Through a glass, darkly

'What's more Venetian than Murano glass?' she asked, and it surprised him to realize that she was serious. 'It would be proof that he really does want to help the city come back to life.' Usually Signorina Elettra was incapable of speaking such words except in tones of mock solemnity, but this was hardly the case here. 'Well,' she added, 'for us, that is. For Venetians.'

'You believe him, then?' Brunetti asked, adding, 'even if he wants to become a politician?'

Sensitive to his scepticism, she tempered her enthusiasm and said only, 'He's the chairman of the glassmakers' organization: that's hardly a political position.'

It's a very good jumping-off point,' Brunetti said, his voice calm and objective. 'He could start on Murano and then move to Venice. You said it yourself: what's more Venetian than Murano glass?' He took her silence as assent and asked, 'How else does he propose to bring the city back to life?'

'He says that no more apartments should be sold to non-Venetians—' and before he could object or quote European law’she added—'unless they're made to pay a substantial non-residents' tax.' When Brunetti did not respond, she added, 'He says that, if they want to live here, then they should pay to do so.'

'Anything else?' Brunetti asked neutrally.

'Because the city always claims it has no money, he's suggested that the finances of the Casino be made public, so people can see how much is spent on salaries, and who gets them, and how much rent is paid by the people who run the restaurants and bars there. And who those concessions are rented to.' This sounded like sovereign good sense to Brunetti, who nodded to encourage her to continue. 'He wants the city or the region to go back to paying forty per cent of the cost of gas for the furnaces on Murano. Or else a lot of people are going to be out of work in a few years' time.'

When Brunetti made no comment, she added, 'And he's concerned about the risk to the laguna from Marghera. He asks why so few fines have been paid.'

'Penalize big business?' Brunetti asked, and immediately regretted the words.

'Or save the laguna,' she said, 'whichever you choose to call it.'

'Does he have any political backing?' Brunetti asked.

'The Greens like him, though he's not their candidate. I suppose he's hoping to do what Di Pietro did, start his own party. But I really don't know that.'

'Not with similar results, I trust’ Brunetti said, thinking of Di Pietro's failed campaign.

'The report's here, sir’ she said, pushing the page a bit farther across the desk. Not for the first time, Signorina Elettra's sudden change of subject made it clear that politics was something about which she preferred not to enter into discussion. But then she surprised him by adding, 'I'm not sure we see eye to eye on the need to protect the laguna, sir.' She got to her feet and walked over to the door.

'Thank you’ he said, reaching across to the paper. Because of the sudden shadow of formality, even reprimand, that had fallen, Brunetti decided not to show her the three sheets of paper from Tassini's file, and she did not linger to ask if there was anything else she might do for him.

18

After Signorina Elettra left, Brunetti asked himself, as would someone from the Disease Control Centre, in which direction the arc of ecological infection was now likely to be passing: whether from her to Vianello or from the Inspector to her. His imagination was seized for a moment by this image, and he found himself wondering what risk of contagion he experienced by working in such proximity to them and when he might begin to feel the first symptoms.

Brunetti believed that his concern for the environment and for the ecological future was stronger than that of the average citizen—only a statue could have resisted the constant harassment of his children—but he obviously must have been judged to have failed to live up to the standards established by his two colleagues. Given the sincerity of their beliefs, why then did Vianello and Signorina Elettra work for the police force, when they could be working for some sort of environmental protection office?

For that matter, why did any of them continue to work for the police? Brunetti wondered. He and Vianello had most reason, for it was a job they had done for decades. But what about someone like Pucetti? He was young, bright, ambitious. So why would he opt to wear a uniform, walk the streets of the city at all hours, and dedicate himself to the maintenance of public order? Even more confusing and enigmatic, however, was Signorina Elettra. Over the years, Brunetti had stopped discussing her with Paola, not so much because of any response he had observed in Paola as because of the way it registered in his own ears to hear himself praise or display such curiosity about a woman other than his wife. She had been at the Questura how long? Five years? Six? Brunetti had to confess he knew little more about her than he had when she first started working there: knew little more, that is, than that he could trust both her abilities and her discretion and that her mask of wry amusement at human foibles was just that, a mask.

He lifted his feet onto the desk, folded his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his chair. He studied the middle distance as he considered everything that had happened since Vianello asked him to go out to Mestre. He ran the events through his mind like the beads of a rosary, each one a separate entity but each leading to and from another, until they led to Tassini's body lying in front of the burning furnace.

He had eaten nothing all day save two panini and now regretted it. The sandwiches had done little more than remind him about food without satisfying his desire for it, and it was now too late to get anything to eat at a restaurant while it was still too early to go home.

He leaned forward and picked up the three sheets of paper and looked at them, then let them float, one by one, back to the surface of his desk. He felt his left knee growing stiff, so he crossed his feet, which allowed him to bend the knee. As he turned in the chair to do so, he felt one of the books in his pockets strike against the back of his chair, reminding him of their presence.

He pulled them out, looked at the ecological frightener and tossed it onto the desk. That left him with Dante, an old friend he had heard nothing from for more than a year. By nature an optimist, Brunetti would have preferred to find Purgatorio, the only book in which hope was a possibility, but given the fact that the alternative was Industrial Illness, he chose the black misery of Hell.

As he had fallen into the habit of doing in recent decades, he opened the book at random, thinking that this might well be the way other people read religious texts: letting fate lead them to some new illumination.

He dipped in just as Dante, still new to Hell and still capable of pity, tried to leave a message for Cavalcante that his son was still alive, then followed his Guide deeper into the abyss, already sickened by the stench. He flipped quickly on and found Vanni Fucci's obscene gesture to God, and flipped on again. He read of Dante's violence towards Bocca Degli Abbati and felt a moment's pleasure that such a traitor was so viciously treated.

He turned back and found himself reading one of the passages bordered by the notes Tassini had made in red. Canto XIV, the burning sand and horrid stream and fiery rain, that whole grotesque parody of nature that Dante thought so well suited to those who sinned against it: the usurers and sodomites. Brunetti followed them as, beneath the flaming snow that fell all around them, Dante and Virgil moved deeper into Hell. There appeared the company of shades, one of whom Brunetti recognized, or remembered, as Brunetto Latini, Dante's respected teacher. Though Brunetti had never much liked the passages that followed—the praise of Dante's genius that he puts into Ser Brunetto's mouth and the outing of public figures—he read on to the end of the next canto. He flipped back to Tassini's heavy red lines under ' . . . the plain whose soil rejects all roots .. . The wood itself is ringed with the red stream.' In the margin, Tassini had written, 'No roots. No life. Nothing.' In black ink, he had written 'The grey stream.'

Brunetti flipped forward and came upon the hypocrites. He recognized them, with their voluminous cloaks, like the Benedictines of Cluny, all dazzle and golden and fair on the outside, leaden and heavy and dull on the inside, the perfect physical manifestation of their deceit, doomed to carry it and measure out their steps until the end of time.

The lines describing their cloaks were circled in green and linked by a line to the text on the facing page, Virgil saying, 'Were I a pane of leaden glass, I could no more instantly imitate your look.'

The phone rang, dragging Brunetti away from Hell. He let his chair fall forward and answered with his name.

'I thought I'd call,' Elio Pelusso said. An old classmate of Brunetti's, Pelusso now worked on the newsdesk of