Fatal Remedies

towards San Polo. They crossed the campo, went over a bridge, and turned into a narrow calle on the right. Just beyond it, they walked right and rang the Morosinis’ bell. The door snapped open almost instantly and they ascended to the piano nobile, where Giovanni Morosini stood at the open door to their apartment, the sound of voices flowing out and down the steps from behind him.

A large man, Morosini still wore the beard he’d first grown as a student caught up in the violent protests of sixty-eight. It had turned grey and grizzled with the passing of the years, and he often joked that the same thing had happened to his ideals and principles. A bit taller and considerably wider than Brunetti, he seemed to fill up the entire space of the doorway. He greeted Paola with a double kiss and gave Brunetti a warm handshake.

‘Welcome, welcome. Come in and have something to drink,’ he said as he took their coats and hung them in the cupboard beside the door. ‘Clara’s in the kitchen, but I have some people I’d like you to meet.’ As always, Brunetti was struck by the disparity in the man’s size and the softness of his voice, barely more than a whisper, as if he were perpetually afraid of being overheard.

He stepped back to let them enter and preceded them down the central hallway that led to the large salotto, off which all the other rooms in the house opened. Four people stood in one corner of the room, and Brunetti was instantly struck by how much two of them appeared to be a couple and how little the other two did.

Hearing them, the people in the room turned and Brunetti saw the eyes of the non-coupled woman light up when she saw Paola. It was not a pleasant sight.

Morosini led them round a low sofa and over to the others. ‘Paola and Guido Brunetti,’ he began, ‘I’d like to present Dottor Klaus Rotgeiger, a friend of ours who lives on the other side of the campo, and his wife Bettina.’ The two who formed a couple put down their glasses on the table behind them and turned to extend their hands in grips as warm and tight as had been Morosini’s. The usual compliments fell from their lips in lightly accented Italian. Brunetti was struck by a shared ranginess of build and clarity of eye.

‘And’, Morosini continued, ‘Dottoressa Filomena Santa Lucia and her husband, Luigi Bernardi.’ The second couple placed their glasses next to the others and extended their hands. The same compliments flowed back and forth. This time, Brunetti registered a sort of tactile reluctance on both their parts to allow their hands to be held overlong by strangers. He also noticed that, though they spoke to both him and Paola, they spent far more time observing her. The woman was dark-eyed and had the air of one who believed herself to be far prettier than she was. The man spoke with the elided R of Milano.

Clara’s voice called out from behind them, ‘A tavola, a tavola, ragazzi’ and Giovanni led them into the next room, where a long oval table stood parallel to a bank of tall windows that looked across at the buildings on the other side of the campo.

Clara appeared from the kitchen then, head enveloped in a cloud of vapour rising from a tureen that she carried in front of her like a votive offering. Brunetti could smell broccoli and anchovies, and remembered just how hungry he was.

Conversation during the pasta course was general, the sort of delicate jockeying that always goes on when eight people who really aren’t sure of where sympathies lie try to settle what the topics of interest are. Brunetti was struck, as he had been frequently and strongly in recent years, by the absence of talk about politics. He wasn’t sure if no one cared any more or if the subject had simply become too inflammable to permit strangers to attempt it. Regardless of the cause, it had joined religion in some sort of conversational gulag where no one any longer dared, or cared, to go.

Dottor Rotgeiger was explaining, in Italian Brunetti thought was quite good, the problems he was having at the Ufficio Stranieri in getting permission to prolong his stay in Venice for another year. Each time he went, he was assailed by self-proclaimed ‘agents’ who lingered by the long lines and said they could help speed up the paperwork.

Brunetti accepted a second helping of pasta and said nothing.

By the time the fish course began – an enormous boiled branzino that must have been half a metre long – conversation had passed to Dottoressa Santa Lucia, a cultural anthropologist who had just returned from a long research trip to Indonesia, where she had spent a year studying familial power structures.

Though she directed her remarks at the entire table, Brunetti could see that her eyes were most often directed at Paola. ‘You have to understand’, she said, not quite smiling but with the satisfied look of one who was able to grasp the subtlety of an alien culture, ‘that the family structure is based upon the preservation of same. That is, everything must be done to keep the family intact, even if it means the sacrifice of its least important members.’

‘As defined by whom?’ Paola asked, taking a tiny piece of fish bone from her mouth and placing it with excessive care at the side of her plate.

‘That’s a very interesting question,’ Dottoressa Santa Lucia said in exactly the tone she must have used when explaining the same thing hundreds of times to her students. ‘But I think this is one of the few cases where the social judgements of their very complex and sophisticated culture agree with our own more simplistic view.’ She paused, waiting for someone to ask for clarification.

Bettina Rotgeiger complied: ‘In what way the same?’

‘In that we agree on who they are, the least important members of the society.’ Having said this, the dottoressa paused and, seeing that she had the full attention of everyone at the table, took a small sip of wine while they awaited her answer.

‘Let me guess,’ Paola interrupted, smiling, her chin propped in her open palm, her fish forgotten below her. ‘Young girls?’

After a brief pause, Dottoressa Santa Lucia said, ‘Exactly,’ giving no sign that she was disconcerted at having had her thunder stolen. ‘Do you find that strange?’

‘Not in the least,’ Paola answered, smiled again, and returned her attention to her branzino.

‘Yes,’ the anthropologist continued, ‘in a certain sense, societal norms being what they are, they’re expendable, given that more of them are born than most families can support and the fact that male children are far more desirable.’ She looked around to see how this went down and added with a haste she made obvious was caused by fear that she had somehow offended their rigidly Western sensibilities, ‘In their terms, of course, thinking as they do. After all, who else will provide for aged parents?’

Brunetti picked up the bottle of Chardonnay and leaned across the table to fill Paola’s glass, then filled his own. Their eyes met; she gave him a small smile and a smaller nod.

‘I think it’s necessary that we see this issue through their eyes, that we try to consider it as they do, at least so far as our own cultural prejudices will allow us to do so,’ Dottoressa Santa Lucia proclaimed and was gone for some minutes, explaining the need to expand our vision so as to encompass cultural differences and give to them the respect that was earned by having been developed over the course of many millennia to respond to the specific needs of diverse societies.

After a while that Brunetti measured as the time it took him to finish a refill of wine and eat his helping of boiled potatoes, she finished, picked up her glass and smiled, as if waiting for the appreciative members of her class to approach the podium to tell her how illuminating the lecture had been. A lengthening pause stretched out and was at last broken by Paola, who said, ‘Clara, let me help you carry these plates into the kitchen.’ Brunetti was not the only person who breathed a sigh of relief.

* * * *

Later, on the way home, Brunetti asked, ‘Why did you let her go?’

Beside him Paola shrugged.

‘No, why? Tell me.’

‘Too easy,’ Paola said dismissively. ‘It was obvious from the beginning that she wanted to get me to talk about it, about why I did it. Why else would she bring up all that nonsense about girls being expendable?’

Brunetti walked beside her, her elbow tucked into the angle of his arm. He nodded. ‘Maybe she believed it.’ They walked a few more paces, considering this, then he said, ‘I always hate to see women like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Who don’t like women.’ They walked a few more steps. ‘Can you imagine what a class of hers must be like?’