Suffer the Little Children (22 page)

Brunetti nodded again. ‘And?' he asked.

‘And he said Marcolini is a man to be reckoned with. He made his fortune himself, you know.' She paused, then added, ‘Some people still find that an intoxicating idea.' Her voice was rich with a disdain that only those born into great wealth can experience.

‘My father says he has friends everywhere: in local government, in regional government, even in Rome. In the last few years, he's come to control an enormous number of votes.'

‘Suppressing a news story would be easy for him, then?' Brunetti asked.

‘Child's play,' she said, a phrase that struck Brunetti with an odd resonance.

‘And the marriage?'

‘“Chiesa dei Miracoli garlanded with flowers”: the usual. She works as a financial adviser for a bank; he's the assistant
primario
in
pediatria
at the Ospedale Civile.'

None of these statements seemed to have merited the excitement Brunetti thought he heard in her voice, something experience told him came from revelations still unspoken. ‘And the non-official news?' he asked.

‘The baby, of course,' she said, and he registered that she was finally in her stride.

‘Of course,' he repeated and smiled.

‘The gossip among their friends was that he had had a short affair with a woman – not even an affair: just a few days – when he was in Cosenza for a medical conference. I've asked a number of people who know them, and that's the story I was told every time.'

‘Was it your father who told you about this?'

‘No,' she answered instantly, surprised that he would think her father capable of gossip. Then, in explanation, she offered, ‘I saw my mother this afternoon and asked her about them.' Paola had come by her inquisitiveness about other people's lives honestly: similarly, the Contessa's emeralds would some day be hers.

‘So this is the official story?' he asked.

She had to think for a while before she answered, ‘It sounds true and people seem to believe it is. After all, it's the sort of thing they
want to believe, isn't it? It's the stuff of film, cheap fiction. The erring husband returns to the hearth and the long-suffering wife forgives him. Not only forgives him, but agrees to take the little cuckoo into the nest and raise it as their own. Heart-warming reunion, the rebirth of love: Rhett and Scarlett together again for ever.' She paused a moment and then added, ‘It certainly plays better than saying that they went down to the market, bought a baby, and brought it home.'

‘You sound more mordantly cynical than usual, my dove,' Brunetti said, picking up her hand and kissing the tips of her fingers.

She pulled her hand away, but with a smile, and said, ‘Thank you, Guido.' Then, in a more serious tone, she continued, ‘As I said, people seemed to believe it, or at least wanted to. The Gamberinis know them, and Gabi told me that they went to dinner there about six months after they brought the baby home. Well . . . he brought the baby home, but she said the reunion might not have continued so happily.'

‘You really love gossip, don't you?' he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine.

‘Yes, I suppose I do,' she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. ‘You think that's why I love reading novels so much?'

‘Probably,' he said, then asked, ‘In what way not a happy reunion?'

‘Gabi didn't actually say. People usually don't. But it was pretty clear from what she said, well, more from the way she said it. You know how people are.'

How he wished that were true, Brunetti thought. ‘Did she speculate about the reason?'

Paola closed her eyes, and he watched her replay the conversation. ‘No, not really.'

‘Would you like a glass of wine?' he asked.

‘Yes. And then we can have dinner.'

He took her hand and kissed it again by way of thanks. ‘White or red?' he asked.

She chose white, probably because of the risotto with leeks, which started the meal. The children had recently gone back to school, so they spent much of the meal reporting on what their classmates had done during the summer. One girl in Chiara's class had spent two months in Australia and returned disgruntled that she had traded summer for winter and then returned to autumn. Another had worked at an ice-cream shop on the island of Santorini and came back with a passable knowledge of spoken German. Raffi's best friend had backpacked from Newfoundland to Vancouver, though the quotation marks with which Raffi pronounced ‘backpacked' was rich with a suggestion of trains and aeroplanes.

