The Temptation of Forgiveness

by Donna Leon

  ‘Of course you can, Signora,’ Griffoni said with just the right note of piety in her voice.

  ‘I understand him completely,’ Brunetti began, voice rich with admiration, ‘And what with the cost of medicine today, twenty per cent would …’

  He was cut off by Griffoni, who waved a hand in the direction of the Signora’s face, as though she were a magician and Signora Gasparini the rabbit, saying, ‘And your complexion is certainly proof that a woman should buy only the best.’

  Signora Gasparini’s face grew thoughtful when she heard that, and she started speaking again. ‘He’s apologized to me, more than once, that the regulations of the health system are so complicated that he really can’t return the money to me without them finding out he gave me the drug without a prescription. If that happened, he told me they’d take his licence away. He’s been such a good friend to me that I can’t risk that.’

  Griffoni and Brunetti nodded in agreement, which created a grotesque scene of three nodding heads in the same limited space.

  Using his most concerned voice, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you recall how many times this has happened over the years, that you’ve forgotten to bring your prescriptions with you?’

  Friendly and solicitous, he paid close attention to her face; he saw her eyes close slowly and, when they opened again, seem faintly out of focus, as though a different person had been called upon to play the next part of the scene.

  ‘Over the years, it’s been … oh,’ she said, her surprise conspicuously audible, ‘I don’t really remember.’ She looked from one to the other, as though the missing number might be written on their foreheads, and if only she looked hard enough, she’d find it. But apparently this was not to be.

  Ordinarily, Brunetti would have repeated the question, but it was evident that Signora Gasparini had decided not to remember. Consequently, he changed the topic and said, with great earnestness, ‘How lucky you are to find a pharmacist who cares enough about his clients to take that risk.’

  She smiled, hearing her sudden loss of memory dismissed by this man as both convincing and unimportant. Her confidence in them and their discretion restored, she leaned forward again and, in a lowered voice, said, ‘That’s exactly what Signora Lamon told me. She was at the counter ahead of me one day, and I couldn’t help hearing their conversation. She’d forgotten her prescription, and Dottor Donato took out one of the coupons for her. When I saw her in Tonolo a few days ago – I go there for the mini bignés, especially the dark chocolate ones – and when I saw her, I told her that he’d done it for me, too.’ She paused here, as one does in a long conversation, trying to remember if one has already said something. Perhaps assured by her memory that she had not, she continued, ‘She told me she has two friends he also does it for.’

  She clasped her hands in front of her bosom in an old-fashioned gesture and said, ‘He’s so kind, that he does it for us.’

  Seamlessly, as though one person’s virtue led to another’s, Brunetti said, ‘He’s lucky to be able to work so closely with Dottoressa Ruberti, who surely must be another extremely kind person.’ He continued without pause, hoping to divert her from asking how he knew who her doctor was, and added, ‘My mother-in-law’s gone to her for years and never ceases to sing her praises.’

  Griffoni put on a smile and nodded a few times at the truth of this. The old woman saw the smile but had apparently forgotten the face on which it appeared.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Signora Gasparini concurred. ‘And she’s brave, like Dottor Donato, ready to take chances to see that her patients are well taken care of.’

  ‘Oh,’ Griffoni said with the enthusiastic curiosity of a younger person, ‘what has she done for you, Signora?’

  Signora Gasparini opened her mouth to answer but paused, as if struck by sudden difficulty in recalling just what the doctor had done for her.

  Brunetti saw the same panic in her eyes that he had seen in his mother’s when, in the early stages, she had failed to remember something, so he asked, ‘How long has she been your doctor, Signora?’ as if Griffoni had not asked the other question.

