by Donna Leon
‘You’re from Castello, Commissario?’ she asked, calling attention to the fact that they had not been speaking in Veneziano. Seeing his surprise, she said, ‘Your accent, I mean.’
‘I lived there when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘I don’t hear it any more, but I’m sure I’ll never lose it.’
‘We never do. Not completely.’ As if he’d asked for an explanation, she said, ‘My father was a voice coach at the Goldoni, so he raised us to listen to people’s voices carefully.’ Her eyes wandered over to one of the windows, and she remained silent for some time, until she said, ‘I never thought about it, but that’s probably one of the reasons I know when people tell the truth. It’s in their voices, as well.’
Brunetti had known this for most of his professional life but said nothing.
‘We were talking about Dottor Donato, Dottoressa,’ he reminded her.
‘Of course. Excuse me. I suppose I’m delaying things.’ She sat up straighter. ‘Because you’re Venetian, you know how small the city is.’
Brunetti nodded.
‘It means that you could easily find out whatever I tell you. Little remains private in a small town.’ After a long pause, she continued, ‘I was married for some years and am now divorced. I have a son who has severe mental and physical disabilities. I’m a doctor, so I know how seriously he’s impaired and the physical path his life will follow, but I also have an idea of what his … social future will be.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about your son, Signora,’ Brunetti said.
She smiled again. ‘Thank you for that, Commissario.’ She studied his face, and then said, ‘In this case, my telling you is not an appeal to pity: it’s something you have to know.’
Brunetti nodded again.
‘My son, Teodoro, is in a private facility, and that’s because I’m a doctor and have seen how some of my patients and former patients are kept in public institutions.’ Her voice had tightened as she said this. ‘I am a family doctor, Commissario. I have more patients than I can take care of while working a normal schedule, so I work even longer hours in order to earn more. But still it is often not enough to pay for Teo’s care.’ She saw Brunetti begin to speak and held up a hand. ‘Before you ask, no, I do not receive anything from my ex-husband. I don’t care for myself, but I do care for Teo.
‘My husband is also a doctor and is remarried and now working in Dubai. There is a court order against him, claiming half of the cost of Teo’s care, but he refuses to pay it. So long as he remains in Dubai, there is no way to make him pay.’
To Brunetti, Dubai was a new element, but the story was certainly a common one.
‘As I said, this is a small town, and I suppose my story is common knowledge in the world of medicine. Which includes Dottor Donato.
‘Two years ago – when I’d already missed a few payments for Teo’s care – he came to me with a proposal, asking me to write prescriptions for my patients for one medicine while he would give them a different one. I refused and asked him to leave. I’m afraid I got up on my high horse and told him I’d vowed to do no harm to my patients, but he insisted that no one would be harmed by what he had in mind.’
Brunetti, from long experience, had observed that most people, when speaking to him and knowing him to be a policeman, displayed their nervousness in many ways: they fidgeted in their chairs, brushed their hair this way and that, touched their faces, folded and unfolded their hands. Dottoressa Ruberti, instead, looked him in the eye and remained motionless.
‘What did he propose?’ Brunetti asked.
‘He told me that, if I’d write prescriptions for the most expensive medicines, he in his turn would select the best of the current generics of that medicine and promised that my patients would get that. Farther, it would be packaged like the more expensive medicine and look exactly like it.’
‘How could he do that?’ Brunetti asked, although he had a suspicion.
‘He refused to tell me in detail. All he said was that he had built up friendships with the salesmen from some of the pharmaceutical companies, and he promised me they would take care of supply.’ She let Brunetti think about this for a while and then said, ‘When I still refused, he assured me – though in a very oblique way – that the boxes would be from the same company that produced the expensive medicine, and the bar codes would be the real ones.’
Brunetti nodded. The stratagem was not unknown. ‘What did he offer you?’
‘Thirty per cent of the difference between what he actually paid for the generic and what the health service repaid him for the more expensive medicine. I made it clear that the patient had to receive a medicine identical to the one I prescribed.’
‘And the risk?’ Brunetti asked.
‘None. He would be giving them a medicine that was in the same boxes and had the same effect as the medicine I’d prescribed.’
‘And?’
‘I asked for a day to think about it and went home and became – though I didn’t know him then – a kind of Tullio Gasparini.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that I spent the night looking at numbers: what Teo’s care would cost in five years, ten years, and how much I’d be making then and whether I could afford it.’ She gave him a direct look. ‘And the numbers told me that I could not, which meant Teo, sooner or later, would have to be put in a state institution.’ She looked at him. She did not ask if he had children. She did not say that, as a mother, she could not … She did not ask him to understand her situation.
‘The next day, I stopped in his pharmacy and told him I’d do it, and he gave me a list of medicines he suggested I prescribe for a number of diseases and told me that he would leave it to me how to convince my patients to go to his pharmacy to get their medication.’
‘In the far reaches of Canareggio,’ Brunetti said.
The look she gave him was steady, followed by a small nod of resignation: so the policeman knew where Dottor Donato’s pharmacy was. ‘Indeed. In the far reaches of Canareggio.’
‘When did the escalation start?’ Brunetti asked.
