Suffer the Little Children

buddies, but it sounds like a dreadful place then, and it sounds like a dreadful place now.' He heard the clink of glasses and, opening one eye, saw her place two on the table in front of him.

'Read Tolstoy,' she advised him. 'Hell make you like it more.'

'The country or the book?' Brunetti asked, eyes still closed.

'lime for gossip,' she announced, ignoring his question. She tapped his feet and he pulled them back to create room enough for her to sit.

He opened his eyes then and took the glass she handed him. He sipped, took a deep breath and inhaled the essence of grappa, and sipped again. Is that the Gaia?' he asked.

'We've had the bottle since Christmas. With any luck we'll get another one this year, so I see no reason we shouldn't drink it.'

'Do you think there's grappa in heaven?' Brunetti asked.

'Since there's no heaven, no, there's no grappa in heaven’ she answered,-then added, 'which is even more reason to drink it while we can.'

'I'm helpless in the face of your logic’ Brunetti said, emptied his glass, and handed it to her.

'I'll be back in a moment.'

'Good’ Brunetti said and closed his eyes again.

Brunetti felt, rather than saw, Paola get up from the sofa. He listened as she went into the kitchen, heard her moving around and then come back into the living room. Glass clinked against glass, liquid poured, and then she said, 'Here.'

Suddenly curious about how long he could keep his eyes closed, Brunetti stuck his hand in the air, fingers waving. She gave him the glass, he heard another clink, another glug, and then he felt the sofa shake as she sat back down.

'Salute’ she said, and he took a sip from the glass he couldn't see. Again he had a foretaste of heaven.

'Tell me’ he asked.

'You're welcome’ she answered and then segued seamlessly into, 'At the beginning, people thought Pedrolli was nervous or embarrassed that they would make jokes about him, but as soon as it became obvious how crazy he was about his son, there was no chance that anyone would make fun of him. The only talk was nice talk, or so I was told.'

'And the Rhett and Scarlett reunion you said didn't work?'

'I didn't say it: I was told it’ she corrected him. 'According to a number of people, he was always the loving partner, and she was the one who was loved, right from the beginning. But after the son arrived, the equilibrium changed.'

How?' he asked, sensing from her voice that the answer to this would not be the obvious one that the wife neglected the husband for the new child.

'He transferred his affection to the son ... or so I was told’ she said, reminding Brunetti of how careful Paola always was to provide citations for her gossip.

'And where did the wife transfer hers?' he asked.

'Not to the child, apparently,' she said. 'But that would be understandable, I suppose, if the baby wasn't hers to begin with and if her husband began to pay more attention to the baby than to her.'

'Even if she didn't much want these attentions any longer?' Brunetti asked.

Paola leaned against him and rested her elbow on his knees. 'That doesn't make any difference, Guido. You know that.'

'What doesn't?'

'Whether she wanted his affections or not. She still wanted to be the object of them.'

'That doesn't make any sense,' he said.

She was silent for so long that Brunetti finally opened his eyes and looked at her. She had her face buried in her hands and was shaking her head from side to side.

'All right, what have I said?' he asked.

She gave him a level look. 'Even if a woman isn't happy to have them, she still doesn't want them to go to anyone else,' she said.

'But it's their son, for heaven's sake.'

'His son,' Paola corrected him, then added for emphasis, 'Not theirs, but his.'

'Perhaps not,' Brunetti said, then told her the contents of the Carabinieri report.

'Who the biological father was really doesn't make any difference,' Paola insisted. 'To Pedrolli, the boy is his son. And from what I heard today, my guess is that she never really thought of the child as hers.'

How much had Pedrolli actually told his wife? She claimed that he had told her the truth, but what was the truth? Brunetti imagined that the Albanian woman, threatened with extradition, would have told the authorities whatever it was she thought they wanted to hear and whatever would make them view her with greatest sympathy. If they asked her if Dottor Pedrolli had promised to raise the boy as his son, this was at least something she could take credit for, if only because it demonstrated a desire to ensure that her son would have a better life. Far better to admit to this, even if money had changed hands, than to admit she had sold her son to someone without much caring where the child would end up.

And what of Pedrolli? Was he to endure his life like the parents of children who are the victims of actual kidnappings? To wonder - for ever - if the child was alive or dead? To spend the rest of his life searching for that remembered face in the face of every child, teenaged boy, man of about the right age?

''Oh, to lose all father now,'' Brunetti said.

20

Brunetti's sleep was disturbed, not by excess of grappa, but by thoughts of the Pedrolli child. How much would he remember of those first months of his life? What was the future psychological cost of being taken from a loving home and placed in a public institution?

Between sleeping and waking, Brunetti told himself repeatedly to let it all go, to forget Pedrolli, to forget the sight of the man as he lay in the hospital bed, and most of all to forget about his son. Brunetti was uninterested in either the legal or the biological realities: it sufficed for him that Pedrolli had claimed the child as his own and that the child's natural mother had been willing to let him go. And that the doctor loved the child.

What he could not fathom were the feelings of Bianca Marcolini, but he did not feel able, during that long night, to wake Paola, sleeping quietly beside him, and ask her what a woman would feel. Why should Paola understand it any better than he? Were he to ask, she would probably assail him for the most blatant sort of sexist thinking: surely a man could understand a woman's feelings? But that was precisely what troubled Brunetti, the absence in Bianca Marcolini of what Paola would, again, assail him for thinking of as a woman's feelings. If the reports given to Paola were accurate, then Bianca Marcolini had shown little evidence of maternal feelings to the people Paola had talked to or to Brunetti himself.

Some time before six, an idea came to Brunetti of how to learn more about Bianca Marcolini and her feelings towards the child. Soon after he thought of it, he drifted off to sleep, and when he woke again, the idea was still with him. He lay there, looking at the ceiling. Three bells rang: soon it would be seven and he would get up and make coffee, bring some back to Paola. She had a class that morning and had asked him to wake her before he went to work.

Well, this was before he went to work, wasn't it? 'Paola,' he said. He waited, repeated her name, and waited a longer time.

The bells began to ring the hour: Brunetti took this as a sign that he could wake her now. He turned, put his hand on her shoulder and shook it gently. 'Paola,' he said again.

There was the faintest tremor of movement.

‘Paola’ he repeated. 'Could your father arrange for me to meet Giuliano Marcolini?' The last bell chimed, and the world returned to silence.

‘Paola, could your father arrange for me to see Giuliano Marcolini?'

The bundle beside him turned away. He put his hand on her shoulder again, and the bundle moved even further.

‘Paola, could