Fatal Remedies

by Donna Leon

  Dorandi looked down at his joined hands, but didn’t answer. Brunetti reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the sheets of paper Signorina Elettra had given him. ‘Would you be willing to be a bit more precise about that, Signor Dorandi?’ Brunetti asked, looking down at the papers.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The number of men who took women with them when they went to Bangkok. Say in the last year.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Brunetti didn’t waste a smile on him. ‘Signor Dorandi, I’ll remind you that this is a murder investigation, which means that we have the right to request, or demand, if we are forced to do so, certain information from the people involved.’

  ‘What do you mean, “involved”?’ Dorandi spluttered.

  ‘That should be clear to you,’ Brunetti answered in a level voice. ‘This is a travel agency, which sells a certain number of tickets and arranges tours to what you call “exotic” locations. An accusation has been made that these are for the purposes of sex-tourism, which I hardly need remind you is now illegal in this country. A man, the owner of this agency, has been murdered and a note left suggesting that these tours might be the motive for that crime. You yourself seem to believe that there is a connection. So it would appear that the agency is involved and so are you as its manager.’ Brunetti paused for a moment, before asking, ‘Have I made myself clear?’

  ‘Yes.’ Dorandi’s voice was sullen.

  ‘Then would you mind telling me how accurate your statement - or, if I might speak more plainly - how true your statement was that most of the men who went to Bangkok took women along with them?’

  ‘Of course it’s true,’ Dorandi insisted, shifting to the left side of his chair, one hand still on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Not according to your ticket sales, Signor Dorandi.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘The sales of plane tickets made by your agency, all of which, I’m sure you must know, are kept in a centralized computer system.’ Brunetti saw this register and went on, ‘Most of the tickets to Bangkok that your agency sold, during the last six months at least, were to men travelling alone.’

  Almost before he could think, Dorandi blurted out, ‘Their wives joined them later. They were travelling on business, the men, and their wives joined them.’

  ‘Did they buy tickets from your agency?’

  ‘How do I know?’

  Brunetti placed the papers, face up, on the desk in front of him, leaving them in plain sight, open to Dorandi if he chose to try to read them. He drew a deep breath. ‘Signor Dorandi, shall we start again with this? I’ll repeat my question and this time I’d like you to consider your answer before you give it to me.’ He paused a long time, then asked, ‘Did the men who bought tickets to Bangkok through your agency travel with women or not?’

  Dorandi took a long time to answer, but finally said ‘No’ and nothing more.

  ‘And these tours you arrange with “tolerant hotel management” and “convenient location” - Brunetti’s voice was absolutely neutral, not a trace of emotion audible in it - ‘are they for the purpose of sex?’

  ‘I don’t know what they do when they get there,’ Dorandi insisted. ‘It’s not my business.’ He pulled his head down into the too-wide neck of his jacket, rather in the manner of a turtle under attack.

  ‘Do you know anything about the sort of hotels where these particular tourists go?’ Before Dorandi could answer, Brunetti put his elbows on the desk, cupped his chin in his palm and looked down at the list.

  ‘They have tolerant managements,’ Dorandi said eventually.

  ‘Does that mean they allow prostitutes to work there, perhaps even provide them?’

  Dorandi shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Girls? Not women, girls?’

  Dorandi glared across the desk at him. ‘I don’t know anything about the hotels except the prices. What my clients do there isn’t my business.’

  ‘Girls?’ Brunetti repeated.

  Dorandi waved a hand angrily in the air. ‘I told you, it’s none of my business.’

  ‘But it’s our business now, Signor Dorandi, so I would prefer an answer.’

  Dorandi looked at the wall again, but found no convenient solution there. ‘Yes.’ he said.

  ‘Is that the reason you choose them?’

  ‘I choose them because they offer me the best price. If the men who go there decide to take prostitutes back to their rooms in those hotels, that’s their business.’ He tried but could not restrain his anger. ‘I sell travel packages. I don’t preach morality. I’ve checked every word of those ads with my lawyer, and there’s nothing at all even remotely illegal in them. I’m not breaking any law.’

  ‘I’m sure of that,’ Brunetti couldn’t stop himself from saying. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be here any more. He stood. ‘I’m afraid we’ve taken up rather a lot of your time, Signor Dorandi. I’ll leave you now, but we might like to speak to you again.’

  Dorandi didn’t bother to answer. Nor did he get to his feet when Brunetti and Vianello left the room.

  * * * *

  14

  As they crossed Campo Manin, Vianello and Brunetti knew without discussing it that they would go and speak to the widow now, while they were still out, rather than go back to the Questura. To get to the Mitris’ apartment, which was in Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, they walked back to Rialto and took the number 1 towards the station.

  They chose to stand outside, preferring the coldness of the open deck to the damp air trapped inside the passenger cabin. Brunetti waited until they had passed under the Rialto before he asked Vianello, ‘Well?’

