Suffer the Little Children by Donna Leon

Polish woman’s baby home, what happened?’ Brunetti asked. In the hospital, the Captain had said that the Pedrolli operation was ‘separate,’ but Brunetti was certain that he could, sooner or later, be led to explain this.
    Tossing his paper napkin on to the plate,Marvilli said, ‘A judge issued an order allowing them to be kept under surveillance.’
    â€˜Which means?’ Brunetti asked, as though he didn’t already know.
    â€˜Their home phone and fax and email were tapped, so were their
telefonini
. Their mail was opened, and they were followed occasionally,’ Marvilli answered.
    â€˜And was the same true for Dottor Pedrolli and his wife?’ Brunetti asked.
    â€˜No, they were different,’ said Marvilli.
    â€˜In what way?’
    Marvilli’s lips flattened into a straight line and he said, ‘I can’t say more than that we received the information about them from a different source.’
    â€˜Can’t or won’t?’ Brunetti asked.
    â€˜Can’t,’ Marvilli said, sounding displeased. Brunetti was unsure whether this resulted from being asked the question or from not being able to answer it.
    He decided to risk one more question. ‘Did you know about them from the beginning, too?’
    Marvilli shook his head but said nothing.
    Brunetti accepted Marvilli’s response with apparent resignation, intrigued by the repeated suggestion that Pedrolli’s situation was somehow different and in some way separate from the long-planned action. He sensed that Vianello wanted to say something and decided to let him. It would serve as a graceful way to move the subject away from the anomalous case of the Pedrollis. He turned to Vianelloand, careful to use his first name, asked, ‘What is it, Lorenzo?’
    â€˜Captain,’ Vianello began, ‘if your superiors knew what these people had done, why weren’t they simply arrested?’
    â€˜The middle man, the person behind the arrangements. That’s who we wanted,’ Marvilli explained. He turned to Brunetti and said, ‘You realize by now that it’s not just the people who were arrested last night that we’re interested in, no?’
    Brunetti nodded.
    â€˜These aren’t isolated cases,’ Marvilli continued. ‘This is going on all over the country. We probably don’t have any idea of how common it is.’
    He turned back to Vianello. ‘That’s why we need the middle man, so we can find out who was providing the documents, the birth certificates, in one case even false medical papers, claiming that a woman had given birth to a child that wasn’t hers.’ He folded his hands on the table like an obedient schoolboy.
    Brunetti waited a few moments before saying, ‘We’ve had a few cases here, in the Veneto, but as far as I know, this is the first time anyone’s been arrested in the city.’
    Marvilli acknowledged this and Brunetti asked, ‘Does anyone have any idea . . . well, of the whole picture?’
    â€˜I can’t answer that, either, Commissario. I was assigned this case only last night, and I was briefed about it then.’ It seemed to Brunetti thatthe Captain had certainly learned a great deal in a very short time.
    Instead of commenting on this, Brunetti asked, ‘And do you know if this man you call the middle man was arrested?’
    Marvilli shrugged, leading Brunetti to assume that the answer was no. ‘What I do know is that two of the couples who were to be arrested last night had visited the same clinic in Verona,’ the Captain finally said.
    The surprise Brunetti felt at the name of a city in the economic heart of the country forced him to accept how automatic was his assumption that crime was somehow the natural heritage of the South. But why should the willingness to go to criminal lengths to have a child be more prevalent there than in the comfortable, rich North?
    He tuned back in