Suffer the Little Children (29 page)

Was he a chameleon, then, Dottor Franchi, keeping his judgements to himself when he thought they might offend someone whose good opinion he sought, only to reveal them to those he considered his inferiors? In Brunetti's experience, it was not uncommon for people to behave in this fashion. Was this one of the reasons why people married, then, to free themselves to say what they thought and thus spare themselves the terrible exhaustion of leading a double life? Then what of Bianca Marcolini: what life could she lead if any day, any moment, her husband were to discover what her father had done at her urging? It had been so easy to lead Marcolini into boasting about his phone call; surely, she must have known that, sooner or later, her husband would learn what had actually happened. No, not what had happened, but why it had happened. The bolt struck Brunetti then: Pedrolli would never learn what had happened to the child, only why it had.

He became aware that the tension had returned to his shoulders and that he was still standing in front of the
edicola
, gazing open-mouthed at the naked bodies on the covers of the magazines. In a chill moment of lucidity, he saw what Paola meant: they were there, on display, these young
women, naked and undefended and inviting any attention a man might please to give them.

Trapped, his eyes moved to the left and fell on a column of bright-coloured covers, each of which displayed a bare-breasted woman in a posture of submission: some bound with straps, some with ropes, and some with chains. Some looked frightened; some looked happy; they all looked excited.

He pulled his eyes away and looked at the façade of Palazzo Dolfin. ‘She's right,' he said under his breath.

‘You going to stand there all day talking to yourself?' he heard someone ask in a loud, angry voice. He drew his attention away from the building and turned. The news vendor was standing less than a metre from him, his face red. Again he asked, ‘You going to stand there all day? What's next, you put your hands in your pockets?'

Brunetti raised a hand to defend himself, to explain, but then he let it drop and walked away, out of the
campo
and towards his home.

He had heard that people who had pets often found them at the door of their homes when they returned from work, that animals had some sixth sense that alerted them to the approach of what they no doubt thought of as their pet humans. When he reached the top of the steps and began to hunt for his keys, the door opened to reveal Paola, just inside. He could not disguise his joy at seeing her.

‘Bad day?' she asked.

‘How did you know?'

‘I heard you coming up the stairs and it sounded like the tread of a weary man, so I thought it might help if I opened the door and told you how it lifts my heart that you are here.'

‘You know, you're right about the tits and ass in magazines,' he blurted out.

She tilted her head to one side and studied his face. ‘Come in, Guido. I think you might need a glass of wine.'

He smiled. ‘I capitulate to you about something we've argued about for decades, and all you can do is offer me a glass of wine?' he asked.

‘Why, what did you want instead?'

‘How about some tits and ass?' he asked, making a grab for her.

After dinner, he trailed her down to her study. He had drunk little wine with dinner and had no desire now save to sit and talk and listen to what she might have to say about something he still did not know how to refer to: the Pedrolli disaster was perhaps as good as he could manage.

‘The pharmacist in Campo Sant'Angelo?' she asked when he had finished telling the story – in what he hoped was a chronological, but what he feared was a garbled, manner.

Brunetti sat beside her, his arms folded across his chest. ‘You know him?'

‘No. It's out of the way for me. Besides, it's one of those
campi
where you don't think of stopping, isn't it? You just walk across it on your way to Accademia or Rialto: I've never even
bought one of those cotton shirts from the place by the bridge.'

Brunetti's inner map focused on the
campo
, viewed first from the entrance from the bridge and then from Calle della Mandola. A restaurant where he had never eaten, an art gallery, the inevitable real estate agency, the
edicola
with the chocolate Labrador.

He was summoned from these cartographical consider ations by Paola, who asked, ‘You think he'd do that? Call and tell people about his clients?'

‘I used to think there were limits to what people were capable of doing,' Brunetti said. ‘But I don't think that any more. Given the right stimuli, we're all probably capable of anything.' He listened to that statement echo, realized the extent to which it was a response to the events of the day, and said quickly, ‘No, that's not right, is it?'

