'The blood from the pharmacy?'
'Yes.'
'Have you told anyone?'
'No. The email just came in. Why?'
'No reason. I'll talk to Vianello.'
If s not his blood, is it?' Bocchese asked in a neutral voice.
The question so stunned Brunetti that he could not stop himself from barking, 'What?'
A long silence ensued at the other end, after which a curiously sober Bocchese said, ‘I didn't mean it that way. With a sample, we don't know whose it is.'
'Then say it that way,' Brunetti said, still shouting. 'And don't make jokes like that. They're not funny,' he added, his voice still rough, taken aback by the surge of anger he felt towards the technician.
'Sorry,' Bocchese said. 'It's an occupational hazard, I think. We see only pieces of people or samples of people, so we make jokes about them, and maybe we forget about the actual people themselves.'
'It's all right’ Brunetti said, then in a calmer voice, added. ‘I’ll go and tell him.'
'You won't ...' the technician began, but Brunetti cut him off by saying, 'I'll tell him the sample's back.' In a softer voice, he added, 'Don't worry. That's all I'll tell him. We'll see if it matches the blood of anyone we have in the files.'
Bocchese thanked him and said goodbye, in a polite manner, and hung up.
Brunetti went down to find Vianello.
It took them almost no time to find the match among the medical files from Franchi's computer and only a few phone calls to find a possible motive. Piero Cogetto was a lawyer, recently separated from the woman, also a lawyer, with whom he had lived for seven years. He had no history of drug use and had never been arrested.
Once Vianello had that hint, it took him only two more phone calls before he found someone who told him the rest of the story: upon learning that he was HIV positive, Cogetto's fiancee had moved out. She claimed that it was the infidelity and not the disease that made her leave, but this had been treated with a certain amount of scepticism among the people who knew her. The second person Vianello spoke to said she had always maintained that she had learned about his disease when someone told her about it by mistake.
Having recounted all this to Brunetti and Pucetti, Vianello asked, 'What do we do now?'
'If he's positive, he can't go to jail,' Brunetti said, ‘But at least, if we can get him to admit the break-in, we can close the file on the vandalism and get it off the books.' He realized how very much like Patta he sounded and was grateful that the other men did not mention this.
'You think he'll admit it?' 'Vianello asked.
Brunetti shrugged. 'Why not? The blood samples match, and a DN A test would probably confirm the match. But he's a lawyer, so he knows there's nothing we can do to him if he's positive.' He was suddenly weary and wanted all this to be over.
'I'd understand if he did do it’ said Pucetti.
'Who wouldn't?' agreed Vianello, giving tacit agreement to the idea that Dottor Franchi had been the person to make the 'mistake'.
‘I’ll talk to him if you like’ Vianello volunteered to Brunetti. 'As soon as the water goes down.' Turning to Pucetti, he said, 'Why don't you come along and see what if s like to talk to someone who knows he can't be arrested?'
'Lot of that around,' Pucetti said, absolutely straight-faced.
25
He liked it back here in the lab, working, preparing medicines that would help people and restore them to health. He liked the order, the jars and bottles lined up as he wanted them to be, obedient to his will and following the system he knew was best. He liked the feeling of unbuttoning his lab coat and reaching into the watch pocket of his waistcoat for the key to the cabinet. He wore a suit to work every day, put his jacket on a hanger in his office but left the waistcoat on under his lab coat. No sweaters at work: waistcoat and tie. How else would people know that he was a professional,
The others did not. He no longer felt he had the power to make them conform to his standards of propriety regarding dress, though he still would not allow the women to wear skirts shorter than their lab coats, just as he would not permit any of them to wear trainers to work. In the summer, sandals were acceptable, but only for the women. A professional had to dress like one, otherwise where were we?
He ran his fingers down the gold chain until he found the key to the poisons cabinet. He crouched down and unlocked the metal door, comforted by the sound of the key turning in the lock: was there another pharmacy in Venice where they took their responsibility to their clients as seriously as he did? He remembered that he had, some years ago, visited a colleague in his pharmacy and had been invited back to the preparation room. The room was empty as they entered, and he had seen that the door to the poison cabinet was standing open, the key in the lock. It was only by the exercise of great restraint that he had prevented himself from commenting on this, from pointing out the tremendous risks of such negligence. Why, anyone could get in there: a child slipping away from its mother, a person bent on theft, a drug addict. Anyone, and God forbid what might happen then. Wasn't there a movie, or was it in a book, where a woman goes into a pharmacy and eats arsenic that has been left unattended? Some poison; he couldn't remember which. But she was a bad woman, he remembered, so perhaps it was right.
He pulled out the bottle of sulphuric acid.
stood, and placed it carefully on the counter, then slid it slowly back until it touched the wall, safely away from harm. He did the same with other bottles, sliding each carefully back and lining them up so that their labels were to the front and clearly legible. There were small containers: arsenic, nitroglycerine, belladonna, and chloroform. He lined them up, two to the left and two to the right of the acid, turning each carefully so that the skull and crossbones on the labels were visible. The lab door was shut, the way he always left it: the others knew to knock and ask to come in.-He liked that.
The prescription lay on the counter. Signora Basso had been suffering from the same gastric problem for years, and he had filled out this prescription at least eight times, so there was really no need to consult the written prescription, but a true professional did not toy with such things, especially when it was something as serious as this. Yes, the dosage was the same: the hydrochloric acid was always mixed one to two with pepsin, then added to twenty grammes of sugar and the resulting mixture added to two hundred and forty grammes of water. What might differ from prescription to prescription was the number of drops Dottor Prina prescribed for use after each meal, and that depended on the results of the Signora's tests. He was responsible for the reliability and the consistency of the solution. How else could the missing gastric juices be replicated in Signora Basso's stomach?
She, poor thing, had suffered for years, and
Dottor Prina said the condition was common in her family. She was worthy of all of his help and sympathy, poor woman, and not only because she was a fellow parishioner at Santo Stefano and a member of his mother's rosary society. She did her duty and bore her cross in life in silence, not like that other one, Vittorio Priante, little more than a glutton. Fat-faced and flat-footed, all he could talk about, every time he came in, was food and food and food, and then about wine and grappa, and then again about food. Only by lying about his symptoms could he have deceived a doctor into prescribing the acid solution to help him with his digestion, and that made him a liar, as well as a glutton.
But the profession made demands like this on a person who was loyal to it. He could easily have altered the solution, made it stronger or weaker, but that would be to betray his sacred trust. No matter how much Signor Priante might deserve punishment for his excesses and dishonesties, that was in the hands of God, not in his. From him all of his patients would receive the care he had sworn to provide them; he would never allow his personal certainties to affect that, not in any way. To do so would be to be unprofessional, and that was unthinkable. Signor Priante, however, might well have emulated his own moderation at table. His mother had taught him that: indeed, she had taught him moderation in all things. Tonight was Tuesday, so they would have gnocchi that she had made
