Through a glass, darkly

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