Fatal Remedies

could say anything, Raffi came into the kitchen, bent down to kiss his mother and went to the stove to pour himself a cup of coffee from the six-cup moka express. He added hot milk, came back to the table, sat down and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I used your razor, Papa.’

‘To do what?’ Chiara asked, ‘trim your fingernails? There’s certainly nothing growing on that face of yours that needs a razor.’ That said, she moved out of Raffi’s range and closer to Brunetti, who gave her a reproving squeeze through the thick flannel of her pyjamas.

Raffi leaned towards her across the table, but his heart wasn’t in it and he stopped his hand over the pile of brioches and picked one up. He dunked one end into the coffee and took an enormous bite. ‘How come there’s brioches?’ he wanted to know. When no one answered he turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘You go out?’

Brunetti nodded and took his arms from around Chiara. He slipped out from under her and got to his feet.

‘You get the papers, too?’ Raffi asked from around another mouthful of brioche.

‘No,’ Brunetti said, moving to the door.

‘How come?’

‘I forgot,’ he lied to his only son, went into the hall, put on his coat and left the apartment.

* * * *

Outside, he turned towards Rialto and the decades-long familiar route to the Questura. Most mornings he found delight in some small element of the walk: a particularly absurd headline on one of the national papers, some new misspelling on the front of the cheap sweat-shirts that filled the booths on both sides of the market, the first arrival of some longed-for fruit or vegetable. But this morning he saw little and noticed nothing as he made his way through the market, over the bridge and into the first of the narrow streets that would take him to the Questura and to work.

Much of the time it took him to walk to his office he spent thinking about Ruberti and Bellini, wondering if their personal loyalty to a superior who had treated them with a certain measure of humanity would prove sufficient motive for them to betray their oath of loyalty to the State. He assumed it would, but when he realized how suspiciously close this was to the scale of values that had animated Paola’s behaviour, he forced his mind away from them and, instead, contemplated the day’s immediate trial: the ninth of the ‘convocations du personnel’ which his immediate supervisor, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, had instituted at the Questura after the recent training course he’d attended at Interpol headquarters in Lyon.

There, in Lyon, Patta had exposed himself to the elements of the various nations which now made up united Europe: champagne and truffles from France, Danish ham, English beer and some very old Spanish brandy. At the same time he had sampled the various managerial styles on offer by bureaucrats of the different nations. At the end of the course he’d returned to Italy, suitcases filled with smoked salmon and Irish butter, head bursting with new, progressive ideas about how to handle the people who worked for him. The first of these, and the only one so far to be revealed to the members of the Questura, was the now weekly ‘convocations du personnel’, an interminable meeting at which matters of surpassing triviality were presented to the entire staff, there to be discussed, dissected and ultimately disregarded by everyone present.

When the meetings had first begun two months ago, Brunetti had joined the majority in the opinion that they would not last more than a week or two, but here they were, after eight of them, with no end in sight. After the second Brunetti had started to bring his newspaper, but that had been stopped by Lieutenant Scarpa, Patta’s personal assistant, who had repeatedly asked if Brunetti were so little interested in what happened in the city that he would read a paper during the meetings. He had then tried a book, but he could never find one small enough to hold in his cupped hands.

His salvation had come, as had often been the case in the last years, from Signorina Elettra. On the morning of the fifth meeting she had come into his office ten minutes before it was due to begin and asked Brunetti, with no explanation, for ten thousand lire.

He had handed it over and, in return, she’d given him twenty brass-centred five-hundred-lire coins. In response to his questioning look she’d handed him a small card, little bigger than the box that held compact discs.

He’d looked down at the card, seen that it was divided into twenty-five equally sized squares, each of which contained a word or phrase, printed in tiny letters. He’d had to hold it close to his eyes to read some of them: ‘Maximize’, ‘prioritize’, ‘outsource’, ‘liaison’, ‘interface’, ‘issue’ and a host of the newest, emptiest buzz-words to have slipped into the language in recent years.

‘What’s this?’ he’d asked.

‘Bingo,’ was Signorina Elettra’s simple answer. Before he could ask, she’d explained, ‘My mother used to play it. All you have to do is wait for someone to use one of the words on your card – all the cards are different – and when you hear it, you cover it with a coin. The first one to cover five words in a straight line wins.’

‘Wins what?’

‘The money of all the other players.’

‘What other players?’

‘You’ll see,’ was all she’d had time to say before they were summoned to the meeting.

And since that day the meetings had been tolerable, at least for those provided with the small cards. That first day there had been only Brunetti, Signorina Elettra and one of the other commissari, a woman just returned from maternity leave. Since then, however, the cards had appeared on the laps or within the notebooks of an ever expanding number of people and each week Brunetti felt as much interest in seeing who had a card as in actually winning the game. Each week, too, the words changed, usually in conformity with the changing patterns or enthusiasms of Patta’s speech: they sometimes reflected the Vice-Questore’s attempts at urbanity and ‘multiculturalism’ – a word which had also appeared – as well as his occasional attempt to use the vocabulary of languages he did not speak; hence, ‘voodoo economies’, ‘pyramid scheme’ and ‘Wirtschaftlicher Aufschwung’.

Brunetti arrived at the Questura half an hour before the meeting was scheduled to begin. Neither Ruberti nor Bellini was on duty when he got there, so it was a different officer who handed him the previous night’s crime log when he asked to see it. He glanced with every appearance of lack of interest at the pages: a burglary in Dorsoduro at the home of people away on vacation; a fight in a bar in Santa Marta between sailors from a Turkish freighter and two crewmen from a Greek cruise ship. Three of them had been taken to Pronto Soccorso at the Giustinian Hospital, one with a broken arm, but no charges had been pressed as both boats were to sail that afternoon. The window of a travel agency in Campo Martin had been shattered by a rock, but no one had been arrested, nor had there been any witnesses. And the all-night machine that sold prophylactics in front of a pharmacy in Cannaregio had been prised open, probably with a screwdriver and, according to the calculations of the owner of the pharmacy, seventeen thousand lire had been taken. And sixteen packages of prophylactics.

The meeting, when it finally convened, brought no surprises. At the beginning of the second hour, Vice- Questore Patta announced that, in order to assure that they were not being used to launder money, the various non-profit organizations in the city would have to be asked to allow their files to be ‘accessed’ by the computers of the police, at which point Signorina Elettra made a small motion with her right hand, looked across at Vianello, smiled and said, but very softly, ‘Bingo.’

‘Excuse me, Signorina?’ Vice-Questore Patta was aware that something had been going on for some time but ignorant of what it could be.

She looked at the Vice-Questore, repeated her smile and said, ‘Dingo, sir.’

‘Dingo?’ he enquired, peering at her over the tops of the half-glasses he affected for these meetings.

‘The animal protection people, sir, the ones who put the canisters in the shops to collect money to take care of strays. They’re a non-profit organization. So we should contact them as well.’

‘Indeed?’ Patta asked, not certain that this was what he had heard, or what he had expected.

‘I wouldn’t want anyone to forget them,’ she explained.

Patta turned his attention back to the papers in front of him and the meeting continued. Brunetti, chin propped on his hand, watched as six other people made small stacks of coins in front of themselves. Lieutenant Scarpa watched them carefully, but the cards, previously shielded by hands, notebooks and coffee cups, had all disappeared. Only the coins remained – and the meeting, which dragged itself tiredly along for yet another half- hour.