a decent man [who achieves] a quiet heroism." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"If you're heading to Venice, take along a few of [Leon's] books to use for both entertainment and travel directions."

—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"[Brunetti's] humane police work is disarming, and his ambles through the city are a delight."

—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"A beautifully cadenced mystery ... no one is more graceful and accomplished than Leon." —The Washington Post

"Smuggling, sexual betrayal, high-class fakery and, of course, Mafia money make for a rich brew.... Exactly the right cop for the right city. Long may he walk, or wade, through it." —Sarah Dunant, author of The Birth of Venus

"Leon's books shimmer in the grace of their setting and are warmed by the charm of their characters."

—The New York Times Book Review

"Superb ... An outstanding book, deserving of the widest audience possible, a chance for American readers to again experience a master practitioner's art."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Richly atmospheric, Leon introduces you to the Venice insiders know." —Ellen Hale, USA Today

"A new Donna Leon book about... Brunetti is ready for our immediate pleasure. She uses the relatively small and crime-free canvas of Venice for riffs about Italian life, sexual styles, and—best of all—the kind of ingrown business and political corruption that seems to lurk just below the surface." —Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

"Uniform Justice is a neat balancing act. Its silken prose and considerable charm almost conceal its underlying anger; it is an unlovely story set in the loveliest of cities. . . . Donna Leon is indeed sophisticated."

—Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post

"There's atmosphere aplenty in Uniform Justice.... Brunetti is a compelling character, a good man trying to stay on the honest path in a devious and twisted world."

—The Baltimore Sun

"Venice provides a beautifully rendered backdrop for this operatic story of fathers and sons, and Leon's writing trembles with true feeling." —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"One of the best international crime writers is Donna Leon, and her Commissario Guido Brunetti tales set in Venice are at the apex of continental thrillers.... The author has written a pitch-perfect tale where all the characters are three-dimensional, breathing entities, and the lives they live, while by turns sweet and horrific, are always believable. Let Leon be your travel agent and tour guide to Venice. It's an unforgettable trip." —Rocky Mountain Nexvs

"Events are powered by Leon's compelling portraits."

—The Oregonian (Portland)

"The plot is silky and complex, and the main appeal is the protagonist, Brunetti." —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Leon, a wonderfully literate writer, sets forth her plot clearly and succinctly. . . . The ending of Uniform Justice is not a neat wrap-up of the case with justice prevailing. It is rather the ending that one would expect in real life. Leon says that 'the murder mystery is a craft, not an art,' but I say that murder mystery in her hands is an art."

—The Roanoke Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donna Leon, who was born in New Jersey, has lived in Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her other mysteries featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti include A Noble Radiance, Uniform Justice, Acqua Alta, Death in a Strange Country, Blood from a Stone, Dressed for Death, and Death and Judgment, all available from Penguin.

Donna Leon

Through a Glass, Darkly

for Cecilia Bartoli

Da qual tremore insolito

Sento assalir gli spiriti!

Dond'escono quei vortici

Di foco pien d'orror?

What strange fear

Assails my spirits!

Where do they come from,

Those horrible whirlwinds of flame?

Don Giovanni Mozart

1

Brunetti stood at his window and flirted with springtime. It was there, just on the other side of the canal, evident in the shoots he saw popping up from the earth. Over the last few days, someone—in all these years, he had never seen a person working in the garden—had raked the earth, though he noticed it only now. Tiny white flowers were visible amidst the grass, and those fearless little ones that hugged themselves close to the ground, the names of which he could never remember—the little yellow and pink ones—sprouted from the freshly turned earth.

He opened the windows and felt fresh air flood into his overheated room. It brought with it the scent of new growth or rising sap or whatever it was that led to spring fever and an atavistic urge towards happiness. Birds, he noticed, were busy on the ground, no doubt pleased to discover that the worms had somehow been lured to the surface. Two of them squabbled over something, then one flew away, and Brunetti watched it disappear to the left of the church.

'Excuse me,' he heard someone say behind him. He wiped away his smile before he turned. It was Vianello, wearing his uniform and looking far more serious than he should on such a lovely day. From the expression on the Inspector's face and the stiffness of his body, Brunetti wondered if he should address him with the formal Lei, a grammatical formality they had abandoned on Vianello's promotion to inspector. 'Yes, what is it?' Brunetti asked in a friendly tone while evading the grammatical issue.

'I wondered if you had a moment’ Vianello said, using the familiar tu and not referring to Brunetti as 'sir', thus increasing the likelihood that this would be an informal conversation.

Further to relax the atmosphere, Brunetti said, 'I was just looking at those flowers across the way—' gesturing with his head towards the garden—'and wondering what we were doing inside on a day like this.'

'First day you begin to feel it's spring,' Vianello agreed, smiling at last. 'I always used to play hooky.'

'Me, too’ said Brunetti, who had not. 'What did you do?'

Vianello sat in the chair on the right, his usual chair, and said, 'My older brother delivered fruit

to Rialto, so that's where I'd go. Instead of going to school, that is. I'd go over to the market and meet him and help him carry crates of fruit and vegetables all morning, and then go home for lunch at the same time I usually got home from school.' He smiled again and then he laughed. 'My mother always knew. I don't know how she did, but she always asked me how things were at Rialto and why I hadn't brought her any artichokes.' Vianello shook his head at the memory. 'And now Nadia is the same with the kids: it's like she can read their minds and always knows when they haven't gone to school or have done something they shouldn't.' He looked at Brunetti. 'You have any idea how they do it?'

'Who? Mothers?'

'Yes.'

'You said, it, Lorenzo. They read minds.' Brunetti judged that the atmosphere was sufficiently relaxed and so asked, 'What was it you wanted?'

His question restored all of Vianello's nervousness. He uncrossed his legs and brought his feet together, sitting up straighter. 'It's about a friend of mine,' he said. 'He's in trouble.'

'What kind of trouble?'

'With us.'

'The police?'

Vianello nodded.

'Here? In Venice?'

Vianello shook his head and said, 'No. In Mestre. That is, in Mogliano, but they were taken to Mestre.'

'Who?'

'The people who were arrested.'

'Which people?'

'The ones outside the factory.'

'The paint factory?' Brunetti asked, recalling an article he had seen in that morning's paper.

'Yes.'

The Gazzettino had devoted the front page of its second section to a report of the arrest of six people during a 'No Global' protest in front of a paint factory in Mogliano Veneto the previous day. The factory had been repeatedly fined for its failure to observe regulations on the disposal of toxic waste but had continued to operate regardless, choosing to pay the derisory fines rather than invest in changes to its production methods. The protesters were demanding that the factory be closed and had tried to prevent the workers from entering. This had led to a confrontation between the protesters and the workers, during which the police had intervened and arrested seven people.

'Is he a worker or a "No Global"?' Brunetti asked.

'Neither’ Vianello answered, then qualified his response by adding, 'Well, not a real "No Global," that is. Any more than I am.' This sounded, apparently even to Vianello himself, like a dead end as an explanation, so he took a breath and began again. 'Marco and I were at school together, but then he went to university and became an engineer. He's always been interested in ecology: that's how we know one another, from meetings and things. Once in a while we have a drink together, after a meeting.'

Brunetti chose not to inquire about these meetings. The Inspector continued. 'He's very concerned about what's going on at that factory. And in Marghera. I know he's been at the protests there, too, but he's never been involved in anything like this.'

'Like what?'

'When things get violent.'

'I didn't know that was the case,' Brunetti said. The paper had reported only that people had been arrested; there had been no mention of violence. 'What happened?' he asked. 'Who started it?' He knew how people always answered this question, whether for themselves or for their friends: it was always the other guy.

Vianello sat back in his chair and crossed his legs again. 'I don't know. I only spoke to his wife. That is, she called me this morning and asked me if I could think of some way to help him.'

'Only this morning?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello nodded. 'She said he called her last night, from the jail in Mestre, and he asked her to call me, but not until the morning. She got hold of me just as I was leaving for work.' Vianello returned to Brunetti's question. 'So I don't know who started it. It could have been the workers, or it could have been some of the "No Globals".'

Brunetti was surprised to hear Vianello admit this as a possibility. The Inspector went on, 'Marco's a peaceful guy: he wouldn't start anything. I know that, but some of the people who go to these things, well, I think they use it as a way to have some fun.'

'That's a strange choice of word: "fun".'

Vianello raised a hand and let it fall to his lap. 'I know it is, but that's the way some of these people look at it. Marco's talked about them, says he doesn't like them and doesn't like it when they join a protest, because it increases the risk of trouble.'

'Does he know who the violent ones are?' Brunetti asked.

'He's never said, only that they make him nervous.'

Brunetti decided to bring the conversation back to its original purpose. 'But what did you want to ask me?'

'You know the people in Mestre. Better than I do. And the magistrates, though I don't know who this has been given to. So I wondered if you could call and see what you could find out.'

'I still don't understand why you don't do it,' Brunetti said, making this sound like what it was—a request for information—and not what it was not, a suggestion that Vianello take care of it himself.

'I think it would be better if the inquiry came from a commissario.'

Brunetti considered this for a moment and then said, 'Yes; maybe. Do you know what the charge is?' he asked.

'No. Probably causing a disturbance or resisting a public official in pursuit of his duties. Marco's wife didn't say. I told her not to do anything until I had time to talk to you. I figured you, or we, might be able to do something . . . well, informally. It would save him a lot of trouble.'

'Did she tell you anything at all about what happened?'

'Just what Marco told her: that he was standing there with a placard, along with the other people from his group: about a dozen of them. Suddenly there were three or four men they didn't know, shouting at the workers and spitting at them, and then someone threw a rock.' Before Brunetti could ask, Vianello said, 'No, he didn't know who did it; he said he didn't see anything. Someone else told him about the rock. And then the police were there, and he got thrown to the ground and then they put him in a truck and took him to Mestre.'

None of this surprised Brunetti in any way. Unless someone had been there with a video camera, they would never know who had thrown the first punch, or rock, so it really was anyone's guess what the charges would be and whom they would be brought against.

After a brief pause, Brunetti said, 'You're right, but we better do this in person.' If nothing else, Brunetti caught himself thinking, it would be an excuse to get out of his office. 'You ready to go?'

'Yes,' said Vianello, getting to his feet.

2

As they left the Questura, Brunetti saw one of the launches approaching. The new pilot, Foa, stood at the wheel and he gave Brunetti a smile and Vianello a wave as he pulled up to the dock. 'Where are you going?' Foa asked, and then added, 'sir’ to make it clear whom he was addressing.

'Piazzale Roma,' Brunetti said. He had called the substation there and asked that a car be ready for them. Because there had been no launch visible from his window, he had assumed that he and Vianello would have to take the vaporetto.

Foa looked at his watch. 'I don't have to be anywhere until eleven, sir, so I could easily take you there and get back.' Then to Vianello, 'Come on, Lorenzo: the weather's perfect today.'

They needed no more to lure them onto the deck, where they remained while Foa took them up the Grand Canal. At Rialto, Brunetti turned to Vianello and observed, 'First day of spring, and we're both playing hooky again.'

Vianello laughed, not so much at what Brunetti had said but at the perfect day, the certain slant of light on the water in front of them, and at the joy of playing hooky on the first day of spring.

As the boat slipped into one of the taxi ranks at Piazzale Roma, both men thanked the pilot and stepped up onto the dock. Beyond the ACTV building, a police car waited, engine running, and as soon as they got in, it pulled out into the traffic leading across the causeway to the mainland.

At the Mestre headquarters, Brunetti quickly learned that the case of the detained protesters had been assigned to Giuseppe Zedda, a commissario he had worked with some years before. A Sicilian and almost a head shorter than Brunetti, Zedda had impressed him then with his rigorous honesty. They had not become friends, but as colleagues they had shared a mutual respect. Brunetti trusted Zedda to see that things were done fairly and well and that none of the people arrested would be prevailed upon to give statements they might later retract.

'Could we speak to one of them?' Brunetti asked, after he and Vianello had turned down Zedda's offer to have a coffee in his office.

'Which one?' Zedda asked, and Brunetti realized he knew nothing more about the man under arrest than that his name was Marco and he was a friend of Vianello's.

'Ribetti’ Vianello supplied.

'Come with me’ Zedda said. ‘I’ll put you in one of the interrogation rooms and get him for you.'

The room was like every interrogation room Brunetti had ever known: the floor might have been washed that morning—it might have been washed ten minutes ago—but grit crunched underfoot, and two plastic coffee cups lay on the floor beside the wastepaper basket. It smelled of smoke and unwashed clothing and defeat. Entering it, Brunetti wanted to confess to something, anything, if only it would get him out of there quickly.

After about ten minutes Zedda came back, leading a man taller than himself yet at least ten pounds lighter. Brunetti often noticed that people who were arrested or held overnight in police custody quickly came to shrink inside their clothing: such was the case here. The bottoms of the man's trousers touched the ground, and his shirt bunched up and overflowed his buttoned jacket. He had apparently not been able to shave that morning, and his hair, thick and dark, stuck up on one side. His ears jutted out and gave him an ungainly look that went with the outsize clothing. He looked at Brunetti without expression, but on seeing Vianello he smiled with relief and pleasure, and when his face softened Brunetti saw that he was younger than he had first seemed, perhaps in his mid-thirties.

'Assunta found you?' the man asked, embracing Vianello and clapping him on the back.

The Inspector seemed surprised at the warmth of the greeting but returned Ribetti's embrace and said, 'Yes, she called me before I left for work and asked if there was anything I could do.' He took a step back and turned to Brunetti. "This is my commander, Commissario Brunetti. He offered to come with me.'

Ribetti put out his hand and shook Brunetti's. 'Thank you for coming, Commissario.' He looked at Vianello, at Brunetti, then back to Vianello. 'I didn't want to . . .' He left the sentence unfinished. 'That is, I didn't want to cause you so much trouble, Lorenzo.' And to Brunetti, 'Or you, Commissario.'

Vianello walked over to the table, saying, 'It's no trouble, Marco. It's what we do all the time, anyway: talk to people.' He pulled out two of the chairs on one side of the table and then the one at the head, which he held for Ribetti.

When they were all seated, Vianello turned to Brunetti, as if handing over to him. 'Tell us what happened,' Brunetti said.

'Everything?' Ribetti asked.

'Everything,' Brunetti answered.

'We've been out there for three days,' Ribetti began, looking at the two men to see if they knew about the protest. When both nodded in acknowledgement, he said, 'Yesterday there were about ten of us. With placards. We've been trying to convince the workers that what they're doing is bad for all of us.'

Brunetti had few illusions as to how willing workers would be to give up their jobs when told that what they were doing was bad for countless people they didn't know, but he nodded again.

Ribetti folded his hands on the table and looked at his fingers.

'What time did you get there?' Brunetti asked.

'It was in the afternoon, about three-thirty,' he answered, looking at Brunetti. 'Most of us on the committee have jobs, so we can go out only after lunch. The workers come back at four, and we like them to see us, maybe even listen to us or talk to us, when they go in.' A look of great perplexity came over his face, reminding Brunetti of his son, as Ribetti said, 'If we can make them understand what the factory is doing, not only to them, but to everyone, then maybe .. .'

Again, Brunetti kept his thoughts to himself. It was Vianello who broke the silence by asking, 'Does it do any good, talking to them?'

Ribetti answered this with a smile. 'Who knows? If they're alone, sometimes they listen. If there's more than one of them, though, they just walk past us, or sometimes they say things.'

'What sort of things?'

He looked at the two policemen, then at his hands. 'Oh, they tell us they aren't interested, they have to work, they have families’ Ribetti answered, then added, 'or they get abusive.'

'But no violence?' Vianello asked.

Ribetti looked at him and shook his head. 'No, nothing. We've all been trained not to react, not to argue with them, never to do anything that could provoke them.' He continued to look at Vianello, as if to convince him of the truth of this by the sincerity of his expression. 'We're there to help them’ he said, and Brunetti believed he meant it.

