Suffer the Little Children

Brunetti put his elbow on his desk and rubbed his hand across his mouth a few times as he considered the implications of this. Access to those files meant access to all information about medication, hospitalization, diseases cured or under treatment. It meant that an unauthorized person would have access to potentially secret parts of another person's life.

'AIDS,' Brunetti said. After a long pause, he added, 'Drug rehabilitation. Methadone.'

'Venereal diseases,' contributed Vianello.

'Abortions,' added Brunetti, then added, 'If they're his clients, he knows whether they're married, about their family lives, where they work, who their friends are.'

'The friendly family pharmacist; known you since you were a kid,' added Vianello.

'How many?' Brunetti asked.

'He's looked into the files of about thirty of his clients,' Vianello said, pausing to allow Brunetti to register the implications of this. 'Her friend says he won't be able to send us the actual files until tomorrow’

Brunetti let out a low whistle, then drew their attention back to the original reason for their interest in Dottor Franchi. 'And the appointments?'

'He's made more than a hundred in the last two years’ Before Brunetti could express his surprise at the number, Vianello said, 'That's only one a week, remember’

Brunetti nodded. 'Has this friend of Signorina Elettra... does he have a name, by the way?' he asked.

'No’ Vianello said in a curiously bland voice.

'Have you checked to see which of these appointments actually took place?' Brunetti asked.

'He sent her the final list of the appointments only this morning’ Vianello said. 'And it seems that all of the appointments Franchi made were kept.' When Brunetti said nothing, the Inspector continued, 'She's already run a check on the other pharmacists. One of them has scheduled only seventeen appointments in the last two years, and all of them were kept: we spoke to the people. Andrea doesn't use the system, so he's off the list. In the other case, she checked the record of appointments in the files in the hospitals here and in Mestre, and in almost all cases the people were listed as having shown up for the appointments he scheduled’ Vianello could barely contain his excitement when he said, 'But one of the pharmacists scheduled three appointments for people who didn't need medical help.'

'Tell me, Lorenzo,' Brunetti said to save time.

They're dead,' Vianello said.

‘You mean, from what happened to them during the appointments?' asked an astonished Brunetti, wondering how something like this could have happened and he not be aware of it.

'No. They were dead when the appointments were made.' Vianello allowed himself to savour, and Brunetti to grasp, that information, and then he continued, ‘It looks like he got careless, the pharmacist, and just started punching in the patient numbers of customers at the pharmacy: perhaps he thought they had moved away or perhaps...' and here Vianello gave the small pause he always made before he dropped what he considered to be a bomb. 'Perhaps he's starting to lose his memory. At that age.'

'Gabetti?' asked Brunetti.

'None other,' responded a grinning Vianello.

'All right, Lorenzo. You win,' Brunetti said with a smile. Tell me about the appointments he scheduled for these dead people.'

'In each case, the doctor recorded on his computer that he had seen the patient, made a diagnosis - it was always something innocuous - and then billed the health service for the appointment.'

'Very careless,' Brunetti agreed. 'Or very bold. What about the doctors?'

'It's always the same three, and in each case they recorded the appointments and requested payment’ Vianello said. Almost reluctantly, Vianello added, 'Franchi never scheduled an appointment with any of those three doctors.'

'I wonder what else he was doing, though,' Brunetti said, then asked, 'Why can't her friend send the files until tomorrow?'

'Computer things,' said Vianello.

'I'm not a Neanderthal, you know.' Though Brunetti smiled as he said this, he came across as no less defensive.

'Signorina Elettra told me it has to do with the way Franchi protected the files: each one requires a different code to get into it, and then you have to go back and find the patient number, using a different access code ... do you want me to go on?' Vianello asked.

Brunetti's smile became rueful. 'Tomorrow?'

'Yes.'

‘Until then?'

'Until then, we'll keep calling the patients Gabetti made appointments for and asking them if they were satisfied with the treatment they received. And then we can think about asking the doctors to come in and have a word with us.'

Brunetti said, 'No, I'd like to wait until we know what Franchi is up to. Are you sure he wasn't suspicious that you held on to his computer for a day?'

It looked as though Vianello had to stop himself from clapping his hands in delight when he heard the question. ‘I had Alvise take it back’ he said.

Brunetti laughed out loud.

He left the Questura at five, his conscience at peace at the thought that his wife, who had said she would bring him more information about Pedrolli, was unlikely to do so by coming to his office. Whatever she had learned, Brunetti was forced to admit that it had probably become irrelevant by now. Whatever charges might be brought against Pedrolli, they were likely to be of the kind that would evaporate at the wave of a chequebook or at some other manifestation of Bianca Marcolini's father's power.

He let his feet and his whim take him where they pleased, and after a time he found himself standing at the foot of the bridge that led to the entrance to Palazzo Querini Stampalia. The man at the desk knew Brunetti and waved aside his attempt to pay for a ticket.

He went upstairs to the gallery, where he had not been for some time. How he loved to look at these portraits, not so much because of their beauty as paintings but for the resemblance of so many of them to people he saw every day. Indeed, the portrait of Gerolomo Querini, painted almost five hundred years ago, bore an almost photographic likeness to Vianello - well, to what Vianello had looked like as a younger man. He savoured these faces and looked forward to encountering them again in the order he had become accustomed to over the years.

His favourite was the Bellini Presentation in the Temple, and, as always, he allowed himself to come to it last. And saw that child, the swaddled Jesus, being passed back to his mother by the high priest Simeon. The baby's body was bound tight by the encircling strips of cloth, his arms trapped to his sides with only the tips of his fingers wriggling free. At the sight of him, Brunetti's thoughts returned to Pedrolli's child, similarly bound, if by the decisions of the state. The mother of the child in the painting held him protectively in both hands; the look she passed to the high priest across the infant's bound body was cool and sceptical. Brunetti noticed for the first time how her scepticism was echoed in the faces of everyone else in the painting, especially in the eyes of a young man on the far right, who gazed out at the viewer as if to ask how he could expect anything good to come of what was going on here.

Abruptly Brunetti turned from the painting and walked back to the portraits in the other rooms, hoping that the more tranquil faces on the portraits by Bombelli and Tiepolo would erase the uneasy feeling that had come over him at the sight of that trapped child.

Brunetti was unusually inattentive during dinner, nodding when Paola or the children spoke with one another and contributing little to the conversation. Afterwards, he returned to the living room and to St Petersburg, where he encountered his Marquis in a reflective mood, observing of Russia that it was a place where the taste for the superfluous holds sway over a people who are still unacquainted with the necessary'. Brunetti closed his eyes to consider the contemporary truth of this.

He heard Paola's footsteps and, without opening his eyes, said, 'Nothing changes, nothing at all.'

She recognized the book and said, 'I knew nothing good could come of your reading that book.'

I know it's not politically correct, especially when the leaders of our two great countries are such good