  ‘He’d sell his mother for a hundred lire, wouldn’t he?’ Vianello answered, making no attempt to disguise his contempt. He paused for a long time, then demanded, ‘Do you think it’s television, sir?’

  At a loss, Brunetti asked, ‘That what’s television?’

  ‘That lets us get so distanced from the evil we do.’ He saw he had Brunetti’s attention and continued, ‘That is, if we watch it, there on the screen, it’s real, but it isn’t actually, is it? I mean, we see so many people getting shot and hit, and we watch us,’ here he paused, smiled a little and explained, ‘the police, that is. We watch us discovering all sorts of terrible things. But the cops aren’t real, nor are the things. So maybe, if we watch enough of them, the true horrors, when they happen or when they happen to other people, don’t seem real, either.’

  Brunetti was a bit confused by Vianello’s language, but he thought he understood what he meant - and that he agreed - so he answered, ‘They’re how far away, those girls he knows nothing about, fifteen thousand kilometres? Twenty? I’d say it’s probably very easy not to see what happens to them as being real, or if it is, it probably isn’t very important to him.’

  Vianello nodded. ‘You think it’s getting worse?’

  Brunetti shrugged. ‘There are days when I think everything’s getting worse, then there are days when I know they are. But then the sun comes out and I change my mind.’

  Vianello nodded again, this time adding a muffled, ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘And you?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I think it’s worse,’ the sergeant answered with no hesitation. ‘Like you, though, I have days when everything’s fine: the kids jump all over me when I get home or Nadia’s happy and it’s contagious. But on the whole, I think the world’s getting worse as a place to be.’

  Hoping to lighten his uncharacteristic mood, Brunetti said, ‘Not much other choice, is there?’

  Vianello had the grace to laugh at this. ‘No, I guess there isn’t. For good or bad, this is all we’ve got.’ He paused for a moment, watching the palazzo that held the Casino draw near. ‘Maybe it’s different for us because we have kids.’

  ‘Why?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Because we can see ahead to the world they’re going to live in and can look back on the one we grew up in.’

  Brunetti, a
patient reader of history, recalled the countless times the ancient Romans had fulminated against the various ages in which they lived, always insisting that the generation of their own youth or of their parents’ had been far superior in every way to the one in which they now found themselves. He recalled their violent screeds against the insensitivity of the young, their sloth, their ignorance, their lack of respect for and deference to their elders, and he found himself greatly cheered by this memory. If every age thinks this way, then perhaps each is wrong and things aren’t getting worse. He didn’t know how to explain this to Vianello and felt awkward about quoting Pliny, afraid the sergeant would not recognize the writer or would be embarrassed at being made to show that he did not.

  Instead, he tapped him warmly on the shoulder as the boat pulled in to the San Marcuola stop and they both got off, walking single file down the narrow calle to make way for the people who hurried towards the embarcadero.

  ‘Nothing we’re going to solve, is it, sir?’ Vianello commented when they got to the wider street behind the church and could walk side by side.

  ‘I doubt it’s something anyone can solve,’ Brunetti said, aware of how vague a response he had chosen, unsatisfied with it even as he made it.

  ‘May I ask you a question, sir?’ The sergeant started walking again. Both of them knew the address, so they had some idea of the location of the house. ‘It’s about your wife, sir.’

  Brunetti knew from the tone of the question what it was bound to be. ‘Yes?’

  Keeping his eyes straight ahead of them, though no one was any longer coming towards them on the narrow calle, Vianello asked, ‘Did she tell you why she did it?’

  Brunetti walked on, keeping in step with his sergeant. He glanced aside at him and answered, ‘I think it’s in the arrest report.’

  ‘Ah,’ Vianello said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Didn’t you read it?’

  Again, Vianello stopped and turned to Brunetti. ‘As it was about your wife, sir, I didn’t think it was right to read it.’ Vianello was known to be loyal to Brunetti, so it was unlikely that Landi, a follower of Scarpa, would have spoken to him about it, and it was he who had arrested Paola and taken her statement.

  The two men resumed walking before Brunetti replied, ‘She said that it was wrong to arrange sex-tours and that someone had to stop them.’ He waited to see if Vianello would question him, but when the sergeant did not, he went on, ‘She told me that, since the law wouldn’t do anything about it, she would.’ He paused again, waiting for Vianello’s reaction.

  ‘Was it your wife the first time?’

  Without hesitation, Brunetti answered, ‘Yes.’

  Step and step, feet perfectly in line. Finally the sergeant said, ‘Good for her.’

  Brunetti turned to stare at Vianello, but all he saw was his heavy profile and long nose. Before he could ask anything, the other stopped and said, ‘If it’s six-o-seven, it should be right round this corner.’ Turning, they found themselves in front of the house.

  * * * *

  Mitri’s was the top of three bells and Brunetti pressed it, waited, then pushed it again.