'But this time?' Brunetti asked.

Ribetti shook his head a few times. 'I have no idea what happened. Some people came up to us—I don't know where they came from or whether they were with us or were workers— they started to shout, and then the workers did, too. Then someone pushed me and I dropped the placard I was carrying, and after I picked it up, it looked like everyone had suddenly gone crazy. People were shoving and pushing one another, then I heard the police sirens, and then I was on the ground again. Two men pulled me up and put me in the back of a van, and they brought us here. It wasn't until almost midnight that a woman in uniform came into the cell and said I could call someone.' He hurried through this summary, his voice sounding as confused as the events he described.

He turned back and forth between Brunetti and Vianello, then said to the latter, ‘I called Assunta and told her where I was, what had happened, and then I thought of you. And I asked her to see if she could find you and tell you what had happened.' His voice changed as he asked, 'She didn't call you then, did she?' he asked, forgetting that Vianello had already told him.

Vianello smiled. 'No, not until this morning.'

Brunetti noticed that Ribetti seemed relieved to hear this.

'But you didn't have to come all the way out here for me’ Ribetti said, using the plural. 'Really, Lorenzo: I don't know what I was thinking of when I asked her to call you. I guess I panicked. I thought you could make a phone call to someone here or something, and everything would be all right.' He raised a hand in Vianello's direction and said, 'Really, it never occurred to me that you'd have to come out here.' Then, to Brunetti, 'Or that you'd have to come, Commissario.' He looked at his hands again. 'I didn't know what to do.'

'Have you ever been arrested before, Signor Ribetti?' Brunetti asked.

Ribetti looked at him with an astonishment he could not disguise: Brunetti might as well have slapped him. 'Of course not,' he said.

Vianello interrupted to ask, 'Do you know if any of the others have ever been arrested?'

'No, never,' Ribetti said, voice rising with the force of his insistence. 'I told you: we're trained not to cause trouble.'

'Isn't a protest like yours a form of trouble?' Brunetti asked.

Ribetti paused, as if he were playing the question back in his mind to check for sarcasm. Apparently finding none, he said, 'Of course it is. But it's non-violent, and all we're trying to do is make the workers understand how dangerous what they do is. Not only for us, but for themselves even more.'

Brunetti noticed that Vianello accepted this, so he asked, 'What dangers, Signor Ribetti?'

Ribetti looked at Brunetti as though he had just asked the sum of two plus two, but he wiped the expression away and said, 'The solvents and chemicals they work with, more than anything else. At least at the paint factory. They spill them and splash them on themselves and breathe them in all day. And that's not even to mention all the waste they have to get rid of. Somewhere.'

Brunetti, who had been hearing this kind of thing from Vianello for some time, avoided the Inspector's glance. He asked, 'And do you think your protests will change things, Signor Ribetti?'

Ribetti threw his open hands in the air. 'God knows. But at least it's something, some little protest. And maybe other people will see that it's possible to protest. If we don't,' he said, his voice mournful and filled with conviction, 'they'll kill us all'

Precisely because he had had this kind of conversation with Vianello many times, Brunetti did not have to ask Ribetti who 'they' were. Brunetti realized how much he too had come to believe, how much he had been converted, in recent years, and not only because of Vianello's ecological conscience. He increasingly noticed articles about global warming, about the ecomafia and their unbridled dumping of toxic waste all over the South; he had even come to believe that there was a connection between the murder of a RAI television journalist in Somalia some years before and the dumping of toxic waste in that poor afflicted country. What surprised him was that there were people who could still believe that protesting against such things, in their small way, would make some difference. And, he confessed to himself, he did not like to admit that it surprised him.

'But to more practical matters,' Brunetti said abruptly. 'If you've never had any trouble with the police before, then it might be possible for us to do something.' He looked at Vianello. If you stay here, I'll go and talk to Zedda and have a look at the report. If no one's been hurt and if no charges have been brought, then I see no reason why Signor Ribetti has to remain in custody.'

Ribetti cast him a glance of mingled fear and relief. 'Thank you, Commissario,' he said, and then quickly added, 'Even if you can't do anything or if nothing happens, still, thank you.'

Brunetti stood up. He went to the door and was glad to find it unlocked. Out in the corridor, he asked for Zedda, whom he found in his office, an office only a quarter the size of his own, with one window that looked out over a parking lot.

Even before Brunetti could ask, Zedda said, 'Take him home, Brunetti. Nothing's going to come of this. No one got hurt, no one has made a denuncia, and we certainly don't want any trouble with them. They're a pain in the ass, but they're harmless. So just pack up your friend and take him home.'

A younger Brunetti might have thought it necessary to make clear that Ribetti was Vianello's friend and not his, but after so many years working with the Inspector, Brunetti could no longer make this distinction, so he thanked Zedda and asked if there were any forms to be signed. Zedda waved him away, saying that it had been good to see Brunetti again, and came around his desk to shake hands.

Brunetti returned to the interrogation room, told Ribetti that he was free to go and could come with them if he chose, then led the others out to the waiting police car.

3

The three of them emerged from the main entrance of the Mestre Questura and started down the steps. Vianello put an arm around Ribetti's shoulder and said, 'Come on, Marco, the least we can do is give you a ride back to Piazzale Roma.' Ribetti smiled and thanked him. He wiped a hand over his eyes and drew it down one side of his face, and Brunetti could almost feel it graze across his unshaven cheek. As they continued down the steps towards the waiting car, a taxi pulled up and a short, squat man with white hair got out. He leaned in to hand money to the driver and turned to look up at the building. And saw them.

He gave a savage shove to the door of the taxi, slamming it shut behind him. 'You stupid bastard!' he shouted, starting across the pavement. The taxi drove off. The old man stopped, one hand raised, waving it at them. 'You stupid bastard’ he shouted again and started up the steps towards them. Brunetti and the others stopped halfway down, frozen with astonishment.

The man's face was distorted with anger and livid with years of drink. So short he would not reach Brunetti's shoulder, he was almost twice as broad, with a thick torso that was moving downward as muscle turned to paunch. 'You and your animals and your trees and your nature, nature, nature. Go out there and cause trouble and get arrested and get your name in the paper. Stupid bastard. You never had any sense. Now those bastards at the Gazzettino are calling me.'

Brunetti placed himself between the old man and Ribetti. 'I'm afraid there's been some misunderstanding, Signore. Signor Ribetti has not been arrested. Quite the contrary: he's here to help the police with their inquiries.' Brunetti had no idea why he lied. There would be no investigation, so there was no way Ribetti could help with it, but the old man needed to be stopped, and usually people of his age were most easily stopped by mention of the forces of order.

'And who the hell do you think you are?' the old man demanded, tilting his head back to stare up at Brunetti. Without waiting for an answer, he tried to step around Brunetti, who moved to the left and then to the right to stand in his way.

The old man stood still and raised a finger to the height of his own shoulder and poked Brunetti in the chest, saying, 'Look, you bastard, get out of my way. I don't want any interference from strangers.' He took a half-step to the left, but Brunetti blocked him again. 'I said get out of my way!' the old man shouted, this time putting his hand on Brunetti's arm. It could not be said that the old man grabbed Brunetti's arm, nor that he pulled at it, but it was certainly not the casual contact of a man trying to get his friend's attention to make a point.

Vianello came down two steps and stood to the old man's left. 'I think you'd better take your hand off the Commissario, Signore.'

The old man, however, had been carried beyond hearing by his fury. He tore his hand from Brunetti's arm and pointed at Vianello. 'And don't you think you can get in my way, either, you bastard.' His face had grown puce, and Brunetti wondered if he would have some sort of seizure: he had seldom seen a man so easily catapult himself into rage. Sweat stood on the old man's forehead, and Brunetti saw his hands tremble. Spittle had collected at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes, small and dark, appeared to have grown even smaller.

From behind him, Brunetti heard Ribetti say, 'Please, Commissario; he won't cause any trouble.'

Vianello could not hide his surprise, and Brunetti's was apparent to the old man. 'That's right, Signor Commissario whoever you are: I won't cause any trouble. He's the one who causes trouble. Stupid bastard.' He turned his glance from Brunetti to Ribetti, who now stood to Brunetti's left. 'He knows me because he married that fool, my daughter. Went right where he knew the money was and married her. And then filled her with his shitty ideas.' The old man made as if to spit at Ribetti but changed his mind. 'And gets himself arrested’ he added, looking at Brunetti to make it clear that he did not believe what he had been told.

Ribetti caught Brunetti's attention by placing his hand on his arm. 'Thank you, Commissario’ he said, and then to Vianello, 'And you, too, Lorenzo.' Ignoring the old man completely, he moved off to the left and started down the steps. When he reached the sidewalk, Brunetti saw him look at the parked police car, but he continued past it, walked to the next corner, and disappeared around it.

'Coward,' the old man shouted after him. 'You're brave enough when you try to save your goddamn animals or your goddamn trees. But when you have to face a real man . ..' Suddenly the old man ran out of abuse. He looked at Vianello and Brunetti as if he wanted to commit their faces to memory, then pushed past them and went up the steps and into the Questura.

'Well?' Brunetti asked.

'I'll tell you about it on the way back’ Vianello said.

The story that Vianello told Brunetti on the way back to Venice was one he had followed during the six months that a former classmate of his had worked as a maestro in the glass factory of Giovanni De Cal, the old man on the steps, before quitting and moving to a different fornace. It began as a typical story of romance and marriage. She dropped a bag full of oranges at Rialto, and a stranger turned around from buying shrimp to chase the oranges and try to collect them for her. She laughed and thanked him, offered him a coffee for his help, and they talked for an hour over the coffee. He walked her to her boat, took her telefonino number, subsequently called and asked her if she wanted to see a film, and four months later they were living together. Her father, Giovanni De Cal, objected, insisted the young man was a fortune hunter. No longer young, never very pretty, the only job Assunta had ever had was in her father's factory . . . who'd want a woman like that if not for her money? Behind this was the less publicly expressed question of who would look after him if she married and left him, a widower, alone in a ten-room house, too busy running his business to be able to take care of it himself. She married him. Worse was in store when the young man's principles and politics, his concern for the environment and suspicion of the current government, came into conflict with his father-in-law's philosophy: it's a dog-eat-dog world, and workers are meant to work, not to lie around collecting money from their employers for doing nothing; growth and progress are always good, and more is better.

Even worse, from the old man's point of view, were the young man's education and profession. Not only was he a university graduate and thus one of those useless 'dottori' who had studied everything and yet knew nothing; he compounded the fault by working as an engineer for the French company that had won the contract to build garbage dumps in the Veneto, for which he conducted site analyses of location, proximity to rivers and ground water, and soil composition. He wrote reports that obstructed the building of garbage dumps, wrote further reports that made their construction more expensive, and all paid for by money taken from the pockets of people like factory owners, who paid taxes so that the lazy and weak could suck off the public tit and engineers could force cities to spend money just so that some fish and animals wouldn't get dirty or sick.

Ribetti and his wife, Assunta De Cal, lived in a house on Murano that had been left to her by her mother. Caught between father and husband, she tried to keep both peace and house: because she worked in her father's factory all day, neither task was easy. De Cal, as Brunetti and Vianello had observed, was a choleric man, the owner of a glass factory on Murano that had been in his family for six generations.

Vianello paused at this point in the story and said, 'You know, hearing myself tell you all this, I'm not sure why I know this much about them. It's not as if Pietro told me all this while he was working there. I mean, even though Marco and I went to school together, we lost touch until about three years ago, so it doesn't make any sense that I know all this. It's not like we're close friends or anything, and he's never talked about the old man.' Vianello was sitting in the back seat of the car taking them across the Ponte della Liberta, so as he spoke, he saw Brunetti's head framed by the smokestacks of Marghera.

It occurred to Brunetti that Vianello might still, after all this time, not realize the full extent of his ability to draw people into conversation and then into confidence with him. Perhaps it was a natural gift, like perfect pitch or the ability to dance, and those who had it were incapable of seeing it as in any way unusual.

Vianello recaptured Brunetti's attention by waving at the Marghera factories and saying, 'You know I agree with him, don't you?'

'About the protests?'

'Yes’ Vianello answered. 'I can't join them, not with this job, but that doesn't stop me from thinking they should protest and hoping that they continue to do it.'

'What about De Cal?' Brunetti asked, realizing that they would reach Piazzale Roma in a few minutes and eager to prevent Vianello from launching into another discussion about the fate of the planet.

'Oh, he's a bastard’ Vianello said, 'as you saw. He's fought with everyone on Murano: over houses, over salaries, over . . . well, over anything people can fight about.'

'How does he manage to keep his workmen?' Brunetti asked.

'Well, he does and he doesn't’ Vianello said. 'At least that's what I've heard.'

'From Ribetti?'

'No, not from him’ Vianello answered. 'I told you he doesn't talk about the old man, and he doesn't have anything to do with the fornace. But I've got relatives on Murano, and a couple of them work in the fornaci. And everyone knows everybody's business.'

'What do they say?'

'He's kept the same two maestri for the last couple of years’ Vianello said, then added, 'That's something of a record for him, even if they're not very good. Not that it matters so much, I suppose.'

'Why not?' Behind Vianello's head Brunetti saw the side of the Panorama bus: they would soon be there.

'All they make is that tourist crap. You know, the porpoises leaping up out of the waves. And toreadors.'

'With the capes and the black pants?' Brunetti asked.

'Yes, can you believe it, like we had toreadors here. Or porpoises, for that matter.'

'I thought they were all made in China or Bohemia by now’ Brunetti said, repeating something he had heard frequently, and from people who should know.

'Lots of it is’ Vianello said, 'but they still can't do the big pieces, at least not yet. Wait five years and it'll all be coming from China.'

'And your relatives?'

Vianello turned his palms up in a gesture of hopelessness. 'Either they'll learn how to do something else, or everyone will end up like your wife says we will: dressing in seventeenth-century costumes and walking around, speaking Veneziano, to amuse the tourists.'

'Even us?' Brunetti asked. "The police?'

'Yes’ Vianello answered. 'Can you imagine Alvise with a crossbow?'

Laughter put an end to their conversation, and the matter lapsed, merging into the stream of gossip that flowed through Venice, much of it no cleaner than the water that flowed in the canals.

When they were back at the Questura, Brunetti went to Signorina Elettra's office to see if the staffing list had been prepared for the Easter holiday. 'Ah, Commissario’ she said as he entered the office, 'I've been looking for you.'

'Yes?' he asked.

'It's the lottery, you see’ she said easily, as if he should know what she was talking about. 'I wondered if you'd like to buy a ticket.'

Even before he considered what sort of a lottery she was referring to, whether related to Easter or to one of Vianello's green projects, he answered, 'Of course', reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. 'How much?'

'Only five Euros, sir’ she said. 'We figured we'd sell so many tickets that we could keep the price down.'

'Fine, then’ he said, taking out a note, only half listening.

She thanked him and drew a block of notepaper towards her. 'What date would you like, sir?' She looked around her desk, hunting for a pen, then looked up at him again. 'Any time after the first of May, sir.'

For a moment, Brunetti toyed with the idea of choosing the tenth of May, Paola's birthday, and not inquiring further, but curiosity overcame him and he said, 'I don't think I understand, Signorina.'

'You have to choose a date, sir. The person who gets the right date wins everything that's been bet.' She smiled, adding, 'And yes, you can choose more than one date, so long as you pay five Euros for each one.'

'All right,' Brunetti said. 'I confess. I don't know what you're talking about.'

Signorina Elettra put her hand to her mouth, and he thought he saw a faint blush cross her cheeks. 'Ah . . .' she let escape a long sigh, as though she were a soccer ball and someone had let the air out of her. He watched the play of expressions on her face, saw her toy with the idea of lying, then opt for the truth. Brunetti knew all of tins, but didn't know why or how he knew it.

'It's about the Vice-Questore, sir,' she said.