  Perhaps this was less complicated, for she said, ‘For the last ten years. My family doctor retired, and Dottoressa Ruberti took over the practice.’ At the sight of these two young people, nodding encouragingly, she went on. ‘She’s Venetian. My father went to school with her grandfather.’ She smiled, perhaps at having been able to remember this. ‘We discovered this a few months after I started to go to her, and I suppose it was a sort of bond for us.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti muttered. ‘That way, you could be sure she’d take a personal interest in your health.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. Then, almost proudly, she went on, ‘I didn’t go to her often at the beginning, you understand. Not like many of the old women around here. Not until about a year ago, when … when I had a few tests at the hospital, and Dottoressa Ruberti prescribed me some medicine.’ She stopped, and Brunetti wondered if she was willing herself to forget about her illness and to ignore the continual snap, snap, snap of her head. He certainly could not.

  She pulled her hands from the arms of her chair and interlocked her fingers, forcing her joined hands down on her lap. ‘I went to my old pharmacist, the one I used to go to, and he told me that there was another medicine identical to the one Dottoressa Ruberti prescribed that was … what do you call it?’ She brought one hand to her forehead. ‘What is it? Something with “G”.’

  Brunetti saw her fear, the tightness of her mouth, and asked, ‘Do you mean “generic”, Signora?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. That’s it. Of course. I was just about to say it.’ She smiled and made no attempt to hide her relief.

  ‘I told him I had to speak to my doctor about this, and when I did, she told me that the medicines weren’t the same, that the one she’d prescribed for me cost more because it had been proven to be better.’ She closed her eyes in the frustration of age and powerlessness. ‘It’s what they do to us, try to save money in any way they can, no matter if it kills us.’

  Brunetti made a comforting noise but said nothing.

  ‘I went back the next day and told the pharmacist I wouldn’t take the generic,’ she began, evidently proud of having remembered the word, ‘and when he refused to listen to me, I walked out. When I told Dottoressa Ruberti what had happened, she said she’d wanted to warn me about the pharmacist, but she couldn’t do that because of professional ethics. She said she was glad I’d seen for myself, and she knew a pharmacist who would give me the right medicine.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Griffoni whispered.

  ‘Yes. Thank God, indeed. They saved my life.’ Instead of thankful, the old woman sounded anguished, as if the struggle had exhausted her and haunted her still.

  ‘So that’s how you came to be a client of Dottor Donato?’ Brunetti asked in childlike innocence, as though he were eager to hear the end of a fairy tale.

  ‘Yes, it’s the best thing that could have happened. To have a wonderful doctor and a pharmacist who have the same concern for the well-being of their patients.’

  25

  Outside, the day was drawing down, bringing with it a taste of the deeper chill that would soon be upon them. Griffoni turned up the collar of her coat and kept her arms across her chest while they walked towards Rialto. When they arrived at Rizzardini, Brunetti asked if she’d like something to drink and she said she needed a coffee. Inside the tiny pasticceria, they both asked for a coffee, and she asked for a cannolo, saying, ‘It’s the only place here where I might be at home. At least for the pastries.’ The pastry and the coffees came, and they moved to the end of the bar, close to the door.

  She took a sip and made a face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I’m not in Naples is what’s wrong,’ she said seriously but then remembered to smile to suggest she was only joking. She picked up the cylindrical pastry and took a bite; crumbs rained down the front of her coat. ‘It’s not that the coffee’s
bad; it’s more that people up here simply don’t know what good coffee is or don’t know how to make it.’ She pushed the cup farther away with a stiff finger and took another bite, then finished the cream-filled pastry and wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, the front of her coat with her hand. ‘The pastry’s very good, though.’

  Brunetti finished his coffee, having thought it was fine and trying to remember the coffee he had drunk, ages ago, when he was stationed temporarily in Naples. He remembered the pasta and the fish but not the coffee, save that it was half the size of the one he had just drunk, and two were enough to energize him for hours.

  The bar was warm, and they were alone at the counter. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘My best friend’s grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and Signora Gasparini …’ she began, then corrected herself with a smile, ‘and my Aunt Matilde reminds me of her. Sometimes her memory works; other times it doesn’t. When she lets down her guard, she’s a feeble old woman who’s showing signs of Parkinson’s, losing her memory, and trying to hide those facts for as long as she can.’

