Through a Glass Darkly (4 page)

Brunetti could no longer remember the precise nature of the position his superior had been interested in. He had a vague memory that it involved working with – or, as people with positions said, ‘liaising' with – the police of some other nation the language of which Patta did not speak, but he could no longer recall which one.

Into his silence, she supplied the answer. ‘In London, sir. With Scotland Yard, as their expert on the Mafia.'

As so often happened when he learned of developments in Patta's professional life, Brunetti found himself without suitable words. ‘And the lottery?' he finally asked.

‘The date he gets the rejection letter,' she said, voice implacable.

He cared nothing for the details, but he wanted to know. But how to put it? ‘You seem rather certain of that outcome, Signorina.' Yes, that was how to put it.

‘I am,' she said but offered no explanation. Smiling, she waved the pen over the block of paper. ‘And the date, sir?'

‘May the tenth, please.'

She wrote the date on the top of a small sheet of paper, tore it off, and handed it to him. ‘Don't lose it, sir.'

‘In the case of a tie?' he asked as he slipped the paper into his wallet.

‘Oh, that's already decided, sir. There are a few dates a number of people want, but it's been suggested that, in the case of a tie, we give all the money to Greenpeace.'

‘He would, wouldn't he?' Brunetti asked.

‘Who would what, sir?' she asked with every appearance of confusion.

He let out a little puff of air, as if to suggest that even the blind could see the mind at work behind that suggestion. ‘Vianello.'

‘As a matter of fact, sir,' she said, no change in the sweetness of her smile, ‘the idea was mine.'

‘In that case,' he picked up seamlessly, ‘I'll live in the single hope that I win in a tie so that I can be a part of the money's going to such a noble cause.'

She looked at him, her expression neutral, but
then the smile returned and she said, ‘Ah, just listen to the falseness of the man.'

Brunetti was surprised by how flattered he felt and went back to his office, all thought of holiday staffing forgotten.

SPRING ADVANCED, AND
Brunetti continued to measure it florally. The first lilacs appeared in the flower shops, and he took an enormous bouquet home to Paola; the little pink and yellow flowers made their full appearance in the garden across the canal, were succeeded by random daffodils, and then by ordered rows of tulips at the side of the path bordering the garden. And then one Saturday Paola commandeered him into moving the large terracotta vases from the cool, dark
sottotetto
where they spent the winter back on to the terrace, where they would remain until November. From the terrace, he noticed that the flower boxes on the balcony on the other side of the
calle
and one floor below had been planted with the red geraniums Brunetti so much disliked.

Then there was Palm Sunday, which he was aware of only when he saw people walking around with olive branches in their hands. And then Easter and explosions of flowers in the windows of Biancat, displays so excessive that Brunetti was forced to stop every evening on the way home from work to consider them.

On Easter Sunday, they had lunch with Paola's parents; this year her aunt Ugolina was also in attendance, wearing a straw hat covered with tiny paper roses that saw the light of day, perhaps, once a year. They took with them – because there was nothing to take to the Faliers that they did not already have and did not already have in a superior form – flowers. The
palazzo
was already filled with them, but this did not prevent the Countess from gushing over the roses as though they heralded a new species. The excess of flowers also set Chiara off into an impromptu lecture on the ecological wastefulness of hothouse flowers, a discourse she found no one willing to listen to.

The floral note was continued on an invitation Paola received to a gallery opening that was to present the work of three young artists working in glass. From what Brunetti saw from the photos in the invitation, one produced flat panels using gold leaf and coloured glass; the second made vases with lips that resembled the petals of the flowers that would be put inside; and the third used a more traditional style to create cylindrical vases with smooth lips.

The gallery was new, run by the friend of a colleague of Paola's at the university who suggested that they attend. The level of crime in Venice was as low as the waters of that year's spring tides, and so Brunetti was happy to accept; because the gallery was on Murano, he wondered if he would get to meet Ribetti and his wife: he hardly thought a gallery opening was the sort of place where he would re-encounter De Cal.