'What about him?' Brunetti asked without impatience.

'About the Interpol job.'

'You mean he applied?' Brunetti asked, unable to contain his surprise that Patta had actually done it. It is perhaps more accurate to say that he was surprised that he had not been told that

Patta had applied for the position—at Patta's level, jobs were called positions.

'Yes, sir. Four months ago.'

Brunetti could no longer remember the precise nature of the position his superior had been interested in. He had a vague memory that it involved working with—or, as people with positions said, 'liaising' with—the police of some other nation the language of which Patta did not speak, but he could no longer recall which one.

Into his silence, she supplied the answer. 'In London, sir. With Scotland Yard, as their expert on the Mafia.'

As so often happened when he learned of developments in Patta's professional life, Brunetti found himself without suitable words. 'And the lottery?' he finally asked.

"The date he gets the rejection letter,' she said, voice implacable.

He cared nothing for the details, but he wanted to know. But how to put it? 'You seem rather certain of that outcome, Signorina.' Yes, that was how to put it.

'I am,' she said but offered no explanation. Smiling, she waved the pen over the block of paper. 'And the date, sir?'

'May the tenth, please.'

She wrote the date on the top of a small sheet of paper, tore it off, and handed it to him. 'Don't lose it, sir.'

'In the case of a tie?' he asked as he slipped the paper into his wallet.

'Oh, that's already decided, sir. There are a few dates a number of people want, but it's been suggested that, in the case of a tie, we give all the money to Greenpeace.'

'He would, wouldn't he?' Brunetti asked.

'Who would what, sir?' she asked with every appearance of confusion.

He let out a little puff of air, as if to suggest that even the blind could see the mind at work behind that suggestion. 'Vianello.'

'As a matter of fact, sir,' she said, no change in the sweetness of her smile, 'the idea was mine.'

'In that case,' he picked up seamlessly, 'I'll live in the single hope that I win in a tie so that I can be a part of the money's going to such a noble cause.'

She looked at him, her expression neutral, but then the smile returned and she said, 'Ah, just listen to the falseness of the man.'

Brunetti was surprised by how flattered he felt and went back to his office, all thought of holiday staffing forgotten.

4

Spring advanced, and Brunetti continued to measure it florally. The first lilacs appeared in the flower shops, and he took an enormous bouquet home to Paola; the little pink and yellow flowers made their full appearance in the garden across the canal, were succeeded by random daffodils, and then by ordered rows of tulips at the side of the path bordering the garden. And then one Saturday Paola commandeered him into moving the large terracotta vases from the cool, dark sottotetto where they spent the winter back onto the terrace, where they would remain until November. From the terrace, he noticed that the flower boxes on the balcony on the other side of the calle and one floor below had been planted with the red geraniums he so much disliked.

Then there was Palm Sunday, which he was aware of only when he saw people walking around with olive branches in their hands. And then Easter and explosions of flowers in the windows of Biancat, displays so excessive that Brunetti was forced to stop every evening on the way home from work to consider them.

On Easter Sunday, they had lunch with Paola's parents; this year her aunt Ugolina was also in attendance, wearing a straw hat covered with tiny paper roses that saw the light of day, perhaps, once a year. They took with them—because there was nothing to take to the Faliers that they did not already have and did not already have in a superior form—flowers. The palazzo was already filled with them, but this did not prevent the Countess from gushing over the roses as though they heralded a new species. The excess of flowers also set Chiara off into an impromptu lecture on the ecological wastefulness of hothouse flowers, a discourse she found no one willing to listen to.

The floral note was continued on an invitation Paola received to a gallery opening that was to present the work of three young artists working in glass. From what Brunetti saw from the photos in the invitation, one produced flat panels using gold leaf and coloured glass; the second made vases with lips that resembled the petals of the flowers that would be put inside; and the third used a more traditional style to create cylindrical vases with smooth lips.

The gallery was new, run by the friend of a colleague of Paola's at the university who suggested that they attend. The level of crime in Venice was as low as the waters of that year's spring tides, and so Brunetti was happy to accept; because the gallery was on Murano, he wondered if he would get to meet Ribetti and his wife: he hardly thought a gallery opening was the sort of place where he would re-encounter De Cal.

The opening was scheduled to begin at six on a Friday evening, which would allow people time to see the artists' work, have a glass of prosecco, nibble on something, and then go out to dinner or go home on time to eat. As they boarded the 41 at Fondamenta Nuove, Brunetti realized that years had passed since he had been out to Murano. He had gone there as a boy, when his father had worked in one of the factories for a time, but since then he had been there infrequently, since none of their friends lived on Murano, and he had never had reason to go there professionally.

Three or four other couples left the boat at Faro and also started down Viale Garibaldi. "The one in red,' Paola said, moving closer to Brunetti and taking his arm in hers, 'is Professoressa Amadori.'

'And is that the Professore?' Brunetti asked, pointing with his other hand at a tall man with silver hair who walked at the side of the elderly woman in the red coat.

Paola nodded. 'Behave yourself, look attentive and inferior, and perhaps I'll introduce you to her’ she promised.

'Is she that bad?' Brunetti asked, glancing again at what appeared to be a completely ordinary woman, the sort one would see at Rialto, haggling over the price of mullet. From behind, her legs were slightly bowed, her feet stuffed into what looked like very uncomfortable shoes, or perhaps that impression resulted from her walk—tiny steps with inturned toes.

'She's worse’ Paola said. 'I've seen male students come out of their oral exams with her in tears: it's almost a point of pride with her never to be satisfied with their performance.' She paused for a moment, her attention drawn by something in a window, then turned away and continued walking. 'I've known other students who have cancelled exams, even produced doctor's certificates, once they learned that she would be on the examining committee.'

'Could it be that she's only very demanding of them?' he asked.

That stopped her in her tracks. She pulled back a step and looked him in the face. 'You have been living with me for the last twenty years, haven't you, Signore?' she asked. 'And you have heard me mention her a few times?'

'Six hundred and twenty-seven’ Brunetti said. 'If that's a few.'

"'Good’ she said, taking his arm and starting to walk again. "Then you know that it has nothing to do with being demanding, only with being a jealous bitch who doesn't want anyone, ever, to have a chance at getting anything she's got.'

'By failing students in their exams?' Brunetti asked.

'Then they can't get their degrees, which means there's no chance they can join the faculty, and because there's no chance they'll become colleagues, there's no chance they'll ever get an appointment or a promotion or a grant that she might want.'

"That's crazy,' Brunetti said.

She stopped again. 'Is this the same man who works for Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta?' she demanded.

"That's different’ Brunetti was quick to protest.

'How?' she demanded, stopping again and no doubt unwilling to move until he answered.

'He doesn't have any power over what I do. He can't fail me in an exam.'

She looked at him as though he had started to foam at the mouth and howl. 'No power over what you do?' she asked.

Brunetti smiled and shrugged. 'All right, but he can't fail me in an exam.'

She smiled back at him and took his arm. 'Believe me about this, Guido. She's a bitch.'

‘I stand warned,' he said affably. "The professor?'

'A marriage made in heaven,' was all she was willing to volunteer by way of information on that subject.

When they reached the canal, they turned left and then crossed Ponte Ballarin, turning right at the bottom. 'It's got to be along here somewhere’ Paola said, slowing her steps and looking into the windows of the shops and galleries they passed.

'It should be on the invitation,' Brunetti said.

'I know’ she said. 'But I forgot to bring it.'

They continued walking down the riva, attentive to the windows on their left. Past the pescheria they went, past a few more shops, some still open, some already closed. Three people emerged from a doorway in front of them and paused to light cigarettes, holding each other's drinks while they did so.

'That's got to be it’ Paola said. A man and a woman walked out, without drinks, and went off hand in hand in the opposite direction.

When they reached the doorway, two more people emerged, cigarettes already lit, and went to stand with the three other smokers, all leaning against the wall of the embankment and using it as a table for their glasses.

The door was open. Paola went in, paused just inside the threshold and looked around for someone she knew. Brunetti did the same, though with less hope of success. He saw some people he recognized, but it was in a Venetian way that he recognized them, from walking past them on the street over the course of years, perhaps decades, without ever learning who they were or what they did. He could hardly go up to the man who had lost so much of his hair and begin a conversation about that, nor could he ask the woman with the newly blonde hair why she had gained so much weight.

Through a small gap in the wall of people he saw the double row of display cases. He walked towards them, leaving Paola to find someone she knew, or meet someone new, and examined the contents of the first case, which was raised on thin legs to chest height. Upright, gold on one side, cobalt blue on the other, stood a rectangle of worked glass a little bit bigger than a copy of Espresso. The surface was textured, but in no regular, orderly way: it looked more as if someone had dragged their fingers in wet clay from bottom to top and then down again, creating shallow runnels where the light glittered and played. The next case contained another panel: though the size was the same, the texture and colours, even the colour of the gold, were entirely different, making it as unlike the first one as it was like it in size. The third case held four thick glass rectangles with alternating stripes of what appeared to be silver and gold. They were as otherworldly as the others, and quite as beautiful.

An empty glass had been left on top of the third case, and Brunetti removed it, annoyed to find it there. The almost sandy dregs of red wine clashed with the supple smoothness of the glass objects.

The next case held three of the flower-like vases on the invitation, all in the faintest of pastels. Brunetti found them far smaller than he had expected. Nor was the work as delicate: what might have been flower petals were thicker than the real thing, thicker than what he knew a good maestro could create. Another case held three more of them, though these were in stronger, darker colours. The workmanship continued to displease him, and he walked quickly past them to the next case.

These vases were cylindrical, all of them rising up to delicate lips, the sort of lips that the others should have had, Brunetti thought. The vases varied in height and in diameter, but each managed to achieve a perfect harmony between the two. The final case held objects of no definite shape: they didn't resemble anything, had no discernible use, seemed to be little more than swerves and swirls of glass, each curve blending into another of a faintly lighter or darker colour.

'Do you like them?' a young woman asked Brunetti.

He looked away from the objects in the last case, smiled, and said, 'Yes, I think I do.' He turned back to the objects and studied them, then moved to the other side of the Plexiglas case to see them from a different perspective. Now they appeared entirely different and he doubted that he would be able to recognize them from this side, though he had just studied them from the other.

When he looked up, the young woman was back, two glasses of prosecco in her hands. She offered him a glass, and he took it with a smile and a nod. Finding himself now with two glasses, he reached down and set the empty one on the floor against the wall. He took a sip of the wine. 'You like it?' she asked, leaving him in some doubt as to whether she intended the prosecco or the art.

'The wine's excellent,' he said, which was true: for this sort of show, it was good. Usually they served the sort of still red that came in large bottles, and instead of the thin glass he had in his hand, the wine was served in plastic cups.

'And those?' she asked.

'I think I think they're beautiful,' he said and took another sip.

'Only think you think?'

'Yes,' Brunetti confirmed. "They're too unlike what I'm used to seeing in glass, so I need to think about them for a while before I decide.'

'You think about the things you see?' the woman asked, sounding not a little surprised at this. She appeared to be in her late twenties, and had a faint Roman accent and a nose that looked as if it had the same origins. Her eyes were dark and bore no trace of makeup, though her mouth had been enlarged by dark red lipstick.

'It's my job,' he said. 'I'm a policeman.' He had no idea what imp of the perverse had made him say that. Perhaps it had been the sight of the people in the room, or the presence of Professoressa Amadori and her husband, the sort of lofty academics he had suffered under for so many years at university.

He took another sip of prosecco and asked, 'What do you do?'

'I teach at the university,' she said.

Paola had never mentioned anyone like this young woman, but that did not necessarily mean anything: Paola, if she discussed her work, usually talked about books rather than about her colleagues. 'Teach what?' Brunetti asked in what he hoped was a friendly manner.

'Applied Mathematics’ she said, smiled, and added, 'and you don't have to ask. I find it interesting but few other people do.'

He believed her and felt relieved of the burden of having to feign polite interest. He gestured with his glass towards the objects in the two lines of cases. 'And these? Do you like them?'

"The rectangular ones, yes; and these,' she said, 'especially these last ones. I find them very... very peaceful, though I don't know why I say that.'

Brunetti talked with the young woman for a few minutes more, then, finding his glass empty, excused himself and went back to the bar. He searched the room for Paola and saw her on the other side, talking to someone who, had he been able to see him from the back, he might have been able to identify as Professore Amadori. Whether it was he or not, Brunetti could read Paola's expression and made his way across the room to her side.

'Ah,' she said as he came up, 'here's my husband. Guido, this is Professore Amadori, the husband of a colleague of mine.'

The professor nodded to acknowledge Brunetti but did not bother to extend his hand. 'As I was saying, Professoressa’ he went on, 'the chief burden of our society is the influx of people of other cultures. They have no understanding of our traditions, no respect for ...' Brunetti sipped at his wine, playing over in his memory the smooth surfaces of the first pieces he'd seen, marvelling at how harmonious they were. The professor, when Brunetti tuned back in, had moved on to Christian values, and Brunetti's mind moved on to the second set of vases. There had been no prices, but there was sure to be a price list somewhere, placed in a discreet, dark-covered folder. The professor moved on to the Puritan ethic of work and respect for time, and Brunetti moved on to a consideration of where such a piece could be put in their house and how it could be displayed without their having to get an individual display case for it.

Like a seal coming up to a hole in the ice to take a breath, Brunetti again tuned in to the monologue and heard 'oppression of women', and quickly pulled his head back under the water.

Had the professor been a singer, he might well have performed this entire aria on one breath; certainly it had all been sung on the same note. He wondered if this man or his wife could affect Paola's career in any way, and then it occurred to him that, regardless, they could not affect his own, and so he turned to Paola and said, interrupting the professor, 'I need another drink. Would you like one?'

She smiled at him, smiled at the astonished professor, and said, 'Yes. But let me get them, Guido' Oh, she was a sly one, his wife: a snake, a viper, a weasel.

'No, let me’ he insisted and then compromised. 'Or come with me and meet this young woman who has just been telling me the most fascinating things about algorithms and theorems.' He smiled and made a small bow to the professor, muttered a word that could have been 'fascinating', or could have been 'hallucinating', said they would just be gone a moment, and fled, pulling his wife to safety by one hand.

She tried to speak but he held up a hand to indicate that it was not necessary: 'I cannot allow the oppression of women,' Brunetti said.

Together, they went and collected fresh glasses of prosecco; he noticed that Paola drank half of hers thirstily.

He asked if she had looked at the works, then went with her as she walked around each of the cases. When she was finished, she said, 'Displaying it would be a problem, though,' just as if he had asked her if they should buy one and, if so, which.

Brunetti looked around at the crowd, which had grown denser. A bearded scarecrow of a man, he saw, had been caught by Professore Amadori, who seemed to have been switched back to PLAY. A tall woman wearing a miniskirt with a fringe of glass baubles dangling from the hem walked past the professor, but his gaze remained on his listener, whose eyes, however, ached after the miniskirt.

A man and woman appeared by the first display case. They wore matching crocheted white skullcaps and ponchos made of rough wool, as though they had passed through Damascus on their way home from Machu Picchu. The man pointed at each piece in turn, and the woman fluttered her hands in praise or condemnation, Brunetti had no idea which.

When he turned back to Paola, she was gone. Instead, standing less than a metre from him and speaking to a woman with short dark hair, he saw Ribetti. He looked better than he had at their first encounter, and happier. He looked better not only because he was wearing a suit and tie and not the trousers and wrinkled jacket he had been wearing when Brunetti saw him the last time, the clothes he had been wearing when he was pushed to the ground and then detained by the police. The suit fitted him, but it seemed that the woman's company fitted him even better.

