Through a Glass Darkly (22 page)

‘No,' Brunetti answered, turning back towards Raffi's room. As he walked down the corridor, his righteous indignation mounted: it was
his
sweater; he'd worked to pay for it; the colour was perfect for these slacks. He stopped outside Raffi's door, preparing himself for the sight of his son wearing his sweater, knocked on the door and entered when he heard Raffi's voice.

‘
Ciao, Papà
,' Raffi said, looking up from the papers scattered over his desk. A textbook was in front of him, propped open by the ceramic frog Chiara had given him for Christmas. Brunetti said hello and gave what he thought was a quite thoroughly professional glance around the room.

‘I put it on your bed,' Raffi said and went back to his homework.

‘Oh, good,' Brunetti said. ‘Thanks.'

He wore it to dinner, earning compliments from Paola and from Chiara, though she complained that men always got to wear the best sweaters and jackets and girls always had to wear pink angora and horrible things like that. Girls, however, did get first crack, it seemed, at
fried artichoke bottoms and then at pork ribs with polenta. Not at all disturbed by the fact that it had just been carried home, Paola had opened the Sangiovese, and Brunetti found it perfect.

Because he had eaten the two pastries, Brunetti declined a baked pear, to the considerable surprise of the others at the table. No one asked after his health, but he did notice that Paola was particularly solicitous in asking him if he would like a grappa, perhaps with coffee in the living room while the kids did the dishes?

She came in a little later, carrying a tray with two coffees and two ample glasses of grappa. She placed it on the table and sat beside him. ‘Why did you take a shower?' she asked.

He spooned sugar into his coffee and stirred it, saying, ‘I went for a walk, and it was colder than I expected, so I thought it would warm me up.'

‘Did it?' she asked, sipping at her own coffee.

‘Uh huh,' he said, finishing his coffee, and picked up his grappa.

She set her cup down, picked up her glass and moved back in the sofa. ‘Nice day for a walk.'

‘Uh huh,' was the best Brunetti could do. Then he said, ‘I'll tell you another time, all right?'

She moved minimally closer to him, until her shoulder touched his, and said, ‘Of course.'

‘You're good at crossword puzzles and things like that, aren't you?' he asked.

‘I suppose.'

‘I have something I'd like you to look at,' he said, getting to his feet. Without waiting for her answer, he went out to the hallway to get the three sheets of paper from his jacket, and took them back into the living room.

He unfolded them, sat back down beside her, and handed them over. ‘I found these in the room of someone who worked on Murano. I think he was killed.'

She took the papers and held them at some distance from her. Brunetti got up again, went down to her study, and came back with her glasses. After she put them on, she looked more closely at the papers, studying them. She tried to hold them in line with one another, but gave that up, leaned forward and spread them out on the table, pushing the tray to one side to make enough room for them.

Brunetti offered, ‘I thought of bank codes, but that doesn't make any sense. He didn't have any money. I don't think he was very interested in it, either.'

Paola put her head down again and studied the papers. ‘You excluded dates, too?' she asked, and he grunted in assent.

After some time, she said, ‘The first number on the first page is almost twice as big as the second one.'

‘Does that mean anything to you?' he asked.

‘No,' she said with a quick shake of her head. She said nothing about the numbers on the second and third pages.

So they sat, for another ten minutes, staring with futile attention at the papers. Chiara, on her way back to her room to continue her Latin homework, found them that way and flopped down on the arm of the sofa next to Brunetti. ‘What's that?' she asked.

‘Puzzles,' Brunetti answered. ‘Neither of us can make any sense of them.'

‘You mean the coordinates?' Chiara asked, pointing at the numbers that appeared on the third page.

‘Coordinates?' asked an astonished Brunetti.

‘Sure,' Chiara said in her most offhand manner. ‘What else could they be? See,' she said, pointing at the degree sign after the first number, ‘this is the degree, the minute, and the second.' She pulled the paper a bit closer and said, ‘This one is the latitude – that's always given first – and that one's the longitude.' She looked at the numbers a moment more and said, ‘The second set is for a place that's got to be very near to the first, slightly to the south-east. And the third is to the south-west. You want to know where they are?'

‘Where what are?' Brunetti asked, still slightly stunned.

‘The places,' Chiara said, tapping her finger on the paper. ‘Do you want to know where they are?'

‘Yes,' Paola said.

‘OK,' Chiara said and got to her feet. In less than a minute, she was back with the giant atlas she had requested for Christmas, the best
Brunetti could find, more than 500 pages and published in England, its page spread almost as large as the
Gazzettino
's.

Chiara thumped it down on the table, covering the papers, then pulled them out by their corners. She had to use both hands to open the book to the middle, then started to page through it, occasionally glancing at the numbers, then at the book. With a snort of irritation, she turned back to the opening pages, ran her finger across the numbers at the top of a map of Europe, then down the right side of the page.

Carefully she turned the pages by their top corners until she found the page she was looking for, opened the book and let it fall flat, and they all found themselves looking at the
laguna
of Venezia.

‘Looks like they're on Murano,' Chiara said, ‘but you'd need a more detailed map – probably a nautical chart of the
laguna
– to find the exact places.'

Neither of her parents said anything; both were staring at the map. Chiara got to her feet again, saying, ‘I've got to get back to the Gallic Wars', and went to her room.

‘
DID SHE LEARN
all that from reading those Patrick O'Brian books?' Brunetti asked when Chiara was gone.

He had intended the question as a joke, at least as a semi-joke, but Paola took it seriously and answered, ‘They probably used the same notation for writing latitude and longitude in the nineteenth century: she's got the advantage of better maps.'

‘I'll never say another word against those books,' Brunetti promised.

‘But you still won't try again to read them?' she asked.