Brunetti did his best to follow the talk that swirled above the table, but he found himself constantly distracted by the sight of them, assailed by an overwhelming sense of possession: these were his children. Part of him was in them, the part that would go on into their children, and then into the next generation. Try as he might, however, he could recognize little of his physical self in them: only Paola seemed
to have been copied. There was her nose, there the texture of her hair and that unruly curl just behind her left ear. As she spoke, Chiara waved a hand to dismiss something that had been said to her, and the gesture was Paola's.

The next course was
orata
with lemon, further reason to justify the choice of white wine. Brunetti began eating, but halfway through his portion, his attention was drawn again to Chiara, who was now in full denunciation of her English teacher.

‘The subjunctive? Do you know what she told me when I asked about it?' Chiara demanded, voice rich with remembered astonishment as she glanced round the table to see that the others were prepared to respond in similar vein. When she had their attention, she said, ‘That we'd get to it next year.' The noise with which she set down her fork gave ample expression of her disapproval.

Paola shook her head in sympathy. ‘Next year,' she repeated, the conversation somehow having crossed over into English. ‘Unbelievable.'

Chiara turned to her father, hoping perhaps that he would express similar amazement. But she stopped and studied his unresponsive face. She tilted her head to one side, then to the other. Finally she said in an entirely conversational voice, as if in response to a question he had posed. ‘I left it in school,
Papà
.' When he said nothing, she said, ‘No, I didn't bring it home with me today.'

As if emerging from a trance, Brunetti said,
‘I'm sorry, Chiara. What didn't you bring home today?'

‘My second head.'

Utterly at a loss as to what might have occurred at the table while he was staring at his children, Brunetti said, ‘I don't understand. What second head?'

‘The one you've been looking for all night,
Papà
. I just wanted to tell you I didn't bring it home: that's why you don't see it.' To emphasize this, she raised her hands to either side of her head and waved the fingers in the empty air on either side of it.

Raffi guffawed, and when he looked at Paola, she was smiling.

‘Ah, yes,' Brunetti said with some chagrin, returning his attention to his fish. ‘I hope you left it in a safe place.'

There were pears for dessert.

IT WAS LATE
the following afternoon when Vianello came into Brunetti's office, his expression rich with the delight that comes of having been right when others have thought you wrong.

‘It's taken a long time, but it was worth it,' the Inspector said. He came over to Brunetti's desk and placed some papers on it.

Brunetti narrowed his eyes and raised his chin by way of enquiry.

‘Signorina Elettra's friend,' Vianello explained.

She had many friends, Brunetti knew, and he could not recall which one was at the moment contributing to her extra-legal activities. ‘Which friend?'

‘The hacker,' Vianello explained, surprising Brunetti by the ease with which he pronounced the ‘h'. ‘The one we gave the hard disc to.' Before Brunetti could ask, Vianello added, ‘Yes, I got it back to Dottor Franchi the next day, but not before her friend had made a copy of everything that was on it.'

‘Ah, that friend,' Brunetti said and reached for the papers. ‘What's Franchi been up to on his computer?'

‘No kiddie porn and no Internet shopping: I can tell you that right now,' Vianello answered, though his tiger shark smile did not lessen.

‘But?' Brunetti asked.

‘But it seems he's found his way into the ULSS computer system.'

‘Isn't that how he makes the appointments?' Brunetti asked. ‘How the other pharmacists do, too?'

‘Yes,' Vianello agreed and pulled up a chair. ‘He does, and they do,' he said, prodding at Brunetti with a tone that forced him to ask another question.

Which he did. ‘And what else does he do when he's in there?'

‘According to what Signorina Elettra's friend told us, it would seem that he's found a way to bypass their log-in.'

‘Which means what?'

‘It gives him access to other parts of their system,' Vianello said and waited for Brunetti's reaction, as though he thought Brunetti should leap to his feet and cry ‘Eureka!'

He feared his confession would lower him in Vianello's estimation, but Brunetti knew he couldn't bluff his way through this one, so he said, ‘I think you'd better explain it to me, Lorenzo.'

