Fatal Remedies Read Online Free PDF

come, as had often been the case in the last years, from Signorina Elettra. On the morning of the fifth meeting she had come into his office ten minutes before it was due to begin and asked Brunetti, with no explanation, for ten thousand lire.
     
    He had handed it over and, in return, she’d given him twenty brass-centred five-hundred-lire coins. In response to his questioning look she’d handed him a small card, little bigger than the box that held compact discs.
     
    He’d looked down at the card, seen that it was divided into twenty-five equally sized squares, each of which contained a word or phrase, printed in tiny letters. He’d had to hold it close to his eyes to read some of them: ‘Maximize’, ‘prioritize’, ‘outsource’, ‘liaison’, ‘interface’, ‘issue’ and a host of the newest, emptiest buzz-words to have slipped into the language in recent years.
     
    ‘What’s this?’ he’d asked.
     
    ‘Bingo,’ was Signorina Elettra’s simple answer. Before he could ask, she’d explained, ‘My mother used to play it. All you have to do is wait for someone to use one of the words on your card - all the cards are different - and when you hear it, you cover it with a coin. The first one to cover five words in a straight line wins.’
     
    ‘Wins what?’
     
    ‘The money of all the other players.’
     
    ‘What other players?’
     
    ‘You’ll see,’ was all she’d had time to say before they were summoned to the meeting.
     
    And since that day the meetings had been tolerable, at least for those provided with the small cards. That first day there had been only Brunetti, Signorina Elettra and one of the other commissari, a woman just returned from maternity leave. Since then, however, the cards had appeared on the laps or within the notebooks of an ever expanding number of people and each week Brunetti felt as much interest in seeing who had a card as in actually winning the game. Each week, too, the words changed, usually in conformity with the changing patterns or enthusiasms of Patta’s speech: they sometimes reflected the Vice-Questore’s attempts at urbanity and ‘multiculturalism’ - a word which had also appeared - as well as his occasional attempt to use the vocabulary of languages he did not speak; hence, ‘voodoo economies’, ‘pyramid scheme’ and ‘Wirtschaftlicher Aufschwung’.
     
    Brunetti arrived at the Questura half an hour before the meeting was scheduled to begin. Neither Ruberti nor Bellini was on duty when he got there, so it was a different officer who handed him the previous night’s crime log when he asked to see it. He glanced with every appearance of lack of interest at the pages: a burglary in Dorsoduro at the home of people away on vacation; a fight in a bar in Santa Marta between sailors from a Turkish freighter and two crewmen from a Greek cruise ship. Three of them had been taken to Pronto Soccorso at the Giustinian Hospital, one with a broken arm, but no charges had been pressed as both boats were to sail that afternoon. The window of a travel agency in Campo Martin had been shattered by a rock, but no one had been arrested, nor had there been any witnesses. And the all-night machine that sold prophylactics in front of a pharmacy in Cannaregio had been prised open, probably with a screwdriver and, according to the calculations of the owner of the pharmacy, seventeen thousand lire had been taken. And sixteen packages of prophylactics.
     
    The meeting, when it finally convened, brought no surprises. At the beginning of the second hour, Vice-Questore Patta announced that, in order to assure that they were not being used to launder money, the various non-profit organizations in the city would have to be asked to allow their files to be ‘accessed’ by the computers of the police, at which point Signorina Elettra made a small motion with her right hand, looked across at Vianello, smiled and said, but very softly, ‘Bingo.’
     
    ‘Excuse me,