Diego Marani - God's Dog

As the two guardians of the faith went off, the nurse came back. Blank-faced, she replaced the tube in Salazar’s nostrils with practised movements and turned on the drip.

It was dawn when she saw the message arrive on her silenced mobile phone. Outside, the sky was showing signs of whitening. Marta Quinz had left by the back door in order to avoid going past the already open bar. On the patch of waste land near the station illegal immigrants were huddled around fires. The odd burst of laughter and barking dogs could be head above the din of the traffic. Several prostitutes were still standing around the petrol pumps, but the lorries coming off the by-pass were no longer stopping. Marta took a roundabout route, changing buses three times and doing the last stretch on foot to rejoin her associates; the first thing she did when she went into the backroom, breathless from her exertions, was to look out of the window on to the road.

‘Where’s Mirko?’ she asked the man who was standing under the naked bulb that was hanging from the ceiling; his face was carved out by the glancing light, and she could not see his eyes.

‘Through there,’ he said. The fair-haired man came in; he hesitated to look Marta in the eye and bit his lip. Then he took a seat at the table, banging his elbows down on to its surface.

‘What’s happened? Is there any news?’ the woman asked.

‘No. I know nothing. We didn’t see them arrive.’

‘They must have been following you!’

‘In that case they can’t have realised that we were following the lorry; and they didn’t see me get out of the car. But there’s something that doesn’t quite add up. When the two police vehicles arrived, Boris was sitting in front, but not in the driving seat, and Ciro was in the back; clearly, neither of them was at the wheel. So the police must have noticed that the driver wasn’t there, but oddly enough they didn’t look for him. They surrounded the car and stayed put. And it was there that the men in the other two police cars found them when they arrived on the scene, sirens blaring. There was no road block.’

‘Then they could be on our trail. They’re biding their time. Perhaps they’re giving us our heads the better to jump on us when we come out into the open!’

‘That’s not impossible. But there’s another possibility. Maybe Boris got into the driving seat in the service area in order to come and get me. I heard the car door open and close as I moved off. If that’s what happened, the police may have thought that everyone was there, and that’s why they didn’t look any further. Anyway, the fact is that this basement isn’t safe any more. If we want to carry on, we’ll have to move everything into the little house in town.’

‘We can’t, it’s too far away!’

‘We have no alternative. Do we want to carry on?’

Marta was walking up and down between the table and the door, but she kept her eye on the window.

‘Pablo, what do you think?’ The man who had been keeping his distance now came to sit opposite the fair-haired man. He ran a finger through his beard before he spoke.

‘We carry on! We can’t just let everything drop. We’ll never have another chance like this. Just think of the repercussions! Boris and Ciro will manage somehow. The cops have got nothing on them. The car was clean, properly registered in Ciro’s name. We’ve never used it for anything dodgy, not even for removals.’

Marta too pulled up a chair and joined them at the table, heaving a heavy sigh which, in the sudden silence, sounded almost like a shout.

‘We carry on!’ she repeated, more quietly, shaking the men’s hands.

He vaguely recognised the face he now saw beside him, but he couldn’t place it. Then he recognised it from the rosary. The woman gestured to him to keep silent. She had two fingers firmly on the drip, and now she squeezed it.

‘Listen to me carefully. Your life is at stake.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Don’t worry about that. Just listen to me.’

‘First, just undo these straps.’

‘I can’t. Don’t you understand, we’re being watched.’

‘Why should I trust you?’

‘Don’t, then, if that’s how you want it. Just listen.’ The woman gave an exaggerated sigh and proceeded wearily with her explanations.

‘I’m here for a terminally ill patient. In the next room. Last night I opened the wrong door and came in here. That’s how I recognised you.’

‘So it was you who helped Bonardi die?’

‘Yes, it was me.’

‘Or was the old man in San Filippo Neri Davide Zago?’

At these words, her expression darkened. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, looking distinctly uneasy as she did so.

‘Davide Zago, Ivan’s father, wanted by the papal police for performing backstreet abortions,’ insisted Salazar, feeling that at last he had touched upon something solid amidst the surrounding fog. The woman hesitated, and bit her lip; she knew she should say nothing, but she could not contain herself.

‘How do you know about all this?’

‘I was given the task of exposing Davide Zago and laying a trap for his son. That is why I was keeping an eye on the hospital, pretending to be a pilgrim priest.’ She seemed relieved, but then glanced nervously at the panel in the door behind her, reflected in the glass.

‘Davide Zago died last month in the military hospital on the Caelian Hill. He was arrested at Filippo Neri after the last sweep. We weren’t able to hide him. Those swine kept him hostage to get Ivan to give himself up to the police. They may have tortured him. He will certainly have suffered greatly as he died. The family weren’t allowed to take possession of the body.’ It came out all in one breath; it was a story she’d never put into words before, and she was surprised that she was able to sum it up so neatly. Salazar listened in disbelief.

‘I fail to understand such fury against a medical abortionist. There are so many of them. What had this Ivan done that was so serious?’

‘Ivan was one of us. But when they arrested him he let himself be bribed. They’d sentenced him to ten years, so he agreed to perform abortions on the seminary girls.’

‘The seminary girls? And who might they be?’

‘You’ve certainly led a sheltered life, inspector. The seminary girls are the whores who serve the curia. You know how it is, your friends don’t like doing it with a contraceptive; anyway, they’re worth their weight in gold around these parts. So Ivan would perform abortions on them, and the judge commuted his sentence into house arrest. But Ivan kept a careful record of all the abortions, with videos and samples of DNA. Then he fled to Switzerland and began blackmailing the curia, so they took his father hostage. But this is no time for idle chitchat.’

‘I see. Things are becoming a bit clearer. But what do you want from me?’

‘I want to get you out of here.’

‘That’s big of you. Alive or dead?’

‘This is no time for banter. Just listen carefully. In a moment or two I shall be stunning you with this.’ The woman unscrewed a tube from the bed and showed Salazar an object hidden inside it.

‘It’s an electric stun gun. We use them to induce cardiac arrest; when used on the terminally ill, they’re fatal; all it will do to you is cause you to lose consciousness.’

‘And it was this which left those two black marks in Bonardi’s armpit?’

‘Exactly. No one would ever associate such marks with a stun gun.’

‘My congratulations. You had me there. Did you realise who I was?’

‘Not straight away. But caution is second nature to us.’

‘That’s some organisation you’ve got there. How do you choose which patients should be killed? How much do they pay you to die?’