'I beg your pardon’ Patta said, pausing just outside his door. He looked at Signorina Elettra but pointed a finger at Brunetti and then at the door to his office. 'If they apply, then they have to be patient. Just like everyone else who deals with a bureaucracy.'
"Three years?' she inquired.
That stopped him. 'No, not three years.' He made to continue into his office but then stopped on the threshold and turned back to her. 'Who's had to wait three years?'
"The woman who cleans my father's apartment, sir.'
"Three years?'
She nodded.
'Why has it taken so long?'
Brunetti wondered if she would make the obvious response and say that this was exactly what she wanted to know, but she opted for moderation and instead answered, 'I've no idea, sir. She applied three years ago, paid the application fee, and then she heard nothing. She thought that her case would come under the amnesty, but she never heard anything further. So she asked me if I thought she should begin the whole process again and reapply. And pay the fee again.'
'What did you tell her?'
'I don't have an answer to give her, Vice-Questore. It's a lot of money for her—it's a lot of money for anyone—and she doesn't want to go to the expense of applying again if there's any hope that the original application will be successful. That's why I was telling the Commissario that she and her husband were poor, desperate people.'
'I see’ Patta said, turning from her. He waved the waiting Brunetti ahead of him, then turned to Signorina Elettra and said, 'Give me her name and, if you can, her file number and I'll see what I can find out about it.'
'You're very kind, sir,' she said, sounding like she meant it.
Inside, Patta wasted no time: turning to Brunetti, he asked, 'What's all this business of your going out to Murano?'
Deny that he had? Ask how Patta knew? Repeat the question to give himself more time to think of an answer? De Cal? Fasano? Who on Murano had told Patta?
Brunetti opted to tell Patta the truth about what he was doing. 'A woman I know on Murano’ he began—suggesting that she was a woman he had known for some time and thus showing himself how incapable he was of telling Patta the real truth about anything—'told me her father has been threatening her husband, well, making threatening statements about him. Not to him. She wanted me to see if I thought there was any real reason to fear that her father would do something.'
Brunetti watched Patta weigh this, wondering what his superior's response would be to this uncharacteristic frankness. The habit of suspicion, as Brunetti feared, triumphed. 'I suppose this explains why you went out to Murano for some sort of secret meeting in a trattoria, eh?'
Patta asked, unable to disguise his satisfaction at the sight of Brunetti's surprise.
Having begun with the truth, not that it seemed to have helped, Brunetti continued that way. 'He's someone who knows the man who's been making the threats,' Brunetti explained, relieved that Patta appeared to know nothing of Navarro's relationship to Pucetti and even more relieved that his superior had made no mention of Vianello's presence at the meeting. 'I asked him if he thought there was any real basis in them.'
'And? What did he say?'
'He chose not to answer my question.'
'Have you spoken to anyone else?' Patta demanded.
Since telling the truth to Patta had failed as a strategy, Brunetti decided to return to the tried and true path of deceit and said, 'No.'
Patta's information had come from someone who had seen them in the restaurant, so perhaps he knew nothing about Brunetti's visits to Bovo and Tassini.
'So there's no threat?' Patta demanded.
'I'd say no. The man, Giovanni De Cal, is violent, but I think it's language and nothing more.'
'And so?' Patta asked.
'And so I go back to seeing what's to be done about the gypsies’ Brunetti answered, trying to sound contrite.
'Rom,' Patta corrected him.
'Exactly’ said Brunetti in acknowledgement of Patta's concession to the language of political correctness, and left his office.
12
Brunetti called Paola, after one, told her he would not be home for lunch and was hurt when she accepted the news with equanimity. When, however, she went on to observe that, since he said he was calling from his office, and he had not called until now, she had already come to that sad conclusion, he felt himself strangely heartened by her disappointment, however sarcastically she might choose to express it.
He dialled the number of Assunta De Cal's telefonino and told her he would like to come out to Murano to speak to her. No, he assured her, she had nothing to fear from her father's threats: he believed there was little danger in them. But he would still like to speak to her if that were possible.
She asked him how long it would take him to get there. He asked her to hold on a moment, went to the window, and saw Foa standing on the riva, talking to another officer. He went back to the phone and told her it would not take him more then twenty minutes, heard her say she would wait for him at the fornace, and hung up.
When he emerged from the main entrance of the Questura five minutes later there was no sign of Foa, nor of his boat. He asked the man at the door where the pilot was, only to be told he had taken the Vice-Questore to a meeting. This left Brunetti with no choice but to head back to Fondamenta Nuove and the 41.
Thus it took him more than forty minutes to get to the De Cal factory. When he tried the office, Assunta was not there, nor was there any response when he knocked on the door to what a sign indicated was her father's office. Brunetti left that part of the building and went across the courtyard to the entrance to the fornace, hoping to find her there.
The sliding metal doors to the immense brick building had been rolled back sufficiently to allow room for a man to slip in or out. Brunetti stepped inside and found himself in darkness. It took his eyes a moment to adjust, and when they did they were captured by what, for an instant, he thought was an enormous Caravaggio at the other end of the dim room. Six men stood poised for an instant at the doors of a round furnace, half illuminated by the natural daylight that filtered in through the skylights in the roof and by the light that streamed from the furnace. They moved, and the painting fell apart into the intricate motions that lay deep in Brunetti's memory.
Two rectangular ovens stood against the right wall, but the forno di lavoro stood free at the center of the room. There appeared to be only two piazze at work, for he saw only two men twirling the blobs of molten glass at the ends of their canne. One seemed to be working on what would become a platter, for as he spun the canna, centrifugal force transformed the blob first into a saucer and then into a pizza. Memory took Brunetti back to the factory where his father had worked—not as a maestro but as a servente— decades ago. As he watched, this maestro became the maestro for whom his father had worked. And as Brunetti continued to watch, he became every maestro who had worked the glass for more than a thousand years. Except for his jeans and his Nike trainers, he could have stepped out of any of the centuries when such men had done this work.
Ballet was not an art for which Brunetti had much affection, but in the motions of these men he saw the beauty others saw in dance. Still spinning the canna, the maestro glided over to the door of the furnace. He turned to keep his left side towards it, and Brunetti noticed the thick glove and the sleeve protector he wore against the savage heat. In went the canna, one side of the platter passing no more than a centimetre from the solid edge of the door.