Brunetti looked down into his glass, not quite sure of the etiquette involved in a social meeting with a person he had saved from arrest. Ribetti, however, made Brunetti's reticence unnecessary for, as soon as he saw the Commissario, he said something to the woman and came across. 'Commissario, how nice to see you,' he said with what appeared to be real pleasure. Then, after a pause, 'I didn't expect to see you here.' Realizing this could be construed as doubt that a policeman could have any interest in art, he added an explanation, 'I mean on Murano, that is. Not here.' He stopped, as if aware that anything else he might say would only dig him in deeper. He glanced back at the woman and said to Brunetti, 'Come and meet my wife.'

Brunetti followed him over to the woman, who smiled at the approach of her husband. She had short hair in which Brunetti noticed quite a bit of grey. On closer inspection, he saw that she was older than her husband, perhaps by as much as ten years. 'This is the man who didn't arrest me, Assunta,' Ribetti said. He stood beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder.

She smiled at Brunetti and toasted him with her prosecco. 'I'm not at all sure what the protocol might be here,' she said, echoing Brunetti's concern.

Ribetti raised his glass and said, 'I think the protocol is we raise our glasses and give thanks I'm not in the slammer.' He finished what was left of his prosecco, holding the glass in the air for a moment.

I'd like to thank you for helping Marco,' his wife said. 'I didn't know what to do, so I called Lorenzo, but I never imagined he'd involve anyone else.' Her glass remained forgotten in her hand as she spoke to Brunetti. 'In fact, I don't know what I thought he'd do. Just that he'd do something.' Her brown eyes were set under unfashionably thick eyebrows, and her nose was broad at the tip and slightly turned up, but softness had found its way into her face with her mouth, which seemed made for smiles.

1 really didn't do anything, Signora; I assure you. By the time we got there, the magistrate had already decided to release everyone. There was no way charges could have been brought against them.'

'Why is that?' she asked. 'I don't see how they could have been taken there if they weren't going to be arrested.'

Brunetti had no desire to explain the vagaries of police procedure, certainly not now, with a glass of prosecco growing warm in his hand and his wife making her way through the crowd towards him, so he said, 'No one ever made it clear what happened, so no charges were brought.' Before either of them could say anything, he sensed Paola's presence at his side and he said, "This is my wife.' And to Paola, 'Assunta De Cal and Marco Ribetti.'

Paola smiled and said the right things about the pieces on display, then asked how it was they were at the opening. She was delighted to learn that Assunta was the daughter of the owner of the fornace where one of the artists' work had been made.

'The flat panels,' Assunta explained. 'He's a young man from here. The nephew of a woman I went to school with, as a matter of fact. That's why he used my father's fornace. She called me and asked, and I talked to the maestro and then brought Lino to talk to him, and they liked one another's work, so he commissioned the maestro to fire the pieces.'

How Venetian a solution, Brunetti thought: someone knew someone who had gone to school with someone, and so the deal was done.

'Couldn't he do the work himself?' Paola asked. When Assunta and Ribetti seemed not to understand, she pointed to the pieces in the display cabinet and said, 'The artist. Couldn't he make them himself?'

Assunta held up a hand as if to ward away evil. 'No, never. It takes years, decades, before you can fire something. You have to know about the composition of the glass, how to prepare the miscela to get the colours you want, what sort of furnace you're working with, who your servente is, how fast and how reliable he is with the things you have to do for that particular piece.' She stopped as if suddenly exhausted by this long list. 'And that's just the beginning,' she added, and her listeners laughed.

'You sound like you could do it yourself,' Paola said with every sign of respect.

'Oh, no’ Assunta said, 'I'm too small. You really do have to be a man, well, be as strong as a man.' Here she held up her hand, which was little larger than a child's. 'And I'm not that, as you can see.' She let her hand fall to her side. 'But I've been in and out of the fornace since I was a little girl, so I guess I've got glass or sand in my blood.'

'You work for your father?' Paola asked.

The question seemed to puzzle her, as if it had never occurred to her that there might have been anything else she could have done in life. 'Yes. I help him run the fornace. I was there even before I was in school.'

'She's the paid slave,' Rubetti said and ruffled her hair.

She bowed her head as if to escape his hand, but it was obvious that she enjoyed both the attention and the contact. 'Oh, stop it, Marco. You know I love it.' She looked at Paola and asked, 'What do you do, Signora?'

'Call me Paola’ she offered, slipping automatically into the familiar tu. 'I teach English literature at the university.'

'Do you love it?' Assunta asked with surprising directness.

'Yes.'

"Then you understand,' Assunta said. Brunetti was glad she did not think to ask him the same question, for he had no idea how he would have answered. She put a hand on Paola's arm and continued, 'I love to see the things grow and change and become more beautiful, even love to see them resting there overnight in the fornace.' She put her palm flat against the side of the display cabinet. 'And these objects, I love them because they seem to be so alive. Well, at least to me.'

'Then I'd say you have the perfect job,' Brunetti told her.

Assunta smiled and moved, if possible, closer to her husband. Brunetti waited for her to announce that she had also found the perfect man, but instead she said, 'I just hope I can keep it.'

Paola made no attempt to disguise her concern and asked, 'Why? It's not a job you're afraid of losing, is it?'

Paola was looking at Assunta's face, so she missed the glance Ribetti gave her, a slight shake of the head and a momentary narrowing of the eyes. But his wife saw it and immediately said, 'Oh, no, of course not.' Brunetti watched her search for something else to say, other than what she had been about to say. After a long pause, Assunta went on, 'You just want these things to last for ever, I guess.'

'Yes, of course’ Brunetti said, smiling and pretending that he had not observed Ribetti's glance and had not registered the change of atmosphere, the lowering of the human temperature of the conversation. He put his arm around Paola's shoulder and said, 'I'm afraid I've got to drag us away, though.' He looked at his watch. 'We've got to meet people for dinner, and we're already late.'

Paola, no slouch as a liar, looked at her watch and gasped, 'Oh my God, Guido. We are late. And we've got to get to Saraceno.' She reached into her bag, searching for something, finally abandoned the search, and asked Brunetti, 'I forgot my telefonino. Can you call Silvio and Veronica and tell them we'll be late?'

'Of course,' Brunetti said smoothly, though Paola had never had a telefonino, and none of their friends were called Silvio. 'I'll do it from outside. The reception will be better.'

There followed the usual exchange of pleasantries, the two women kissing on the cheek while the two men tried to jockey around the business of choosing between Lei and tu.

It wasn't until they were outside on the riva that he could look Paola in the eye and ask, 'Silvio and Veronica?'

'Every woman must have her dream,' she intoned piously and then turned to begin to walk towards the vaporetto that would take them back to Venice and home.

5

The return of spring also brought the return of tourists to the city, and that brought in its wake the usual mess, just as the migration of wildebeest lures the jackals and hyenas. The Romanians with the die hidden under one of three cups appeared on the tops of bridges, from which their sentries could watch for the arrival of the police. The vu cumpra fished into their capacious hold-alls and produced the new models just launched by the designer bag-makers. And both the Carabinieri and the Polizia Municipale handed endless copies of the proper forms to the people who had had their pockets or purses picked. Springtime in Venice.

Late one afternoon, Brunetti stopped by Signorina Elettra's office, but she was not at her desk. He had hoped to have a word with the Vice-Questore, but when he saw that the door to Patta's office was open, Brunetti came to the conclusion that they had both decided to leave for the day. In Patta's case, this was only to be expected, but Signorina Elettra, since this was the day when she did not arrive until after lunch, usually stayed until at least seven.

He was about to retreat from her room and take the papers he had brought with him back up to his own office, when the impulse to be certain forced him nearer to the door to Patta's office. He was surprised to hear Signorina Elettra speaking English very slowly and enunciating every word as if for the benefit of the hearing impaired, saying, 'May I have some strawberry jam with my scones, please?'

After a longish pause, this was followed by Patta's voice, saying, 'May E ev som strubbry cham per mio sgonzes, pliz?'

'Does this bus go to Hammersmith?'

And on it went, through four phrases of dubious utility until Brunetti heard, once again, the pained request for strawberry jam. Fearing he might be there some time, he went back to the door to her office and knocked loudly, calling out, 'Signorina Elettra, are you there?'

Within seconds she appeared at Patta's doorway, a look of stunned relief illuminating her face, as though Brunetti's voice had just pulled her from quicksand. 'Ah, Commissario,' she said, 'I was just about to call you.' Her voice caressed every syllable of the Italian, as though she were Francesca, the language her Paolo, and this her last chance to speak their love.

'I'd like to have a word with the Vice-Questore, if that's possible’ he said.

'Ah, yes’ she said, stepping clear of Patta's door. 'He's free at the moment.'

Brunetti excused himself and walked past her. Patta sat at his desk, elbows propped on the surface, chin cupped in his palms, as he studied the book in front of him. Brunetti approached and, glancing down, recognized the photo of Tower Bridge on the left-hand page, the black-hatted Beefeater on the right. 'Mi scusi, Dottore’ he said, careful to speak softly and enunciate clearly.

Patta's eyes drifted towards Brunetti and he said, 'Si?'

'I wondered if I might have a word with you, sir?' Brunetti said.

With a slow motion full of resignation, Patta shut the book and moved it to one side. 'Yes? Have a seat, Brunetti. What is it?'

Brunetti did as he was told, careful to keep his eyes away from the book, though it was impossible not to notice the Union Jack waving across the cover. 'It's about the juveniles, sir,' Brunetti said.

It took Patta some time to cross the Channel and return to his desk, but he eventually responded. 'What juveniles?'

'The ones we keep arresting, sir.'

'Ah’ Patta said, 'those juveniles.' Brunetti watched his superior trying to recall the documents or arrest reports that had passed his desk in recent weeks, and saw him fail.

Patta straightened himself in his chair and asked, 'There's a directive from the Ministry, isn't there?'

Brunetti refused the temptation to answer that there was a directive from the Ministry prescribing the number of buttons on the officers' uniform jackets and, instead, said, 'Yes, sir, there is.'

'Then those are the orders we have to follow, Brunetti.' He thought Patta would be content to leave it at that, given that it was so close to the time he usually went home, but something drove Patta to add, 'I think we've had this conversation before. It is your duty to enforce the law, not to question it.'

Nothing in his statement, or in his manner, Brunetti knew, had suggested any questioning or desire to question the law. Yet from force of habit, habit worn deep by years of exposure to his subordinate, Patta had but to hear Brunetti mention a regulation in order to hear some phantom voice rise up in criticism or doubt.

Patta's comment pressed Brunetti into the role of troublemaker. 'Mine is more a procedural question, sir.'

'Yes? What?' Patta asked with some surprise.

'It's about these juveniles, as I said, sir. Each time we arrest them, we take their photos.'

'I know that,' interrupted Patta. 'It's part of the orders in the directive.'

'Exactly,' Brunetti said with a smile he realized more clearly resembled that of a shark than that of a dutiful subordinate.

'Then what is it?' Patta said with a glance at his watch he made neither swift nor covert.

'We're in some uncertainty about how to list them, sir.'

'I don't follow you, Brunetti.'

"The directive says we're to catalogue them according to age, sir.'

'I know that,' said Patta, who probably did not.

'But each time they're arrested and photographed, they give us a different name and a different age, and then a different parent comes to collect them and brings a different piece of identification.' Patta started to speak, but Brunetti rolled right over him. 'So what we wondered, sir, was whether we should list them under the age they give, or under the name, or perhaps according to their photo.' He paused, watching Patta's confusion, then said, 'Perhaps we could institute some system of filing them by photo, sir.'

He saw Patta draw himself up, but before the Vice-Questore could answer, Brunetti thought of one case his officers had complained about that morning, and said, "There's one we've arrested six times in the last ten days, and each time we have the same photo, sir, but we've got. . .' he looked down at the papers he had intended to give Signorina Elettra, which had nothing at all to do with the young man he was talking about, and said, 'six different names and four different ages.' He looked up and gave his most subservient smile. 'So we were hoping you could tell us where to file him.'

If he had expected, or hoped, to goad Patta to anger, Brunetti failed. The closest he got was for the Vice-Questore to drop his chin into one hand, stare at Brunetti for almost a minute, and then say, "There are times when you try my patience, Commissario.' He got to his feet. 'I've got a meeting now,' he said.

Graceful and sleek as an otter, Patta never failed to impress Brunetti with his appearance of power and competence, and so it was now. He ran a hand through his still-thick silvering hair and went to the armadio against the wall, from which he removed a light topcoat. He drew a white silk scarf from one of the sleeves and wrapped it around his neck, then put the coat on. He went to the door of his office and turned back to Brunetti, who still sat in front of his superior's desk. 'As I said, the rules are spelled out in the directive from the Ministry, Commissario.' And he was gone.

Curiosity led Brunetti to lean forward and pick up Patta's book; he flipped through the pages. He saw the usual photos of boy meeting girl, girl meeting boy, then noted how carefully they took turns asking where the other came from and how many people were in their families, before the boy asked the girl if she would like to go and have a cup of tea with him. Brunetti dropped the book back on Patta's desk.

Outside, Signorina Elettra sat at her desk. Sufficient time had passed for her to have returned to some semblance of serenity. 'Does this bus go to Hammersmith?' Brunetti asked in English, straight faced.

Signorina Elettra's expression quit the world of Dante and turned to scripture: her face could have been that of the fleeing Eve on any one of a number of medieval frescos. Ignoring his English, she responded in Veneziano, a language she seldom used with him. "This bus will take you straight to remengo if you're not careful, Dottore.'

Where was remengo, Brunetti wondered? Like most Venetians, he had been told to go there and had been telling people to go there for decades, yet he had never paused to consider whether it was reachable by foot or boat or, in this case, bus. And was it a place like a city, meant to be written with a capital letter, or a more theoretical location like desperation or the devil and thus reachable only by means of imprecation?

'... can't bring myself to be the one to tell him it's hopeless.' Signorina Elettra's words brought him back to the present.

'But you're still giving him English lessons?'

'I used to be able to resist him,' she said. 'But then he became vulnerable when I knew he was going to be rejected and he thought there was still a chance, and now I can't keep myself from trying to help.' She shook her head at the madness of it.

'Even though you know there's no hope he'll get the job?'

She shrugged and repeated, 'Even though I know there's no hope he'll get the job. Everything was fine until I saw his weakness—how much he wants this job—it was enough to make him human. Or very close. I closed my eyes for a minute and he slipped beneath my radar.' She tried to shake the thought away but failed.

Brunetti resisted the temptation to ask her how it was that she was so certain the Vice-Questore had no chance at the job, wished her a good evening and, deciding to walk home, turned left rather than right when he left the Questura. The same magic hand that had been poised over the city for a week remained in place, warding off rain and cold and beckoning forward ever milder temperatures. Urged by some secret motion, plants sprang up everywhere. In passing an iron railing, he noticed vines trailing over the top in an attempt to escape into the calle from the garden where they were being kept prisoner. A dog ran past him, followed by another, busy with doggy things. Perched on the wall of an embankment in the increasing chill of the evening were two young men in T-shirts and jeans, a sight which called Brunetti back to his senses, forcing him to button his jacket.

Paola had said something about lamb that morning, and Brunetti started thinking about the many interesting things that could be done to lamb. With rosemary and black olives or with rosemary and hot chilli peppers. And what was that one that Erizzo liked so much: the stew with balsamico and green beans? Or simply white wine and rosemary—and why was it that lamb cried out for rosemary more than any other herb? Following the trail of lamb, Brunetti found himself on the top of the Rialto, gazing south toward Ca Farsetti and the scaffolding that still covered the facade of the university down at the bend, the buildings softened by the evening light. Look at those palazzi, he told some silent audience of non-Venetians. Look at them and tell me who could build them today. Who could come and stack those blocks of marble one on top of the other and have the finished products display such effortless grace?

Look at them, he went on, look at the homes of the Manins, the Bembos, the Dandolos, or look farther down to what the Grimanis and the Contarinis and the Irons built in their names. Look on those things and tell me we did not once know greatness.

