Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

He did. As he stepped back from the desk, the porter said, ‘I’m sorry about your friend, Signore.’

Brunetti nodded his thanks and started through the high-arched entrance hall, blind to its beauty. By a conscious effort of will, he prevented himself from counting over, like the beads on the rosary of myth, the stories he’d heard of the legendary inefficiency of the hospital. Rossi had been taken to Orthopaedics, and there he had died. And that was all he needed to think about right now.

In London and New York, he knew, there were musical shows that had been running for years. The casts changed, new actors took over the roles from those who retired or went on to different shows, but the plots and the costumes remained the same, year after year. It seemed to Brunetti that much the same happened here: the patients changed, but their costumes and the general air of misery that surrounded them did not. Men and women shuffled through the arcades and stood at the bar in their dressing gowns and pyjamas, supporting themselves on casts and crutches, while the same stories were played out endlessly: some of the players went on to other roles. Some, like Rossi, left the stage.

When he arrived at Orthopaedics, he found a nurse standing outside the door, lounging at the top of the stairs, smoking a cigarette. As he approached, she stabbed out the cigarette in a paper cup she held in her other hand and opened the door, heading back into the ward.

‘Excuse me,’ Brunetti said, walking quickly through the door close behind her.

She tossed the paper cup into a metal wastepaper basket and turned to look at him. ‘Yes?’ she asked, barely glancing at him.

‘I’ve come for Franco Rossi,’ he said. ‘The porter told me he was here.’

She looked at him more closely, and her professional opacity softened, as if his proximity to death made him worthy of better treatment. ‘Are you a relative?’ she asked.

‘No, a friend.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said, and in her tone there was nothing of her profession, only the sincere acknowledgement of human grief.

Brunetti thanked her and then asked, ‘What happened?’

She moved off slowly and Brunetti walked along with her, assuming she was leading him toward Franco Rossi, his friend Franco Rossi. ‘They brought him in here Saturday afternoon,’ she explained. ‘They could see downstairs when they examined him that both arms were broken, so they sent him up here.’

‘But it said in the paper that he was in a coma.’

She hesitated, then suddenly began to walk faster, toward a pair of swinging doors at the end of the corridor. ‘I can’t say anything about that. But he was unconscious when they brought him up.’

‘Unconscious from what?’

She paused again, as if considering how much she could tell him. ‘He must have hit his head when he fell.’

‘How far was it that he fell? Do you know?’

She shook her head and pushed a door open with her hand, holding it to allow him to pass through and into a large open area at one side of which there was a desk, empty now.

When he sensed that she was not going to answer his question, he asked, ‘Was there much damage?’

She started to speak and then said, ‘You’ll have to ask one of the doctors.’

‘Is that what caused his death, the wound to his head?’

He didn’t know if he was imagining it, but it seemed that she drew herself up straighter with his every question, as her voice became more professional and less warm. ‘That’s something else you’ll have to ask the doctors.’

‘But I still don’t understand why he was brought up here,’ Brunetti said.

‘Because of his arms,’ she said.

‘But if his head…’ Brunetti started to say, but the nurse turned away from him and toward another swinging door to the left of the desk.

Just as she reached it, she turned and called back over her shoulder, ‘Perhaps they could explain things to you downstairs. In Emergency. Ask for Dottor Carraro,’ and she was gone.

He did as she suggested and went quickly downstairs. In the Emergency Room he explained to the nurse that he was a friend of Franco Rossi, a man who had died after being seen in the ward, and asked if he could speak to Dottor Carraro. She asked his name and told him to wait while she spoke to the doctor. He went over to one of the plastic chairs that lined one wall and sat, suddenly grown very tired.

After about ten minutes, a man in a white jacket pushed his way through the swinging doors that led to the treatment room and walked a few steps toward Brunetti before he stopped. Standing with his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket, it was obvious that he expected Brunetti to come toward him. He was short, with the swinging, aggressive walk many men of his stature adopt. He had wiry white hair that he wore slicked to his head with oily pomade, and reddened cheeks that spoke of drink rather than good health. Brunetti rose politely to his feet and walked over toward the doctor. He stood at least a head taller than the other man.

‘Who are you?’ Carraro asked, looking up at the other man and showing a lifetime’s resentment at having to do so.

‘As the nurse may have told you, Dottore, I’m a friend of Signor Rossi,’ Brunetti began by way of introduction.

‘Where’s his family?’ the doctor asked.

‘I don’t know. Have they been called?’

The doctor’s resentment turned to irritation, no doubt provoked by the thought that there existed a person so ignorant as to think he had nothing better to do than sit around making phone calls to the relatives of dead people. He didn’t answer and, instead, asked, ‘What do you want?’

‘I’d like to know the cause of Signor Rossi’s death,’ Brunetti answered in an equable voice.

‘What business is it of yours?’ the doctor demanded.

They were understaffed at the hospital, Il Gazzettino often reminded its readers. The hospital was overcrowded, so many doctors ended up working long hours.

‘Were you on duty when he was brought in, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked by way of reply.

‘I asked you who you were,’ the doctor said in a louder voice.

‘Guido Brunetti,’ he answered calmly. ‘I learned that Signor Rossi was in the hospital from the newspaper, and I came to see how he was. The porter told me he’d died, and so I came here.’

‘What for?’

‘To learn the cause of his death,’ Brunetti said, and then added, ‘among other things.’

‘What other things?’ the doctor demanded, his face suffusing with a colour it would not take a doctor to realize was dangerous.

‘To repeat myself, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with an unctuously polite smile, ‘I’d like to know the cause of death.’

‘You said you were a friend, right?’

Brunetti nodded.

‘Then you have no right to know. No one but the immediate family can be told.’

As if the doctor hadn’t spoken, Brunetti asked, ‘When will the autopsy be performed, Dottore?’

‘The what?’ Carraro asked, emphasizing the patent absurdity of Brunetti’s question. When Brunetti made no response, Carraro turned on his heel and started to walk away, his swagger bespeaking his professional contempt for the layman and his stupidity.

‘When will the autopsy be held?’ Brunetti repeated, this time omitting Carraro’s title.

The doctor wheeled around, not without a hint of the melodramatic in his gesture, and walked quickly back towards Brunetti. ‘There will be whatever the medical direction of this hospital decides, Signore. And I hardly think you’ll be asked to take any part in that decision.’ Brunetti was not interested in the heat of Carraro’s anger, only in what could have caused it.

He pulled out his wallet and took his warrant card from it. He held it by a corner and extended it toward Carraro, careful to hold it at such a height that the other man had to tilt his head far back to see it. The doctor grabbed the card, lowered it, and studied it with some attention.