Fatal Remedies (30 page)

‘Then it’s you I want to talk to,’ Sandi stated, looking at him with eyes that glimmered with malice.

‘Come now, Roberto,’ Bonaventura suddenly broke in, placing his hand on Sandi’s arm. ‘You know you can use my lawyer. As soon as he gets here we can talk to him.’

Sandi shook off his hand with a muttered curse. ‘No lawyer. Not yours. I want to talk to the cop.’ He addressed Brunetti: ‘Well? Where can we talk?’

‘Roberto,’ Bonaventura said in a voice he tried to make menacing, ‘you don’t want to talk to him.’

‘You don’t tell me what to do any more,’ Sandi spat. Brunetti turned, opened the door to the office, and took Sandi into the hall. One of the uniformed officers followed them outside and led them down the corridor. Opening a door to a small interview room, he said, ‘In here, sir,’ and waited for them to enter.

Brunetti saw a small desk and four chairs. He sat down, waiting for Sandi. When the latter was seated, Brunetti glanced across at him and said, ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ Sandi asked, still filled with the anger Bonaventura had provoked.

‘What do you want to tell me about the shipments?’

‘How much do you already know?’ Sandi demanded.

Ignoring the question, Brunetti inquired, ‘How many of you are involved in it?’

‘In what?’

Instead of answering immediately, Brunetti propped his elbows on the table, folded his hands, and rested his mouth on the backs of his knuckles. He remained like that for almost a minute, staring across at Sandi, then repeated, ‘How many of you are involved in it?’

‘In what?’ Sandi asked again, this time allowing himself a small smile, the sort children use when they ask a question they think will embarrass the teacher.

Brunetti raised his head, placed his hands on the desk, and pushed himself to his feet. Saying nothing, he went to the door and knocked on it. A face appeared beyond the wire-mesh screen. The door opened and Brunetti left the room, closing the door behind him. He signalled the guard to remain there and went back up the corridor. He peered into the room where Bonaventura was being held and saw that he was still there, though no one was with him. Brunetti stood at the one-way window for ten minutes, watching the man inside. Bonaventura sat sideways to the door, trying not to look at it or to respond to the sound of footsteps when people walked by.

Finally Brunetti opened the door without knocking and went in. Bonaventura’s head shot round. ‘What do you want?’ he asked when he saw Brunetti.

‘I want to talk to you about the shipments.’

‘What shipments?’

‘Of drugs. To Sri Lanka. And Kenya. And Bangladesh.’

‘What about them? They’re perfectly legitimate. We’ve got all the documents at the office.’

Brunetti had no doubt of that. He stayed by the door, leaning back against it, one foot propped up behind him, arms folded over his chest. ‘Signor Bonaventura, do you want to talk about this or do you want me to go back and have a word with your foreman again?’ Brunetti made his voice sound very tired, almost bored.

‘What’s he been saying?’ Bonaventura asked before he could stop himself.

Brunetti stood and watched him for a time, then said again, ‘I want to talk about those shipments.’

Bonaventura decided. He folded his arms in imitation of Brunetti. ‘I’m not saying anything until I see my lawyer.’

Brunetti left and went back to the other room, where the same officer was standing outside. He stepped away from the door when he saw the commissario and opened it for him.

Sandi looked up at Brunetti when he came in. Without preamble he said, ‘All right. What do you want to know?’

‘The shipments, Signor Sandi?’ Brunetti asked, naming him for the microphones hidden in the ceiling, and came to sit opposite him. ‘Where do they go?’

‘To Sri Lanka, like the one last night. And Kenya, and Nigeria. Lots of other places.’

‘Always medicines?’

‘Yes, just like you’ll find in that truck.’

‘What kind of medicines are they?’

‘A lot of it’s for hypertension. There’s some cough syrup. And mood elevators. They’re very popular in the Third World. I think they can buy them without a prescription. And antibiotics.’

‘How much of it is good?’

Sandi shrugged this away, uninterested in such details. ‘I don’t have any idea. Most of it is outdated or discontinued, things we can’t sell in Europe any more, at least not here in the West.’

‘What do you do? Change the labels?’

‘I’m not sure. No one told me about that. All I did was ship it.’ Sandi’s voice had the calm assurance of the practised liar.

‘But surely you must have some idea,’ Brunetti urged, softening his voice as if to suggest that a man as clever as Sandi would have figured it out. When Sandi didn’t respond to this, Brunetti made his voice less soft: ‘Signor Sandi, I think it’s time you started telling me the truth.’

Sandi considered this, staring at an implacable Brunetti. ‘I suppose that’s what they do,’ he finally said. With a toss of his head in the direction of the room where Bonaventura sat, he added, ‘He also owns a company that collects expired medicines from pharmacies. For disposal or destruction. They’re supposed to be burned.’

‘What happens?’

‘Boxes get burned.’

