Paolo Vianello

Paolo Vianello is 63 and has worked as the theatre's caretaker for thirty-four years. He was born in Burano, the island of colorful houses, the son of a fisherman and a lacemaker, and came to Venice at 19 looking for work. He knows the stairs, corridors and cellars of the theatre like the back of his hand.

He lives in a small apartment in Cannaregio, on the third floor of a building with no elevator, with a window over a narrow canal and a kitchen that fits him and one more. He has an iron stove, an old radio always tuned to opera and a television he rarely turns on. He eats early, goes to bed early and wakes before the sun, without an alarm clock, as his father did.

He has a weathered face, thin gray hair and a thick yellowed mustache. He wears a navy-blue wool beret and a worn brown wool coat with a patch on the elbow, which his wife sewed and which he swears never to replace. Wary, he speaks little and answers looking at his own hands, as if waiting for them to confirm.

About the night of the fire, his account is routine: he locked the theatre at 8:30 p.m., as every night, main door, stage door and canal door, and after that no one should have been inside. When the fire started, he was in the entrance booth, having dinner, bread with mortadella, and at 9 p.m. he saw smoke coming out through the roof tiles and called the firemen. He recalls that the canal beside the theatre was dry, drained for cleaning, and the boats had run aground in the mud.

Paolo answers questions in short sentences and shifts in his chair when the conversation nears the attic. It may be the modesty of an old employee who fears losing his job over some slip. It may be the silence of someone who keeps more than he says. The detective will have to decide which.