‘I hope not,' Paola said. ‘But doesn't he take some sort of oath, like a doctor, not to reveal certain things?'

‘I think so. But I'm sure he's too clever to do this sort of thing openly. All he'd have to do is make a phone call to ask after someone's health: ‘Is Daniela back from the hospital yet?' ‘Could you tell Egidio it's time to renew his prescription?' And if anything embarrassing or shameful were revealed by these calls, well, it was just the faithful family pharmacist, trying to be helpful, showing his concern for his patients' well-being, wasn't it?'

Paola considered this, then turned and put her hand on his arm. ‘And it would let him go on thinking of himself in the same way, wouldn't it? If anyone questioned him, he could maintain – not only to them but to himself – that it was merely an excess of zeal on his part.'

‘Probably.'

‘Nasty little bastard.'

‘Most moralists are,' said Brunetti wearily.

‘Is there anything you can do about it, or about him?' she asked.

‘I don't think so,' Brunetti said. ‘One of the strange things about all of this is that, no matter how sordid and disgusting any of it is, the only thing Franchi's done that's illegal is look at those files, and he'd be sure to argue – and believe – that he was simply acting in the best interests of his clients. And Marcolini was doing his duty as a citizen, wasn't he? So was his daughter, I suppose.' Brunetti gave more thought to all of the things that had happened and said, ‘And with Pedrolli, the violence of the Carabinieri wouldn't even be judged criminal. They had a judge's order to make their arrests that night. They did ring the doorbell, but the Pedrollis didn't hear it. And Pedrolli admits that he attacked the Carabiniere first.'

‘All this pain, all this suffering,' Paola said.

They sat quietly side by side for some time. Finally, Brunetti pushed himself to his feet, went back into the living room and retrieved his copy of the
Lettere della Russia
, and came back to her study. In the short time he was absent, like water
seeking the lowest point, Paola had spread out on the sofa with a book, but once again she pulled her feet back to make room for him.

‘Your Russians?' she asked when she saw the book.

He sat down beside her and began to read where he had left off the night before. Paola studied his profile for a moment, then stretched out her feet and slipped them on to his lap, under his book, and returned to her own.

The weather worsened the next day, first with a sudden drop in temperature, followed by a torrential rainstorm, both of which cleaned the streets, first of tourists, then of any dirt that remained. Some hours later the sirens announced the first
acqua alta
of the autumn, worsened by a fierce
bora
that sprang up and blew in from the north-east.

Umbrellaed, hatted, booted, and raincoated, a disgruntled Brunetti arrived at the Questura and made what he thought was
una brutta figura
at the entrance, pausing to shake himself free of water in the manner of a dog. He looked around and saw that the floor was wet for at least a metre in every direction. Heavy-footed and unwilling to talk to anyone, he made his way up the stairs to his office.

He stuffed the umbrella upright behind the door. Let the water run down on to the wooden floor: no one would see it back there. He hung his raincoat in the
armadio
, tossed his sodden hat on the top shelf, and then sat on a chair to
remove his boots. By the time he finally sat behind his desk, he was sweaty and ill-tempered.

The phone rang. ‘
Sì
,' he said with singular lack of grace.

‘Should I hang up and call back after you've had time to go out for a coffee?' asked Bocchese.

‘It wouldn't make any difference, and I'd probably be carried away by the
acqua alta
if I tried to go down to the bar.'

‘Is it that bad?' the technician asked. ‘I got here early, and it wasn't bad when I came in.'

‘Supposed to peak in an hour, but yes, it's bad.'

‘You think any tourists will be drowned?'

‘Don't tempt me, Bocchese. You know our phones are tapped, and what we say might get back to the Tourist Board.' He felt suddenly cheered, perhaps because of Bocchese's unwonted chattiness or perhaps by the thought of drowned tourists. ‘What have you got for me?'

