Suffer the Little Children (25 page)

Pedrolli nodded affirmatively, then pressed his lips together. ‘I'd be a liar if I said I'd never heard about this, Commissario. But it doesn't happen in this department. My
primario
and I see to that.'

Though Brunetti's impulse was to believe the doctor, he still asked, ‘How?'

‘All patients – well, their parents, since our patients are all children – who have appointments scheduled have to sign in with the nurse on duty, and at the end of her shift, she checks that list against the computer list of the patients who were actually seen by every doctor in the department.' He saw Brunetti's response and said, ‘I know, it's very simple. It adds about five minutes of work to the nurse's day, but it eliminates any possibility of falsification.'

‘It sounds as though you set up your system specifically to avoid the possibility, Dottore,' Brunetti said. ‘If I might say that.'

‘I think you should say that, Commissario: that's exactly why we did it.' Pedrolli waited a moment until Brunetti's gaze met his, and then said, ‘Word travels in a hospital.'

‘I see,' Brunetti said.

‘Is that all you wanted to ask me about?' Pedrolli said, beginning to shift his weight forward on his chair.

‘No, Dottore, it isn't. If you'd have a moment's patience . . .'

Pedrolli relaxed back into his chair and said,
‘Of course,' but he looked at his watch as he said it. Suddenly Pedrolli's stomach made a thunderous groan and he gave that same almost embarrassed smile. ‘I haven't had lunch yet.'

‘I'll try not to keep you too long,' Brunetti said, hoping that his own stomach would not begin to echo the doctor's.

‘Dottore,' Brunetti began, ‘are you a customer at the pharmacy in Campo Sant'Angelo.'

‘Yes. It's the one nearest to where I live.'

‘You've used it for years?'

‘Since we moved there, about four years ago. No, a bit more than that.'

‘Do you know the pharmacist well?' Brunetti asked.

A long time passed before Pedrolli said, pronouncing his words carefully, ‘Ah, the exquisitely moral Dottor Franchi.' Then he added, ‘I suppose I know him as well as any doctor knows a pharmacist.'

‘Could you tell me what you mean by that, Dottore?'

Pedrolli shrugged. ‘Dottor Franchi and I have diverging views of human weakness, I fear,' he said with a wry smile. ‘He tends to take a sterner view than I do.' He gave a small smile. When Brunetti said nothing, Pedrolli continued, ‘As to how well I know him professionally, I ask him if patients of mine are collecting their prescriptions, and occasionally I go in to write and sign prescriptions when I've told someone over the phone to take a certain medicine.'

‘And for yourself, Dottore? Do you buy things there?'

‘I suppose I do; toothpaste or things we need in the house. Occasionally I'll get things my wife asks me to buy for her.'

‘Do you get your prescriptions made up there?'

Pedrolli considered this question for a long time and finally said, ‘No, I don't. I get any medicine I need here at the hospital.'

Brunetti nodded.

Pedrolli smiled, but it was not the same smile as before. ‘Would you tell me why you're asking these questions, Commissario?'

Ignoring the question, Brunetti asked, ‘In all these years, you've never had to get a prescription made up there?'

Pedrolli gazed off into the middle distance. ‘Maybe, once, not too long after we moved in. I had flu, and Bianca went out to get medicine for me. She came back with something, but I don't remember if I needed a prescription for it.'

Pedrolli gazed away, his eyes narrowed in an attempt to recall, and he seemed about to speak when Brunetti interrupted to ask, ‘If it had required a prescription, would that information have to be put into your medical records, Dottore?'

Pedrolli gave him a long look, and then suddenly his face went blank, as though someone had turned him off. Life returned in the form of a quick glance that Brunetti could
not read. ‘My medical records?' he finally asked, but it was not a question, not the way he said it. ‘Why do you ask about them, Commissario?'

Brunetti saw no reason not to tell him, so long as he did not mention blackmail. ‘We're looking into the inappropriate use of medical information, Dottore.'

