Through a glass, darkly

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