Through a Glass Darkly Read Free

his thoughts to himself. It was Vianello who broke the silence by asking, ‘Does it do any good, talking to them?’
    Ribetti answered this with a smile. ‘Who knows? If they’re alone, sometimes they listen. If there’s more than one of them, though, they just walk past us, or sometimes they say things.’
    â€˜What sort of things?’
    He looked at the two policemen, then at hishands. ‘Oh, they tell us they aren’t interested, they have to work, they have families,’ Ribetti answered, then added, ‘or they get abusive.’
    â€˜But no violence?’ Vianello asked.
    Ribetti looked at him and shook his head. ‘No, nothing. We’ve all been trained not to react, not to argue with them, never to do anything that could provoke them.’ He continued to look at Vianello, as if to convince him of the truth of this by the sincerity of his expression. ‘We’re there to help them,’ he said, and Brunetti believed he meant it.
    â€˜But this time?’ Brunetti asked.
    Ribetti shook his head a few times. ‘I have no idea what happened. Some people came up to us – I don’t know where they came from or whether they were with us or were workers – they started to shout, and then the workers did, too. Then someone pushed me and I dropped the placard I was carrying, and after I picked it up, it looked like everyone had suddenly gone crazy. People were shoving and pushing one another, then I heard the police sirens, and then I was on the ground again. Two men pulled me up and put me in the back of a van, and they brought us here. It wasn’t until almost midnight that a woman in uniform came into the cell and said I could call someone.’ He hurried through this summary, his voice sounding as confused as the events he described.
    He turned back and forth between Brunetti and Vianello, then said to the latter, ‘I called Assunta and told her where I was, what hadhappened, and then I thought of you. And I asked her to see if she could find you and tell you what had happened.’ His voice changed as he asked, ‘She didn’t call you then, did she?’ he asked, forgetting that Vianello had already told him.
    Vianello smiled. ‘No, not until this morning.’ Brunetti noticed that Ribetti seemed relieved to hear this.
    â€˜But you didn’t have to come all the way out here for me,’ Ribetti said, using the plural. ‘Really, Lorenzo: I don’t know what I was thinking of when I asked her to call you. I guess I panicked. I thought you could make a phone call to someone here or something, and everything would be all right.’ He raised a hand in Vianello’s direction and said, ‘Really, it never occurred to me that you’d have to come out here.’ Then, to Brunetti, ‘Or that you’d have to come, Commissario.’ He looked at his hands again. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’
    â€˜Have you ever been arrested before, Signor Ribetti?’ Brunetti asked.
    Ribetti looked at him with an astonishment he could not disguise: Brunetti might as well have slapped him. ‘Of course not,’ he said.
    Vianello interrupted to ask, ‘Do you know if any of the others have ever been arrested?’
    â€˜No, never,’ Ribetti said, voice rising with the force of his insistence. ‘I told you: we’re trained not to cause trouble.’
    â€˜Isn’t a protest like yours a form of trouble?’ Brunetti asked.
    Ribetti paused, as if he were playing the question back in his mind to check for sarcasm. Apparently finding none, he said, ‘Of course it is. But it’s non-violent, and all we’re trying to do is make the workers understand how dangerous what they do is. Not only for us, but for themselves even more.’
    Brunetti noticed that Vianello accepted this, so he asked, ‘What dangers, Signor Ribetti?’
    Ribetti looked at Brunetti as though he had