‘Boxes of what?’

‘Old papers. Some are just empty boxes. Enough to get the weight right. No one much cares what’s inside, so long as the weight’s right.’

‘Isn’t someone supposed to watch what they do?’

Sandi nodded. ‘There’s a man from the Ministry of Health.’

‘And?’

‘He’s been taken care of.’

‘So these things, these drugs, that don’t get burned, they’re taken to the airport and sent to the Third World?’

Sandi nodded.

‘It gets sent?’ Brunetti repeated, needing a recording to be made of Sandi’s answers.

‘Yes.’

‘And paid for?’

‘Of course.’

‘But it’s already outdated or expired?’

Sandi seemed offended by the question. ‘A lot of those things last much longer than the Ministry of Health says. A great deal of it’s still good. Probably lasts longer than what’s written on the package.’

‘What else gets shipped?’

Sandi watched him with clever eyes but said nothing.

‘The more you tell me now, the better it will be for you in the future.’

‘Better how?’

‘The judges will know that you were willing to help us and that will count in your favour.’

‘What guarantee do I have?’

Brunetti shrugged.

Neither man spoke for a long time, then Brunetti asked, ‘What else did you ship?’

‘Will you tell them I helped you?’ Sandi asked, not content until he could cut a deal.

‘Yes.’

‘What guarantee do I have of that?’

Brunetti shrugged again.

Sandi lowered his head for a moment, traced a figure on the surface of the desk with his finger, then looked up. ‘Some of the stuff in the shipments is useless. Nothing. Flour, or sugar, or whatever it is they use when they make placebos. And coloured water or oil in the ampoules.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Where is all this made?’

‘There.’ Sandi raised a hand to point into the distance, towards where Bonaventura’s factory might or might not be. ‘There’s a crew that comes in at night and works. They make the stuff up, label it, and box it. Then it gets taken to the airport.’

‘Why?’ Brunetti asked and, when he saw that Sandi didn’t understand his question, added, ‘Why placebos? Why not the real medicine?’

‘The hypertension medicine - especially that - is very expensive. The raw material or chemical or whatever it is. And some of the stuff for diabetes, or at least I think it’s that. So to cut costs they use the placebos. Ask him about it,’ he said, pointing in the direction where he had left Bonaventura.

‘And at the airport?’

‘Nothing. Everything’s just as it should be. We put it on planes and it gets delivered at the other end. There’s never any trouble there. Everything’s been taken care of.’

‘Is all this commercial?’ Brunetti asked, possessed of a new idea. ‘Or is some of it given away?’

‘We sell a lot of it to the charity agencies, if that’s what you’re asking. The UN, things like that. We give them a discount and take the rest off taxes. As charity.’

Brunetti stopped himself from showing any reaction to what he was hearing. It sounded as though Sandi knew far more than how to drive a truck to the airport. ‘Does anyone from the UN check the contents?’

Sandi gave a snort of disbelief. ‘All they care about is getting their picture taken when they deliver the stuff to the refugee camps.’

‘Do you send the same things to the camps that you send in the regular shipments?’

‘No, most of that’s for diarrhoea and amoebic dysentery. And a lot of cough syrup. When they’re so thin, that’s what they have to worry about, those things.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti ventured. ‘How long have you been doing this?’

‘A year.’

‘In what capacity?’

‘Foreman. I used to work for Mitri, in his factory. But then I came up here.’ He grimaced at this, as if the memory caused him pain or regret.

‘Did Mitri do the same thing?’

Sandi nodded. ‘He did until he sold his factory.’

‘Why would he sell it?’

Sandi shrugged. ‘I heard that he had an offer he couldn’t refuse. That is, that wasn’t safe to refuse. That some big people wanted to buy it.’

Brunetti understood perfectly what he meant and was surprised to see that, even here, Sandi was afraid to name directly the organization these ‘big people’ represented. ‘So he sold it?’

Sandi nodded. ‘But he recommended me to his brother-in-law.’ Mention of Bonaventura called him back from the realms of memory. ‘And I damn the day I started to work for him.’

‘Because of this?’ Brunetti asked, waving a hand at the bleak sterility of the room in which they sat and all it represented.

Sandi nodded.

‘What about Mitri?’ Brunetti asked.

Sandi contracted his eyebrows in an expression of feigned confusion.

‘Was he involved in the factory?’

‘Which one?’

Brunetti raised his hand and brought his fist smashing down on the table just in front of Sandi, who jumped as if Brunetti had struck him. ‘Don’t waste my time, Signor Sandi,’ Brunetti shouted. ‘Don’t waste my time with stupid questions.’ When Sandi didn’t answer, he leaned towards him and demanded, ‘Do you understand me?’

Sandi nodded.

‘Good,’ Brunetti said. ‘What about the factory? Did Mitri have a part in it?’

‘He must have.’