Fatal Remedies Read Online Free PDF Page A

the stove to pour himself a cup of coffee from the six-cup moka express. He added hot milk, came back to the table, sat down and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I used your razor, Pap à .’
     
    ‘To do what?’ Chiara asked, ‘trim your fingernails? There’s certainly nothing growing on that face of yours that needs a razor.’ That said, she moved out of Raffi’s range and closer to Brunetti, who gave her a reproving squeeze through the thick flannel of her pyjamas.
     
    Raffi leaned towards her across the table, but his heart wasn’t in it and he stopped his hand over the pile of brioches and picked one up. He dunked one end into the coffee and took an enormous bite. ‘How come there’s brioches?’ he wanted to know. When no one answered he turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘You go out?’
     
    Brunetti nodded and took his arms from around Chiara. He slipped out from under her and got to his feet.
     
    ‘You get the papers, too?’ Raffi asked from around another mouthful of brioche.
     
    ‘No,’ Brunetti said, moving to the door.
     
    ‘How come?’
     
    ‘I forgot,’ he lied to his only son, went into the hall, put on his coat and left the apartment.
     
    * * * *
     
    Outside, he turned towards Rialto and the decades-long familiar route to the Questura. Most mornings he found delight in some small element of the walk: a particularly absurd headline on one of the national papers, some new misspelling on the front of the cheap sweat-shirts that filled the booths on both sides of the market, the first arrival of some longed-for fruit or vegetable. But this morning he saw little and noticed nothing as he made his way through the market, over the bridge and into the first of the narrow streets that would take him to the Questura and to work.
     
    Much of the time it took him to walk to his office he spent thinking about Ruberti and Bellini, wondering if their personal loyalty to a superior who had treated them with a certain measure of humanity would prove sufficient motive for them to betray their oath of loyalty to the State. He assumed it would, but when he realized how suspiciously close this was to the scale of values that had animated Paola’s behaviour, he forced his mind away from them and, instead, contemplated the day’s immediate trial: the ninth of the ‘convocations du personnel’ which his immediate supervisor, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, had instituted at the Questura after the recent training course he’d attended at Interpol headquarters in Lyon.
     
    There, in Lyon, Patta had exposed himself to the elements of the various nations which now made up united Europe: champagne and truffles from France, Danish ham, English beer and some very old Spanish brandy. At the same time he had sampled the various managerial styles on offer by bureaucrats of the different nations. At the end of the course he’d returned to Italy, suitcases filled with smoked salmon and Irish butter, head bursting with new, progressive ideas about how to handle the people who worked for him. The first of these, and the only one so far to be revealed to the members of the Questura, was the now weekly ‘convocations du personnel’, an interminable meeting at which matters of surpassing triviality were presented to the entire staff, there to be discussed, dissected and ultimately disregarded by everyone present.
     
    When the meetings had first begun two months ago, Brunetti had joined the majority in the opinion that they would not last more than a week or two, but here they were, after eight of them, with no end in sight. After the second Brunetti had started to bring his newspaper, but that had been stopped by Lieutenant Scarpa, Patta’s personal assistant, who had repeatedly asked if Brunetti were so little interested in what happened in the city that he would read a paper during the meetings. He had then tried a book, but he could never find one small enough to hold in his cupped hands.
     
    His salvation had