by Donna Leon
‘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.'
'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, un dottore, if he did not present himself in a serious way?
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 with her own hands and then a grilled slice of chicken breast, and then a pear. No excess, and one glass of wine: white.
No matter how immoral, no matter how lascivious the behaviour of his clients, he would never think of allowing his own ethical standards, or his standards in anything, to affect his professional behaviour. Even someone like Signora Adami's daughter, only fifteen but already twice prescribed medicines against venereal diseases: he would never think of treating her in anything but a manner that remained true to his oath. To do so would be both unprofessional and sinful, and both of those things were anathema to him. But the girl's mother had a right to know the path her daughter was treading and the place where it was likely to lead her. A mother had the duty to protect the purity of her child: he had never doubted that truth. Thus it was his duty to see that Signora Adami knew of the dangers faced by her child: it was his moral duty, never at variance with his professional duty.
Think of someone like Gabetti, bringing disgrace on the entire profession by his greed. How could he do something like that, betray his trust, use the faith placed in him by the entire medical system to set up those false appointments? And how shocking that doctors, medical doctors, had been party to such corruption. The Gazzettino had carried a front page story that morning, even a photo of Gabetti's pharmacy. What would people think of pharmacists if one of them were capable of something as vile as this? Yet the law was to be made mock of once again. The man was too old to be sent to jail, and so it would all be settled quietly. Some paltry fine, perhaps he would be barred from the profession, but he would never be punished, and crimes such as this, indeed, most crimes, merited punishment.
He opened one of the upper cabinets and lifted down the ceramic mixing bowl, the middle-sized one, the one he used for prescriptions of 250 cc. From one of the lower cabinets he took an empty brown medicine bottle and placed it on the counter. He reached into the upper cabinet for plastic gloves, pulled them on, and then reached into the poison cabinet for the bottle of hydrochloric acid. He set it on the counter in front of him, twisted the glass stopper and placed it in a low glass dish kept there especially for this purpose.
Chemistry is not random, he reflected: it followed the laws established for it by God, as God has established laws for all creation. To follow those laws is to partake in a small way in the power God exercises over the world. To add substances in the proper sequence - first this one and then that one - is to follow God's plan, and to give those substances to his patients was to do his duty, fulfilling his part in that vast plan.
The syringe was in the top drawer, wrapped for its single use in a clear plastic package. He tore it open, checked the plunger, pushing and emptying the air from it to see that it moved freely. He inserted the needle into the bottle of acid, slipped his left hand down to steady it, and drew the plunger slowly up, bending down to read the numbers on the side. Carefully, he pulled the tip of the needle out, wiping it gentry against the side of the bottle, then held it over the ceramic dish. Fifteen drops, and no more.
He had reached eleven when he was distracted by a noise behind him. Was it the door? Who would open it without knocking first? He could not remove his eyes from the tip of the syringe, for if he lost count, he would have to clean out the dish and start again, and he didn't want to empty that acid, no matter how minimal the amount, into the city water supply. People might laugh at such cautio
n, but even fifteen drops of hydrochloric acid might do some unknown harm.
The door closed, more quietly than it had opened, as the last drop fell into the dish. He turned and saw one of his patients, though he was really more of a colleague than a patient, wasn't he?
'Ah, Dottor Pedrolli,' he said, unable to disguise his reaction. 'I'm surprised to see you here.' He phrased it that way, carefully, so as not to offend a medical doctor, a man whose education and responsibilities placed him in a rank above his own. He addressed Pedrolli as 'Lei', a vocal sign of the respect he paid to all medical doctors, no matter how many years he might have worked with them. Outside of the pharmacy, perhaps, he would have liked to use 'tu' with doctors and thus demonstrate the closeness of their professional association, but they all continued to address him formally, and so formality had become natural to him over the years. He took it as a sign of their respect for him and his position and had come to take pride in that. He stripped off the plastic gloves and put them in the wastepaper basket before extending his hand to the doctor.
‘I wanted to talk to you, Dottor Franchi,' the other man said in a soft voice after they shook hands. He seemed agitated, Dottor Pedrolli, which was unusual, since he had always seemed such a calm man.
'Who let you in?' Franchi asked, but he was careful to ask the question mildly, in a tone indicative only of curiosity, not of irritation. Only some sort of medical emergency could induce one of his staff to override his instructions about the door.
'Your colleague, Dottor Banfi. I told him I had to see you about a patient.'
'Which one?' the pharmacist asked, genuinely alarmed that one of his patients might be sick or in peril. He began to run through the names of the children he knew were in Dottor Pedrolli's care: perhaps it was one with a longstanding condition, and by guessing who it was, he could save precious seconds in preparing the medicine, could be of greater service to a sick person.
'My son,' Pedrolli said. It made no sense. He had heard, with great astonishment, about the Carabinieri and what had happened at Dottor