  A voice, made sepulchral either by grief or a bad connection, came through the speaker phone, asking who they were.

  ‘Commissario Brunetti. I’d like to speak to Signora Mitri.’

  For a long time there was no answer, then the voice said, ‘Wait a minute’ and was gone.

  Much more than one minute passed before the door clicked. Brunetti pushed it open and led the way into a large atrium with two large palm trees growing on either side of a round fountain. Light filtered down from the sky above.

  They ducked into the passage in front of them and headed for the back of the building and the stairs. Just as in Brunetti’s own building, the paint on the walls was flaking off, victim of the salt rising up by absorption from the waters below. Flecks the size of hundred-lire coins lay either swept or kicked to the sides of the staircase, exposing the brick walls below. When they reached the first landing, they could see the horizontal line that marked the point the dampness had reached: above it, the stairs were free of flecks of paint and the walls smooth and white.

  Brunetti thought of the estimate an engineering company had given the seven owners of the apartments in his own building to correct the dampness, of the enormity of the sum and, depressed, immediately pushed it from his mind.

  At the top the door stood open and a young girl about Chiara’s age stood behind it, her body half hidden.

  Brunetti stopped and said, not offering his hand, ‘I’m Commissario Brunetti and this is Sergeant Vianello. We’d like to speak to Signora Mitri.’

  The girl didn’t move. ‘My grandmother isn’t well.’ Her voice was uneven with nervousness.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Brunetti said. ‘And I’m sorry about what happened to your grandfather. That’s why I’m here, because we’d like to do something about it.’

  ‘My grandmother says there’s nothing anyone can do.’

  ‘Perhaps we can find the person who did it.’

  The girl considered this. As tall as Chiara, she had brown hair parted in the middle that fell to her shoulders on either side. She would not grow to be a beauty, Brunetti thought, but that had nothing to do with her features, which were both fine and regular: wide-spaced eyes and a well-defined mouth. Instead, her plainness was made inevitable by a total lack of animation when she spoke or listened. Her placidity and inertness conveyed the sense that she was not concerned with what she was saying or, in a way, not really participating in whatever was said. ‘May we come in?’ he asked, stepping forward as he spoke, either to make her decision easier or to force her into making it.

  She didn’t say anything but stepped back and held open the door for them. Both men politely asked permission to enter and followed her into the apartment.

  A long central corridor led from the door to a bank of four Gothic windows at the other end. Brunetti’s sense of orientation told him that the light must be coming in from Rio di San Girolamo, especially as the distance to the buildings visible through them was so great: the only open space that large must be the expanse of the Rio.

  The girl led them into the first room on the right, a large sitting-room with a fireplace flanked by two windows, each more than two metres high. She waved at the sofa that stood facing the fireplace, but neither man sat.

  ‘Would you please tell your grandmother we’re here?’ Brunetti asked.

  She nodded but said, ‘I don’t think she wants to talk to anyone.’

  ‘Please tell her it’s very important,’ Brunetti insisted. Thinking it best to make it evident that he intended to stay, he removed his overcoat and put it over the back of a chair, then sat at one end of the sofa. He motioned to Vianello to join him, which he did, first laying his coat on top of Brunetti’s, then taking a seat at the other end of the sofa. Vianello removed his notebook from his pocket and clipped his pen to the front cover. Neither man spoke.

  The girl left the room and both men used the opportunity to look around. A large gilded mirror sat above a table on which stood an enormous spray of red gladioli, their colour and number reflected by the glass, so that they seemed to multiply and fill the room. A silk carpet, Brunetti thought it a Nain, lay in front of the fireplace, so close to the sofa that whoever sat there would have to put their feet on it. An oak chest stood against the wall opposite the flowers, on its surface a large brass salver gone grey with age. The wealth and opulence, though discreet, were evident.

  Before they could say anything, the door to the room opened and a woman in her fifties came in. She was stout-bodied and wore a grey wool dress that came well below her knees. She had thick ankles and small feet in shoes that looked uncomfortably narrow. Her hair and make-up were perfectly arranged and gave evidence of great expenditure of time and effort. Her eyes were lighter than her granddaughter’s, her features thicker: in fact, there was little familial resemblance between them save that
strange placidity of manner.

  Both men got to their feet immediately and Brunetti moved towards her. ‘Signora Mitri?’ he asked.

  She nodded but said nothing.

  ‘I’m Commissario Brunetti and this is Sergeant Vianello. We’d like to speak to you for a few moments about your husband and about this terrible thing that has happened to him.’ Hearing this, she closed her eyes but remained silent.

  Her face had about it the same absence of animation that was so noticeable on her granddaughter’s, and Brunetti found himself wondering if the daughter in Rome, whose child she must be, displayed a similar immobility.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Signora Mitri asked, still standing in front of Brunetti. Her voice had the high pitch that was common among post-menopausal women. Though Brunetti knew she was Venetian, she chose to speak in Italian, as had he.