Diego Marani - God's Dog

Ivan Zago had now been on the run for a week. Wherever he went, he felt that he was followed. It could not go on like this. By now he had wandered all over Germany. It was not money that was the problem; he had plenty of that. His job as a doctor travelling the world for various oil companies had netted him a decent nest egg. But whenever he went back to Zurich between engagements, the curia’s cut-throats were instantly on his tail. The last one — a greenhorn who was at least one step behind him — had had to be blown away. He hadn’t realised that Ivan had spotted him. On the evening when the papal agent had left his lair to come out to kill him, Ivan had waited for him outside the hotel and shot him down with a stolen gun. Now he could no longer go back to Zurich. It was too risky; his next engagement was not until July, on an offshore oil well in Alaska. He thought all this would have come to an end with his father’s death. When he had learned that his father was seriously ill in hospital, Ivan had stopped blackmailing them, hoping that they would then leave his father in peace, that they wouldn’t persist in hounding a dying man. But in fact they had taken him hostage; they thought that Ivan would concede defeat and give himself up. Indeed, in a sudden fit of rage, he had been about to do so; he was ready to sacrifice himself to save his father further suffering. Then his father had died, alone and left to his own devices in a hospital for infectious diseases. Ivan certainly had no intention of calling it a day; he would make them pay for it, and he wanted his revenge to be carefully considered. But the curia wasn’t calling it a day either; by now Novak must have been running scared. All the better! The problem had to be solved at its source: he would have to go to Rome and settle his score with Novak. That same night, after almost two years, he phoned Marta.

Things seemed unusually busy when Salazar arrived at the hospital. The sisters’ office was closed and the police were denying access to relatives who had come for the evening visit. In the corridor with the light brown linoleum, Salazar saw a group of nurses clustered around the bed of patient 148.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked the doctor with the goatee, who was coming out of the room.

‘There’s been a death. But there don’t seem to be any suspicious circumstances.’

‘Bonardi?’

‘Yes. Cardiac arrest. We’re just taking the readings.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Last night. Well, shortly before dawn, according to the police doctor.’

‘Have the relatives been informed? Does his daughter know?’

‘We phoned her, but there was no answer. Her mobile was switched off. She’s probably on her way now — it’s visiting time. We’ll soon be letting the relatives in.’

Salazar drew the man to one side and spoke to him quietly.

‘Doctor…you realise that I shall have to see the body?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve already given orders to that effect. You can come in now. The other patient has been moved.’ With those words, the doctor nodded to the nurses who were standing in the doorway. Then he turned to Salazar and rapped him lightly on the chest with his knuckles, smiling as he did so.

‘I told you, inspector, you should have looked for this man’s guardian angel. Perhaps he’s still around! A wingless angel never wanders far. Basically they are functionaries, just like ourselves. He’ll be waiting to hear about his new job. Maternity is on the fourth floor!’ he added with a sarcastic grin.

Salazar couldn’t decide whether the man was joking or being completely serious. He hurried towards Bonardi’s room.

The body had been moved on to a stretcher and two doctors were examining it. It was greyish, almost leaden in colour, it no longer looked as if it were made of flesh; the rigid limbs, and the hands, in plastic gloves, had adopted grotesque positions. The face was ashen, the mouth freed at last from the anguished grimace into which pain had forced it for so long. Now it seemed impossible that that tangle of bones might once have been alive. With practised movements, without exchanging a word, the two doctors examined the body. The nurse was leaning up against the bedside table, filling in various documents; she waited until the photographic readings had been completed, then covered up what remained of the engineer Marco Bonardi with a white cloth.

‘Nothing untoward. No signs of violence,’ said the police doctor to Salazar, lowering his mask. But then he added:

‘Just two small marks under the left armpit; like two burns. We don’t know what they are. You see?’ He lifted the cloth and raised the dead man’s arm to show Salazar two little black marks the width of the head of a nail.

‘But they might be bedsores, or lesions the patient himself caused; for example, indentations made by two pyjama buttons, pressed against his skin by the weight of his own body.’

The doctor pulled the cloth up again, and two stretcher-bearers wheeled the body from the room. Salazar began to study one of them carefully: he had a hooked nose and a wrinkled neck, his shoulders were slightly hunched, and he had a swaying walk. Salazar listened to the way he spoke, noted the way he moved; he thought he recognised him as one of the two men he’d caught by surprise in the prayer room. Then he turned his attention to the other man, who was now signing the papers which the nurse handed him. He could not be certain they were the same men; it had been too dark for him to see their faces; he had seen them only in profile. Nonetheless, he memorised the names on their identification badges; he would see whether there was anything suspicious in their CVs later, when he got their files from the Vicar.

‘We’ll look into matters more thoroughly after the family has been notified of the death. For the moment we cannot touch the body,’ said the police doctor, following the nurse and his colleague into the corridor. Meanwhile the sister had opened the gate and the relatives had filed into the unit. Salazar felt a sudden premonition. He stayed on for a time in room 148, which was now empty, then scanned the small crowd in the entrance hall and went down the stairs to the vending machine. There was no one there. It was then that he realised that the dead man was not Marco Bonardi, but Davide Zago. And whoever the woman in the blue handkerchief was, she had achieved her aim.

Since escaping from the re-education centre almost ten years ago, after having been sentenced for abortion, Marta Quinz had been in hiding. She had been given a five-year sentence for having aborted the child she had conceived as the result of a rape. She had just started working as a doctor in the maternity department of a Milanese hospital when she was struck by a tragedy which was to change her life. Two guardians of the faith were on her trail because they suspected her of allowing newborn babies with serious impairments to die, but they could not come up with any conclusive evidence against her, and this enraged them. They had lain in wait for her one night in the hospital parking lot and bundled her into a car; they had threatened and beaten her, telling her that she would have to confess if she didn’t want something worse to happen. Marta had held out against their blows; if she had talked, dozens of families would have been incriminated, dozens of mothers would have ended up in prison. Her kidnappers were convinced that she would blurt out the truth at the first slap; they had not expected such resistance. The car had stopped at a traffic light, and Marta had managed to jump out, but they had caught up with her and had given her a hard night. They had not even bothered to cover their faces, so certain were they that they would get off scot-free. They had left her bleeding on a street on the outskirts of town, and had she not received help from a tramp who was sleeping rough under a bridge over the motorway, she would have died. She did not want to report a rape: if a woman became pregnant as a result, she was obliged to carry the pregnancy to term. Marta had asked for help from a colleague in the hospital. In the distant past, she and Ivan had had an affair, a long-standing relationship which had somehow recently petered out; through apathy, perhaps, she was not really sure.