The opening was scheduled to begin at six on a Friday evening, which would allow people time to see the artists' work, have a glass of prosecco, nibble on something, and then go out to dinner or go home on time to eat. As they boarded the 41 at Fondamenta Nuove, Brunetti realized that years had passed since he had been out to Murano. He had gone there as a boy, when his father had worked in one of the factories for a time, but since then he had been there infrequently, since none of their friends lived on Murano, and he had never had reason to go there professionally.

Three or four other couples left the boat at Faro and also started down Viale Garibaldi. ‘The one in red,' Paola said, moving closer to Brunetti and taking his arm in hers, ‘is Professoressa Amadori.'

‘And is that the Professor?' Brunetti asked, pointing with his other hand at a tall man with silver hair who walked at the side of the elderly woman in the red coat.

Paola nodded. ‘Behave yourself, look
attentive and inferior, and perhaps I'll introduce you to her,' she promised.

‘Is she that bad?' Brunetti asked, glancing again at what appeared to be a completely ordinary woman, thesort one would see at Rialto, haggling over the price of mullet. From behind, her legs were slightly bowed, her feet stuffed into what looked like very uncomfortable shoes, or perhaps that impression resulted from her walk – tiny steps with inturned toes.

‘She's worse,' Paola said. ‘I've seen male students come out of their oral exams with her in tears: it's almost a point of pride with her never to be satisfied with their performance.' She paused for a moment, her attention drawn by something in a window, then turned away and continued walking. ‘I've known other students who have cancelled exams, even produced doctor's certificates, once they learned that she would be on the examining committee.'

‘Could it be that she's only very demanding of them?' he asked.

That stopped her in her tracks. She pulled back a step and looked him in the face. ‘You have been living with me for the last twenty years, haven't you, Signore?' she asked. ‘And you have heard me mention her a few times?'

‘Six hundred and twenty-seven,' Brunetti said. ‘If that's a few.'

‘Good,' she said, taking his arm and starting to walk again. ‘Then you know that it has nothing to do with being demanding, only with being a jealous bitch who doesn't want anyone,
ever, to have a chance at getting anything she's got.'

‘By failing students in their exams?' Brunetti asked.

‘Then they can't get their degrees, which means there's no chance they can join the faculty, and because there's no chance they'll become colleagues, there's no chance they'll ever get an appointment or a promotion or a grant that she might want.'

‘That's crazy,' Brunetti said.

She stopped again. ‘Is this the same man who works for Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta?' she demanded.

‘That's different,' Brunetti was quick to protest.

‘How?' she demanded, stopping again and no doubt unwilling to move until he answered.

‘He doesn't have any power over what I do. He can't fail me in an exam.'

She looked at him as though he had started to foam at the mouth and howl. ‘No power over what you do?' she asked.

Brunetti smiled and shrugged. ‘All right, but he can't fail me in an exam.'

She smiled back at him and took his arm. ‘Believe me about this, Guido. She's a bitch.'

‘I stand warned,' he said affably. ‘The Professor?'

‘A marriage made in heaven,' was all she was willing to volunteer by way of information on that subject.

When they reached the canal, they turned left
and then crossed Ponte Ballarin, turning right at the bottom. ‘It's got to be along here somewhere,' Paola said, slowing her steps and looking into the windows of the shops and galleries they passed.

‘It should be on the invitation,' Brunetti said.

‘I know,' she said. ‘But I forgot to bring it.'

They continued walking down the
riva
, attentive to the windows on their left. Past the
pescheria
they went, past a few more shops, some still open, some already closed. Three people emerged from a doorway in front of them and paused to light cigarettes, holding each other's drinks while they did so.

‘That's got to be it,' Paola said. A man and a woman walked out, without drinks, and went off hand in hand in the opposite direction.

