Suffer the Little Children

They remained in role until they were on the train back to Venice, sitting across from one another in the all but empty first-class carriage of the Eurocity from Milano. They had not spoken while they waited in the clinic for the taxi the receptionist called, nor in the taxi itself. But in the train, with no remaining chance that they would be seen or overheard, Signorina Elettra sat back in her seat and took a deep breath. Brunetti thought he saw her real persona return to take possession of her, but since he was never quite sure just what that persona was, he was not certain that this had actually taken place.

‘Well?^’ Brunetti asked her.

'No, not yet’ she said. ‘I'm still exhausted from all those tears’

‘Now did you do it?' Brunetti asked. 'What? Cry?'

'Yes.' In over a decade, he had seen her cry only once, and then it had been for real. Many of the tales of human misery and malice that unfolded at the Questura were such as to cause a stone to weep, but she had always maintained a professional distance from them, even when many others, including the impenetrably unimaginative Alvise, were moved.

'I thought about the masegni,' she said with a small smile.

She had made odd remarks in the past, but to suggest that she could cry at the thought of paving stones was not something he was prepared for. 'I beg your pardon,' he said, all thought of Dottor Calamandri momentarily forgotten, 'why do you cry at the thought of the masegni?'

'Because I'm Venetian,' she answered, aiding understanding no further.

The conductor passed by at that moment, and when he was finished checking their tickets and had moved down the compartment, Brunetti said, 'Could you explain?'

'They're gone, you know? Or hadn't you noticed?' she asked.

Where would paving stones go? Brunetti wondered. And how? Perhaps the stress of the last hour had ...

'During the repaving of the streets,' she continued, preventing him from completing the thought. 'When they raised the sidewalks against acqua alta,' she added, raising her eyebrows in silent comment on the folly of that attempt. 'They dug up all the masegni, the ones that had been there for centuries’ Hearing her, he remembered the months he had spent watching the workmen, as campi and colli were torn up, pipes and phone wires installed or renewed, then everything put back again.

'And what did they replace them with?' she asked. Brunetti tried never to encourage the asking of rhetorical questions by dignifying them with an answer, and so he remained silent.

'They replaced them with machine-cut, perfectly rectangular stones, every one a living example of just how perfect four right angles can be’

Brunetti remembered now being struck by how well the new stones did fit together, unlike the old ones with their rough edges and irregular surfaces.

'And where did the old ones go, I wonder?' she asked, raising her right index finger in the air in a ritual gesture of interrogation’When Brunetti still made no answer, she said, 'Friends of mine saw them, stacked up neatly in a field in Marghera.' She smiled, and went on: 'carefully bound in wire, as if ready for shipment to somewhere else. They even photographed them. And there has been talk of a piazza somewhere in Japan where they were used.'

Brunetti made no attempt to disguise his confusion. Japan?' he asked.

That's just talk, sir’ she said. 'Since I haven't seen them myself, only the photographs, I suppose all of this could be nothing more than urban myth. And there's no proof, well, no proof aside from the fact that they were there, thousands of them, centuries-old stones, when the work started, and now most of them aren't there. So unless they decided to turn themselves into lemmings and jump into the laguna one night when no one was watching, someone took them and didn't bring them back’

Brunetti was busy calculating the sheer volume of stone. There would have been boatloads, truckfuls, whole acres of the things. Too many of them to hide, enormously expensive to transport, how could anyone organize such a thing? And for what purpose?

Almost as if he had posed the questions out loud, she said. To sell them, Commissario. To dig them up and take them away at the city's expense - hand-cut, centuries-old volcanic rock paving stones - and sell them. That's why’ He thought she had finished but she added, 'Even the French and the Austrians, when they invaded - and God knows they stripped us clean - at least they left us the paving stones. Just thinking about it is enough to make me weep.'

As it would, Brunetti realized, any Venetian. He found his imagination working, wondering who might have organized this, who would have had to be complicit in order for it to have been done, and he liked none of the possibilities that occurred to him. From nowhere, the memory arose of an expression his mother had often used, that Neapolitans 'would steal the shoes from your feet while you were walking⁷. Well, how much more clever we Venetians, for some of us manage to steal the paving stones from under our own feet.

'As to Dottor Calamandri,' she said, reeling in Brunetti's wandering attention, lie seemed like a very busy doctor who wanted to be honest with his patients. He at least wanted them not to have any illusions about the possibilities that were open to them. And to discourage false illusions.' She gave that time to register and then asked, 'And you?'

'Pretty much the same. He could very easily have recommended that we have the whole series of tests done again. At his clinic. In his lab.'

'But he didn't,' she agreed. 'Which is a sign of an honest man.'

'Or one who wants to appear to be honest,' Brunetti suggested.

Those would have been my next words,' she said with a smile; The train began to slow as it approached the Mestre station. On their left, people hurried into and out of the station, into and out of McDonald's. They watched the people on the platform and in the other train to their right, and then the doors slammed shut and they were moving again.

They talked idly, discussing Dottoressa Fontana's chilly manner and agreeing that the only thing now was to wait to see if Brunini would receive a phone call from someone saying they worked with the clinic. Failing that, perhaps either Pedrolli or his wife would be more form-coming, or Signorina Elettra would find a way to worm her way into the records of the ongoing Carabinieri investigation.

A few minutes later, the smokestacks of Marghera came into view on their right, and Brunetti wondered what sort of comment Signorina Elettra would have to make about them today. But it seemed that her ration of indignation had been used up by the masegni, for she remained silent, and soon the train drew into Santa Lucia.

As they walked towards the exit, Brunetti looked up at the clock and saw that it was thirteen minutes after six. He could easily catch the Number One that left at six-sixteen: like a baby penguin that has imprinted the image of his mother in his memory, Brunetti had known for more than a generation that the Number One left from in front of the station at ten-minute intervals, starting at six minutes after the hour.

'I think ‘I’LL walk’ she said as they started down the steps, threading their way through the mass of people rushing for their trains. Neither of them discussed the possibility, or the duty, of going back to the Questura.

At the bottom, they paused, she poised to move off to the left and he towards the imbarcadero on the right. 'Thank you,' Brunetti said, smiling.

'You're more than welcome, Commissario. It's far better than spending the afternoon working on staff projections for next month.' She raised a hand in farewell, and disappeared into the streams of people walking from the station. He watched her for a moment, but then he heard the vaporetto reversing its engines as it pulled up to the imbarcadero, and he hurried to his boat and home.

'You're early tonight,' Paola called from the living room as he let himself into the apartment. She made it sound as if his unexpected arrival was the most pleasant thing that had happened to her in some time.

'I had to leave the city to go and talk to someone, and when I got back it was too late to bother going back to work,' he called while he hung up his jacket. He chose to leave it all very vague, this trip out of the city; if she asked he would tell her, but there was no reason to burden her with the details of his work. He loosened his tie: