Fatal Remedies Read Online Free PDF Page B

Signorina?’ Vice-Questore Patta was aware that something had been going on for some time but ignorant of what it could be.
     
    She looked at the Vice-Questore, repeated her smile and said, ‘Dingo, sir.’
     
    ‘Dingo?’ he enquired, peering at her over the tops of the half-glasses he affected for these meetings.
     
    ‘The animal protection people, sir, the ones who put the canisters in the shops to collect money to take care of strays. They’re a non-profit organization. So we should contact them as well.’
     
    ‘Indeed?’ Patta asked, not certain that this was what he had heard, or what he had expected.
     
    ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to forget them,’ she explained.
     
    Patta turned his attention back to the papers in front of him and the meeting continued. Brunetti, chin propped on his hand, watched as six other people made small stacks of coins in front of themselves. Lieutenant Scarpa watched them carefully, but the cards, previously shielded by hands, notebooks and coffee cups, had all disappeared. Only the coins remained - and the meeting, which dragged itself tiredly along for yet another half-hour.
     
    Just at the moment when insurrection - and most of the people in the room carried weapons - was about to break out, Patta removed his glasses and set them tiredly on the papers in front of him. ‘Has anyone anything else to say?’ he asked.
     
    Anyone who might have spoken did not, no doubt deterred by the thought of all those weapons, so the meeting ended. Patta left, followed by Scarpa. Small piles of coins were slid down two sides of the table until they stood either in front of or directly across from Signorina Elettra. With a croupier’s grace she swept them all off the side of the table into one cupped hand and got to her feet, signalling that the meeting really was over.
     
    Brunetti went back upstairs with her, strangely cheered by the sound of coins jingling in the pocket of the grey silk jacket she wore. ‘Accessed?’ he repeated, using the English word but making it, this time, sound like an English word.
     
    ‘It’s computer speak, sir,’ she said.
     
    ‘To access?’ he asked. ‘It’s a verb now?’
     
    ‘Yes, sir, I believe it is.’
     
    ‘But it didn’t use to be,’ Brunetti said, remembering when it had been a noun.
     
    ‘I think Americans are allowed to do that to their words, sir.’
     
    ‘Make them verbs? Or nouns? If they feel like it?’
     
    ‘Yes, sir.’
     
    ‘Ah,’ Brunetti breathed.
     
    He nodded to her at the top of the first flight of stairs, and she went towards the front of the building and her small office, just outside Patta’s. Brunetti continued up to his own, thinking about the liberties some people thought they could take with language. Just like the liberties Paola thought she could take with the law.
     
    Brunetti went into his office and closed the door. Everything, he realized when he tried to read the papers on his desk, would pull his thoughts back to Paola and the events of the early morning. There would be no resolution and they would not be free of it until they could talk about it, but the memory of what she had dared to do launched him into a state of anger so consuming that he knew he was still incapable of discussing it with her.
     
    He looked out of the window, seeing nothing, and tried to discover the real reason for his rage. Her behaviour, had he failed to stamp out evidence of it, would have put his job and his career in jeopardy. Had it not been for Ruberti’s and Bellini’s presence and quiet complicity, the newspapers would soon have been full of the story. And there were many journalists -Brunetti busied himself for some minutes making a list of them - who would delight in telling the story of the criminal wife of the commissario. He rethought the phrase, turning it into a headline in capital letters.
     
    But she had been stopped, at least for the present. He remembered taking her in his arms, recalled the