Suffer the Little Children (30 page)

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 gently 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 caution, 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
Pedrolli's home. Surely, the child could no longer be considered a patient.

‘But I thought . . .' Franchi began, and then came the thought that the child might have been returned. ‘Has he . . .?' he began but didn't know how to finish the question.

‘No,' said Pedrolli in his typically soft voice. It sounded strange here, in this small room which usually made sounds larger. ‘No, he hasn't,' the doctor said and regret flowed across his face. ‘And he won't.'

‘Then I'm afraid I don't understand,' Franchi said. Suddenly conscious of the syringe in his hand, he placed it on the counter, careful to see that the tip did not touch the surface. He saw that Pedrolli watched as he placed it there, and he saw the doctor's professional glance range over the bottles on the counter. Pedrolli was a fellow professional and would surely appreciate his carefulness, the disciplined orderliness of his workshop, a sure reflection of the disciplined orderliness of his work; indeed, of his entire life.

‘I'm preparing a pepsin mixture for a patient,' he explained in answer to no question from Pedrolli, hoping the doctor noticed the way he declined to use the patient's name. With a gesture towards the bottles ranked up against the wall, he said, ‘I didn't want to risk taking a bottle out from the back of the cabinet while the others were still there, in front of it, so I took them all out. For safety.' A doctor would appreciate this kind of caution, he was sure.

Pedrolli nodded, seemingly uninterested. ‘I'm
also a patient here, aren't I?' he surprised the pharmacist by asking.

‘Yes. Of course,' he agreed. He took it as a compliment that a doctor, a fellow professional but nevertheless senior to him, had chosen him as his pharmacist, though it was really the doctor's wife who was his client. And the child, of course, though no longer.

‘That's why I came,' Dottor Pedrolli said, again confusing the pharmacist.

‘I still don't understand,' Franchi said. Could the loss have upset the balance of this man's mind? Ah, poor man, but perhaps understandable after so much trouble.

‘You have my records, then?' Pedrolli surprised him by asking.

‘Of course, Dottore,' he answered. ‘I have records for all of my clients.' He liked to think of them as his patients, but he knew he had to refer to them as clients, to show that he knew his proper place in the order of things.

‘Could you tell me how it is you come to have them, Dottore?' Pedrolli asked.

‘Have them?' Franchi repeated stupidly.

‘My medical records.'

But he had said only ‘records', surely, not ‘medical records.' The other man had not understood. ‘I don't mean to correct you, Dottore,' he began, though he did, ‘but I have your records for this pharmacy', he said, choosing his words very carefully. ‘It would not be proper for me to have your medical records.' That was true enough, thus to say so was not to lie.

Pedrolli smiled, but it was not a reassuring thing to see. ‘I'm afraid that's not what I heard.'

‘From whom?' asked an indignant Franchi. Was he, a professional, a man who had lawyers, judges, engineers, and doctors among his patients, was he to be subject to such an accusation?

‘From someone who knows.'

Franchi's face grew hot. ‘You can't come in here and make that sort of accusation.' Then, remembering the status of the person to whom he spoke, he forced his voice to a more accommodating tone. ‘That's completely inappropriate. And unjust.'

Pedrolli took a short step back; strangely, the distance seemed to increase the difference in height between them: the doctor now loomed above the pharmacist. ‘If you'd like to talk about inappropriate and unjust accusations, Dottor Franchi,' the other man began in a reasonable voice, one that spoke of patience, ‘perhaps we could talk about Romina Salvi.'

Franchi took some time to prepare his face and his voice. ‘Romina Salvi? She's a client of mine, but I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Who has been taking lithium for six years, I believe,' Pedrolli said with a small smile, the kind that encouraged confidence in a patient.

‘I'd have to check her records to be sure of that,' Franchi said.

‘That she's taking lithium or that it's been six years?'