He waited to see how Pedrolli would respond to this hint, but all the doctor did was blink, shrug, and say, ‘I'm not sure that means anything specific to me.' It seemed to Brunetti that, behind the calm expression the doctor appeared to have nailed to his face, he was busy considering what Brunetti had just said, perhaps considering the possibilities towards which it might lead.

Brunetti realized that he had so far failed to raise with Pedrolli the chance of his son's return. He began again but in an entirely different tone of voice. ‘What I would really like to do is talk to you about your son.'

He thought he heard Pedrolli gasp. Certainly the noise he made was stronger than a sigh, though the doctor's face remained impassive.

‘What about my son would you like to know?' Pedrolli asked in a voice he struggled to control.

‘Reports I've received suggest that the boy's natural mother is unlikely to make a claim that he be returned to her.' If Pedrolli understood the real meaning of this, he gave no sign of it, so Brunetti continued, ‘And so I wondered if you had thought of pursuing the case in the courts.'

‘What case?'

‘Of having him returned to you?'

‘How did you think that might be achieved, Commissario?'

‘Your father-in-law is certainly a man . . . well, a man with many connections. Perhaps he could . . .' Brunetti watched the other man's face, waiting to see some play of emotion, but there was none.

The doctor glanced at his watch and said, ‘I don't mean to be impolite, Commissario, but these are matters which concern my family and me, and I would prefer not to discuss them with you.'

Brunetti got to his feet. ‘I wish you well, Dottore. If I can ever be of help to you, I'd like to offer it,' Brunetti said, extending his hand.

Pedrolli took it, briefly looked as if he was going to say something, but remained silent.

Brunetti said he knew the way out of the hospital and left, planning to stop and have something to eat before his next meeting, with the doctor's father-in-law.

BRUNETTI STOPPED IN
a trattoria at the foot of the second bridge between the hospital and Campo Santa Marina but, finding that there was no table free, contented himself with a glass of
vino novello
and a plate of cicchetti, standing at the bar to eat them. Conversation swirled around him, but he overheard none of it, still recalling Pedrolli's surprise when asked about his medical records, or had it been at the suggestion that inappropriate use might have been made of them?

The
fondi di carciofi
were delicious, and Brunetti asked for two more, then another
polpetta
and another glass of wine. When he was finished, he was still not satisfied, though he was no longer hungry. These pick-up meals that he was often forced to eat were one of the worst
things about his job, along with the too-frequent early morning calls, such as the one that had begun this story for him. He paid and left, cut behind the Miracoli and down towards Campo Santa Marina.

Paola had not had to tell him where the office of Marcolini's party was: its location was etched into the minds and hearts of every Venetian, either by fame or by shame. Lega Doge was one of the separatist political parties that had sprung up in the North in recent years, their platform the usual primitive cocktail of fear, rancour, and resentment at the reality of social change in Italy. They disliked foreigners, the Left, and women with equal ferocity, though their contempt in no way lessened their need for all three: the first to work in their factories; the second to blame for the ills of the country; and the third to prove their masculinity by serving in their beds.

Giuliano Marcolini was the founder of Lega Doge – Brunetti blanched at the thought of referring to Marcolini as the ‘ideologue' because of its suggestion that the party might be involved with ideas. He had managed in the course of twenty years to turn his small plumbing supply business into a chain of megastores: for all Brunetti knew, the workers who had refitted his own bathroom four years earlier had obtained their fixtures from a Marcolini outlet.

Some wealthy men bought soccer teams; others acquired new wives or had their current ones rebuilt; some endowed hospitals or art galleries: it was Brunetti's destiny to live in a
country where they began political parties. In obvious imitation of other separatist parties, Lega Doge had chosen a flag displaying a rampant animal; with the lion, however, having already given its allegiance to another party, the griffin, though it had appeared seldom in Venetian history and was an infrequent subject in its iconography, had been dragged into service. The party's colours were purple and yellow, and its salute a clenched fist thrust above the head, embarrassingly reminiscent, at least to anyone with a sense of history – which clause thus excluded most members of the party – of the Black Power salute given by American athletes at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. One waggish journalist of the Left, upon first seeing the salute, asked if this were meant to represent the legendary tight-fistedness of the Veneti, and the first appearance of the purple and yellow flags and matching T-shirts had, alas, coincided with the use of the same colours in the spring collection of a notoriously gay designer.