‘HIV,' the technician said and then, into the resulting silence, ‘That is, I've got a blood sample that is HIV positive. Or, to be even more precise, I've got the results from the lab – finally – saying that the sample I sent them is positive. B negative blood type, which is relatively rare, and HIV, which is not as rare as it should be.'

‘The blood from the pharmacy?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have you told anyone?'

‘No. The email just came in. Why?'

‘No reason. I'll talk to Vianello.'

‘It's not his blood, is it?' Bocchese asked in a neutral voice.

The question so stunned Brunetti that he could not stop himself from barking, ‘What?'

A long silence ensued at the other end, after which a curiously sober Bocchese said, ‘I didn't mean it that way. With a sample, we don't know whose it is.'

‘Then say it that way,' Brunetti said, still shouting. ‘And don't make jokes like that. They're not funny,' he added, his voice still rough, taken aback by the surge of anger he felt towards the technician.

‘Sorry,' Bocchese said. ‘It's an occupational hazard, I think. We see only pieces of people or samples of people, so we make jokes about them, and maybe we forget about the actual people themselves.'

‘It's all right,' Brunetti said, then in a calmer voice, added, ‘I'll go and tell him.'

‘You won't . . .' the technician began, but Brunetti cut him off by saying, ‘I'll tell him the sample's back.' In a softer voice, he added, ‘Don't worry. That's all I'll tell him. We'll see if it matches the blood of anyone we have in the files.'

Bocchese thanked him and said goodbye, in a polite manner, and hung up.

Brunetti went down to find Vianello.

It took them almost no time to find the match among the medical files from Franchi's computer and only a few phone calls to find a possible motive. Piero Cogetto was a lawyer,
recently separated from the woman, also a lawyer, with whom he had lived for seven years. He had no history of drug use and had never been arrested.

Once Vianello had that hint, it took him only two more phone calls before he found someone who told him the rest of the story: upon learning that he was HIV positive, Cogetto's fiancé had moved out. She claimed that it was the infidelity and not the disease that made her leave, but this had been treated with a certain amount of scepticism among the people who knew her. The second person Vianello spoke to said she had always maintained that she had learned about his disease when someone told her about it by mistake.

Having recounted all this to Brunetti and Pucetti, Vianello asked, ‘What do we do now?'

‘If he's positive, he can't go to jail,' Brunetti said, ‘but at least, if we can get him to admit the break-in, we can close the file on the vandalism and get it off the books.' He realized how very much like Patta he sounded and was grateful that the other men did not mention this.

‘You think he'll admit it?' Vianello asked.

Brunetti shrugged. ‘Why not? The blood samples match, and a DNA test would probably confirm the match. But he's a lawyer, so he knows there's nothing we can do to him if he's positive.' He was suddenly weary and wanted all this to be over.

‘I'd understand if he did do it,' said Pucetti.

‘Who wouldn't?' agreed Vianello, giving tacit
agreement to the idea that Dottor Franchi had been the person to make the “mistake”.

‘I'll talk to him if you like,' Vianello volunteered to Brunetti. ‘As soon as the water goes down.' Turning to Pucetti, he said, ‘Why don't you come along and see what it's like to talk to someone who knows he can't be arrested?'

‘Lot of that around,' Pucetti said, absolutely straight-faced.

HE LIKED IT
back here in the lab, working, preparing medicines that would help people and restore them to health. He liked the order, the jars and bottles lined up as he wanted them to be, obedient to his will and following the system he knew was best. He liked the feeling of unbuttoning his lab coat and reaching into the watch pocket of his waistcoat for the key to the cabinet. He wore a suit to work every day, put his jacket on a hanger in his office but left the waistcoat on under his lab coat. No sweaters at work: waistcoat and tie. How else would people know that he was a professional,
un dottore
, if he did not present himself in a serious way?

The others did not. He no longer felt he had the power to make them conform to his
standards of propriety regarding dress, though he still would not allow the women to wear skirts shorter than their lab coats, just as he would not permit any of them to wear trainers to work. In the summer, sandals were acceptable, but only for the women. A professional had to dress like one, otherwise where were we?