A man hurrying across the bridge bumped lightly into Brunetti, excused himself, and ran down the other side. When Brunetti looked back up the canal, the palazzi looked much as they always did, massive and grand, but the magic had dimmed, and now they also looked slightly in need of repair. He walked down the stairs on his side of the bridge and cut along the riva. He didn't want to have to push his way through whatever crowds still lingered near the market or walk the gauntlet of cheap masks and plastic gondolas.

Lamb it was, lamb with balsamic vinegar and green beans. No antipasto and only a salad to follow. This could mean one of a number of things, and as he ate, Brunetti used his professional skills to seek out the possible cause. Either his wife had been so caught up in the reading of some text—Henry James tended to make her most careless about dinner—or she was in a bad mood, but there was no sign of that. Her suitcase was not standing open on their bed, so he excluded the possibility that she was preparing to run off with the butcher, though the lamb would have been more than sufficient inducement for most women. He approached the next course with mounting anticipation and increasing hope: it might involve an explosive dessert, something they had not had for some time.

The detective finished the beans, keeping an eye on the suspects around the table. Whatever it was, the wife and the daughter were in it together. Every so often they exchanged a secret glance, and the girl had trouble disguising her excitement. The boy appeared not to be involved in whatever was going on. He polished off the lamb and ate a slice of bread, looked over at the beans and made no attempt to hide his disappointment that his father had beaten him to them. The woman shot a glance at the boy's plate, and did he detect a smile on her face when she saw that it was empty? The detective glanced away so she would not catch him watching them so closely. To lead them astray, he poured himself a half-glass of Tignanello and said, 'Wonderful meal,' as if that were the end of it.

The girl looked worried, glanced at the woman, who smiled calmly. The girl got to her feet and stacked the plates. She carried them over to the sink and said, her back to the others, 'Anyone interested in dessert?'

A man kept on short rations at his own table— certainly he was interested in dessert. But he left it to the boy to speak, contenting himself with another sip of wine.

The woman got up and went over to the door leading to the back terrace, the one facing north, where she kept things that wouldn't fit in the refrigerator. But when she heard the girl setting the dishes in the sink, she called her over, and they had a whispered conversation. The detective watched the woman go to the cabinet where the dishes were kept and take down shallow bowls. Not fruit salad, for heaven's sake. And not one of those stupid puddings filled with bread.

The detective picked up the bottle and checked to see what was left. Might as well finish it: it was too good to leave uncorked overnight.

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 glassmaking?'

'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.'

6

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 firma 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 Mu-

rano. 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. 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 say 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.

She got to her feet, propped the little boy upright next to his sister, stuck a pillow on his other side, and took a packet of Nazionale blu out of the pocket of her apron. 'Would you watch them while I go and have a cigarette?' she asked. 'Sonia and Giorgio don't want me to smoke in the house, so I have to go out on the landing and open the window.' She grinned at this. 'I suppose it's only fair. I did it to Sonia, God knows, for years.' The grin turned into a smile and she added, 'At least, with her, it worked, and she doesn't smoke. I suppose I should be thankful for that.'

Before Brunetti could agree, she walked to the door of the apartment and out onto the landing, leaving the door ajar. He decided to sit on the chair to the left of the sofa, leaving the children as undisturbed as possible. The little boy seemed to forget his grandmother as soon as she was gone and returned his attention to the plump figures on the screen that were now jumping into a river of blue flowers. The little girl lay where she had fallen. Brunetti sat, gazing at the small children, suddenly overcome by a wild uneasiness that something would happen to one of them while their grandmother was out of the room and he would not know how to deal with the situation. He watched the twins, amazed at the difference in their sizes, looked at the half-closed door, and then at the television screen.

After a few minutes, the woman came back into the apartment, trailing the odour of smoke. 'Giorgio never stops telling me how bad it is for me’ she said, patting the cigarettes that appeared to be back in her pocket. 'And I suppose he's right, but I've been smoking since before he was born, so it can't be as bad for me as he says.' She saw Brunetti's reluctant smile and added, 'Whenever he keeps at it, I always tell him that the salad he's eating is probably just as dangerous as my cigarettes.' She raised her shoulders, lowered them, and sighed deeply. 'I suppose we're both right, but you'd think he'd know me well enough by now to leave me alone about it.' Another sigh, another shrug. 'But he wants to believe what he wants to believe. Just like all of us. Pazienza.'

She took her seat on the sofa again, but this time she lifted the little girl on to her lap, placed a hand at her waist, and held her upright. The boy, seeing that she was holding his sister, scrambled onto his feet on the sofa and wrapped his grandmother's neck in his embrace, whispering secrets in her ear and laughing.

'Oh, look at them,' the woman said, pointing a finger at the screen and using that voice of feigned enthusiasm that seems always to deceive children. 'Look what they're doing now.'

The little boy fell for it and turned his attention away from his grandmother's ear and back to the television. Though he kept one arm draped around her shoulders, he appeared to forget about her. 'What was it you wanted to talk to him about?' she asked Brunetti. The little girl lay inert on her lap.

'Your son-in-law works at the De Cal fornace, I believe’ Brunetti said.

'At the factory?' she asked.

'Yes.'

'What do you want to know? He's only the watchman.'

Brunetti was surprised by her reaction to what had seemed an entirely innocuous question.

"There's been talk of threats being made there, and I wanted to speak to your son-in-law about it’ Brunetti said, not thinking it necessary to tell her any more than that.

'Whatever he said, I'm sure it was just talk and he didn't mean it’ she said.

'Do you know Signor De Cal?' Brunetti asked.

Her free hand moved automatically towards her cigarettes and patted them for whatever comfort the packet might provide. 'I've seen him, but I've never spoken to him’ she said. 'People say he's a difficult man to get along with, and there was that fight in the bar a couple of years ago. Everyone on Murano knows about it.'

'So your son-in-law has told you about the threats?' Brunetti asked.

She patted the little boy's bottom, pulled him a bit closer, but his attention was entirely engaged by the figures on the screen and he could not be distracted. Finally she said, 'Yes. But I told you, it was just talk. I'm sure he didn't mean anything.'

Then why, Brunetti wondered, mention the fight? 'Did your son-in-law tell you exactly what was said?'

Brunetti thought she looked as though he had trapped her into saying something she should not have said and regretted ever having spoken to him. 'He's always blamed De Cal’ she began, speaking softly. 'I know, I know, even though there's nothing that can prove it, Giorgio still believes it. Just like with the cigarettes: he believes it and that's that. No use talking to him.'

She looked at the little girl and placed her palm on her back, covering it completely. 'I've tried to talk to him. Sonia's tried. The doctors. Nothing. He believes it and that's that.'

Brunetti felt as though he had been looking at one programme on television, and while he was momentarily distracted, someone had pressed the remote control and he was now watching a different programme with no idea of what had happened at the beginning.

'And the threat?' was the only thing he could think to ask.

'I don't know what made him do it. In the past, he's always been careful what he said, never said anything directly. Though I'm sure they know what he thinks: no one keeps any secrets out there, and he's talked to the men he works with.' She raised her hands as if her open palms could summon help from heaven. Two weeks ago, he told Sonia he was close to having the final proof. But he's said that so many times’ she went on, her face and her voice growing sadder. 'Besides, we know there's no proof.'

She wrapped her right arm around the boy and pulled him close to her, then used her left hand to wipe her eyes. Suddenly speaking in a voice close to anger, she took her hand from her face and waved it in the direction of the bookcase on the opposite wall. 'I should have known when he started reading all that stuff. How long is it? Two years? Three? And all he wants to do is read. So he keeps that job that pays almost nothing so he can read all night. But the children have to eat, we have to eat, and if I didn't own this apartment and couldn't stay home with the children, God knows what would happen to them: Sonia wouldn't work, and they'd starve on what he earns alone.' Her voice tightened with rage and she made a spitting motion with her lips. 'And try to get any help from this government; just try it. With all the proof they've got, with doctors' letters and certificates and tests from the hospital, and what do they give them? Two hundred Euros a month. And nothing for me, even though I have to stay here with them all the time. You try to raise two children on two hundred Euros a month and come and tell me how easy it is.'

The figures disappeared from the screen, and it was as if the little boy had suddenly been released to feel his grandmother's rage. He turned and put his arms around her neck. 'Good nonna, good nonna,' he said and began to stroke both her cheeks, pressing his face closer to hers.

'See?' she said, looking across at Brunetti. 'See what you've made me do?'

He saw that the woman was emotionally exhausted and was unlikely to answer any more questions, and so he said, 'I'd still like to speak to your son-in-law, Signora.' He pulled out his wallet and handed her one of his cards, then took out a pen and said, 'Could you give me his number so I can get in touch with him?'

'You mean the number of his telefonino?' she asked with an abrupt laugh.

Brunetti nodded.

'He doesn't have a telefonino,' she said, this time her voice carefully restrained. 'He won't use one because he believes the waves that come out of it are bad for his brain.' From her voice, it was evident how little credence she gave this opinion. "That's another idea he got from his books,' she said. 'It's not enough that he thinks he's contaminated; he's got to think telefonini are dangerous.'

'Can you believe that?' she asked with real curiosity. 'Can you believe they'd let that happen, that rays could come out and hurt you?' She made the spitting motion again, though what emerged was really little more than a puff of disbelief. She gave him the phone number of the house, and Brunetti wrote it down.

The woman's agitation finally registered with the little girl, who began to squirm around on the sofa. She made a noise, but it was nothing like the peeping noise her brother had made in time to the motions of the dancing figures. It was a bleat, a wail, the voice of anguish in a very high register. It started, it went on, and then the woman said, 'You better go now. Once she starts like this, it can go on for hours, and I don't think you want to hear it.'

Brunetti thanked her, did not offer her his hand, and did not pat the little boy on the head, as he would have done had the girl not begun to wail. He left the apartment, went down the stairs, and out into the light.

8

As he walked back towards the Questura, Brunetti found himself dwelling on a noise and a confusion. The noise was the one made by the little girl: something prevented him from referring to it as her voice. The other was the strangely parallel conversation he had had with the grandmother: he spoke of threats, and she said they were meaningless, nothing, all the while suggesting that De Cal was a potentially violent man. He tried to remember everything they had said and could come up with only one alternative interpretation: it was Tassini who had made the threats, perhaps provoked into them by De Cal's violence. If not this, then the old woman was talking nonsense, and that was something Brunetti was convinced this particular woman would not do. Lie, perhaps; evade, certainly; but she would always talk sense.

His phone rang, and when he stopped walking to answer it he heard Pucetti's voice asking, 'Commissario?'

'Yes. What is it, Pucetti?'

'You had lunch yet, sir?'

'No’ Brunetti answered, suddenly reminded that he was hungry.

'Would you like to go out to Murano and talk to someone?'

'One of your relatives?' Brunetti asked, pleased that the young man had worked so fast.

'Yes. My uncle.'

'I'd be happy to’ Brunetti said, changing direction and starting back towards Celestia, where he could get a boat to Murano.

'Good. What time do you think you could be there?'

'It shouldn't take me more than half an hour.'

'All right. I'll tell him to meet you at one-thirty.'

'Where?'

'Nanni's’ Pucetti answered. It's on Sacca Serenella, the place where all the glass-workers eat. Anyone can tell you where it is.'

'What's your uncle's name?'

'Navarro. Giulio. He'll be there.'

'How will I know him?'

'Oh, don't worry about that, sir. He'll know you.'

'How?' Brunetti asked.

'Are you wearing a suit?'

'Yes.'

Did he hear Pucetti laugh? 'He'll know you, sir', he said and broke the connection.

It took Brunetti more than half an hour because he just missed a boat and had to wait at the Celestia stop for the next and then again at Fondamenta Nuove. As he got off the boat at Sacca Serenella, he stopped a man behind him and asked where the trattoria was.

'You mean Nanni's?' he asked.

'Yes. I've got to meet someone there, but all I know is that it's the place where the workers go.'

'And where you eat well?' the man asked with a smile.

'I wasn't told that’ Brunetti answered, 'but it wouldn't hurt.'

'Come with me, then,' the man said, turning off to the right and leading Brunetti along a cement pavement that ran beside the canal towards the entrance to a shipyard. 'It's Wednesday,' the man said. 'So there'll be liver. It's good.'

'With polenta?' Brunetti asked.

'Of course,' the man said, pausing to glance aside at this man who spoke Veneziano yet who had to ask if liver was served with polenta.

The man turned to the left, leaving the water behind them, and led Brunetti along a dirt trail that crossed an abandoned field. At the end, Brunetti saw a low cement building, its walls striped with what looked like dark trails of rust running down from leaking gutters. In front of it, a few rusted metal tables stood around drunkenly, their legs trapped in the dirt or propped up with chunks of cement. The man led Brunetti past the tables and to the door of the building. He pushed it open and held it politely for Brunetti to enter.

Inside, Brunetti found the trattoria of his youth: the tables were covered with sheets of white butcher paper, and on most tables lay four plates and four sets of knives and forks. The glasses had once been clean, perhaps even still were. They were squat things that held little more than two swigs of wine; years of use had scratched and clouded them almost to whiteness. There were paper napkins, and in the centre of each table a metal tray that held suspiciously pale olive oil, some white vinegar, salt, pepper, and individually wrapped packets of toothpicks.

Brunetti was surprised to see Vianello, in jeans and jacket, sitting at one of these tables, accompanied by an older man who bore no resemblance whatsoever to Pucetti. Brunetti thanked the man who had led him there, offered him un'ombra, which the man refused, and walked over to greet Vianello. The other man stood and held out his hand. 'Navarro,' he said as he took Brunetti's hand. 'Giulio.' He was a thick man, with a bull-like neck and a barrel chest: he looked like he had spent his life lifting weight, rather than lifting weights. His legs were slightly bowed, as if they had slowly given way under decades of heavy burdens. His nose had been broken a few times and badly set, or not set at all, and his right front tooth had been chipped off at a sharp angle. Though Navarro was surely more than sixty, Brunetti had no doubt that he would have no trouble lifting either him or Vianello and tossing them halfway across the room.

Brunetti introduced himself and said, "Thanks for coming to talk to us’ including Vianello, though he had no idea how the Inspector happened to be there.

Navarro looked embarrassed by such easy gratitude. 'I live just around the corner. Really.'

'Your nephew is a good boy,' Brunetti said. 'We're lucky to have him.'

This time, it was praise that made Navarro glance away in embarrassment. When he looked back, his face had softened, even grown sweet. 'He's my sister's boy,' he explained. 'Yes, a good boy'

'As I suppose he's told you’ Brunetti said as they seated themselves, 'we'd like to ask you about some of the people out here.'

'He told me. You want to know about De Cal?'

Before Brunetti could answer, a waiter came to the table. He had no pen or order pad, rattled off the menu and asked them what they'd like.

Navarro said the men were friends of his, which caused the waiter to recite the menu again, slowly, with comments, even with recommendations.

They ended up asking for spaghetti with vongole. The waiter winked to suggest that they had been dredged up, perhaps illegally, but definitely in the laguna, the night before. Brunetti

had never much liked liver, so he asked for a grilled rombo, while Vianello and Navarro both asked for coda di rospo.

'Patate bollite?' the waiter asked before he walked away.

They all said yes.

Without asking, the waiter was soon back with a litre of mineral water and one of white wine, which he set down on their table before going into the kitchen, where they could hear him shouting out their order.

As if there had been no interruption, Brunetti asked, 'What do you know about him? Do you work for him?'

'No’ Navarro answered, obviously surprised by the question. 'But I know him. Everyone here does. He's a bastard.' Navarro tore open a package of grissini. He put one in his mouth and nibbled it right down to the bottom, like a cartoon rabbit eating a carrot.

'You mean in the sense that he's difficult to work with?' Brunetti asked.

'You said it. He's had two maestri now for about two years: longest he's ever kept any of them, far as I know.'

'Why is that?' asked Vianello, pouring wine for all of them.

