Brunetti certainly remembered the word, but little more than that. 'Only that it's made of sand and other things,' he said.
The coffee came and Grassi stirred in three more sugars. 'Sand, yes’ he said, 'then the minerals for the right miscela. If the colour we want is amethyst, then we mix in manganese, or cadmium for red. Some of the bags look alike, so they have to be kept separate and upright. The stuff can't spill on the floor or we have an awful mess and have to throw it all away.' He looked at Brunetti, who nodded to show he was following.
'Starting when the rest of us get off work, l’uomo di notte shovels the miscela into the crogiolo, adding it according to the formula and stirring it, and then it heats all night long, so it's ready and we can start working at seven, when we come in.'
'What else did he have to do?'
Again, Grassi paused to try to remember what the dead man's duties would have been. 'Check the filters and maybe shift the barrels around.'
'What filters?' Brunetti asked.
'From the grinding wheels. It all gets filtered, the water they use when they're grinding, and then the gunk that's collected gets put in barrels. It's filtered a couple of times’ Grassi said without interest. 'I don't know about that stuff, really, only about glass.'
Grassi gave Brunetti a speculative look, as if weighing his audience, and then said, 'It's crazy, isn't it? They let Marghera pump any crap it wants to into the air or the laguna: cadmium, dioxin, petro this and petro that, and no one says a word about it. But if we let a cupful of powdered glass drain into the laguna, they're all over us with inspectors and fines. Some of them are so big it would put you out of business.' He considered what he had said and then added, 'No wonder De Cal's thinking about selling the place.'
Brunetti set this remark aside for future reference and returned to Tassini. 'Were these the sort of things Tassini said? About the environment?'
Grassi rolled his eyes. 'It's all he'd talk about. All you had to do was start him talking about these things and he was off, sometimes until we had to tell him to shut up. Poison this and poison that, and not only at Marghera. Even here, and it was poisoning us all.' He delved into memory, then said, 'I tried to talk to him a couple of times. But he wouldn't listen.' He leaned towards Brunetti and put a hand on his arm. 'I've seen the numbers, and I know we don't die the way they do in Marghera: they die like flies over there.' He moved back and removed his hand.
'Maybe it's the currents: maybe they take things away from here. I don't know. I tried to tell Giorgio this, but he wouldn't listen. He had his mind made up that we were all being poisoned, and that's what he was going to believe, no matter what anyone said.'
Grassi stopped talking for a moment, then added, with a note of real sadness in his voice. 'He had to believe it, didn't he? Because of the little girl.' He shook his head, at the thought of the child or at the thought of human frailty, Brunetti had no idea. Grassi spoke with a complete absence of disapproval; in fact, Brunetti could hear little but affection in his voice, the sort one has for a person who always manages to get everything wrong yet who never manages to alienate anyone in the process.
‘I think your boat's coming,' Grassi said.
Brunetti's question was no more than a tilting of his head.
'I don't recognize the engine, and it's coming fast, out from the city,' the maestro said. He pulled some money from his pocket and left it on the counter; Brunetti thanked him and they headed for the door.
When they reached the canal, Grassi was right: the police boat was pulling up to the ACTV embarcadero. On board were Bocchese and the crime team.
15
Brunetti waved to them from his side of the canal and crossed the bridge to meet them. Apart from Bocchese, there were two photographers and two technicians, all with the usual amount of equipment, which the men were busy unloading from the boat.
Brunetti introduced Bocchese to Grassi and explained to the technician that Grassi was one of the maestri who worked at the fornace where the dead man was. Bocchese and Grassi shook hands and then Bocchese turned and said something to one of his crew, who waved a lazy hand in acknowledgement. Boxes and bags piled up on the dock; Brunetti waited until it seemed everything had been unloaded and then led them down the dirt path towards the metal doors of the factory. He was surprised to see two men standing outside, one of them a man in police uniform—he recognized Lazzari from the Murano squad—and the other De Cal, who was waving his arms and speaking loudly.
De Cal saw Brunetti and stormed towards him, shouting, 'What the hell is it now? First you let that bastard out of jail, and now I can't even go into my own factory.'
More familiar with De Cal than the others, Grassi stepped forward and, gesturing at the technicians, who were now struggling into their disposable scene-of-crime suits, said, 'I think they want to go in there alone, sir.'
'Remember who you work for, Grassi,' De Cal spat with effulgent rage. 'For me. Not for the police. I give the orders here, not the police.' He put his face close to Grassi's. Brunetti could see that the tendons of his neck were swollen. 'You understand that?'
Brunetti moved up beside Grassi. 'Your factory is the scene of a death, Signor De Cal,' he said, noticing that Lazzari seemed relieved by his having taken over. 'The technical crew will be here for a few hours, and then the scene will be opened and your men can go back to work.'
De Cal came suddenly closer, forcing Brunetti to move back one step. 'I can't afford a few hours.' De Cal noticed, as if for the first time, the technicians and their equipment. 'These fools will be in there all day. How can my men work with them there?'
'If you prefer, Signore,' Brunetti said with his most official voice, 'we can get an order from a judge and sequester the site for a week or two.' He smiled. Grassi, he noticed, had taken the opportunity to disappear.
De Cal opened his mouth, then closed it and backed away, muttering. Brunetti heard 'bastard' a few times, and worse, but he chose to ignore the old man.
The technicians, who had set down their bags while all this was going on, now picked them up and moved towards the doors. Brunetti held up a hand to stop them. Turning to Bocchese, he said, 'If you have masks, you better use them.' The men set their bags down again and one of them hunted around until he found a stack of cellophane-wrapped surgical masks, which he passed out to the other men. Brunetti put out his hand and accepted one, ripped it open, and pulled the elastics over his ears. He adjusted the mask over his nose and mouth, then took a pair of plastic gloves from the same man and slipped them on.
One of the crew humped a long bag onto his shoulder: lights and tripods. He went in first and started looking around for an electrical socket. To no one in particular, Brunetti said, 'He's down by the free-standing furnace', and then joined the technicians entering the building.
His eyes had barely adjusted to the dimmer light when he heard his name called from the entrance and turned to see Vianello, wearing gloves but no mask. Brunetti held up a hand to Vianello and went over to the technician to ask for another mask. He took it over to the Inspector and said, 'You'll need this.'
Side by side, Brunetti fortified by the other man's presence, they went towards the third furnace but stopped a few metres from it and waited for the photographer to finish. Brunetti glanced at the gauges and saw that Forno III had risen to 1,348 degrees. He had no idea what the temperature just outside and below the door would be.