God's Dog (4 page)

‘Thanks for the suggestion, doctor. I'll mention it to my superiors, though I doubt that my task will leave me time for training of this kind. But it may be a path to consider in the future,' said Salazar, getting himself off the hook, he felt, with some adroitness.

‘As you prefer, inspector. We are at your service!' replied the doctor, making an expansive gesture. Salazar nodded courteously. He could hardly wait to get out of that room.

‘I have no more questions for the moment, but if it's not too much trouble I shall be back when I know more about the patients. One last thing. Do I have your permission to look at your doctors' personal files?' That was the only thing he really wanted to ask. The doctor raised a hand to his chin, and a large watch emerged from his shirt cuff as he did so.

‘Unfortunately we have no access to such files except in the case of explicit charges. For preliminary enquiries we need authorisation from the Papal Medical Council, as required by professional ethics. Suspicion of our doctors would amount to lack of faith in the system. You will have to ask your superior about such matters. But I am sure that a secret agent in the papal force will have no difficulty in procuring a piece of paper with a couple of official stamps, inspector! Ah, bureaucratic procedure, what a thing it is! How could we live without it!' exclaimed the doctor, rising elegantly from his chair to offer Salazar his hand. The inspector freed himself from the man's sweaty grasp as quickly as he decently could, and left the room, after yet more thanks, received by their grim recipient with a series of goatee-waggles, in lieu of more orthodox leave-taking.

Throughout the day, a leaden sky had seemed to promise snow; the nearby Monti Prenestini were already sprinkled with white. But in the evening the rain returned and the radio announced that the Tiber might flood during the night. Salazar had spent his first days studying the patients' files. In subsequent meetings, the Vicar had given him the abstracts from the Land Registry concerning all relevant properties, and the police files on all the patients' close relatives. The inspector now knew the personal histories of each of the men who were dying in the palliative care unit. He had started cross-referencing the data, seeking points of connection. Documentation on the doctors would have provided him with other pointers; but the inspector did not like too much paperwork. This was not a game to be played in the archives. He was going to have to get out on the street, find a trail and follow it. He had immediately discarded the atheists among the twenty-seven patients: they would be easy quarry. Those who declare themselves have nothing to hide. Instead, he concentrated on those who had survived the longest. It was they who were the most tempted to put an end to it all. Whichever of them was Davide Zago, he must have accomplices who were pretending to be his relatives and coming to pay him visits. There couldn't be many people providing this cover. He therefore discarded those who had a lot of registered visitors. He was now left with five potential suspects. That Thursday, he waited until it was time for the evening visit, then took the corridor to the palliative care unit.

The whole of the first floor of that wing of the hospital was occupied by patients who were terminally ill. The windows overlooked the inner courtyards of the building, and the entrances to the various storerooms and depots. Above, on the flat roof, the back of a large lit-up sign saying ‘San Filippo Neri' was visible, supported by rusty posts stuck in the concrete. The windowless prayer room was situated between the unit's two corridors. By day it received a little feeble light from the two frosted glass doors which gave on to the outer wing of the building, which itself could not be reached from that same floor. It was there that the first corridor ended. The second one opened off to the left of the prayer room and continued around the edge of the courtyard.

