Through a Glass Darkly Read Online Free PDF Page B

other’s drinks while they did so.
    â€˜That’s got to be it,’ Paola said. A man and a woman walked out, without drinks, and went off hand in hand in the opposite direction.
    When they reached the doorway, two more people emerged, cigarettes already lit, and went to stand with the three other smokers, all leaning against the wall of the embankment and using it as a table for their glasses.
    The door was open. Paola went in, paused just inside the threshold and looked around for someone she knew. Brunetti did the same, though with less hope of success. He saw some people he recognized, but it was in a Venetian way that he recognized them, from walking past them on the street over the course of years, perhaps decades, without ever learning who they were or what they did. He could hardly go up to the man who had lost so much of his hair and begin a conversation about that, nor couldhe ask the woman with the newly blonde hair why she had gained so much weight.
    Through a small gap in the wall of people he saw the double row of display cases. He walked towards them, leaving Paola to find someone she knew, or meet someone new, and examined the contents of the first case, which was raised on thin legs to chest height. Upright, gold on one side, cobalt blue on the other, stood a rectangle of worked glass a little bit bigger than a copy of
Espresso
. The surface was textured, but in no regular, orderly way: it looked more as if someone had dragged their fingers in wet clay from bottom to top and then down again, creating shallow runnels where the light glittered and played. The next case contained another panel: though the size was the same, the texture and colours, even the colour of the gold, were entirely different, making it as unlike the first one as it was like it in size. The third case held four thick glass rectangles with alternating stripes of what appeared to be silver and gold. They were as otherworldly as the others, and quite as beautiful.
    An empty glass had been left on top of the third case, and Brunetti removed it, annoyed to find it there. The almost sandy dregs of red wine clashed with the supple smoothness of the glass objects.
    The next case held three of the flower-like vases on the invitation, all in the faintest of pastels. Brunetti found them far smaller than he had expected. Nor was the work as delicate:what might have been flower petals were thicker than the real thing, thicker than what he knew a good
maestro
could create. Another case held three more of them, though these were in stronger, darker colours. The workmanship continued to displease him, and he walked quickly past them to the next case.
    These vases were cylindrical, all of them rising up to delicate lips, the sort of lips that the others should have had, Brunetti thought. The vases varied in height and in diameter, but each managed to achieve a perfect harmony between the two. The final case held objects of no definite shape: they didn’t resemble anything, had no discernible use, seemed to be little more than swerves and swirls of glass, each curve blending into another of a faintly lighter or darker colour.
    â€˜Do you like them?’ a young woman asked Brunetti.
    He looked away from the objects in the last case, smiled, and said, ‘Yes, I think I do.’ He turned back to the objects and studied them, then moved to the other side of the Plexiglas case to see them from a different perspective. Now they appeared entirely different and he doubted that he would be able to recognize them from this side, though he had just studied them from the other.
    When he looked up, the young woman was back, two glasses of prosecco in her hands. She offered him a glass, and he took it with a smile and a nod. Finding himself now with two glasses, he reached down and set the empty one on thefloor against the wall. He took a sip of the wine. ‘You like it?’ she asked, leaving him in some doubt as to whether she intended the