But the intensity of Marcolini's rhetoric and the faith of his listeners had easily overcome these initial obstacles, and within six years of its establishment, Lega Doge had already won the mayorships of four towns in the Veneto and numerous seats on the city councils of Verona, Brescia, and Treviso. Politicians in Rome had begun to pay attention to Signor Marcolini and his . . . the Right talked of his ideas, while the Left referred to his opinions. He was courted by
those politicians who thought Marcolini might be useful to them, causing Brunetti to reflect upon the observation made of Hitler by the leader of one of the political parties he would subsequently sweep into oblivion: ‘Goodness, the man can talk: we could use him.'

As he entered Campo Santa Marina, Brunetti considered who he should appear to be when he arrived. Gruff, of course, a real man who took no nonsense from women or foreigners; well, unless the foreigners were men and Europeans and could speak a civilized language like Italian, though real men spoke in dialect, didn't they? He hadn't known that morning that he would be speaking to Marcolini, or he would have dressed for the occasion, though for the life of him, Brunetti could not imagine the appropriate costume for an appearance at the offices of Lega Doge. Something faintly military, with just a hint of dominance: Marvilli's boots, perhaps?

He crossed in front of the hotel and turned into Ramo Bragadin. The first door on the right opened on to a courtyard and a flight of stairs leading to the offices of Lega Doge. A marble-cutting workshop was located on the ground floor, and Brunetti wondered what the noise would be like upstairs. The bell was quickly answered by a clean-shaven young man wearing a tweed jacket and black jeans.

‘Guido Brunetti,' he said, omitting his title and putting out his hand. ‘I have an appointment with Signor Marcolini.' Brunetti was
careful to pronounce the Italian precisely, as though it did not come to him naturally.

The young man, who had a face so thin that his eyes looked even closer together than they were, smiled in return and shook Brunetti's hand. In dialect, he responded, ‘He'll be free in a moment, Signore. If you follow me, I'll take you back to his office.'

Brunetti greeted the switch to dialect with an audible sigh, relieved of the burden of speaking in a foreign language.

Brunetti had no idea how a plumbing millionaire would choose to decorate the offices of his political party, but what he saw here seemed just about right. One wall of the corridor down which the young man led him had windows that looked out on to the houses opposite and back towards Campo Santa Marina. The other wall was covered with pairs of crossed Lega flags on long wooden poles, about the size of those carried at the head of the Palio parade and thus somewhat outsized for the not very high corridor. There were a few shields, obvious modern copies of medieval originals, which looked like they were made from heavily shellacked papier mâché. The young man preceded him into a large room, the ceiling of which contained a newly and quite excessively restored fresco of some celestial event, attendance at which had clearly necessitated the baring, not only of swords, but of great areas of pink female flesh. White stucco decorations encircled the painting with a nervous halo while pastel swirls spread
menacingly away from it towards the corners of the room.

Six chairs made of a wood so highly glossed it succeeded in looking like plastic stood against one wall, and above them was a gold framed print of Vittorio Emanuele III inspecting the troops, perhaps before some disastrous First World War battle. As he studied the scene, Brunetti realized that one of two things had happened: either the artist had added twenty centimetres to the King's height, or most of the men who fought on the Italian side in the First World War were dwarfs.

‘It's before Caporetto,' the young man said.

‘Ah,' Brunetti let escape him, ‘a significant battle.'

‘There are sure to be more,' the young man said in a voice so full of longing that Brunetti had to stop himself from staring at him.

‘No doubt,' Brunetti said, then gave a nod of manly satisfaction in the direction of the pictured scene.

A red plush sofa that looked as if it had begun life in a French brothel stood against the far wall, and above it were more prints, these of actual battles. The weapons differed, but all of them managed to bring to his knees a young man in uniform who held the Italian flag aloft with one hand while clutching at his heart with the other.