Ignoring the question, Brunetti said, ‘Do we still have those nautical charts?'

‘They'd be in the box,' Paola answered, leaving
it to Brunetti to go and hunt out the battered old wooden box in which the family kept their maps.

He was back with it in a few minutes, handed her half of the pile and started sorting through the others. After a few minutes Paola said, holding it up, ‘Here's the big one of the
laguna
.'

It was a relic of the summer they had spent exploring the
laguna
in a battered old boat a friend had let them use. It must have been more than twenty years ago, before either of the kids was born. He remembered one star-scattered night when they had been trapped in a canal by the withdrawing tide.

‘Those mosquitoes,' Paola said, her memory, too, drawn to that night and what they had done after spreading insect repellent on one another.

Brunetti dropped the maps he held on the floor and spread hers across the table. Unasked, she read him out the latitudinal coordinate of the first number while he ran his finger down the side of the map, stopping when he found the proper place. With his knees he pushed the table back to allow the entire map to fit flat on it. She read out the longitude, and he brought his finger slowly across the top of the map until he found that number, as well. He ran his left index finger down one of the vertical lines on the map; then the right followed a horizontal line until his fingers met at the point of intersection. The second point
appeared to be little more than a few metres from the first.

‘They're all on Sacca Serenella,' he said.

‘You don't sound surprised.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Why?'

It took Brunetti almost half an hour to tell her, glossing over the precise circumstances of Tassini's death, to arrive at their search of the dead man's room, a room located not far from the point where those lines intersected, and then the grim meeting with his wife and mother-in-law.

When he finished, Paola went into the kitchen and returned holding the bottle of grappa. She handed it to Brunetti and sat next to him, then folded the map and dropped it on top of the others on the floor. She took back the bottle and poured them each another small glass.

‘Did he really believe all that about having been contaminated and passing it on to his daughter?' Paola asked.

‘I think so, yes.'

‘Even in the face of the medical evidence?' Paola asked.

Brunetti shrugged, as if to show how unimportant medical evidence was to a person who chose not to believe it. ‘It's what he thought happened.'

‘But how would he be contaminated?' she asked. ‘I'd believe it if he worked at Marghera, but I've never heard any talk that Murano is at risk, well, that the people who work there are.'

Brunetti thought back to his conversation with Tassini. ‘He believed that there was a conspiracy to prevent him from getting accurate test results, so there would never be sufficient genetic evidence.' He read her scepticism and said, ‘He believed it.'

‘But
what
did he believe?' Paola demanded.

Brunetti opened his hands in a gesture of futility. ‘That's what I couldn't get him to tell me: what he thought his problem was or how it would have affected the baby. All he'd tell me was that De Cal wasn't the only person involved in whatever was going on,' and before she could ask again, he added, ‘and no, he didn't say what that was.'

‘You think he was crazy?' Paola asked in a softer voice.

‘I don't know about things like that,' Brunetti answered after considering the question. ‘He believed in something for which there seems to be no evidence and for which he appeared to have no proof. I'm not ready to call that crazy.'

He waited to see if Paola would remark that he had just described religious belief, but she was taking no easy shots that evening, it seemed, and said only, ‘But he believed it enough to write down these numbers, whatever they are.'

‘Yes,' Brunetti admitted. ‘Doesn't mean that what he believed is true, just because he wrote some numbers down.'

‘What about these other numbers?' she said,
taking the other two sheets from the floor and placing them on the table.

‘No idea,' Brunetti said. ‘I've been staring at them all afternoon and they don't make any sense to me.'

‘No clues?' she asked. ‘Wasn't there anything else in his room?'

‘No, nothing,' Brunetti said, and then he remembered the books. ‘Just industrial illness and Dante.'

‘Don't be cute, Guido,' she snapped.

He got up and went over to his jacket again; this time he brought back the two books.

Her reaction to
Industrial Illness
was the same as his, though she tossed it on the floor, not on the table. ‘Dante,' she said, reaching for the book. He handed it to her and watched as she examined it: she opened to the title page, then turned to the publication information, then opened it in the middle and flipped through to the end.

‘It's his school text, isn't it?' she said. ‘Was he a reader?'

‘There were a lot of books in his house.'

‘What sort of books?' Like Brunetti, she believed that books served as a mirror of the person who accumulated them.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘They were in a shelf against the back wall, and I never got close enough to read the titles.' He hadn't been conscious of examining them at the time, but now, recalling the room, he saw the rows of books, the backs of some of what might well have
been the standard editions of the poets, and the gold-ribbed backs of the same editions of the great novelists Paola had in her study.

‘He was a real reader, though,' Brunetti finally said.

Paola had the Dante open and was already lost in it. He watched her for a few minutes, until she turned a page, looked across at him with an expression of blank astonishment, and asked, ‘How is it that I forget how perfect he is?'

Brunetti picked up the maps and put them back in the box. He closed it and left it on the floor.

Suddenly the accumulated weight of the day's events bore down on him. ‘I think I have to go to bed,' he said, offering no explanation. She acknowledged his words with a nod and plunged back into Hell.

Brunetti sank immediately into a heavy sleep and was not aware of Paola when she came to bed. If she turned on the light, if she made any noise, if she stayed awake reading: Brunetti had no idea. But as the bells of San Marco rolled past their window at five the following morning, he woke up, saying, ‘Laws.'

He turned on the light, raised himself on to his shoulder to see if he had woken Paola, and saw that he had not. He pushed back the covers and went out into the hallway, one side of which was lined with the books he thought of as his: the Greek and Roman historians as well as those who had followed them for the next two thousand years. On the other side were art
books and travel books and, on the top shelf, some of the textbooks he had used at university as well as some current volumes on civil and criminal law.