Read Online Suffer the Little Children by Donna Leon - Free Book Online

baby-traffickers. Five people had been arrested and three babies consigned to the care of the state.
    â€˜Poor things,’ Vianello muttered, and it was clear that he was speaking about the children.
    â€˜But what else to do with them?’ Brunetti responded.
    Alvise, who had come in unnoticed and now stood near them, interrupted loudly, as though speaking to the television but inreality addressing Brunetti, ‘What else? Leave them with their parents, for the love of God.’
    â€˜Their parents didn’t want them,’ Brunetti observed drily. ‘That’s why all this is happening.’
    Alvise threw his right hand into the air. ‘I don’t mean the people they were born to: I mean their parents, the people who raised them, who had them for –’ he raised his voice further – ‘some of them had them for eighteen months. That’s a year and a half. They’re walking by then, talking. You can’t just go in and take them away and put them in an orphanage.
Porco Giuda
, these are children, not shipments of cocaine we can sequester and put in a closet.’ Alvise slammed his hand down on a table and gave his superior a red-faced look. ‘What sort of country is this, anyway, where something like this can happen?’
    Brunetti could only agree. Alvise’s question was perfectly fair. What sort of country, indeed?
    The screen was filled with soccer players, either on strike or being arrested, Brunetti could not tell and did not care, so he turned away from the television and left the room, followed by Vianello.
    As they climbed the stairs, the Inspector said, ‘He’s right, you know. Alvise.’
    Brunetti did not answer, so Vianello added, ‘It might be the first time in recorded history that he
has
been right, but he’s right.’
    Brunetti waited at the top of the stairs, andwhen Vianello reached him, said, ‘The law is a heartless beast, Lorenzo.’
    â€˜What’s that supposed to mean?’
    â€˜It means,’ Brunetti said, stopping just inside the door to his office, ‘that if these people are allowed to keep the babies, it establishes a precedent: people can buy babies or get them any way they want and from anywhere they want, and for any purpose they want, and it’s completely legal for them to do so.’
    â€˜What other purpose could there be than to raise them and love them?’ asked an outraged Vianello.
    From the first time he had heard them, Brunetti had decided to treat all rumours of the buying of babies and children for use as involuntary organ donors as an urban myth. But, over the years, the rumours had grown in frequency and moved geographically from the Third World to the First, and now, though he still refused to believe them, hearing them unsettled him. Logic suggested that an operation as complicated as a transplant required a number of people and a controlled and well-staffed medical environment where at least one of the patients could recover. The chances that this could happen and that all of those involved would keep quiet were odds Brunetti was not willing to give. This, at least, surely held true in Italy. Beyond its borders, Brunetti no longer dared to speculate.
    He still remembered reading – it must have been more than a decade ago – the agonized, andagonizing, letter in
La Repubblica
, from a woman who admitted that she had broken what she knew to be the law and taken her twelve-year-old daughter to India for a kidney transplant. The letter recounted the diagnosis, the assigning of her daughter’s name to a ranking so low on the health service waiting list for transplants as to amount to a sentence of death.
    The woman wrote that she was fully aware that some person, some other child, perhaps, would be constrained by poverty to sell a piece of their living flesh. She knew, further, that the donor’s health would afterwards be permanently compromised, regardless of