In the first room there were two beds, the faces of their occupants, who showed no sign of movement, carved out by the dim white glow of the nightlight. Their breathing seemed to divide the narrow space into two parts: it sounded like whispered voices, trying to persuade anyone who would listen of some enormous truth. On the side of the room where the door was, it was the first – soft and phlegm-laden – which was the stronger. On the window side the breathing was dry and rasping, often breaking up into bursts of intermittent coughing. In the middle of the room both were equally audible. Despite their different rhythms, they sometimes coincided, could briefly be heard as one, then once again diverged. Like two nightbirds, they vanished and reappeared, flew suddenly downwards and soared up again. A woman was seated by the bed on the window side, her head bent, one hand on the sick man's arm, the other telling her beads. Salazar went up to her. He glanced at the hand that was lying on the sheet, at the big black veins pierced by the needles from the drip, at the catheter tube dripping into the bag hanging from the edge of the bed. The man's eyes were half-closed, but he was looking upwards, his open mouth almost lipless. When the woman turned in his direction, Salazar nodded his head and pointed to the crucifix on his jacket. The woman nodded and went back to her prayers. In the meantime the other patient's visitor had also arrived. He was a big man, probably around forty. Without taking off his coat, he stood at the foot of the bed and shuffled his feet on the floor. He was holding his hat in one hand, and occasionally wiping the sweat from his forehead with the other; his expression, as he looked at the man he was visiting, was somewhere between surprise and dismay. He had a parcel of fresh linen with him, and handed it to the sister, eager to be rid of it. He cannot have been a regular visitor, because when he saw Salazar he made as though to offer him his chair. Salazar communicated his refusal by gestures, raising his hand and half-closing his eyes. Then he slipped out of the room; it had no more to tell him. He went into the next one, where the light was on, and a soundless television was sending out blue flashes over the steel of the bed frames. A man was sitting at a table near the window, holding a newspaper in place with his crooked elbows. For a moment Salazar wondered if he were crying, but the man looked up at him for a moment, dry-eyed, then carried on reading. The man in the next bed had tubes in his nose; the silence was broken by a slight gurgling sound, not unlike that of deep-sea diving equipment. The other bed, the one next to the door, was empty. Salazar carried on down the corridor to complete his pious rounds. He wanted to get this mission over and done with as soon as possible so that he could get back to Amsterdam. But at the same time he felt a morbid curiosity about this world of pain. On his way back to the sister's office, he found himself in the prayer room. He sat down on a bench to take stock of things. The room was in semi-darkness; the only light came from the glass partition giving on to the corridor of the adjacent ward, spreading over the bubbles in the linoleum and turning them into dim puddles of whiteness. The little cupboard which served as an altar had been pushed up against the wall, the benches stacked up at the end of the room. The crucifix and the embroidery on the chaplain's vestments, folded on top of a large missal, glistened faintly in the half-light. A radiator was ticking, the flow of hot water through its pipes making a soft murmuring sound which filled the silence. Suddenly the door to the other ward was opened; two white-coated doctors appeared and immediately locked the door behind them. They came forward cautiously, the soles of their shoes flattening the bubbles on the linoleum, their shadows splintered by the dazzling lamplight. They were engaged in lively argument, although they kept their voices down. One was shaking his head, while the other kept on saying: ‘I can't do it, I just can't! Not now!' They had not noticed Salazar, who was standing in a recess, the upper part of his body sunk in shadow, his legs hidden by a pile of chairs. It was only when they were well into the room that the two doctors saw him, and instantly fell silent, greeted him coldly and went off. Salazar waited until their silhouettes had vanished down the corridor, then, mingling with the relatives who were coming out of the wards, laden with piles of dirty linen and redoubled anguish, he went slowly back to the sister's office.

‘Sister, what time do you close the gate to the unit?'

‘At eight o'clock, straight after supper. That's when the night-watch starts.'

‘Do you close all the doors? Including those which lead to the other wing?'

‘Those are never open.'

‘Aha! Not even in the day?'

‘Well, they're no longer in use, you see. We have the keys, though.'

Salazar smiled to himself. He had already found the flaw.

‘So no one can get in without coming through here?' he asked, as though to spell things out.

‘The duty nurse is the only one who can open up. This is the command button.' The nurse pointed to an electric panel set into the wall of the porter's lodge.

‘And how does the night-watch get in and out?'

‘They have to come through our porter's lodge. There's an intercom system for emergencies.'

The sister was about to leave. She switched off the computer, lowered the blinds and seemed about to leave the office (double-locking it as she did so).

‘Signor Salazar, if you want to stay here for the vigils, I've put a camp-bed in the space behind the changing-rooms. That way you'll be able to get to the bathroom more easily and no one will disturb you,' she said, giving him a knowing look.

‘Thank you, sister,' he said in a neutral tone.

‘Good night then!' Attaching the bunch of keys to her belt, she slipped on her black jacket and set off towards the stairs.

‘Good night!' Salazar went with her for a few paces, pretending to be lost in thought. He paused on the gallery to observe the comings and goings of the staff as they ended their shift. When it seemed to him that the way was clear, he went quickly back into the prayer room, pulled the cupboard holding the altar under the video-surveillance camera, climbed on to it and trained the lens on to the door through which the two doctors had gone. Then he went to lie down on his camp-bed, took off his shoes and folded the cushion beneath his head. From where he lay he had a view of the screens in the sister's office, the way into the corridor and the entrance to the stairs. The new duty nurse had switched on the neon lighting and settled into her seat in the porter's lodge, the blue of her freshly ironed nurse's uniform clearly visible in the darkness as she poured herself a hot drink from a thermos. She gave Salazar a vacant look and opened her newspaper out on the table.