  She reached into the pocket of her coat and put a five-Euro note on the counter. The barman brought her change and took the cups and saucers away.

  ‘And so?’ Brunetti asked.

  Griffoni didn’t answer but turned to the door and opened it. She walked out into the main calle, turned into the first on the left, and stopped, looking at the pastries in the window. ‘Gasparini had the coupons. He got them from his aunt,’ she said, speaking slowly as she ordered things in her mind. ‘She knew the same was being done for other people, and she may have told her nephew that, as well. Perhaps he confronted Donato and told him he knew what he was doing. Or threatened to come to us.’ She paused but did not look at him.

  ‘Why would Gasparini bother to tell him?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Why not simply do it, come to us with the coupons and whatever information his aunt had given him? About Signora Lamon, for example.’

  Griffoni put her hands into the pockets of her jacket and rolled up and down, up and down, on the balls of her feet. Brunetti could all but hear the gears in her mind shifting higher, then back again to a low steady beat, then up again to high.

  When she still failed to answer, Brunetti said, ‘You’re right that he might have known about the others. It took less than half an hour for your aunt to tell us about them.’

  Griffoni said only, ‘Signora Lamon.’

  ‘Why would Donato limit himself to medicines for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s?’ Brunetti asked. He thought for a while and continued, ‘The ones for psychological problems are expensive, especially when they’re first put on the market.’ He thought, but did not say, that the people who were prescribed this kind of drug were also the people most likely to forget to take their prescriptions with them to the pharmacy and the least likely to pay close attention to the price of their medicines or how or what they paid for them.

  People trusted their pharmacists as much as they did their doctors, he knew; perhaps even more – and trusted them with their secrets. ‘Donato would know if the families were rich or whether someone in the family would become suspicious at the disappearance of a hundred Euros every once in a while,’ he said.

  Griffoni took her eyes from the pastries and turned to look at him. ‘A pharmacist would probably be able to judge how serious their disease had become from reading the prescription: he could probably estimate how forgetful they were likely to be. Especially people with the beginnings of Alzheimer’s.’

  Brunetti nodded, asking himself how many of the coupons would be forgotten about or lost by the people who paid for them. If, months later, they found a few stuffed in a drawer, how many of them would remember what they were?

  ‘It could be a gold mine, couldn’t it?’ Griffoni said.

  ‘But what about the other people working there?’ he asked. In response to her glance, he said, ‘I don’t know if they’d all suggest a client pay the full price in return for a coupon.’ He drew to a sudden halt. ‘Are we agreed that they’d all have to be complicit in what’s going on?’

  ‘They’d have to know,’ Griffoni said. ‘I don’t know if that’s complicity.’

  ‘What else would it be?’ Brunetti asked in a voice he intentionally kept calm.

  ‘Avoiding trouble, keeping your job, minding your own business.’ She paused to see that he’d heard and understood her and then said, ‘Remember the Bible, Guido.’

  ‘What?’ he asked, unable to disguise his astonishment. ‘You? Saying that?’

  She smiled at the intensity of his response. She patted his arm and said, ‘Don’t worry, Guido. I’m talking only about the seven fat years and the seven lean years. We had lots of fat years; now the lean years have begun. So people, even pharmacists, are far less brave than they were in the past, far less able to risk losing their jobs.’

  ‘Able or willing?’ Brunetti asked with northern rigour.

  ‘Willing,’ conceded Griffoni, the Neapolitan.

  ‘They take an oath. Like doctors.’ Brunetti insisted.

  ‘Certainly,’ she said amiably. ‘But I’m not sure that means much any more. Not to most people. They want to survive, keep their heads down and survive. So that’s what they do.’

  ‘Keep their heads down?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Brunetti didn’t like knowing that she was right.

