Through a glass, darkly

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.'