Free Fatal Remedies by Donna Leon Page B

tours?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘Usually Thailand, I think, but there are lots of them to the Philippines. And Cuba. And in the last couple of years they’ve started them to Burma and Cambodia.’
     
    ‘What are the ads like?’ asked Brunetti, who had never paid any attention to them.
     
    ‘They used to say things overtly: “In the middle of the red light district, friendly companions, all dreams come true”, that sort of thing. But now that the law’s been changed, it’s all in a sort of code: “Hotel staff very open-minded, near the night spots, friendly hostesses.” It’s all the same sort of thing, though, lots of whores for men too lazy to go out on the road and look for them.’
     
    Brunetti had no idea how Paola had learned about this or how much she knew concerning Mitri’s agency. ‘Has Mitri’s place got the same sort of ads?’
     
    Vianello shrugged. ‘I suppose so. The ones who do it all seem to use a similar coded language. You learn to read it after a while. But most of them also do a lot of legitimate booking: the Maldives, the Seychelles, wherever there’s cheap fun and lots of sun.’
     
    For a moment Brunetti feared that Vianello, who had had a pre-cancerous growth removed from his back some years ago and had militantly avoided the sun since then, would launch into his favourite topic, but instead Vianello said, ‘I’ve asked about him. Downstairs. Just checking to see if the boys know anything.’
     
    ‘And?’
     
    Vianello shook his head. ‘Nothing. Might as well not exist.’
     
    ‘Well, it’s not illegal, what he’s doing,’ Brunetti said.
     
    ‘I know it’s not illegal,’ Vianello finally said. ‘But it should be.’ Then, before Brunetti could answer, he added, ‘I know it’s not our job to make the law. Probably not even our job to question it. But no one should be allowed to send grown men off to have sex with children.’
     
    Put like that, Brunetti realized, there was little to be argued against it. But all the travel agency did, so far as the law was concerned, was arrange for the purchase of tickets so that people could travel to other places and arrange hotels for them when they arrived. What they did when they were there was entirely their own affair. Brunetti found himself remembering his university course in logic and how excited he had been by the all but mathematical simplicity of it. All men are mortal. Giovanni is a man. Therefore Giovanni is mortal. There had been rules, he remembered, for checking the validity of a syllogism, something about a major term and a middle term: they had to be in certain places and not too many of them could be negative.
     
    The details seemed to have disappeared, flown off to join all those other facts, statistics, and first principles that had escaped his keeping in the decades since he had finished his exams and been accepted into the ranks of the doctors of law. He recalled, even at this remove, the tremendous sense of assurance that had come to him in learning that certain laws did apply and could be used to govern the validity of conclusions, that they could be demonstrated to be correct or arrived at truly.
     
    The ensuing years had worn away that assurance. Now truth, seemed to reside in the possession of those who could shout the loudest or hire the best lawyers. And there was no syllogism that could resist the argument of a gun or a knife, or any of the other forms of argumentation with which his professional life was filled.
     
    He pulled himself away from these reflections and returned his attention to Vianello, caught him in mid-sentence: ‘. . . a lawyer?’
     
    ‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti said. ‘I was thinking about something else.’
     
    ‘I wondered if you’d thought of getting a lawyer for this.’
     
    Ever since he had walked down from Patta’s office, Brunetti had been thrusting away this idea. Just as he would not answer for his wife to the men in the upstairs office, he had not allowed