Suffer the Little Children

he?'

Neither proposed a solution, and finally, after a contemplative silence, Vianello said, 'The wife's probably at the hospital. You want to go and talk to her?'

Brunetti nodded. He got to his feet and went over to the bar.

'Ten Euros, Commissario,' said Sergio.

Brunetti placed the bill on the counter then half turned to the door, where Vianello was already waiting for him. Over his shoulder, Brunetti asked, 'Bambola?'

Sergio smiled. ‘I saw his real name on his work permit, and there was no way I was going to be able to pronounce it. So he suggested I call him Bambola, since it's as close as anyone can get to his real name in Italian.'

'Work permit?' Brunetti asked.

'At that pasticceria in Barbaria delle Tolle,' Sergio said, pronouncing the name of the calle in Veneziano, something Brunetti had never heard a foreigner succeed in doing. 'He actually has one.'

Vianello and Brunetti left the bar, heading back to the Questura. It was not yet seven, so they went to the squad room, where there was an ancient black and white television on which they could watch the early morning news. They sat through the interminable political reports, as ministers and politicians were filmed speaking into microphones while a voiceover explained what they had supposedly said. Then a car bomb. Government denials that inflation was rising. Three new saints.

Gradually, other officers drifted in and joined them. The programme moved on to a badly focused film of a blue Carabinieri sedan pulling up at the Questura in Brescia. A man with his face buried in his handcuffed hands emerged from the car. The voiceover explained that the Carabinieri had effected night-time raids in Brescia, Verona, and Venice to close up a ring of baby-traffickers. Five people had been arrested and three babies consigned to the care of the state.

‘Poor things,' Vianello muttered, and it was clear that he was speaking about the children.

'But what else to do with them?' Brunetti responded.

Alvise, who had come in unnoticed and now stood near them, interrupted loudly, as though speaking to the television but in reality addressing Brunetti, 'What else? Leave them with their parents, for the love of God’

'Their parents didn't want them’ Brunetti observed drily. 'That's why all this is happening.'

Alvise threw his right hand into the air. ‘I don't mean the people they were born to: I mean their parents, the people who raised them, who had them for -' he raised his voice further -'some of them had them for eighteen months. That's a year and a half. They re walking by then, talking. You can't just go in and take them away and put them in an orphanage. Porco Giuda, these are children, not shipments of cocaine we can sequester and put in a closet’ Alvise slammed his hand down on a table and gave his superior a red-faced look. 'What sort of country is this, anyway, where something like this can happen?'

Brunetti could only agree. Alvise's question was perfectly fair. What sort of country, indeed?

The screen was filled with soccer players, either on strike or being arrested, Brunetti could not tell and did not care, so he turned away from the television and left the room, followed by Vianello.

As they climbed the stairs, the Inspector said, 'He's right, you know. Alvise.'

Brunetti did not answer, so Vianello added, 'It might be the first time in recorded history that he has been right, but he's right.'

Brunetti waited at the top of the stairs, and when Vianello reached him, said, 'The law is a heartless beast, Lorenzo.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'It means,' Brunetti said, stopping just inside the door to his office, 'that if these people are allowed to keep the babies, it establishes a precedent: people can buy babies or get them any way they want and from anywhere they want, and for any purpose they want, and it's completely legal for them to do so.'

'What other purpose could there be than to raise them and love them?' asked an outraged Vianello.

From the first time he had heard them, Brunetti had decided to treat all rumours of the buying of babies and children for use as involuntary organ donors as an urban myth. But, over the years, the rumours had grown in frequency and moved geographically from the Third World to the First, and now, though he still refused to believe them, hearing them unsettled him. Logic suggested that an operation as complicated as a transplant required a number of people and a controlled and well-staffed medical environment where at least one of the patients could recover. The chances that this could happen and that all of those involved would keep quiet were odds Brunetti was not willing to give. This, at least, surely held true in Italy. Beyond its borders, Brunetti no longer dared to speculate.

He still remembered reading - it must have been more than a decade ago - the agonized, and agonizing, letter in La Repubblica, from a woman who admitted that she had broken what she knew to be the law and taken her twelve-year-old daughter to India for a kidney transplant. The letter recounted the diagnosis, the assigning of her daughter's name to a ranking so low on the health service waiting list for transplants as to amount to a sentence of death.

The woman wrote that she was fully aware that some person, some other child, perhaps, would be constrained by poverty to sell a piece of their living flesh. She knew, further, that the donor's health would afterwards be permanently compromised, regardless of what they were paid and regardless of what they did with the money. But when she measured her daughter's life against the increased risk for some stranger, she had opted to accept that guilt. So she had taken her daughter to India with one badly functioning kidney and had brought her back to Italy with a healthy one.

One of the things Brunetti had always secretly admired about some of the ancients - and he had to admit that it was one of the reasons he read them so relentlessly - was the apparent ease with which they made ethical decisions. Right and wrong; white and black. Ah, what easy times they seemed.

But along came science to stick a rod between the spinning wheels of ethical decision while the rules tried to catch up with science and technology. Conception could be achieved any which way, the dead were no longer entirely dead, the living not necessarily fully alive, and maybe there did exist a place where hearts and livers were for sale.

He wanted to express this in his answer to Vianello, but could find no way to compress or phrase it so that it made any sense. Instead, he turned to Vianello and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I don't have any big answers, only small ideas’

'What does that mean?'

'It means,' he said, though the idea came to him only as he spoke, 'that because we didn't arrest him, maybe we can try to protect him’

‘I’m not sure I understand,' said Vianello.

'I'm not sure I do, either, Lorenzo, but I think he's a man who might need protection.'

‘From Marvilli?'

'No, not from him. But from the sort of men Marvilli works for.'

Vianello sat down in one of the chairs in Brunetti's office. 'Have you dealt with them before?' he asked.

Brunetti, still feeling the buzz of the caffeine and sugar and too restless to sit, leaned against his desk. 'No, not with the men in Verona. I suppose I meant the type’

'Men who'd give the babies to an orphanage?' Vianello asked, unable to evade the hold that thought had taken on him.

'Yes,' Brunetti agreed, 'I suppose you could refer to them that way.'

Vianello acknowledged this concept with a shake of his head. 'How can we protect him?'

'The first way would be to find out if he has a lawyer and, if so, who that is’ Brunetti answered.

With a wry smile, Vianello said, 'Sounds like you want to stack the deck against us.'

'If they're going to charge him with the list Marvilli gave us, then he needs a good one.'

'Donatini?' Vianello suggested, pronouncing the name as though it were a dirty word.

Brunetti raised his hands in feigned horror. 'No, I'd draw the line short of that. He'll need someone as good as Donatini, but honest.'

More because it was expected of him than because he fully meant it, Vianello repeated, 'Honest? A lawyer?'