Suffer the Little Children

think he's gone downstairs. They brought Dottor Pedrolli in about an hour ago: Dottor Damasco is examining him now’ She turned her attention from the Veneziano-speaking Brunetti to the uniformed Marvilli. 'He's been beaten by the Carabinieri, it seems’

Brunetti felt Marvilli stiffen and start to move forward, so he stepped in front of him to prevent him. 'Would it be possible for me to see him?' he asked, then turned and gave Marvilli a glance severe enough to stop him from speaking.

I suppose so,' she said slowly. 'Come with me, please’ She rose from her chair. As they walked past her desk, Brunetti saw that the screen of the computer showed a scene from a historical film, perhaps Gladiator, perhaps Alexander.

He followed her down the corridor, aware of Marvilli's footsteps behind them. She stopped at a door on the right, knocked, and in response to a noise Brunetti did not hear, opened the door and put her head inside. 'A policeman's here, Dottore’ she said.

'One of them's in here already, damn it,' a man's voice said, with no attempt to disguise his anger. 'That's enough. Tell him to wait.'

The nurse drew her head back and closed the door. 'You heard him,' she said, all pleasantness fled from her voice and from her face.

Marvilli looked at his watch. 'What time does the hospital bar open?' he asked.

'Five,' she answered. Seeing the face he made in response to this, her tone softened and she said, 'There are some coffee machines on the ground floor.' She left them without another word and went back to her film.

Marvilli asked Brunetti if he wanted anything, but Brunetti declined. Saying he would be back soon, the Captain turned away. Brunetti immediately regretted his decision and was about to call after his retreating back, 'Caffe doppio, con due zuccheri, per piacere,' but something restrained him from breaking the silence. He watched Marvilli pass through the swinging doors at the end of the corridor, then went over to a row of orange plastic chairs. Brunetti took a seat and began to wait for someone to emerge from the room.

4

While Brunetti waited, he tried to make some sense of what was going on. If the assistant chief of neurology had been called in at three in the morning, then something serious had been done to this Dottor Pedrolli, despite Marvilli's attempts to downplay the situation. Brunetti could not understand the excessive use of force, though it was possible that a captain who was not part of the men's command unit might not have been able to control the operation as effectively as would someone more familiar with his men. No wonder Marvilli was uneasy.

Could it be that Dottor Pedrolli, as well as having illegally adopted a baby himself, was more deeply involved in whatever traffic was going on? As a paediatrician, he would have access to children and, through them, to their parents, perhaps to parents who wanted other children, or even to those who could be persuaded to part with an unwanted child.

Or he might have access to orphanages: those children must have as much need of a doctor's services - perhaps more - than children living at home with their parents. Vianello, he knew, had been raised with orphans: his mother had taken in the children of a friend, but she had done it to keep them from being sent to an orphanage, that atavistic terror of his parents' generation. Surely things were different now, what with the involvement of the social services, of child psychologists. But Brunetti was forced to admit that he didn't know how many orphanages still existed in the country and, in fact, even where any of them were.

His mind flashed to the early years of his marriage to Paola, when the university had assigned her to teach a class on Dickens, and he, with the solidarity of a new husband, had read the novels along with her. He remembered, with a shudder, the orphanage where Oliver Twist was sent, but then he recalled the passage in Great Expectations that had most chilled his blood at the time, Mrs Joe's admonition that children should be 'brought up by hand', a phrase neither he nor Paola could ever decipher but which had nevertheless unsettled them both.

But Dickens had written almost two centuries ago, when families, by today's standards, were enormous: his own parents had each had six siblings. Do we try today to treat children better, now that they are in short supply? he wondered.

Brunetti suddenly raised the fingers of his right hand to his forehead in an involuntary gesture of surprise. No formal charge had been brought against Dottor Pedrolli, Brunetti had seen no evidence, and here he was, assuming the man's guilt, just on the word of some captain in riding boots.

His reverie was broken by Vianello, who appeared at the end of the corridor and came to sit beside him. I'm glad you're here,' the Inspector said.

'What's going on?' Brunetti asked, no less relieved to see the Inspector.

Speaking softly, Vianello began to explain. ‘I was on night shift with Riverre when the call came in: I couldn't make any sense of it,' he said, then tried and failed to stop himself from yawning.

He slumped forward with his elbows on his knees and turned his head to Brunetti. 'A woman called, saying that there were men with guns in front of a house in San Marco. Over by La Fenice: Calle Venier. Near the old Carive offices. So we sent a patrol over, but by the time they got there, the men were gone, and someone shouted down from a window that it was the Carabinieri and that a man was hurt and they'd taken him to the hospital.'

Vianello glanced at Brunetti to see if he was following, then continued. 'It was the guys on the patrol - our guys - who called and told me all of this and that it was a doctor who was hurt, so I came over here to see what was going on, and that's when some jerk of a captain - wearing riding boots, for God's sake - told me it was their case and none of my business.' Brunetti let his Inspector's contempt for an officer go unremarked.

'That's when I decided to call you,' Vianello said.

The Inspector paused and Brunetti asked, 'What else?'

'After I did - call you, that is -I waited here for a while. I spoke to the neurologist when he got here and tried to tell him what was going on. But then Little Red Riding Boots came out of the room, and the doctor went in to see his patient. So I went down to the boat and talked to one of the Carabinieri who brought him in. He told me the squad making the arrest were from Verona, but the guy with the boots is stationed here. He's from Pordenone or some place like that, but he's been here for six months or so. Anyway, there was trouble when they went in to arrest this doctor. He'd fallen or something when he attacked one of them, and when they couldn't get him back on his feet, his wife started screaming, so they decided to bring him over here to have the doctors take a look.'

'Did he say anything about a baby?' Brunetti asked.

'No. Nothing’ Vianello answered with a confused look. 'The man I spoke to didn't seem to want to say much, and I wasn't sure what to ask. I just wanted to find out what happened to this doctor, how he got hurt’

Briefly, Brunetti told Vianello what he had learned from Marvilli about the raid, its purpose, and its result. Vianello muttered something; Brunetti thought he heard the word 'attacked'.

'You don't think he fell?' Brunetti asked, remembering what Dottoressa Cardinale had said.

Vianello let out his breath in a sudden noise of disbelief. 'Not unless he tripped over the Captain's spurs when they got him out of bed. He was naked when they brought him in. Or at least that’s what one of the nurses downstairs told me. Wrapped in a blanket, but naked.'

'And so?' Brunetti asked.

'Take a man's clothes off him, and he's only half a man,' Vianello said. 'A naked man doesn't attack a man with a gun,' he concluded, incorrectly in this case.

'Two, I think,' Brunetti observed.

'Exactly,' Vianello answered, refusing to abandon his conviction. .

'Yes’ Brunetti agreed, and then looked up at the sound of footsteps in the corridor. Marvilli was approaching them.

The Captain noticed Vianello and said, ‘I see your sergeant's filling you in on what happened’

Vianello started to speak, but Brunetti forestalled him by getting to his feet and taking a step towards Marvilli. 'The Inspector's telling me what he's been told, Captain,' Brunetti said with an easy smile, then added, 'That's not necessarily the same thing.'

Seamlessly, Marvilli replied, 'That would depend on whom he's spoken to, I suppose.'

'I'm sure someone will tell us the truth, in the end’ Brunetti countered, wondering if Marvilli was in some sort of caffeine-induced state of agitation.