  He looked at his watch and saw that it was after six. Idiotic to go back to work when he was so close to home. ‘You going to get a boat?’ he asked Griffoni.

  ‘Yes. But I’m not going back to the Questura. If Lieutenant Scarpa asks me where I was, I’ll say I was following a suspect all the way down to San Pietro in Castello.’

  He laughed at the idea of anyone who was not Venetian trying to do that, and they turned back towards Rialto, Brunetti having decided to accompany her to San Silvestro.

  ‘Last weekend,’ she began, ‘I went over to Angelo Raffaele and spent two hours walking around.’

  ‘Were you lost?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t going anywhere or looking for anything. I simply walked around in circles – well, rectangular circles – until I began to recognize shops I’d passed or restaurants that were on corners where I’d turned before. I always turned at the bottom of the second bridge I came to.’

  ‘And?’ he asked.

  ‘I think I have a vague sense of where things are.’

  ‘It’s not easy.’

  ‘I know. I know. You have to have been born here.’

  ‘It helps,’ Brunetti said, just as they turned into the calle that led to the embarcadero. He looked at his watch. ‘There’s a boat going towards the Lido in two minutes.’

  She turned and stared at him. ‘Do you have them programmed into your memory?’

  ‘This is my stop, so I know the times.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. She pulled her wallet from her bag and extracted her imob.

  Brunetti heard the motor of the approaching boat; after a few seconds, so did she. ‘And tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Brunetti answered and turned back toward the underpass.

  After dinner, Brunetti went into Paola’s study and extended himself on her sofa, hands clasped behind his head. He had left the door ajar, allowing light to come into the room from the hallway. Outside, it was dark. Dimness was the proper setting.

  He stared at the ceiling and thought about his own pharmacy, in Campo San Bortolo, just to the statue’s left. He went there because, well, because he had always gone there.

  He closed his eyes and imagined walking in, going up to the counter with a prescription.

  From the front room of the apartment, he heard voices: Chiara and Raffi. One of them laughed. It was such a normal sound that Brunetti barely noticed it.

  Barely noticed it. Of course, no one paid any attention to what a pharmacist did. He took your prescription, brought you the medicine and told you w
hat to pay. Had his pharmacist told Brunetti that a medicine cost twenty-two Euros, instead of two, he would not have questioned the price. If the pharmacist told a person taking medicine against mental confusion, but who had forgotten to bring the necessary prescription, that the only way they could have their medicine was to pay full price for it and receive, as a guarantee of future repayment, a coupon from the pharmacy, who would question him?

  If the client refused, then the pharmacist had only to apologize for having suggested an alternative procedure in hopes of saving his client another trip to the pharmacy, and tell them they simply had to return with the prescription to have the medicine they needed at the usual price. And never try it with that client again.

  Would someone actually do this, risk his profession for so little? He remembered a well-known and very successful lawyer who had been caught last year shoplifting three ties from Hermès. Vice-Questore Patta had put a lock-down on that one: no charges had been brought, nor had information been slipped to Il Gazzettino, which would certainly have smacked its lips over the story. Brunetti had understood Patta’s decision: a moment’s folly should not incinerate a career and a reputation.

  Twenty years ago, he knew, his response would have been different, more punitive, more fierce. ‘How Italian you’re becoming,’ he said out loud.

  ‘That’s a good thing. I’d hate to think I’d married an Australian and never noticed,’ Paola said, pushing the door open with her foot. She carried a tray with two cups of coffee, two small glasses, and a tall, thin bottle that looked as if it might contain grappa.

  26

  Brunetti was awakened from deep sleep at about four by the sound of rushing wind. He sat up, alarmed at the noise and uncertain for a moment where he was. He extended his right hand and found Paola’s shoulder, searched for and saw the familiar pattern thrown on the far wall by the light that managed to filter in from the street lights five floors below. He waited for the noise to come again; it did not. He lay back on his pillow, but the sound did not return. The night lay silent on his ears.