The little Spartan boy with the fox eating away at his vitals could have kept no straighter a face than did Vianello. ‘It means he can access the central computer and examine the medical files of anyone for whom he has the ULSS number.'

‘His clients?'

‘Exactly.'

Brunetti put his elbow on his desk and rubbed his hand across his mouth a few times as he considered the implications of this. Access to those files meant access to all information about medication, hospitalization, diseases cured or under treatment. It meant that an unauthorized person would have access to potentially secret parts of another person's life.

‘AIDS,' Brunetti said. After a long pause, he added, ‘Drug rehabilitation. Methadone.'

‘Venereal diseases,' contributed Vianello.

‘Abortions,' added Brunetti, then added, ‘If they're his clients, he knows whether they're married, about their family lives, where they work, who their friends are.'

‘The friendly family pharmacist; known you since you were a kid,' added Vianello.

‘How many?' Brunetti asked.

‘He's looked into the files of about thirty of his clients,' Vianello said, pausing to allow Brunetti to register the implications of this. ‘Her
friend says he won't be able to send us the actual files until tomorrow.'

Brunetti let out a low whistle, then drew their attention back to the original reason for their interest in Dottor Franchi. ‘And the appointments?'

‘He's made more than a hundred in the last two years.' Before Brunetti could express his surprise at the number, Vianello said, ‘That's only one a week, remember.'

Brunetti nodded. ‘Has this friend of Signorina Elettra . . . does he have a name, by the way?' he asked.

‘No,' Vianello said in a curiously bland voice.

‘Have you checked to see which of these appointments actually took place?' Brunetti asked.

‘He sent her the final list of the appointments only this morning,' Vianello said. ‘And it seems that all of the appointments Franchi made were kept.' When Brunetti said nothing, the Inspector continued, ‘She's already run a check on the other pharmacists. One of them has scheduled only seventeen appointments in the last two years, and all of them were kept: we spoke to the people. Andrea doesn't use the system, so he's off the list. In the other case, she checked the record of appointments in the files in the hospitals here and in Mestre, and in almost all cases the people were listed as having shown up for the appointments he scheduled.' Vianello could barely contain his excitement when he said, ‘But one of the pharmacists scheduled
three appointments for people who didn't need medical help.'

‘Tell me, Lorenzo,' Brunetti said to save time.

‘They're dead,' Vianello said.

‘You mean, from what happened to them during the appointments?' asked an astonished Brunetti, wondering how something like this could have happened and he not be aware of it.

‘No. They were dead when the appointments were made.' Vianello allowed himself to savour, and Brunetti to grasp, that information, and then he continued, ‘It looks like he got careless, the pharmacist, and just started punching in the patient numbers of customers at the pharmacy: perhaps he thought they had moved away or perhaps . . .' and here Vianello gave the small pause he always made before he dropped what he considered to be a bomb. ‘Perhaps he's starting to lose his memory. At that age.'

‘Gabetti?' asked Brunetti.

‘None other,' responded a grinning Vianello.

‘All right, Lorenzo. You win,' Brunetti said with a smile. Tell me about the appointments he scheduled for these dead people.'

‘In each case, the doctor recorded on his computer that he had seen the patient, made a diagnosis – it was always something innocuous – and then billed the health service for the appointment.'

‘Very careless,' Brunetti agreed. ‘Or very bold. What about the doctors?'

‘It's always the same three, and in each case
they recorded the appointments and requested payment,' Vianello said. Almost reluctantly, Vianello added, ‘Franchi never scheduled an appointment with any of those three doctors.'

‘I wonder what else he was doing, though,' Brunetti said, then asked, ‘Why can't her friend send the files until tomorrow?'

‘Computer things,' said Vianello.

‘I'm not a Neanderthal, you know.' Though Brunetti smiled as he said this, he came across as no less defensive.

‘Signorina Elettra told me it has to do with the way Franchi protected the files: each one requires a different code to get into it, and then you have to go back and find the patient number, using a different access code . . . do you want me to go on?' Vianello asked.