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- he thought it had appeared in Panorama - which had provoked Paola to incendiary rage. He had heard the first salvo two weeks before in Paola’s voice, which had shouted from the back of the apartment ‘Bastardi’, a sound which had shattered the peace of a Sunday afternoon and, Brunetti now feared, far more than that.
     
    He had not had to go back to her study, for she had stormed into the living-room, the magazine a clenched cylinder in her right hand. There had been no preamble. ‘Listen to this, Guido.’
     
    Paola had unrolled the magazine, flattened the page against her knee and straightened up to read, ‘“A paedophile, as the word says, is one who doubtlessly loves children.”‘ She stopped there and looked across the room at him.
     
    ‘And rapists, presumably, love women?’ Brunetti had asked.
     
    ‘Do you believe this?’ Paola had demanded, ignoring his remark. ‘One of the most popular magazines in the country - and only God knows how that can be - and they can print this shit?’ She glanced down at the page and added, ‘And he teaches sociology. God, have these people no conscience? When is someone in this disgusting country going to say that we’re responsible for our behaviour instead of blaming it on society or, for God’s sake, the victim?’
     
    Because Brunetti could never answer questions like this, he had made no attempt to do so. Instead, he asked her what else the article said.
     
    She’d told him then, her rage not at all diminished by her having to become lucid to do so. Like any good tour, the article touched all the by now famous sites: Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Manila, then brought things closer to home by regurgitating the most recent cases in Belgium and Italy. But it was the tone which had enraged her and, he had to admit, disgusted Brunetti: starting from the astonishing premise that paedophiles loved children, the magazine’s resident sociologist had gone on to explain how a permissive society induced men to do these things. Part of the reason, this sage opined, was the tremendous seductiveness of children. Rage had stopped Paola from reading further.
     
    ‘Sex-tourism,’ Paola had muttered between teeth clenched so hard that Brunetti could see the tendons in her neck pulled out from the skin. ‘God, to think that they can do it, that they can buy a ticket, sign up for a tour, and go and rape ten-year-olds.’ She had thrown the magazine to the back of the sofa and returned to her study, but it was that night after dinner that she had first proposed the idea of stopping the industry.
     
    Brunetti had at first thought she was joking and now, in retrospect, he feared that his refusal to take her seriously might have upped the ante and driven her that fatal step from outrage to action. He remembered asking her, his voice in memory arch and condescending, if she planned to stop the traffic all by herself.
     
    ‘And the fact that it’s illegal?’
     
    ‘What’s illegal?’
     
    ‘To throw rocks through windows, Paola.’
     
    ‘And it’s not illegal to rape ten-year-olds?’
     
    Brunetti had stopped the conversation then, and in retrospect he had to admit it had been because he had no answer to give her. No, it seemed, in some places in the world it was not illegal to rape ten-year-olds. But it was illegal, here in Venice, in Italy, to throw rocks through windows, and that was his job: to see that people did not do it or, if they did, that they were arrested.
     
    The train pulled into the station and came to a slow stop. Many of the passengers getting down on to the platform carried paper-wrapped cones of flowers, reminding Brunetti that today was the first of November, the day of the dead, when most citizens would go out to the cemetery to lay flowers on the tombs of their departed. It was a sign of his misery that he welcomed the thought of dead relatives as a comfortable distraction. He wouldn’t go; he seldom did.
     
    Brunetti decided to walk home rather