'Because he's a bastard.' Even Navarro sensed the circularity of his argument and so added, 'He'll try anything to cheat you.'

'Could you give us an example?' Brunetti asked.

This seemed to stump Navarro for a moment, as though a request to supply evidence to support a judgement were a novelty for him. He drank a glass of wine, filled his glass and drank another, then ate two more grissini. Finally he said, 'He'll always hire garzoni and let them go before they can become serventi so he won't have to pay them more. He'll keep them for a year or so, working off the books or working with two-month contracts, but then when it's time for them to move up, and get more money, he fires them. Invents some reason to get rid of them, and hires new ones.'

'How long can he go on doing this?' Vianello asked.

Navarro shrugged. 'So long as there are boys who need jobs, he can probably go on doing it for ever.'

'What else?'

'He argues and fights.'

'With?' Vianello asked.

'Suppliers, workers, the guys on the boats who bring the sand or the guys on the boats who take the glass away. If there's money involved— and there's money involved in all of this—then he'll argue with them.'

'I've heard about a fight in a bar a couple of years ago . . .' Brunetti began and let his voice drop away.

'Oh that’ Navarro said. 'It's probably the one time the old bastard didn't start it. Some guy said something he didn't like and De Cal said something back, and the guy hit him. I wasn't there, but my brother was. Believe me, he hates De Cal more than I do, so if he said the old bastard didn't start it, then he didn't.'

'What about his daughter?' Brunetti asked.

Before Navarro could answer, the waiter brought their pasta and set the plates in front of them. Conversation stopped as the three men dug into the spaghetti. The waiter returned with three empty plates for the shells.

'Peperoncino,' Brunetti said, mouth full.

'Good, eh?' Navarro said.

Brunetti nodded, took a sip of wine, and returned to the spaghetti, which was better than good. He had to remember to tell Paola about the peperoncino, which was more than she used but still good.

When their plates were empty and the other plates full of shells, the waiter came and took them all away, asking if they had eaten well. Brunetti and Vianello said enthusiastic things: Navarro, a regular customer, was not obliged to comment.

Soon the waiter was back with a bowl of potatoes and the fish: Brunetti's was already filleted. Navarro asked for olive oil, and the waiter returned with a bottle of much better oil. All three poured it on their fish but not on the potatoes, which already sat in a pool of it at the bottom of the bowl. None of them spoke for some time.

While Vianello spooned the last of the potatoes from the bowl, Brunetti returned to his questions and asked, 'His daughter, do you know much about her?'

Navarro finished the wine and held up the empty carafe to get the waiter's attention. 'She's a good girl, but she married that engineer.'

Brunetti nodded. 'Do you know him or know anything about him?'

'He's an ecologist’ Navarro said, using the same sort of tone another person might use to identify a pederast or a kleptomaniac. It was meant to end discussion. Brunetti allowed it to pass and decided to play ignorant. 'Does he work here on Murano?' he asked.

'Ah, thank God, no,' Navarro said, taking the litre of white wine from the waiter's hand and filling all of their glasses. 'He works on the mainland somewhere, goes around looking for places where we'll still be allowed to put our garbage.' He drank a half-glass of wine, perhaps thought of Ribetti's professional duties, and finished the glass.

'We've got two perfectly good incinerators here, so why can't we just burn it all? Or if it's dangerous, just bury it somewhere in the countryside or ship it to Africa or China. Those people will let you pay for that. So why not do it? They've got all those open spaces, so just bury it there.'

Brunetti allowed himself a quick glance at Vianello, who was finishing the last of his potatoes. He set his knife and fork down on his plate and, as Brunetti feared he would, opened his mouth to speak to Navarro. 'If we built nuclear plants, then we could do the same thing with the waste from them, and then we wouldn't have to import all that electricity from Switzerland and France, either.' Vianello gave a manly smile, first to Navarro and then to Brunetti.

'Yes’ said Navarro. 'I hadn't thought about that, but it's a good idea.' Smiling, he turned back to Brunetti, 'What else did you want to know about De Cal?'

I've heard there's talk he wants to sell the fornace,' Vianello interrupted, now that Navarro had looked on him with approval.

'Yes. I've heard that, too’ Navarro said, not much interested. 'But there's always talk like that.' He shrugged off such talk, then added, 'Besides, if anyone buys it, it'll be Fasano. He's got the factory right alongside De Cal's, so if he bought it, he'd only have to join the two buildings together and he'd double his production.' Navarro thought about this possibility for a while and nodded.

'Fasano runs the Glassmakers' Association, doesn't he?' Vianello asked as the waiter arrived with another bowl of potatoes. Vianello let the waiter spoon a few onto his plate, but Navarro and Brunetti said no.

In answer to Vianello's question, Navarro smiled at the waiter and said, "That's what he does now, but who knows what he wants to become?' Hearing this, the waiter nodded and turned away.

Brunetti feared the conversation was veering away from De Cal, so he interrupted to say, 'I've heard there's been talk that De Cal's been threatening his son-in-law.'

'You mean that he says he's going to kill him?'

'Yes’ Brunetti said.

'He's said it in the bars, but he was usually drunk when he said it. Drinks too much, the old bastard’ Navarro said, filling his glass again. 'He's got diabetes and shouldn't drink, but. . .' Navarro paused and considered something for a moment, then said, "That's funny. You know, in the last couple of months he's started to look worse, like the disease is really getting to him.'

Brunetti, who had seen the old man only once some weeks before, had no point of comparison: he had seen an old man weakened and perhaps fuddled by years of drink.

'I'm not sure this is a legitimate question, Signor Navarro’ Brunetti began, taking a sip of wine he did not want. 'You think there's any real threat?'

'You mean that he'd really kill him?'

'Yes.'

Navarro finished his wine and put the glass on the table. He made no move to help himself to more and called to the waiter for three coffees. After he had given the order, he returned to Brunetti's question and at last said, 'I think I'd rather not answer that, Commissario.'

The waiter cleared away their plates. Both Brunetti and Vianello said that the meal had been excellent, and Navarro seemed more pleased than the waiter to hear them say it. When the coffee came, he put two packets of sugar into his cup, stirred it, looked at his watch, and said, 'I've got to get back to work, gentlemen.' He stood and shook hands with both of them, called over to the waiter that the bill was his and that he'd pay it the next day. Brunetti started to object, but Vianello stood and put out his hand again and thanked the older man. Brunetti did the same.

Navarro smiled one last time and said, 'Take good care of my sister's boy for me, all right?' He went over to the door, opened it, and was gone.

Brunetti and Vianello sat back down. Brunetti drank the last of his coffee, looked over at Vianello, and asked, 'Did Pucetti call you?'

'Yes.'

'What did he say?'

"That you were coming out here and maybe I should join you.'

Undecided as to whether he liked it or not, Brunetti finally said, 'I liked that about the nuclear waste.'

'I'm sure it's a feeling in which you are joined by countless people in the government,' Vianello said.

9

'Oh my, oh my, oh my’ Vianello said, directing his attention to the entrance of the trattoria. Brunetti, curious, started to turn around, but Vianello put a hand on his arm and said, 'No, don't look.' When Brunetti was facing him again, Vianello said, unable to disguise his surprise, 'What Navarro said about De Cal is true: he looks much worse than he did the last time.'

'Where is he?'

'He just came in and he's standing at the bar, having a drink.'

'Alone or with someone?'

'He's with someone’ Vianello answered. 'And that's what's interesting.'

'Why?'

'Because he's with Gianluca Fasano.'

An involuntary 'ah' escaped Brunetti and then he said, 'Not only President of the Glass-makers of Murano, but, as I've heard a few times and as even Navarro seems to know, a man who might be very interested in becoming our next mayor.'

'Right on both counts’ Vianello said, raising his glass in Brunetti's direction but not taking a sip. 'Complimenti.' He kept his eyes on Brunetti's face, but occasionally shifted his head to one side and cast his attention towards the two men standing at the bar. If the men looked in their direction, Brunetti realized, they would see two men at a table, one with his back to them. The only time De Cal had seen Vianello, he had been in uniform: without it, he could be anyone. Vianello nodded in the direction of the two men and said, 'Be interesting to know what they're saying, wouldn't it?'

'De Cal's a glassmaker, and Fasano's their leader,' Brunetti said. 'I don't see much of a mystery there.'

'There are more than a hundred fornaci’ Vianello said. 'De Cal's is one of the smallest.'

'He's got a fornace to sell,' Brunetti argued.

'He's got a daughter to inherit,' Vianello countered. The Inspector reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out five Euros. 'At least we can tip,' he said, putting the bill on the table.

'Probably give the waiter in a place like this a seizure,' Brunetti said. He saw Vianello shift in his chair and asked, 'Are they still there?'

'De Cal's paying.' After a minute, Vianello got quickly to his feet, saying, 'I want to see where they go.'

Brunetti doubted that De Cal, who had been beside himself with anger the one time they met, would remember him, but he stayed at the table and let Vianello go outside by himself.

After a few minutes, Vianello came back; Brunetti got to his feet and went over to join him at the door. 'Well?' he asked.

"They walked down to the water and turned left, down to a dirt path and turned left again. Then they went back to some buildings on the other side of an empty field.'

'Do you have your telefonino?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello took his phone from the pocket of his jacket and held it up.

'Why don't you call that classmate of yours who told you the love story about Assunta and ask him where De Cal's factory is?'

Vianello flipped the phone open, found the number and called. Brunetti heard him ask the question, then explain that they were at Nanni's. He watched as Vianello nodded his way through his friend's explanation, thanked him and hung up. 'That's where De Cal's place is: down at the end of that path, the buildings on the right. Just beside Fasano's.'

'You think that's important?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello shrugged. 'I don't know, not really. I'm interested because of what I've read in the papers—that Fasano's suddenly discovered ecology, or suddenly discovered his commitment to it.'

Brunetti had a vague memory of having read something along these lines, some months ago, and of having had a similarly cynical response, but he simply asked, "That's the way it happens to most people, though, isn't it?' Brunetti left it to Vianello to realize, or not, that it was precisely what had happened to him.

'Yes’ Vianello admitted, though reluctantly. 'Maybe it's because of his interest in politics. Once someone says they're thinking about public office, I start to get suspicious of anything they do or say'

Though he had taken a few steps, Brunetti was not yet this far along the road to total cynicism, and so he said, 'It's other people who are saying it about him, if I remember correctly'

'It's one of the things politicians love the most: popular acclamation,' Vianello replied.

'Come on, Lorenzo’ Brunetti said, unwilling to continue with this subject. Remembering the other thing he could usefully do while he was on Mu-rano, he explained about Assunta's visit and said he wanted to go and talk to one of the men who had heard her father threaten Ribetti. He told Vianello he would see him back at the Questura. They walked out to the riva, and Vianello went down to the Sacca Serenella stop to wait for the 41.

Assunta had told him Bovo lived just on the other side of the bridge, in Calle drio i Orti, and he found the calle with little trouble. He walked as far as Calle Leonarducci without finding the house and turned to go back and check more closely. This time he found the number and Bovo's name among those on the doorbells. He rang and waited, then rang again. He heard a window open above him, stepped back, and looked up. A child, from this vantage point its age and sex unclear, stuck its head out of a third-floor window and called, 'Si?'

'I'm looking for your father,' Brunetti called up.

'He's down at the bar,' the child called back in a voice so high it could have belonged to either a boy or a girl.

'Which one?'

A tiny hand stuck out the window, pointing to Brunetti's left. 'Down there,' the voice called, and then the child disappeared.

The window remained open, so Brunetti called his thanks up to it and turned to return to Calle Leonarducci. At the corner he came to a window covered to chest height with curtains that had begun life as a red-and-white check but had moved into a wrinkled, hepatic middle age. He opened the door and walked into a room more filled with smoke than any he could remember having entered in years. He went to the bar and ordered a coffee. He displayed no interest in the barman's tattoos, a pattern of intertwined serpents that encircled both wrists with their tails and ran up his arms until they disappeared under the sleeves of his T-shirt. When the coffee came, Brunetti said, I'm looking for Paolo Bovo. His kid told me he was here.'

'Paolo’ the barman called towards a table at the back, where three men sat around a bottle of red wine, talking, 'the cop wants to talk to you.'

Brunetti smiled and asked, 'How come everyone always knows?'

The barman's smile was equal in warmth to Brunetti's, though not in the number of teeth exposed. 'Anyone who talks as good as you do has to be a cop.'

'A lot of people talk as well as I do’ Brunetti said.

'Not the ones who want to see Paolo’ he answered, wiping at the counter with an unusually clean cloth.

Brunetti sensed movement to his left and turned to meet a man of his own height, who appeared to have lost not only all of his hair but at least twenty of the kilos Brunetti was carrying. From this distance, Brunetti could see that he had lost his eyebrows and eyelashes as well, which explained the pale greasiness of his skin.

Brunetti extended his hand and said, 'Signor Bovo?' At the man's nod, Brunetti asked, 'May I offer you something to drink?'

Bovo declined with a shake of his head. In a deep voice presumably left over from his former body, he said, 'I've got some wine back with my friends.' He shook Brunetti's hand and Brunetti read on his face the effort it cost him to make his grip firm. He spoke in Veneziano, with a Muranese accent of the sort that Brunetti and his friends used to imitate for comic effect.

'What do you want?' Bovo asked. He rested one elbow on the bar, succeeding in making the gesture look casual rather than necessary. Before his illness, Brunetti realized, this situation would have been charged with aggression, perhaps even danger: now the best the man could manage was gruffness.

'You know Giovanni De Cal’ Brunetti said and stopped.

Bovo said nothing for some time. He looked at the barman, who was pretending to take no interest in their conversation; then he glanced back at the men he had left at the table. Brunetti watched him weighing the chances that, reduced to no power except words, he could still impress his friends with his toughness. 'The bastard wouldn't give me a job.'

'When was that?'

'When that bastard at the other fornace fired me’ he said but offered no further information.

'Why did he fire you?' Brunetti asked.

Brunetti watched his question register with Bovo, saw in his eyes the confusion it caused him, as if he had never given the matter any thought.

Finally Bovo said, 'Because I couldn't lift things any more.'

'What sort of things?'

'Bags of sand, the chemicals, the barrels we have to move. How was I supposed to lift them if I couldn't even bend down to tie my shoes?'

Brunetti said, ‘I don't know.' He waited some time before asking, 'And then what happened?'

'Then I left. What else could I do?' Bovo moved a bit closer to the bar and put his other elbow on it, shifting his weight as he changed arms.

This conversation seemed not to be going anywhere, so Brunetti decided to return to his original point. 'I'd like to know what you heard De Cal say about Ribetti and if you could tell me the circumstances.'

Bovo called the barman over and asked for a glass of mineral water. When it came, he lifted it to salute Brunetti and drank some of it. He put the glass back on the bar and said, 'He was in here one night after work. He usually doesn't come in here: got his own bar he goes to, down towards Colonna, but they were closed or something, so he came in here.' He looked at Brunetti to see that he was following, and Brunetti nodded.

'So he was sitting there, in the back, when I came in. He was being the big man with his friends, drinking and talking about how many orders he had, and how people always wanted his glass pieces, and how someone from the museum asked if they could have a piece for a show.' He looked at Brunetti and pursed his lips, as if to ask him if he had ever heard anything so ridiculous.

'Did he see you?'

'Of course he saw me,' Bovo said. "This was six months ago.' He said it with pride, as though boasting of some other person whose every entrance was sure to be noted by everyone in the place.

'What happened?'

'Some friends of mine were at another table, so I went back to have a drink with them. No, we weren't close: there was a table between us. I sat down and I guess he sort of forgot about me. And after a while he started to talk about his son-in-law: the usual shit he always says, that he's crazy and married Assunta for her money and doesn't know anything and just cares about animals. We've all heard it a thousand times, ever since Assunta married him.'

'Do you know Ribetti?' Brunetti asked.