Surprised, she asked, ‘Do you know him?’
‘I know the type,’ Brunetti allowed himself to say.
‘Yes. As do we all,’ she answered and remained in silent thought until she finally said, ‘Some months later, he asked me to write some other, expensive prescriptions and simply give them to him and not to the patient for whom they were written. He’d obviously seen which of my patients were least able to pay attention or remember what was prescribed for them, or perhaps he’d found out which of them lived alone. All I had to do was write prescriptions and he’d process them: they’d pass through the system effortlessly and he’d be paid for medicine he never sold.’
‘It would surely be less trouble for your patients,’ Brunetti said, thinking of the trip these old people would no longer have to make to Canareggio.
She leaned forward slightly, as if waiting for him to add some ironic coda to what he had said. When he did not, she said, ‘And more profit for me.’
Brunetti resisted the urge to comment. He suddenly recalled his classes in logic in liceo and his old favourite logical error, the reductio ad absurdum, and thought he’d give it a try by making a ridiculous comparison. ‘Is this why people wait six months for a hip replacement?’
She looked up, startled and, it seemed, prepared to be angry. But when she saw that his question was deliberately provocative and not serious, she did not answer him, so he asked, ‘What if someone found out what you were doing?’
‘That was impossible,’ she said with every sign of certainty. ‘The only people who knew about the prescriptions were Dottor Donato and I.’
‘It’s very clever,’ Brunetti said, as though ‘clever’ were a dirty word.
‘And very common,’ she added.
‘But Gasparini found out,’ Brunetti finally said.
She smiled; it was a small, pathetic thing. ‘It had nothing to do with the prescriptions,’ she said and
instantly amended her remark, as if for the sake of precision, ‘at least as far as I was involved.’
Brunetti made a small noise but said nothing.
She braced her hands against the front of her desk to push herself back in her chair. ‘It was greed,’ she said. ‘Donato is a greedy man, and I’d allowed myself to ignore that.’
‘The coupons?’ Brunetti suggested, if only to give her an idea of what he might know.
‘Yes,’ she said and shook her head in what appeared to Brunetti to be honest confusion. ‘He wanted more. I knew nothing about them and thought he was cheating only the state. But now it turned out that he was also cheating these old people.’ It was clear from the way she spoke that she saw a vast difference between the two.
‘Cheating them how?’ Brunetti asked, not because he didn’t know what Donato was doing so much as to see how she’d define ‘cheating’.
‘He’d make them pay cash if they forgot their prescriptions and give them a coupon equal to the value of the medicine. Eighty Euros, sixty. One hundred and sixty. It didn’t matter to him, so long as they gave it to him. Her voice tightened even more, and she said, ‘And then he’d give them a coupon, pay the two Euros to process the prescription, and keep the entire sum they’d paid.
‘By the time they came back for the money – a day, two, a week, a month – they’d have forgotten what he’d told them, and then he’d explain in his comforting manner that he’d only tried to help them, that he’d made it clear at the time that the coupons couldn’t be redeemed for money or used for medicine, but that they had to redeem them for other products.’
She held both hands to the corners of her mouth and pulled the skin tight. ‘Oh, he’s very clever. He knew they’d never admit not remembering what he claimed he’d told them. To confirm the fact that they’d forgotten was to confirm my diagnosis, and many of my patients can’t or won’t do that.’
She pulled her hands away, and the lines fell back in place on either side of her mouth. ‘To keep them from feeling cheated and perhaps to stop them from talking about it to someone who might understand what he was doing, he invented the ruse of the extra twenty per cent. So instead of thinking they’d been cheated by having to pay eighty Euros or fifty-nine Euros for medicine that should have cost them two Euros, they could feel good about having been given twenty per cent extra in what he must have made sound like a bonus, when it was merely a way to force them to buy products that make him a much higher profit. That is, if they remembered what the coupons were.’ He watched her consider whether to add something here, and he went quiet as a stone, waiting.
She looked across at Brunetti, and he saw her eyes grow cold. ‘One of my patients told me how generous Dottor Donato always was to her.’
‘Is that how you learned about it?’
‘No. I knew nothing about it until Gasparini asked me. After his aunt told him about it, he spoke to one of her friends, and she told him the same story.’
‘And the dead people?’ Brunetti asked, curious as to how Donato would have justified it.
She looked away, then down at her desk to study her hands, which she had folded after she heard the question. ‘That was …’ she started and gave a small cough ‘… his idea. He told me the husband of one of my patients had come in to tell him his wife had died and to ask him to come to the funeral: I saw him there. He waited two days after the funeral before he came and asked me to write some prescriptions for her.’
Her eyes flashed up to his. ‘I tried to resist.’
Brunetti did no more than meet her gaze, and she lowered her eyes again.
‘He offered me half,’ she said, speaking very quickly, as if eager to get this over with. ‘So I agreed.’
Brunetti waited for her to explain or offer some excuse about special costs for her son at that time, or some immediate need for the money, but she said no more.
She raised a hand to stop him from speaking, and said, ‘There’s a bank account in my son’s name. All of the money that I’ve got from Dottor Donato – he always paid me in cash – is in that account, as well as any money I’ve managed to save since I accepted what Teo’s future will be.’