When they reached the doorway, two more people emerged, cigarettes already lit, and went to stand with the three other smokers, all leaning against the wall of the embankment and using it as a table for their glasses.

The door was open. Paola went in, paused just inside the threshold and looked around for someone she knew. Brunetti did the same, though with less hope of success. He saw some people he recognized, but it was in a Venetian way that he recognized them, from walking past them on the street over the course of years, perhaps decades, without ever learning who they were or what they did. He could hardly go up to the man who had lost so much of his hair and begin a conversation about that, nor could
he ask the woman with the newly blonde hair why she had gained so much weight.

Through a small gap in the wall of people he saw the double row of display cases. He walked towards them, leaving Paola to find someone she knew, or meet someone new, and examined the contents of the first case, which was raised on thin legs to chest height. Upright, gold on one side, cobalt blue on the other, stood a rectangle of worked glass a little bit bigger than a copy of
Espresso
. The surface was textured, but in no regular, orderly way: it looked more as if someone had dragged their fingers in wet clay from bottom to top and then down again, creating shallow runnels where the light glittered and played. The next case contained another panel: though the size was the same, the texture and colours, even the colour of the gold, were entirely different, making it as unlike the first one as it was like it in size. The third case held four thick glass rectangles with alternating stripes of what appeared to be silver and gold. They were as otherworldly as the others, and quite as beautiful.

An empty glass had been left on top of the third case, and Brunetti removed it, annoyed to find it there. The almost sandy dregs of red wine clashed with the supple smoothness of the glass objects.

The next case held three of the flower-like vases on the invitation, all in the faintest of pastels. Brunetti found them far smaller than he had expected. Nor was the work as delicate:
what might have been flower petals were thicker than the real thing, thicker than what he knew a good
maestro
could create. Another case held three more of them, though these were in stronger, darker colours. The workmanship continued to displease him, and he walked quickly past them to the next case.

These vases were cylindrical, all of them rising up to delicate lips, the sort of lips that the others should have had, Brunetti thought. The vases varied in height and in diameter, but each managed to achieve a perfect harmony between the two. The final case held objects of no definite shape: they didn't resemble anything, had no discernible use, seemed to be little more than swerves and swirls of glass, each curve blending into another of a faintly lighter or darker colour.

‘Do you like them?' a young woman asked Brunetti.

He looked away from the objects in the last case, smiled, and said, ‘Yes, I think I do.' He turned back to the objects and studied them, then moved to the other side of the Plexiglas case to see them from a different perspective. Now they appeared entirely different and he doubted that he would be able to recognize them from this side, though he had just studied them from the other.

When he looked up, the young woman was back, two glasses of prosecco in her hands. She offered him a glass, and he took it with a smile and a nod. Finding himself now with two glasses, he reached down and set the empty one on the
floor against the wall. He took a sip of the wine. ‘You like it?' she asked, leaving him in some doubt as to whether she intended the prosecco or the art.

‘The wine's excellent,' he said, which was true: for this sort of show, it was good. Usually they served the sort of still red that came in large bottles, and instead of the thin glass he had in his hand, the wine was served in plastic cups.

‘And those?' she asked.

‘I think I think they're beautiful,' he said and took another sip.

‘Only
think
you think?'

‘Yes,' Brunetti confirmed. ‘They're too unlike what I'm used to seeing in glass, so I need to think about them for a while before I decide.'

‘You think about the things you see?' the woman asked, sounding not a little surprised at this. She appeared to be in her late twenties, and had a faint Roman accent and a nose that looked as if it had the same origins. Her eyes were dark and bore no trace of makeup, though her mouth had been enlarged by dark red lipstick.

‘It's my job,' he said. ‘I'm a policeman.' He had no idea what imp of the perverse had made him say that. Perhaps it had been the sight of the people in the room, or the presence of Professoressa Amadori and her husband, the sort of lofty academics he had suffered under for so many years at university.