'Yeah, sort of’ Bovo answered. It appeared he was going to leave it at that, but as Brunetti started to ask for an explanation Bovo went on. 'She's a good person, Assunta, and it's obvious the guy loves her. Younger than she is, and he's an engineer, but he's still a good enough guy'

'What was it that De Cal said about him?' Brunetti asked.

"That he'd like to open the Gazzettino one morning and read that he'd been killed in an accident. On the road, at work, in his house: the old bastard didn't care, just so long as he was dead.'

Brunetti waited to see if this was all, then said, 'I'm not sure that's a threat, Signor Bovo.' He added a smile to soften his observation.

'You going to let me finish?' Bovo asked.

'Sorry.'

"Then he said that if he didn't die in an accident, he might have to kill him himself.'

'Do you think he was serious?' Brunetti asked, when it seemed that Bovo had indeed finished.

'I don't know. It's the sort of thing you say, isn't it?' Bovo asked, and Brunetti nodded. The sort of thing you say.

'But I had the feeling he'd really do it, the old bastard.' He took a few more small sips of the water. 'He can't stand it that Assunta's happy.'

'Is that the reason he hates Ribetti so much?'

'I suppose. And that he'll have a say in the fornace when the old bastard dies. I think that's what makes him crazy. He keeps saying Ribetti will ruin everything.'

'You mean if he leaves it to his daughter?'

'Who else can he leave it to?' Bovo asked.

Brunetti paused to acknowledge the truth of that and then said, 'She knows the business. And Ribetti's an engineer; besides, they've been married long enough for him to have learned something about running the place.'

Bovo gave him a long look. 'Maybe that's why the old man thinks he'll ruin everything.'

'I don't understand,' Brunetti confessed.

'If she inherits it, then he'll want to take over, won't he?' Bovo asked. Brunetti maintained a neutral expression and waited for an answer. 'She's a woman, isn't she?' Bovo asked. 'So she'll let him.'

Brunetti smiled. 'I hadn't thought of that’ he said.

Bovo looked satisfied at having successfully explained things to the policeman. 'I'm sorry for Assunta,' he said.

'Why?'

'She's a good person.'

'Is she a friend of yours?' Brunetti asked, curious as to whether there might have been some history between them. They were of an age, and he must once have been a very impressive man.

'No, no, nothing like that’ Bovo said. 'It's that she tried to keep that other bastard from firing me. And when he did, she tried to give me a job, but her father wouldn't let her.' He finished the water and put the glass on the counter. 'So now I don't have a job. My wife does—she goes out and cleans houses—and I'm supposed to stay home with the kids.'

Brunetti thanked him, put two Euros on the counter, and held out his hand. He shook Bovo's hand carefully, thanked him again, and left.

Deciding it would be quicker, Brunetti walked down to the Faro stop and took the 41 back to Fondamenta Nuove, then switched to the 42 that would take him down to the hospital stop. From there, it was a quick walk back to the Questura.

As he walked inside, Brunetti was forced to accept the fact that he had spent almost an entire working day on something that could in no way be justified as a legitimate use of his time. Further, he had involved both an inspector and a junior officer, and some days ago he had commandeered both a police launch and a police car in the same matter. In the absence of a crime, it could not be called an investigation: it was nothing more than indulgence in the sort of curiosity he should have abandoned years before.

Conscious of this, he went to Signorina Elettra's office and was happy to find her at her desk, wrapped in spring. A pink scarf was tied around her head, gypsy fashion, and she wore a green shirt and severe black slacks. Her lipstick matched the scarf, prompting Brunetti to wonder when it would start matching the shirt.

'Are you very busy, Signorina?' he asked after they had exchanged greetings.

'No more so than usual’ she said. 'What can I do for you?'

'I'd like you to take a look and see what you can find about two men’ he began and saw her slide a notebook closer. 'Giovanni De Cal, who owns a fornace on Murano, and Giorgio Tassini, the night-watchman at De Cal's factory.'

'Everything?' she asked.

'Whatever you can find, please.'

Idly, driven only by the same sort of curiosity Brunetti felt propelling him, she asked, 'Is this for anything?'

'No, not really’ Brunetti had to admit. He was about to leave, when he added, 'And Marco Ribetti, who works for a French company, but is Venetian. An engineer. His speciality is garbage disposal, I think, or building garbage dumps.'

'I'll see what I can find.'

He thought of adding Fasano's name but stopped himself. It was only a fishing expedition, not an investigation, and she had better things to do. He thanked her and left.

10

A day passed, and then another. Brunetti heard nothing from Assunta De Cal and gave her little thought, nor did he spend time thinking about Murano and the threats made by a drunken old man. He had young men, instead, to keep him occupied, young men—though legally they were still children—who were repeatedly arrested, processed, then identified and collected by people claiming to be their parents or guardians, though because they were gypsies, few of them had documents which could prove this.

And then came the shock story in one of the weekly newspaper inserts about the fate of such young boys in more than one South American city, where they were reportedly being executed by squads of off-duty policemen. 'Well, we aren't there yet’ Brunetti muttered to himself as he finished reading the article. There were many qualities in his fellow citizens that Brunetti, as a policeman, abhorred: their willingness to accommodate crime; their failure to trust the law; their lack of rage at the inefficiency of the legal system. But we don't shoot children in the street because they steal oranges, he said, though he was not at all sure if this was sufficient reason for civic pride.

Like an epileptic sensing the imminence of a seizure, Brunetti knew he was best advised to use work to distract himself from these thoughts. He took out his notebook and found the phone number Tassini's mother-in-law had given him. A man answered.

'Signor Tassini?' Brunetti asked.

'Si’

"This is Commissario Guido Brunetti, Signore.' He paused, waiting for Tassini's question, but the man said nothing, and so Brunetti continued. 'I wonder if I could trouble you for some of your time, Signor Tassini. I'd like to speak to you.'

'Are you the one who was here?' Tassini asked, making no attempt to hide his suspicion.

'Yes, I am’ Brunetti answered easily. 'I spoke to your mother-in-law, but she could give me very little information.'

'What about?' Tassini asked neutrally.

'About the place where you work, Signore’ he said and again waited for Tassini to respond.

'What about it?'

'It has to do with your employer, Giovanni De Cal. That's why I chose to contact you away from your place of work. We would prefer that your employer not learn that we're taking an interest in him.' This was true enough, and it was similarly true that De Cal could cause considerable trouble if he were to learn that Brunetti was in essence running a private investigation.

'Is it about my complaint?' Tassini asked, curiosity getting the better of his distrust.

'It's about that, of course,' Brunetti lied effortlessly, 'as well as about Signor De Cal and a report we've had about him.'

'A report from whom?' Tassini asked.

'I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to reveal that, Signor Tassini. I'm sure you understand that everything we're told, we're told in confidence.' He waited to see if Tassini would swallow this, and when his silence suggested that he had, Brunetti asked, 'Would it be possible to speak to you?'

After some hesitation, Tassini asked, 'When?'

'Whenever it's convenient for you, Signore.'

Tassini's voice, when he answered, was less easy than it had been a moment before. 'How did you get this number?'

'Your mother-in-law gave it to me,' Brunetti said. Softening his voice and putting into it a note of near-embarrassment, he added 'Your mother-in-law told me you have no telefonino, Signor Tassini. Speaking personally, I'd like to compliment you on the wisdom of that decision.' He ended with a half-laugh.

'You think they're dangerous, too?' Tassini asked eagerly.

'From what I've read, I'd say there's good reason to believe it’ Brunetti said. From what he had read, there was also good reason to believe that automobiles, central heating, and aeroplanes were dangerous, but this was a sentiment he chose not to reveal to Signor Tassini.

'When do you want to meet?' Tassini asked.

'If you could possibly spare me the time right now, I could be there in about fifteen minutes.'

The line sang emptily for a long time, but Brunetti resisted the impulse to speak. 'All right’ Tassini said, 'but not here at the house. There's a bar opposite San Francesco di Paola.'

'On the corner before the park?' Brunetti asked.

'Yes.'

'I know it, the place that draws the little hearts on the cappuccino schiuma, no?'

'Yes’ said Tassini in a gentler tone.

'I'll be there in fifteen minutes’ said Brunetti and put down the phone.

When Brunetti entered the bar, he looked around for a man who might be the night-watchman in a glass factory. There was one man at the bar, drinking a coffee and talking to the barman. Another pair stood farther along, two coffees in front of them, one man with a briefcase propped against his leg. Another man with a large nose and a peculiarly small head stood at the end of the bar, feeding one-Euro coins into a video poker machine. His gestures were rhythmic: feed a coin, punch a button, wait to see the flashing results, punch more buttons, wait again to see the results, quick double sip at a glass of red wine, then another coin.

Brunetti excluded them all, as he did a young man next to the poker player, who was drinking what looked like a gingerino. There were four tables against the back wall: at one of them sat three women, each with a cup and a pot of tea. They were handing around photographs and exclaiming in enthusiasm that sounded genuine enough for it to be a baby and not a vacation. At the last table, in the angle behind the bar, sat a man who glanced in Brunetti's direction. He had a glass of water in front of him, and as Brunetti moved towards him, the man raised the glass in his left hand and saluted him with it.

The man got to his feet and extended his hand. 'Tassini,' he said. He was tall, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with large dark eyes set wide apart and a nose that seemed too small to fill the space left for it. He had an untrimmed beard with some grey in it that covered, though it did not hide, the hollowness of his cheeks. Brunetti had seen that face on countless icons: the suffering Christ. 'Commissario Brunetti?' Tassini asked.

Brunetti took his hand and thanked him for agreeing to speak to him. 'What would you like to drink?' Tassini asked when Brunetti was seated, raising his hand to catch the attention of the barman.

'Since I'm here’ Brunetti said with a smile, 'I should have a cappuccino, don't you think?' He sat, and Tassini called the order to the barman. For some time, neither man spoke.

Brunetti finally said, 'Signor Tassini, as I told you on the phone, we'd like to speak to you about Giovanni De Cal, your employer.' Before Tassini could ask, Brunetti added, using his gravest voice, 'And, of course, about your complaint.'

'So you're beginning to believe me, eh?' Tassini asked, using the plural.

'We're certainly interested in listening to what you have to say,' Brunetti said. He was spared the need to elaborate by the arrival of the barman with his cappuccino. As he anticipated, the foam had been poured in a swirling motion that created a heart on the surface. He tore open a packet of sugar and poured it in. He stirred the coffee around, and broke its heart.

'What about my letters, then?' Tassini asked.

"That's certainly part of the reason I'm here, Signor Tassini,' Brunetti said and took a sip of his coffee. It was still too hot to drink, so he set the cup back in the saucer to let it cool.

'Did you read them?'

Brunetti gave him his most direct look. 'Ordinarily, if this were part of an official investigation, I'm afraid I'd lie here and say I had,' he said, trying to sound faintly embarrassed by the confession. 'But in this case, let me deal frankly, right from the start.' Before Tassini could reply, he went on. 'They're in a file held by another division. But I've been told about them by people who have read them, and some excerpts have been passed on to us.'

'But they were addressed to you’ Tassini insisted. 'That is, to the police.'

'Yes’ Brunetti acknowledged with a nod, 'but we're detectives, and such things don't get sent on to us automatically. The letters were given to the complaints department and a file was opened. But before those files are processed and passed on to the people who actually will conduct an investigation, months can pass.' He saw the anguished look on Tassini's face, saw him open his mouth to protest, and added, lowering his face in feigned embarrassment again, 'or even longer.'

'But you know about them?'

'I've been told about them, as I've said, but it's come to me third hand.' Brunetti looked across at Tassini and opened his eyes wider as if to suggest that some new possibility had suddenly occurred to him. 'Would you be willing to tell me, in your own words, so that I'd finally understand what's in them? That might help things move more quickly'

At the sight of Tassini's dawning relief, Brunetti felt faintly soiled by what he had just done: it was too simple, too effortless: human need was just too easy to take advantage of. He picked up his cappuccino and took a few sips.

'It's about the factory’ Tassini began. 'You know at least that much?'

'Of course’ Brunetti said with a little deceitful bow of his head.

'It's a death trap,' Tassini said. 'All sorts of things: potassium, nitric acid and fluoric acid, cadmium, even arsenic. We work around this stuff; we breathe it in; we probably even eat it.'

Brunetti nodded. Any Venetian knew this much, but even Vianello had never suggested there existed any significant risk for the workers on Murano. And if anyone would know, it was Vianello.

"That's why it happened,' Tassini said.

'Why what happened, Signor Tassini?'

Tassini's eyes contracted in a look replete with what Brunetti knew was suspicion. But still he said, 'My daughter.'

'Emma?' Brunetti supplied seamlessly. And then, filled with something close to disgust at himself, he said, 'Poor little girl.'

That did it: Tassini was his. He watched as all reservation, all suspicion, all discretion fled from Tassini's face. "That's why it happened,' Tassini said, voice hot with conviction. 'All those things. I've been working there for years, breathing them, touching them, spilling them on me.' He drew his hands together in tight fists. "That's why I keep writing those letters, even when no one will pay attention to what I say.' He looked up at Brunetti with a face made soft by hope, or love, or some emotion Brunetti chose not to identify. 'You're the first one who's paid any attention to me.'

'Tell me about it’ Brunetti forced himself to say.

'I've read a lot’ Tassini began. 'I read all the time. I've got a computer and I read things on the Internet, and I've read books about chemistry and genetics. And it's all there, it's all there.' He rapped his left fist three times on the table as he repeated, 'It's all there.'

'Go on.'

'These things, especially the minerals, can damage the genetic structure. And once the genes are affected, then we can pass the damage on to our children. Damaged genes. You know about the letters, so you know what I've described. When you see the medical reports, you'll know what the doctors say is wrong with her.' He looked at Brunetti. 'Have you seen the photos?'

Even though Brunetti had seen the child so could have continued to lie, he could not bring himself to do so: all the rest, but not this. 'No.'

'Well’ Tassini said. 'Maybe that's better. Besides, you know what's wrong, so there's no need for you to see them.'

'And the doctors? What do they say?'

Tassini's enthusiasm disappeared abruptly; apparently mention of the doctors took him back into the land of the unbelievers. 'They don't want to get involved.'

'Why's that?' Brunetti asked.

'You've seen what's happened at Marghera, with the protests and people wanting to shut it all down. Imagine if it became public, what's going on on Murano.'

Brunetti nodded.

'So you see why they have to lie’ Tassini said with growing heat. 'I've tried to talk to the people at the hospital, tried to get them to test Emma. To test me. I know what's wrong. I know why she's the way she is. All they have to do is find the right test, find the right thing that's in me and in her, and then they'd know what happened. If they admitted what happened to Emma, then they'd have to look at all the other damage, all the other people who are sick, all the people who have died.' He spoke with conviction and urgency, willing Brunetti to understand, and agree.

Brunetti was suddenly aware that, though he had known how to get himself into this one, he had no idea how to get out.

'And your employer?'

'De Cal?'

'Do you think he knows?'

Tassini's face changed again and he moved his mouth into something that resembled a smile but was not. 'Yes, he knows. They both do, but they have to cover it all up, don't they?' he asked, and Brunetti wondered in what way Assunta could be involved in this.

'But you have proof?' Brunetti asked.

Tassini gave a sly smile. 'I've started a file, and I keep everything in there. The new job gives me the time to find the final proofs. I'm close. I'm very close.' He glanced across at Brunetti, his eyes filled with the illumination of one who has discovered the truth. 'I put it all in there. I read a lot, and it helps me understand things. I keep track of everything.' With a sly glance he added, 'But we'll have to wait and see, won't we?'

'Why?'

Brunetti was not sure Tassini had heard his question, for by way of answer he said, 'Our greatest men knew about these things long before we did, and so now I do, too.' Ever since his daughter had been mentioned, Tassini had become increasingly agitated. When he started to talk of his file and the information he kept there, a bemused Brunetti decided it was time to deflect him back to the subject of De Cal.

