Through a Glass Darkly by Donna Leon Page B

correctly.’
    â€˜It’s one of the things politicians love the most: popular acclamation,’ Vianello replied.
    â€˜Come on, Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said, unwilling to continue with this subject. Remembering the other thing he could usefully do while he was on Murano, he explained about Assunta’s visit and said he wanted to go and talk to one of the men who had heard her father threaten Ribetti. He told Vianello he would see him back at the Questura. They walked out to the
riva
, and Vianello went down to the Sacca Serenella stop to wait for the 41.
    Assunta had told him Bovo lived just on theother side of the bridge, in Calle drio i Orti, and he found the
calle
with little trouble. He walked as far as Calle Leonarducci without finding the house and turned to go back and check more closely. This time he found the number and Bovo’s name among those on the doorbells. He rang and waited, then rang again. He heard a window open above him, stepped back, and looked up. A child, from this vantage point its age and sex unclear, stuck its head out of a third-floor window and called, ‘
Sì
?’
    â€˜I’m looking for your father,’ Brunetti called up.
    â€˜He’s down at the bar,’ the child called back in a voice so high it could have belonged to either a boy or a girl.
    â€˜Which one?’
    A tiny hand stuck out the window, pointing to Brunetti’s left. ‘Down there,’ the voice called, and then the child disappeared.
    The window remained open, so Brunetti called his thanks up to it and turned to return to Calle Leonarducci. At the corner he came to a window covered to chest height with curtains that had begun life as a red-and-white check but had moved into a wrinkled, hepatic middle age. He opened the door and walked into a room more filled with smoke than any he could remember having entered in years. He went to the bar and ordered a coffee. He displayed no interest in the barman’s tattoos, a pattern of intertwined serpents that encircled both wristswith their tails and ran up his arms until they disappeared under the sleeves of his T-shirt. When the coffee came, Brunetti said, ‘I’m looking for Paolo Bovo. His kid told me he was here.’
    â€˜Paolo,’ the barman called towards a table at the back, where three men sat around a bottle of red wine, talking, ‘the cop wants to talk to you.’
    Brunetti smiled and asked, ‘How come everyone always knows?’
    The barman’s smile was equal in warmth to Brunetti’s, though not in the number of teeth exposed. ‘Anyone who talks as good as you do has to be a cop.’
    â€˜A lot of people talk as well as I do,’ Brunetti said.
    â€˜Not the ones who want to see Paolo,’ he answered, wiping at the counter with an unusually clean cloth.
    Brunetti sensed movement to his left and turned to meet a man of his own height, who appeared to have lost not only all of his hair but at least twenty of the kilos Brunetti was carrying. From this distance, Brunetti could see that he had lost his eyebrows and eyelashes as well, which explained the pale greasiness of his skin.
    Brunetti extended his hand and said, ‘Signor Bovo?’ At the man’s nod, Brunetti asked, ‘May I offer you something to drink?’
    Bovo declined with a shake of his head. In a deep voice presumably left over from his former body, he said, ‘I’ve got some wine backwith my friends.’ He shook Brunetti’s hand and Brunetti read on his face the effort it cost him to make his grip firm. He spoke in Veneziano, with a Muranese accent of the sort that Brunetti and his friends used to imitate for comic effect.
    â€˜What do you want?’ Bovo asked. He rested one elbow on the bar, succeeding in making the gesture look casual rather than necessary. Before his illness, Brunetti realized, this situation would have been charged with aggression, perhaps even danger: now the best the