God's Dog (11 page)

‘Inspector, have you anything to say to us?'

Salazar tried to prop himself on his elbows to get a better view of his questioner, but was prevented by the straps round his arms and legs.

‘I think I must have fallen among abortionists! Sergeant, please untie me! What's going on?'

‘That's for you to tell us, inspector…'

‘Where are we? What is this place?'

‘It's a hospital. And this is the palliative care unit…'

Then Salazar understood. He half-closed his eyes and tried to clench his fists, but even that was beyond him.

‘What do you want from me?'

‘You are accused of treachery and offences against religion. We want the names of your accomplices in Amsterdam.'

‘What do you mean, accomplices? I am a front-line defender of the faith in Amsterdam!' expostulated Salazar, fully aware that protest would serve no purpose. What he most feared had already happened; they had him cornered.

‘In Amsterdam you had a homosexual relationship with an infidel, thereby violating the rule of chastity. Do I have to remind you of number 2351 in Joseph Ratzinger's catechism: the chief sins against chastity are adultery, masturbation, fornication, pornography, prostitution, rape and homosexual acts. Furthermore, you founded a scientistic sect, the so-called Biblical-Koranists. Number 2110, the sin of polytheism and idolatry. Inspector, we want the names of all the missionary priests involved.'

‘Sects, idolatry, what utter rubbish! The word is proselytism! Sergeant, these are important matters we're talking about. I am here in Rome on a secret mission and someone tried to kill me,' protested Salazar in a vain attempt to parry the hail of accusations being levelled against him.

‘Who are the Darwinists with whom you are plotting against the Church? Who is in the know about the monstrous experiments your accomplice is conducting? The sooner you start to talk, inspector, the sooner we can try and help you…' The man was looking at him with rheumy eyes which did not seem to fit with his face. He made an angry gesture, then controlled himself.

‘Sergeant, get me off this bed and let me speak to my Vicar! The appointment is at Sant'Andrea della Valle, Friday, seven o'clock. My registration number is 18246592NLA.'

‘We're quite aware of that, inspector…'

‘You're barking up the wrong tree, sergeant. I'm on the track of a gang of abortionists who also practise euthanasia. If you don't free me immediately you'll have to answer for the consequences!'

‘Salazar, we'll all have to answer for the consequences. But here it's you who's out of place. We know all about you, inspector. We also know that you are a survivor. You escaped the catastrophe which divine providence, in its infinite wisdom, had planned for you. There is no earthquake, no tsunami, which is not part of God's plan, as Sodom and Gomorrah tell us all too clearly. You come from an evil place, inspector, and to such a place, sooner or later, you must return…' At these words, Salazar saw that he was in the hands of a fanatic.

The man with the red moustache stood up. He stood at the foot of the bed and gripped the bars with both hands. The other man went to the door and gestured towards someone who was waiting in the corridor.

‘Inspector, if you won't talk, we for our part have nothing to say to you. Just take a look around. Do you realise where you are? Think about it. We'll be back tomorrow.'

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.

III

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?'

The woman looked around her, uncertain whether to talk or to remain silent. But she found Salazar's provocations impossible to resist.

‘We don't kill them, we save them! And we don't ask for money, though they can give us money, if they want. We use it to finance the backstreet abortions. It's the families who contact us. We have ourselves registered as visiting relatives and we go and live in relatives' houses, to avoid suspicion. The relatives themselves go to stay in our safe houses while we are getting things sorted out. Sometimes we have to do a bit of jiggery-pokery to make things seem more plausible.'

‘Like photographs in family albums?'

‘Down to the last detail. We know your methods!'

‘And you go from hospital to hospital, so as to keep a low profile.'

‘That's right, we're constantly on the move, even from city to city.'

‘When did you realise who I was?'

‘It was pure chance. The morning when you went into the Bonardi flat, I'd forgotten my tube pass. So I went back, and when I arrived on the landing I heard noises. I lay in wait for you in the street and saw you come out.'

‘One can never be too careful…'

‘Listen, we haven't got much time. When I've done the business with the stun gun, your pulse rate will be too low to register on the cardiac monitor, so the alarm will go off, and the flying squad will take you into the recovery room. That's where we come on the scene. We'll put you into a bogus ambulance and get you out of here, and we'll have to sedate you, to get through the check points.'

‘But why do you want to save my life, Mrs…what should I call you? Bonardi? Loiacono?' An expression of unease flickered over her face again.

‘I see you haven't wasted any time…'

‘I'm a policeman…'

‘As you will have suspected, Loiacono is a false name, too.'

‘Well, I thought so. But it could be a clue.'

She bit her lip. ‘It could indeed,' she said thoughtfully. Then, reverting to her previous briskness:

‘You could call me “death's angel”. Isn't that what you call us?'

‘All right, death's angel. What do you want in exchange?'

‘Information. About the ceremony on Easter Day. About where the marksmen will be positioned; how many plainclothes policemen will be there, how to recognise them, what time will the pope be arriving on the podium, who will be with him, the route of the pope-mobile…that kind of thing.'

Salazar thought that it might be as well to make the bogus Mrs Bonardi believe that he had something to divulge. He tried to think who among the police had laid that trap for him; perhaps some corrupt secret service agent who wanted to trip him up? Perhaps his anti-reformist activism had irked someone? Or perhaps, more simply, he had trodden on the toes of some bad egg who had friends in high places?