Suffer the Little Children

undefended and inviting any attention a man might please to give them.

Trapped, his eyes moved to the left and fell on a column of bright-coloured covers, each of which displayed a bare-breasted woman in a posture of submission: some bound with straps, some with ropes, and some with chains. Some looked frightened; some looked happy; they all looked excited.

He pulled his eyes away and looked at the facade of Palazzo Dolfin. 'She's right,' he said under his breath.

‘You going to stand there all day talking to yourself?' he heard someone ask in a loud, angry voice. He drew his attention away from the building and turned. The news vendor was standing less than a metre from him, his face red. Again he asked, 'You going to stand there all day? What’s next, you put your hands in your pockets?'

Brunetti raised a hand to defend himself, to explain, but then he let it drop and walked away, out of the campo and towards his home.

He had heard that people who had pets often found them at the door of their homes when they returned from work, that animals had some sixth sense that alerted them to the approach of what they no doubt thought of as their pet humans. When he reached the top of the steps and began to hunt for his keys, the door opened to reveal Paola, just inside. He could not disguise his joy at seeing her.

'Bad day?' she asked.

'How did you know?'

'I heard you coming up the stairs and it sounded like the tread of a weary man, so I thought it might help if I opened the door and told you how it lifts my heart that you are here’

'You know, you're right about the tits and ass in magazines,' he blurted out.

She tilted her head to one side and studied his face. 'Come in, Guido. I think you might need a glass of wine.'

He smiled. ‘I capitulate to you about something we've argued about for decades, and all you can do is offer me a glass of wine?' he asked.

'Why, what did you want instead?'

'How about some tits and ass?' he asked, making a grab for her.

After dinner, he trailed her down to her study. He had drunk little wine with dinner and had no desire now save to sit and talk and listen to what she might have to say about something he still did not know how to refer to: the Pedrolli disaster was perhaps as good as he could manage.

'The pharmacist in Campo Sant'Angelo?' she asked when he had finished telling the story -in what he hoped was a chronological, but what he feared was a garbled, manner.

Brunetti sat beside her, his arms folded across his chest. 'You know him?'

'No. It's out of the way for me. Besides, it's one of those campi where you don't think of stopping, isn't it? You just walk across it on your way to Accademia or Rialto: I've never even bought one of those cotton shirts from the place by the bridge’

Brunetti's inner map focused on the campo, viewed first from the entrance from the bridge and then from Calle della Mandola. A restaurant where he had never eaten, an art gallery, the inevitable real estate agency, the edicola with the chocolate Labrador.

He was summoned from these cartographical considerations by Paola, who asked, 'You think he'd do that? Call and tell people about his clients?'

'I used to think there were limits to what people were capable of doing,' Brunetti said. 'But I don't think that any more. Given the right stimuli, we're all probably capable of anything.' He listened to that statement echo, realized die extent to which it was a response to the events of the day, and said quickly, 'No, that's not right, is it?'

‘I hope not,' Paola said. 'But doesn't he take some sort of oath, like a doctor, not to reveal certain things?'

I think so. But I'm sure he's too clever to do this sort of thing openly. All he'd have to do is make a phone call to ask after someone's health: Is Daniela back from the hospital yet?' 'Could you tell Egidio it’s time to renew his prescription?' And if anything embarrassing or shameful were revealed by these calls, well, it was just the faithful family pharmacist, trying to be helpful, showing his concern for his patients' well-being, wasn't it?'

Paola considered this, then turned and put her hand on his arm. 'And it would let him go on thinking of himself in the same way, wouldn't it? If anyone questioned him, he could maintain - not only to them but to himself - that it was merely an excess of zeal on his part.'

'Probably.'

'Nasty little bastard.'

'Most moralists are’ said Brunetti wearily.

'Is there anything you can do about it, or about him?' she asked.

'I don't think so,' Brunetti said. 'One of the strange things about all of this is that, no matter how sordid and disgusting any of it is, the only thing Franchi's done that's illegal is look at those files, and he'd be sure to argue - and believe - that he was simply acting in the best interests of his clients. And Marcolini was doing his duty as a citizen, wasn't he? So was his daughter, I suppose.' Brunetti gave more thought to all of the things that had happened and said, 'And with Pedrolli, the violence of the Carabinieri wouldn't even be judged criminal. They had a judge's order to make their arrests that night. They did ring the doorbell, but the Pedrollis didn't hear it. And Pedrolli admits that he attacked the Carabiniere first.'

'All this pain, all this suffering’ Paola said.

They sat quietly side by side for some time. Finally, Brunetti pushed himself to his feet, went back into the living room and retrieved his copy of the Lettere della Russia, and came back to her study. In the short time he was absent, like water seeking the lowest point, Paola had spread out on the sofa with a book, but once again she pulled her feet back to make room for him.

'Your Russians?' she asked when she saw the book.

He sat down beside her and began to read where he had left off the night before. Paola studied his profile for a moment, then stretched out her feet and slipped them on to his lap, under his book, and returned to her own.

The weather worsened the next day, first with a sudden drop in temperature, followed by a torrential rainstorm, both of which cleaned the streets, first of tourists, then of any dirt that remained. Some hours later the sirens announced the first acquo, alta of the autumn, worsened by a fierce bora that sprang up and blew in from the north-east.

Umbrellaed, hatted, booted, and raincoated, a disgruntled Brunetti arrived at the Questura and made what he thought was una brutta figura at the entrance, pausing to shake himself free of water in the manner of a dog. He looked around and saw that the floor was wet for at least a metre in every direction. Heavy-footed and unwilling to talk to anyone, he made his way up the stairs to his office.

He stuffed the umbrella upright behind the door. Let the water run down on to the wooden floor: no one would see it back there. He hung his raincoat in the armadio, tossed his sodden hat on the top shelf, and then sat on a chair to remove his boots. By the time he finally sat behind his desk, he was sweaty and ill-tempered.

The phone rang. 'Si,' he said with singular lack of grace.

'Should I hang up and call back after you've had time to go out for a coffee?' asked Bocchese.

It wouldn't make any difference, and I'd probably be carried away by the acqua alta if I tried to go down to the bar.'

'Is it that bad?' the technician asked. ‘I got here early, and it wasn't bad when I came in.'

'Supposed to peak in an hour, but yes, it's bad.'

'You think any tourists will be drowned?'

'Don't tempt me, Bocchese. You know our phones are tapped, and what we say might get back to the Tourist Board.' He felt suddenly cheered, perhaps because of Bocchese's unwonted chattiness or perhaps by the thought of drowned tourists. 'What have you got for me?'

'HIV,' the technician said and then, into the resulting silence, 'That is, I've got a blood sample that is HTV positive. Or, to be even more precise, I've got the results from the lab - finally - saying that the sample I sent them is positive. B negative blood type, which is relatively rare, and HIV, which is not as rare as it should be.'