Fatal Remedies

Just at the moment when insurrection – and most of the people in the room carried weapons – was about to break out, Patta removed his glasses and set them tiredly on the papers in front of him. ‘Has anyone anything else to say?’ he asked.

Anyone who might have spoken did not, no doubt deterred by the thought of all those weapons, so the meeting ended. Patta left, followed by Scarpa. Small piles of coins were slid down two sides of the table until they stood either in front of or directly across from Signorina Elettra. With a croupier’s grace she swept them all off the side of the table into one cupped hand and got to her feet, signalling that the meeting really was over.

Brunetti went back upstairs with her, strangely cheered by the sound of coins jingling in the pocket of the grey silk jacket she wore. ‘Accessed?’ he repeated, using the English word but making it, this time, sound like an English word.

‘It’s computer speak, sir,’ she said.

‘To access?’ he asked. ‘It’s a verb now?’

‘Yes, sir, I believe it is.’

‘But it didn’t use to be,’ Brunetti said, remembering when it had been a noun.

‘I think Americans are allowed to do that to their words, sir.’

‘Make them verbs? Or nouns? If they feel like it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Ah,’ Brunetti breathed.

He nodded to her at the top of the first flight of stairs, and she went towards the front of the building and her small office, just outside Patta’s. Brunetti continued up to his own, thinking about the liberties some people thought they could take with language. Just like the liberties Paola thought she could take with the law.

Brunetti went into his office and closed the door. Everything, he realized when he tried to read the papers on his desk, would pull his thoughts back to Paola and the events of the early morning. There would be no resolution and they would not be free of it until they could talk about it, but the memory of what she had dared to do launched him into a state of anger so consuming that he knew he was still incapable of discussing it with her.

He looked out of the window, seeing nothing, and tried to discover the real reason for his rage. Her behaviour, had he failed to stamp out evidence of it, would have put his job and his career in jeopardy. Had it not been for Ruberti’s and Bellini’s presence and quiet complicity, the newspapers would soon have been full of the story. And there were many journalists -Brunetti busied himself for some minutes making a list of them – who would delight in telling the story of the criminal wife of the commissario. He rethought the phrase, turning it into a headline in capital letters.

But she had been stopped, at least for the present. He remembered taking her in his arms, recalled the current of raw fear running through her. Perhaps her exposure to real violence, even though it was no more than violence against property, would have been a sufficient gesture against injustice. And perhaps she would have time to realize that Brunetti’s career would be put at risk by her action. He glanced down at his watch and saw that he had just enough time to get to the station for the train to Treviso. At the thought of being able to deal with something as straightforward as a bank robbery, Brunetti felt himself filled with a sense of happy relief.

* * * *

5

During the journey back from Treviso late in the afternoon, Brunetti felt no sense of success, even though the witness had identified a photo of the man the police believed was the one who appeared on the video and said he would be willing to testify against him. Feeling he had to do it, Brunetti explained who the suspect was, as well as the possible dangers of identifying and testifying against him. Much to his surprise, Signor Iacovantuono, who worked as a cook in a pizzeria, hadn’t been worried about that, indeed, did not seem to be at all interested. He had seen a crime committed. He recognized photos of the man accused of it. And so to him it was his duty as a citizen to testify against the criminal, regardless of the risk to himself or his family. He had seemed, if anything, puzzled at Brunetti’s continued assurances that they would be provided with police protection.

More unsettling, Signor Iacovantuono was from Salerno and hence one of those criminally disposed southerners whose presence here in the north was said to be destroying the social fabric of the nation. ‘But, Commissario,’ he had insisted in his heavily accented voice, ‘if we don’t do something about these people, what life will our children have?’

Brunetti was unable to free himself from the echo of these words and began to fear that his days were now to be haunted by the baying of the moral hounds that had been unleashed in his conscience by Paola’s actions of the night before. It had all seemed so simple to the dark-haired pizzaiolo from Salerno: wrong had been done; it was his duty to see that it was punished. Even when warned of the potential danger, he had remained adamant in his need to do what he thought to be right.

As the sleeping fields on the outskirts of Venice swept past the window of the train, Brunetti wondered how it could seem so simple to Signor Iacovantuono and yet so complicated to him. Perhaps the fact that it was illegal to rob banks made it easier. After all, society was in general agreement about that. And no law said it was wrong to sell a ticket to Thailand or the Philippines; nor that it was illegal to buy one. Nor, for that matter, did the law concern itself with what a person chose to do when he got there, at least not laws that had ever been applied in Italy. Rather like those against blasphemy, they existed in a kind of juridical limbo for the existence of which no real proof had ever been seen.

For the last few months, even longer than that, articles had been appearing in national newspapers and magazines in which various experts analyzed the international traffic in sex-tourism statistically, psychologically, sociologically – in any of those ways the press loved to chew up a hot topic. Brunetti could remember some of them, even recalled a photo of prepubescent girls, said to be working in a brothel in Cambodia, their budding breasts an offence to his eyes, their small faces blotted out by some sort of visual computer static.

He had read the Interpol reports on the subject, seen how the estimates of the numbers involved, both as clients and as – he could find no other word – victims varied by as much as half a million. He had read the numbers and part of him had always chosen to believe the lowest numbers given: his humanity would be soiled were he to accept the highest.

It was the most recent article – he thought it had appeared in Panorama – which had provoked Paola to incendiary rage. He had heard the first salvo two weeks before in Paola’s voice, which had shouted from the back of the apartment ‘Bastardi’, a sound which had shattered the peace of a Sunday afternoon and, Brunetti now feared, far more than that.

He had not had to go back to her study, for she had stormed into the living-room, the magazine a clenched cylinder in her right hand. There had been no preamble. ‘Listen to this, Guido.’

Paola had unrolled the magazine, flattened the page against her knee and straightened up to read, ‘“A paedophile, as the word says, is one who doubtlessly loves children.”‘ She stopped there and looked across the room at him.

‘And rapists, presumably, love women?’ Brunetti had asked.

‘Do you believe this?’ Paola had demanded, ignoring his remark. ‘One of the most popular magazines in the country – and only God knows how that can be – and they can print this shit?’ She glanced down at the page and added, ‘And he teaches sociology. God, have these people no conscience? When is someone in this disgusting country going to say that we’re responsible for our behaviour instead of blaming it on society or, for God’s sake, the victim?’

Because Brunetti could never answer questions like this, he had made no attempt to do so. Instead, he asked her what else the article said.

She’d told him then, her rage not at all diminished by her having to become lucid to do so. Like any good tour, the article touched all the by now famous sites: Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Manila, then brought things closer to home by regurgitating the most recent cases in Belgium and Italy. But it was the tone which had enraged her and, he had to admit, disgusted Brunetti: starting from the astonishing premise that paedophiles loved children, the magazine’s