'Yes, sir. Aunts and uncles and three cousins.'
'Any of them work at the fornaci?'
He watched Pucetti run through the list of his relatives. Finally he said, 'Two.'
'They people you can ask things?' Brunetti asked, not having to specify that the question referred to their discretion more than to the information they might possess.
'One of them is,' Pucetti said.
'Good. I'd like you to ask about Giovanni De Cal. He owns a fornace out there.'
'I know it, sir. It's on Sacca Serenella.'
'Do you know him?' Brunetti asked.
'No, sir. I don't. But I've heard about him. Is there anything specific you'd like to know?'
'Yes. He's got a son-in-law he hates and whom he may have threatened. I'd like to know if anyone thinks he'd actually do anything or if it's just talk. And I'd like to know if there's any word that he's thinking of selling his fornace.'
Brunetti watched Pucetti suppress the impulse to salute as he said, 'Yes, sir.' Then the younger man asked, 'Is there any hurry? Should I call him now?'
'No, I'd like to keep this as casual as possible. Why don't you go home and change and go out and talk to him? I don't want it to seem like ...' Brunetti let his voice trail off.
'Seem like it is what it is?' Pucetti asked with a smile.
'Exactly,' Brunetti said, 'though I'm not sure I know what that is.'
7
L'uomo di notte, Brunetti considered, by definition worked nights, which would have him home during the day. It was only a little after eleven, one of the sweetest times of day in springtime, and so Brunetti decided to walk down to Castello to talk to Giorgio Tassini and see if he would be willing to repeat what De Cal had told him. It occurred to Brunetti that he was perhaps engaging in that portmanteau offence, abuso d'ufficio, for he was certainly using the powers of his office to look into something that was of interest to him personally and had no official interest to the forces of order. The thought that the alternative to a walk in the sunshine down to Via Garibaldi was to return to his office to begin reading through the personnel files of the officers due for promotion was more than enough to propel Brunetti out onto Riva degli Schiavoni.
He turned left and started down towards Sant'-Elena. His strides grew longer as he felt the sun begin to work the winter stiffness out of him. Days like these reminded him of what a filthy climate the city really had: cold and damp in the winter; hot and damp in the summer. He banished this thought as the remains of winter gloom and looked around him, his smile as bright as the day itself.
He turned into Via Garibaldi, leaving the warmth of the sun behind him. According to Assunta, Tassini lived opposite the church of San Francesco di Paola, and he slowed as he saw the church on his left. He found the number he sought, read the names on the three bells and pressed the one at the top with 'Tassini' written below it. When there was no response, he rang the bell again, this time keeping his finger on it long enough to wake the sleeping man. Suddenly he heard a loud squawk from the speaker phone and then the low hiss of a loose connection. Silence. He rang a third time, and this time a low-pitched voice asked what he wanted.
I'd like to speak to Signor Tassini’ he said, his voice unnaturally loud in an attempt to penetrate the hiss and the static that didn't stop.
'What?' the voice asked through another roar of static.
'Signor Tassini,' he shouted.
'... trouble ... who? ... enough...' the voice said.
Brunetti decided communication was useless, so he pressed his finger against the bell and kept it there until the door snapped open.
He climbed the stairs to the third floor, where he found a white-haired woman standing in a doorway on the top landing. She had the papery skin of a heavy smoker and short, badly permed white hair that fell in a jagged fringe across her eyebrows. Below it, her eyes were deep green and held in a perpetual squint, as though forced into it by decades of rising smoke. She was short, and her squat rotundity spoke of endurance and strength. She did not smile, but her face relaxed, and a thin tracery of wrinkles softened around her eyes and mouth. 'What can I do for you?' she asked in purest Castello, her voice almost as deep as his own.
Brunetti answered in dialect, as seemed only polite. 'I'd like to speak to Signor Tassini if he's here’ he said.
'Signor Tassini is it, now?' she asked with an inquisitive tilt of her chin. 'What could my son-in-law have done that the cops are interested in him?' She seemed curious rattier than fearful.
'Is it that obvious, Signora?' Brunetti asked, waving his right hand at his own body. 'Couldn't I be the gasman?'
'As easily as I could be the Queen of Sheba’ she said and laughed from somewhere deep behind her stomach. When she stopped, both of them heard what sounded like the yipping of a puppy from inside the apartment. She turned her head towards it, still speaking to Brunetti as she did so. 'You better come in, then, so you can talk to me. Besides, I've got to keep an eye on them while Sonia does the shopping, isn't it true?'
As he gave her his name and shook her hand, it occurred to Brunetti to wonder how much of what she said would be comprehensible to a person from, say, Bologna. A number of the teeth on the top left side of her mouth were missing, so her speech was slurred, but it was the Veneziano stretto that was sure to defeat any ear not born within a hundred kilometres of the laguna. Yet how sweet it was to hear that dialect, so much like the one his grandmother had spoken all her life, never bothering to have anything to do with Italian, which she had always dismissed as a foreign language and not worthy of her attention.
The woman, who might have been fifty as easily as sixty, led him into a meticulously clean living room at the end of which stood a bookcase out of which books pretty well did whatever they wanted to do—hung, leaned, fell, tilted. Facing the sofa where the woman must have been sitting was a small television with a hothouse cyclamen in a plastic pot on top of it. On the television, pastel-coloured cartoon creatures danced around silently, for the sound had been turned down or off.
The sofa was draped with a plaid blanket and might once have been white, though it was now the colour of oatmeal. In the middle of the sofa sat a young boy, perhaps two years old. He was the source of the noise, a piping cry of wordless joy with which he kept time to the jumps and steps of the pastel creatures. At the approach of the adults, the little boy smiled at his grandmother and patted the place beside him.
She plumped herself down next to him, grabbed him up, and pulled him onto her lap. She bent and kissed the top of his head, provoking ecstatic wriggles. He turned away from the screen, hiked himself up on his feet, and planted a wet kiss on her nose. She looked up at Brunetti, smiled, then put her face up to the little boy's. Then she buried her face in his neck and whispered, 'More, xe beo, xe propio beo.' She looked at Brunetti, face bright, and asked, 'E xe beo, me puteo?'
Brunetti grinned in agreement and praised the boy's sunlike radiance, his obvious superiority to any child he'd ever seen, his remarkable resemblance to his grandmother. Her eyes narrowed momentarily, and she gave Brunetti a long, speculative glance.
'Mine are older now’ he said, 'but I still remember when they were his age. I used to invent some excuse to leave and go home from work just to be with them. I'd say I was going out to question someone, and I'd go home and play with my babies.'
Her smile widened in approval. From the back of the apartment there came a muffled noise, the unmistakable cry of a baby, and Brunetti looked at her in confusion. 'It's Emma,' she said. She bounced the boy on her lap and added, 'His twin sister.' She sized up Brunetti with astute eyes and asked, 'You think you could go and get her? He'll cry if I leave him now, even for a minute.'