Suffer the Little Children

now?'

The nurse gave a nervous smile. 'I'm sorry, Signore, but he's gone. He went home as soon as he finished his rounds. I didn't know he'd gone, and when someone mentioned it, I came down here to tell you. I'm sorry,' he repeated, sounding as if he were responsible for Dottor Damasco's disappearance.

Brunetti looked at his watch and saw that more than half an hour had passed. 'It's all right,' he said, suddenly aware of just how tired he was. He wished that, like Dottor Damasco, he could just finish his rounds and go home.

Instead, making a pretence of being fully awake, he thanked the young man and started back towards the reception desk. Passing the nurses' station, he approached the glass doors that led to the ward. He was stunned to see, halfway down the corridor, a few paces from the closed door of Pedrolli's room, the unmistakable back of his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta. Brunetti recognized the broad shoulders in the cashmere overcoat and the thick head of silver hair. What he did not recognize was the attentive, posture of the Vice-Questore, who was leaning towards a man, all of whom save an outline was blocked from view by Patta's body. Patta raised his right hand and patted at the air between them in a conciliatory manner, then lowered if to his side and moved back a step as if to allow more room for the man's response.

Beta dog deferring to alpha dog, was Brunetti's instant thought, and he retreated until he was partly hidden behind the chest-high counter of the nurses' station. Should Patta start to turn towards him, he would have time to back away and out of sight while he decided if he wanted his superior to discover him; he could take a few steps down the corridor, turn, then give vent to the very real surprise he felt at seeing his superior here at this hour.

The other man, most of his considerable bulk still obscured by Patta's body, raised both hands in what could be exasperation or surprise, then jabbed an angry finger repeatedly towards the closed door of Pedrolli's room. In response, Patta's head shook from side to side, then nodded up and down, much in the manner of a toy dog in the back of a car that had just hit a rough patch.

Suddenly the other man wheeled away from Patta and started down the corridor away from him. All Brunetti saw before he ducked behind the counter was the man's back: neck almost as thick as his head, short buzz-cut white hair, a body almost as wide as it was tall. When Brunetti looked again, he saw that Patta had made no motion to follow the man. As Brunetti watched, the man reached the doors at the end of the corridor and shoved them open, slamming the right one back against the wall with a crack that reverberated down the corridor.

Brunetti's impulse was to approach Patta and feign surprise, but good sense propelled him backwards, down a corridor, then through another set of doors. He waited there a full five minutes, and when he returned to neurologia, there was no sign of Patta.

9

Brunetti went back to the corridor outside Pedrolli's room, waiting for Signora Marcolini to emerge so that he could slip back into his role of sympathetic listener. He reached into his jacket pocket for his telefbnino but discovered that he had left it at home. He did not want to miss Signora Marcolini when she emerged, but he did want to call Paola and tell her he would not be home for lunch and had no idea when he would be.

He sat in the plastic chair and stared into space, careful to keep his head forward and away from the temptation of the wall behind him. After less than a minute, he went to the end of the corridor and read the list of instructions for evacuation in case of fire, then the list of doctors working on the ward. Gina came through the door on the other side of the desk.

'Signora Gina, excuse me, but could I use the phone?'

She gave him a very small smile and said, 'Dial nine first.' He picked up the phone behind the nurses' desk and dialled his home number.

'Si?' he heard Paola answer.

'Still too tired to talk?' he couldn't resist asking.

'Of course not,' she answered. Then, 'Where are you?'

'At the hospital.' Trouble?'

'The Carabinieri over-reacted making an arrest, it seems, and the man is here. He's a doctor, so at least he's assured of good care.'

'The Carabinieri attacked a doctor?' she said, incapable of keeping the shock from her voice.

‘I didn't say they attacked him, Paola,' he said, though what she said was true enough. ‘I said they over-reacted.'

'And what does that mean, that they drove their boats too fast taking him to the hospital? Or made too much noise and disturbed the neighbours when they were kicking in his door?'

Though Brunetti tended to share Paola's scepticism about the overall competence of the Carabinieri, he did not, in his caffeine-and-sugar-induced state, want to have to listen to her voice it. 'It means he resisted arrest and broke the nose of one of the men who were sent to get him.'

She was on to him like a hawk. 'One of the men? How many were there?'

'Two’ Brunetti chose to lie, marvelling at how quickly he had been manoeuvred into defending the men who had assaulted Pedrolli.

'Armed men?' she asked.

Suddenly tired of this, Brunetti said, 'Paola, I'll tell you everything when I see you, all right?'

'Of course,' she answered. 'Do you know him?'

'No’ Having heard enough about the doctor to have formed a favourable opinion of him did not count as knowing him, Brunetti told himself.

'Why did they arrest him?' she asked.

'He adopted a baby a year and a half ago, and it seems now that he did it illegally’

'What happened to the baby?' Paola asked.

'They took him away,' Brunetti said in a neutral voice.

'Took him away?' Paola asked with all of her former belligerence. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'He was taken into care.'

'Into care as in given back to his real mother, or into care as in put in an orphanage?'

'The latter, I'm afraid,' Brunetti admitted.

There was a long pause, after which Paola said, as if to herself, 'A year and a half,' and then she added, 'God, what heartless bastards they are, eh?'

Betray the state by agreeing with her or betray humanity by demurring: Brunetti considered the options open to him and gave the only response he could. 'Yes’

'We'll talk about it when you get home, all right?' said a suddenly accommodating Paola.

'Yes,' Brunetti said and replaced the phone.

Brunetti was relieved he had not told Paola about the other people, the ones who had been kept under surveillance for almost two years. Alvise - even Brunetti himself - had focused on that number, that year and a half that a knowing authority had allowed the new parents to keep the child. That's when a man becomes a father, Brunetti knew, or at least he remembered that it was during that first year and a half that his own children had been soldered into his heart. Had either of them been taken from him, for any reason, after that time, he would have gone through life with some essential part of himself irreparably damaged. Before that conviction could fully take shape in his mind, Brunetti realized that, had either child been taken from him at any time after he first saw them, his suffering would have been no different than if he had had them for eighteen months, or eighteen years..

Back in his chair, he resumed his consideration of the wall and of the strange fact of Patta's presence, and