Through a glass, darkly

'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.