‘Is your son legally able to …?’ Brunetti began but failed to find the right words for the question.
‘No, he’s not. But a friend of mine is the signatory on the account and will see that it’s used for Teodoro while it lasts.’
‘You’re prepared for what will happen?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Ever since I agreed to write the prescriptions for him, I’ve been prepared, Commissario. I’ll never be able to practise medicine after this.’ Her expression grew distant in thought, and she said, ‘How strange, that I went ahead with this, when I knew where it might lead.’
Brunetti disagreed: he knew of cases where doctors had performed unnecessary surgery with no damage to their careers. ‘But …’ he began, only to have her cut him off.
‘It seems strange for me to have to remind you, Commissario, but aren’t you forgetting about Signor Gasparini?’
He had not forgotten; he had merely delayed. Following the Ariadne’s thread of her involvement in the prescriptions and having been moved to sympathy by the story of her son had not led him away from the straight path that had led him here.
‘Would you tell me about that, Dottoressa?’
‘There’s very little to tell, really. He came to me a few weeks ago, asking if I knew Dottor Donato, his aunt’s pharmacist. I said that I did. He asked if many of my patients went to that pharmacy, and I said that it might well be the case because I had great confidence in the professional competence of Dottor Donato, which is certainly true. Then he asked me if I knew about the coupons that Dottor Donato was giving his clients, and I was relieved to be able to say that I had no idea what he was talking about. He thanked me and left, but I knew I’d see him again.’
‘Why did you know that, Dottoressa?’
‘Because I saw what kind of man he was. And because I know what kind of man Dottor Donato is: he’d manage to turn Gasparini’s suspicions towards me.’ She paused long enough to draw another breath and added, ‘Which is exactly what he did.’
Brunetti thought it best to say nothing.
‘He was back a week later. Angry. Donato had told him, it seemed, that I had suggested the idea of the coupons to him. I tried to explain that I had nothing to do with it, but Signor Gasparini didn’t want to listen to me. He had been persuaded by Donato that I was the guilty party: divorced woman, living alone, son put in a private institution, instead of a public facility, where most people have to send their children.’ She shrugged. ‘He’d bought it all: man-to-man talk. When I asked him how I could possibly profit from the coupons, he refused to listen.’
‘What happened?’
‘He called me one day – I suppose his sense of justice made him do that – and said he was going to go to the police. Once they started investigating the coupons, I’d have no choice but to tell them what else was going on. And that would be the end of my career, wouldn’t it?’
When Brunetti remained silent, she demanded, ‘Wouldn’t it?’
‘What did you do?’ he asked, rather than answer.
‘I forced myself to calm down and asked if I could see him before he went. I said it was only correct to grant me at least that.’ She shook her head, as if amazed that she should have sunk to something like that.
‘He said he’d meet me near his home late the next evening, after he got home from work. It could not be in a public place because people knew him in the neighbourhood, and it would look strange for him to meet a woman in a bar that late in the evening.’ She looked at Brunetti again and opened her eyes wide in feigned disbelief.
‘We agreed on the bridge, at quarter to twelve. I was there early. I’d planned to bring him Teo’s clinical records, but I decided not to bother because that wouldn’t have made any difference to him. I was just another person living off the state system, living well on what I’d stol
en, and I had to be punished. I think it was as simple as that to him.’
She looked at Brunetti and, in a normal conversational voice, asked, ‘Do you think it’s because he worked with numbers all his life?’
‘It could be,’ Brunetti admitted, then asked, ‘What happened?’
Again, she put her face in her hands and wiped away the years, then let them return and looked at him. ‘He was right on time, and no one to see us.’ Her smile was a grim thing to see. ‘I tried to explain that I wasn’t involved with the coupons, but he wouldn’t listen, didn’t even let me talk. He started again about people who had no respect for the state and who spat in the common plate we were all meant to eat from and then stole from it to profit themselves.’ Seeing Brunetti’s expression, she paused and then said, ‘Yes. That’s the way he spoke. And then he told me he’d done enough by meeting me, and now he was going home.
‘We’d both moved around while we were talking, and I had my back turned to the direction he had to go in and was standing in his way.’
She raised both hands to the level of her shoulders, palms turned forward, like a child in a game told to stand stock still. ‘So he would have had to move around me to go down the bridge.’ Startled, she looked at her hands and lowered them to her lap. ‘And then, as he was trying to get around me, he said something about how shocking it was for me, a doctor, to steal from the weakest and most undefended and then to justify it all with the story of my son, who would be perfectly well off in a public institution.’
Her gaze drifted away, no doubt to the scene that had led to her being there with Brunetti. ‘I must have raised a hand to try to stop him; he grabbed it and pushed it away. I braced the other against his chest, and he said I should be ashamed of using my son as an excuse for my greed.’
She was breathing heavily and spoke in a strange, erratic cadence. ‘I don’t remember what I did. He started to move around me and brushed me aside with his body. I grabbed for him then. Maybe I wanted to push him away or maybe I wanted to hurt him. He moved suddenly, but he was falling, not walking.’