He lowered his head in a gesture that suggested deep thought, then looked across at Tassini and said, 'I'll have a look at our file as soon as I get back to the Questura.' He shifted his cup to one side to indicate a change of subject and went on, 'I'd like to ask you some questions about your employer, Giovanni De Cal.'

His question brought Tassini up short, and the man could not disguise his surprise and disappointment, just when he had begun to talk about the great men who agreed with him. He took a not very clean handkerchief out of his left-hand pocket and blew his nose. He stuffed it back in his pocket and asked, 'What do you want to know?'

'It's been reported to us that Signor De Cal has threatened the life of his son-in-law. Do you know anything about this?'

'Well, it makes sense, doesn't it?' Tassini asked.

Brunetti gave a smile of mild confusion and said, 'I'm not sure I follow your reasoning.' He smiled again to emphasize his belief that there was some thread of reasoning here, although he in fact suspected there might be none.

'To keep him from inheriting the fornace.'

'But isn't it his daughter who would inherit?' Brunetti inquired.

'Yes. But then Ribetti would be free to go there’ Tassini said, as if this were something so obvious it hardly needed mentioning.

'Doesn't he go there now?' Behind them, a telephone rang; not a telefonino, a real telephone.

Tassini laughed. 'I heard the old bastard talk about killing him once. That was just talk, but if he saw him at the fornace, he'd probably try.'

Just as Brunetti started to ask Tassini to explain this remark, the barman called, 'Giorgio, it's your wife. She wants to talk to you.'

Panic crossed Tassini's face and he scrambled to his feet. He walked quickly to the bar and took the receiver the barman handed to him. He turned his back on both the barman and Brunetti and hunched over the phone.

As Brunetti watched, Tassini's body relaxed, but only minimally. He listened for some time, spoke again, and then listened for an even longer time. As the conversation progressed, he gradually stood more and more upright until he reached his normal height. He said something and put the phone down, then turned and thanked the barman. He took a few coins out of his pocket and put them on the bar.

He came back to Brunetti and said, 'I have to go.' From the look on his face, he was already gone; he had already forgotten Brunetti or dismissed him as insignificant.

Brunetti pushed his chair back and started to get to his feet, but by the time he was standing, Tassini had already turned and was walking towards the door. He opened it, slipped through it, and shut it behind him.

11

The conversation, interrogation, whatever it was, with Tassini left Brunetti uneasy. He felt cheapened by the way he had deceived the man and by the way he had induced him to speak of his daughter. Who knew what the poor devil suffered because of her? And who knew the effect of the presence of the healthy child: a sense of relief that at least one of them was not afflicted? Or was his health and vitality but part of the daily flagellation that the profundity of the other child's condition caused the father?

Brunetti was neither a religious nor a superstitious man, though if he could have thought of the proper deity, he would have given thanks for the health and safety of his own children. As it was, he was left with a vague sense of unease at their continued good fortune and never ceased to worry about them. Sometimes he viewed this quality in himself with favour and thought of it as feminine; other times he saw it as a form of cowardice and chided himself with being womanly. Paola, not much given to sparing him the rough edge of her tongue, never joked with him about this tendency, certainly an indication that she saw it as central to his being and thus unapproachable.

He carried these unhappy thoughts back to the Questura and, to divert himself from them, went directly to Signorina Elettra's office. Perhaps the Vice-Questore had come up with some new directive suggesting a strategy for dealing with the recidivist adolescents.

She smiled when he came in and asked, 'Did Vianello tell you?'

'Tell me what?'

To come and see me after you spoke to Signor Tassini.'

'No. Nothing. What have you got?'

She picked up a sheaf of papers and waved them, then set them on the desk and started to leaf through them, identifying each as she did: 'The non-arrest report for Signor De Cal; Ribetti's driver's licence application and driving record—it was the only thing about him in our files; Bovo's real arrest record, for assault, though it was six years ago; and copies of the letters Tassini has been sending for more than a year, as well as the medical records for his wife and child.'

There were still a number of papers on the desk when she finished, and he asked, 'And those?'

She looked up with an embarrassed grin and said, 'Copies of De Cal's tax statements for the last six years. Once I start looking for things, it's hard for me to stop.' She smiled with what a less astute person might have mistaken for sincerity.

He nodded to suggest that he, too, understood the frenzy of the hunt, and she said, 'The most interesting are the medical records, especially if you read them in conjunction with Tassini's letters.'

'Do you want to tell me,' he asked seriously, 'or do you want me to read them and then come back and talk about them to see if I find them interesting in the same way you do?'

'I think that would be the best thing’ she said and handed him the papers. 'But I'll come up when you want to look at them together. I'm not sure the Vice-Questore would be pleased, if he should come in and find us discussing documents from a non-case.'

He thanked her, accepted the papers, and went up to his office to read them. Though he trusted her judgement that the first papers were not likely to prove of great interest, he read through them anyway, only to come to the same conclusion. The police report exonerated De Cal from any aggression; Bovo's case was quite the opposite, but things ended when the other man refused to press charges; and Ribetti was revealed to have a blameless driving record.

He turned to the medical records and noticed a few notations and, above the first of them, in Signorina Elettra's hand, 'Barbara checked through these.' Her sister, a doctor, should certainly be able to interpret a medical record, and judging from the pencilled notes in the margin, she had paid close attention.

The story told by the records was a grim one. It began with a pregnant woman who had decided, with her husband, to have her child at home. Even when they were told that the child they were expecting was two children, thus increasing the danger of home delivery, they persisted in their decision. The record of obstetrical visits had a pencilled 'tutto normale' in the margin. Two weeks before the estimated date of delivery, there was an unscheduled obstetrical visit. The record contained a recommendation for a Caesarean, followed by, 'Refused by patient.' The margin contained a lone exclamation point.

There was a gap of two weeks, and when Brunetti turned the page he found himself with two babies, though their mother and one of the babies were in the sala di rianimazione. A marginal note read: 'Attached 118 report of original phone call at 3.17 AM', and sent him to the last sheet of paper, where he found a brief description of the call for medical help and the 3.21 departure time of the emergency ambulance boat. When the crew arrived at the Murano address, seventeen minutes later, they found Signora Sonia Tassini already delivered of one baby, while the other was trapped in the birth canal. The ambulance arrived at the Ospedale Civile at 4:16, which was astonishing, given the fact that they had had to go out to Murano.

Brunetti flipped back to the medical record. The second delivery, by Caesarean, was difficult, both for the mother and for the baby, who appeared to have been cut off from the oxygen supply during the final minutes of the procedure.

Sara Tassini remained in the hospital for more than two weeks, though she was released as a patient on the fifth day. The second child, a girl to be named Emma, had remained in rianimazione for four more days, and then had been put in a room with her mother and her brother, where they all remained for another week. When they were released, her mother was instructed to bring the child back every two weeks for tests to monitor her development, both physical and neurological.

For the first six months, the Tassinis brought the child to the hospital, but they failed to cooperate with the various social agencies which existed to help people in similar circumstances. When he read the phrase, 'similar circumstances', Brunetti whispered 'Gesu Bambino' and turned the page. The child was described as being smaller than other children her age, and likely to remain so for however long she lived. Though the full extent of her handicaps would become evident only with time, there was no doubt in the minds of any of the doctors who examined her that the damage was the result of the lack of oxygen to her brain during her birth, and was irreversible.

Because of the demands of caring for the child, the Tassinis moved, when the children were six months old, to the home of Signora Tassini's mother, a widow who lived in Castello. At this point, Signora Tassini ceased to take the child to the hospital, and this was also the point when Tassini's letters started arriving at the police and at various other city offices. Some months later, Signora Tassini had begun treatment for depression at Palazzo Boldu. She was oppressed, she said, by a sense of guilt at having gone along with her husband's insistence that the children be born at home.

Attached was a report from Palazzo Boldu, chronicling her gradual ascent out of depression. Though she still felt guilt, the report stated, it was no longer crippling her life. However, Signora Tassini stated that her husband was still very much afflicted with it, though it manifested itself in his trying to find another explanation for the child's condition. For a time, she said, he claimed it was a result of the environmental contamination of their vegetarian diet, of medical incompetence, and then of some defect in their genes. 'Classic,' was pencilled in the margin. During her many conversations with her doctor, she never mentioned the letters her husband was writing, making Brunetti wonder if she even knew about them.

Brunetti turned almost with relief to Tassini's letters. They chronicled the changing targets his wife had mentioned but also referred to the negligence of the boat crew and the delivery room staff. And then on to genes and genetic disturbance, which he claimed had been exacerbated by the electric transformer one street from their home in Murano. Tassini also blamed his daughter's condition on the air that drifted over to the city from Marghera, but then he began to maintain that it resulted from his employment in a glass factory on Murano. What struck Brunetti was the apparent lucidity of the early letters, the clear, cogent style, with frequent reference to specific reports and scientific papers which presented evidence in support of his various and ever-changing contentions.

The villain responsible for the Tassinis' plight was chameleon-like, changing and changing again as Tassini read more, explored farther with his reading and Internet researches. But the guilty party was always at one remove, was always other, never his own ideas or behaviour. Brunetti didn't know whether to weep for the man or take him by the shoulders and shake him until he admitted what he had done.

The most recent letter was dated more than three weeks before and made mention of new information that Tassini was in the process of acquiring, more evidence he would soon be able to produce to prove that he had been the unknowing victim of the criminal behaviour of two people. He said that he was now in a position to prove his assertions and had but to perform what he called two more 'examinations' in order to confirm his suspicions.

Brunetti read through the letters again and reinforced the sense he had the first time he read them, that the style had deteriorated over time, that they ceased to present their case clearly or cogently and came ever more to resemble the sort of vague accusatory letters the police were all too familiar with. The conjunction Signorina Elettra identified was no doubt that of the growing misery of the child's condition with the mounting confusion of Tassini's letters.

He finished reading the letters for a second time and let them fall onto his desk. Paola had once told him about a medieval Russian epic she had read about while at university, named after its hero: Misery Luckless Plight. Indeed.

The content of the papers had made him forget Signorina Elettra's admonition that they discuss them in his office, not hers; absent-mindedly, he picked them up and started down to her. If she seemed surprised to see him or to see him with the papers, she gave no sign of it and said only, 'Terrible, eh?'

I've seen the little girl,' he said.

Her answering nod could either have been in acknowledgement that she knew he had seen her or that he was telling her now.

'Poor, desperate people,' she said.

He allowed a long silence to pas's before he asked, "The letters?'

'He's got to blame somebody else, hasn't he?'

'The wife doesn't seem to feel the same need,' Brunetti said with some asperity. 'That is, she realizes they were responsible for what happened.'

'Women have . , .' she started to say and then stopped.

Brunetti waited a moment and at her continued silence, prodded, 'Have what?'

Her glance put him on the scales and weighed him, and then she said, 'Less trouble accepting reality, I think.'

'Possibly,' he answered, hearing in his own voice that tone of half-doubt with which the unwilling greet the expression of good sense. He corrected himself to 'Probably,' and her expression softened.

'What now?' she asked.

'I think I have no choice but to wait until he contacts me and gives me this evidence he keeps talking about.'

'You don't sound very persuaded,' she said.

With a wry look, Brunetti asked, 'Would you be?'

'I didn't talk to him, remember. So I don't have a real sense of him, as a person. Just the letters, and they . . . they don't suggest great reliability. At least not the ones he's writing now. In the beginning, perhaps.' She stopped and then could do nothing more than repeat, after a long pause, 'Poor, desperate people.'

'Which people?' Patta asked from behind Brunetti.

Neither of them had heard the Vice-Questore approach, but it was Signorina Elettra who recovered more quickly. Without missing a beat, she answered, 'The extracomunitari who apply for residence permits and then never hear anything more about them.'

'I beg your pardon’ Patta said, pausing just outside his door. He looked at Signorina Elettra but pointed a finger at Brunetti and then at the door to his office. 'If they apply, then they have to be patient. Just like everyone else who deals with a bureaucracy.'

"Three years?' she inquired.

That stopped him. 'No, not three years.' He made to continue into his office but then stopped on the threshold and turned back to her. 'Who's had to wait three years?'

"The woman who cleans my father's apartment, sir.'

"Three years?'

She nodded.

'Why has it taken so long?'

Brunetti wondered if she would make the obvious response and say that this was exactly what she wanted to know, but she opted for moderation and instead answered, 'I've no idea, sir. She applied three years ago, paid the application fee, and then she heard nothing. She thought that her case would come under the amnesty, but she never heard anything further. So she asked me if I thought she should begin the whole process again and reapply. And pay the fee again.'

'What did you tell her?'

'I don't have an answer to give her, Vice-Questore. It's a lot of money for her—it's a lot of money for anyone—and she doesn't want to go to the expense of applying again if there's any hope that the original application will be successful. That's why I was telling the Commissario that she and her husband were poor, desperate people.'

'I see’ Patta said, turning from her. He waved the waiting Brunetti ahead of him, then turned to Signorina Elettra and said, 'Give me her name and, if you can, her file number and I'll see what I can find out about it.'

'You're very kind, sir,' she said, sounding like she meant it.

Inside, Patta wasted no time: turning to Brunetti, he asked, 'What's all this business of your going out to Murano?'

Deny that he had? Ask how Patta knew? Repeat the question to give himself more time to think of an answer? De Cal? Fasano? Who on Murano had told Patta?

Brunetti opted to tell Patta the truth about what he was doing. 'A woman I know on Murano’ he began—suggesting that she was a woman he had known for some time and thus showing himself how incapable he was of telling Patta the real truth about anything—'told me her father has been threatening her husband, well, making threatening statements about him. Not to him. She wanted me to see if I thought there was any real reason to fear that her father would do something.'

Brunetti watched Patta weigh this, wondering what his superior's response would be to this uncharacteristic frankness. The habit of suspicion, as Brunetti feared, triumphed. 'I suppose this explains why you went out to Murano for some sort of secret meeting in a trattoria, eh?'

Patta asked, unable to disguise his satisfaction at the sight of Brunetti's surprise.

Having begun with the truth, not that it seemed to have helped, Brunetti continued that way. 'He's someone who knows the man who's been making the threats,' Brunetti explained, relieved that Patta appeared to know nothing of Navarro's relationship to Pucetti and even more relieved that his superior had made no mention of Vianello's presence at the meeting. 'I asked him if he thought there was any real basis in them.'

'And? What did he say?'

'He chose not to answer my question.'

'Have you spoken to anyone else?' Patta demanded.

Since telling the truth to Patta had failed as a strategy, Brunetti decided to return to the tried and true path of deceit and said, 'No.'

Patta's information had come from someone who had seen them in the restaurant, so perhaps he knew nothing about Brunetti's visits to Bovo and Tassini.

'So there's no threat?' Patta demanded.

'I'd say no. The man, Giovanni De Cal, is violent, but I think it's language and nothing more.'

'And so?' Patta asked.

'And so I go back to seeing what's to be done about the gypsies’ Brunetti answered, trying to sound contrite.

'Rom,' Patta corrected him.

'Exactly’ said Brunetti in acknowledgement of Patta's concession to the language of political correctness, and left his office.

12

Brunetti called Paola, after one, told her he would not be home for lunch and was hurt when she accepted the news with equanimity. When, however, she went on to observe that, since he said he was calling from his office, and he had not called until now, she had already come to that sad conclusion, he felt himself strangely heartened by her disappointment, however sarcastically she might choose to express it.

He dialled the number of Assunta De Cal's telefonino and told her he would like to come out to Murano to speak to her. No, he assured her, she had nothing to fear from her father's threats: he believed there was little danger in them. But he would still like to speak to her if that were possible.

She asked him how long it would take him to get there. He asked her to hold on a moment, went to the window, and saw Foa standing on the riva, talking to another officer. He went back to the phone and told her it would not take him more then twenty minutes, heard her say she would wait for him at the fornace, and hung up.

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.