Suffer the Little Children

'Yes’

After she had said nothing for a long time, he opened his eyes and glanced in her direction. 'What is it?' he asked, sensing that she had something she wanted to say.

'It seems I can't read a magazine or a newspaper without coming on an article about overpopulation,' Paola said. 'Six billion, seven, eight, dire warnings about the population bomb and the lack of sufficient natural resources to support us all. And at the same time, people are going to fertility clinics ...'

'In order to add to the population?' he asked.

'No’ she answered instantly. 'Hardly. In order to satisfy a real human urge.'

'Not a human need?' he asked.

'Guido’ she began in a voice she forced to sound .tired, 'we've been here before, trying to define 'need'. You know what I think it means: if you don't get it - like food or water - you die.'

'And I keep thinking it's more: that it's those things that make us different from the other animals.'

He saw her nod, but then she said, 'I think I don't want to pursue this now. Besides, I know that, even if you badger me with logic and good sense, and even if you argue from the personal about our own children, you still won't get me to agree that it's a need, having children. So let me save us both time and energy by not talking about it, all right?'

He leaned forward to pick up the bottle, then decided against it and set it back on the table. ‘I went to Verona with Signorina Elettra,' he said, surprising himself with the revelation. 'We were a couple desperate to have a child. I wanted to see if the clinic is involved with these adoptions.'

'Did they believe you? At the clinic?' she asked, though to Brunetti the more important matter was whether the clinic was in fact involved in the false adoptions.

'I think so,' he said, considering it better not to attempt to explain why this might be so.

Paola shifted her feet on to the floor and sat up. She placed her glass on the table, then turned to Brunetti and picked a long dark hair from the front of his shirt. She let it drop to the carpet and got to her feet. Saying nothing, she went into the kitchen to prepare the rest of dinner.

16

As the days passed, the Pedrolli case, and to a lesser degree the cases of illegal adoption in other cities, disappeared from the news. Brunetti continued to interest himself in a semi-official way. Vianello managed to find the transcript of the conversation Brunetti had had with the woman who lived near Rialto. When the Inspector went to speak to her, she could remember nothing further, save that the woman who made the phone call had worn glasses. The apartment opposite, where the pregnant woman had spent those days, turned out to be owned by a man in Torino and was rented out by the week or month. When questioned, the managing agent found only an indication that a Signor Giulio D'Alessio, who had not given an address and had preferred to pay with cash, had rented the apartment during the period when the young woman had been there. No, the agent had no clear memory of Signor Rossi. The trail, if indeed it had been a trail, ended there.

Marvilli did not return either of the calls Brunetti made to his office, and the other contacts he had at the Carabinieri failed to divulge any information other than what had been given to the press: the children were in the care of social services and the investigation was proceeding. He did learn, however, that a fax had been sent by the Carabinieri to the Questura the day before the raid, informing the Venice police of the planned raid and giving Pedrolli's name and address. The absence of reply from the police had been taken by the Carabinieri to signify assent. In response to Brunetti's request, the Carabinieri sent a copy of the fax, along with the receipt for its successful transmission to the appropriate number at the Questura.

Brunetti's reports to the Vice-Questore had included this information, as well as a note of the failure of all attempts to locate the missing fax. In response, Patta suggested that Brunetti return to his other cases and let the Carabinieri get on with Dottor Pedrolli.

Brunetti could not understand the media's apparentlack of interest in the story: he assumed that the veil of official or bureaucratic privacy would have descended to cover the children, their names and their whereabouts, but the parents and the lengths to which they had gone in order to obtain children would surely still be of interest to readers and viewers alike. In a country where the presence of a child in a criminal case, whether as the victim of murder or the survivor of an attempt - or, even better, as the perpetrator - was sure to keep media coverage of a case percolating for days, perhaps weeks, it was strange that these people had so swiftly disappeared from public view.

Years after her arrest for the murder of her child, an interview with 'la madre di Cogne' - even simply an article about her - was a surefire way to raise viewer or reader numbers. Even a Ukrainian who tossed her newborn into a skip was bound to get headlines for three days. But the local press dropped Pedrolli after two days, though La Repubblica kept the story going for another three before it was superseded by the death of a young Carabiniere, shot by a convicted murderer out of prison on a weekend pass. It was the speed with which the Pedrolli story vanished from II Gazzettino and La Nuova, however, that aroused Brunetti's curiosity, so on the second morning when there was no mention of the case in the papers, he called his friend Pelusso at his office. The journalist explained that the word at II Gazzettino was that the story had not appealed to someone, and so it had been dropped.

Brunetti, a dedicated reader of that newspaper, knew who the chief advertisers were, and Signorina Elettra had discovered that Signora Marcolini belonged to the plumbing supply branch of the family. Thus Brunetti observed To say toilet is to say Marcolini’

'Indeed’ agreed Pelusso, but then quickly added, as though driven to it by whatever remnant of respect for accuracy had managed to survive his decades of journalistic employment, 'He's the likely suspect, because of his daughter, but no one here mentioned his name directly’

'You think it's necessary to mention it?' Brunetti asked. 'After all, as you said, she's his daughter, and this sort of publicity can't work to anyone's good.'

'Don't be so certain about that, Guido’ the journalist answered. 'The Carabinieri broke in: the husband might still be in the hospital for all anyone knows. And they took the baby. That's got to be enough to earn the two of them a great deal of sympathy, regardless of how they got the baby in the first place’

This presented an interesting possibility to Brunetti, and he said, 'The Carabinieri, then.'

'Why would they squelch a story like this?'

'Well, first, to dispose of something that presents them in a bad light, but also maybe to lead the people they think are behind all of this to believe it's safe to begin coming out of the woodwork’ Brunetti suggested. When Pelusso said nothing, Brunetti continued, forming his ideas as he continued to speak. 'If this is some sort of ring, it means whoever's organizing it knows a number of people who want babies and are willing to pay for them, and that means there have got to be other women who have agreed to give them up after they're born.' 'Obviously.'

'But you can't postpone that, can you?' Brunetti asked. 'If a woman's going to have .a baby, then she's going to have it when the baby is ready to come, not when some middle man tells her it's time.'

'And if there's as much money in this as I've heard there is,' Pelusso continued slowly, adding his own reasoning to Brunetti's, 'then they'll get back in touch with their buyers.'

Immediately alert, Brunetti asked, ‘I)o you hear much about this sort of thing?'

'I think a lot of it's urban myth,' Pelusso answered. 'You know, like the Chinese who never die because there's never a funeral. But a lot of people do talk about this business of buying and selling babies.'

'You ever hear anyone mention a price?' Brunetti asked, hoping that Pelusso would not ask him why the police didn't already have this information.

There followed a longish pause, as though Pelusso were entertaining that same thought, but when he spoke, it was merely to answer Brunetti's question. 'No, not with any certainty. I've heard rumours, but as I told you, Guido, people talk about it the way they talk about everything: 'I heard this from someone who knows.' 'My friend knows all about this.' 'My neighbour has a cousin who has a friend who ...' There's no way to know whether we're being told the truth or not'

Brunetti stopped himself from observing that this uncertainty was a common phenomenon and hardly limited to Pelusso's experience as a member of the press. Brunetti had no way of knowing if Italians were more gullible