Kept awake by the patients' moans, Salazar spent a sleepless night. He timed the movements of the night-watch, the comings and goings of the lifts, even the movements of the buses in the street below. He kept his eye on the video-surveillance system in the prayer room and on the occasionally nodding head of the nurse in the porter's lodge. From time to time he glanced at the clock on the wall, noting the all too slow passing of the hours. He saw the traffic on the avenue thinning out, and the last empty train on the overground slipping over the railway bridge. At seven on the dot the night-watch went off duty and the nurses on the new shift started pushing the medicine trolleys along the corridor. Salazar folded up his bedclothes, closed up the camp-bed and went into the bathroom to wash his face. He met the new sister on the stairs; she was out of breath, and her cheeks were pink with cold.

‘Up already, father? At least come and have a coffee. Real coffee, not that stuff from the machines. We nurses have our own mocha, and I've brought some croissants!' she said, pointing to the bag on her arm.

‘Thank you, sister, but I'm in a bit of a hurry,' he said, and scuttled off down the steps. Outside, the wind had got up again. He breathed in the damp air with a sense of relief; after a night spent with the smell of warm plastic and disinfectant in his nostrils, even the stench of diesel from the buses on the square was welcome. He didn't feel like joining in the rough and tumble of the overground quite yet, and decided to walk on to the next stop. Once he got on, he soon dozed off, and was awoken by a sudden jolt just before the bridge over the Tiber. In front of the convent, the newspaper kiosk was already open. He bought a copy of the
Osservatore Romano
and went up to his room, where he filled his pipe, lit the table lamp, opened the newspaper and, taking his first puff, read the front page headline: ‘Death penalty for abortionists'.

Yesterday at the Angelus the Holy Father once again called for those found guilty of abortion, whether practitioners or advocates, to suffer the death penalty. By so doing, the Pope is giving his explicit support to the Ministry of Justice of the Italian Catholic Republic, which has already proposed a similar law on two occasions. As is well-known, the proposal was both times rejected with an adverse vote by the Justice Board of rank and file Catholics. Their ideological tenacity has been repeatedly criticised by their own allies in the government, but to no avail. Today, many observers are wondering what credence can be given to a movement which is now politically isolated, and which is adopting a position of questionable theological severity in defence of the enemies of the Church. The essence of Faith does not lend itself to succinct interpretations, but is nonetheless crystal clear, as the Holy Father has emphasised over the last few days. Buoyed up by the arrest, last month, of yet another unit of backstreet abortionist doctors, the government is now launching a new offensive to storm the last bastions of recalcitrance, and hence to endow our country with this invaluable juridical instrument for the defence of all our citizens. Monsignor Damiani has already drafted a third bill. It is to be hoped that on this occasion the rank and file Catholics will give their support to this long-awaited measure. Number 2267 of Joseph Ratzinger's catechism of the Catholic Church reads as follows: ‘Always supposing that the identity and responsibility of the guilty party have been fully established, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only feasible way of defending the lives of human beings against such unjust aggression.' The events of the last few weeks prove that our society is now in precisely such an emergency situation as that described by Joseph Ratzinger. The abortionist criminals are striking at human life at its most vulnerable, that is, within the mother's womb. Thus Benedict XVIII's appeal for fitting punishment is in complete conformity with a well-established doctrinal approach which should find favour amongst all the faithful. ‘The rank and file Catholics' vetoing of a law which safeguards human life is incomprehensible, and their position within the government must now be questioned,' Monsignor Damiani firmly stated recently. Today much of the heat seems to have gone out of the argument, all the more so because the government can apparently rely on a majority to get the law through without calling upon the rank and file Catholics. ‘We wish to avoid pointless friction within the majority but we cannot betray the hopes of the electors who have given us their votes,' said Monsignor Damiani, mindful of the fact that if the rank and file Catholics left the government on a matter of doctrine, this might raise doubts about the movement's legality. But opinion polls conducted by Ecclesia show that the rank and file Catholic movement is crumbling. ‘It is disheartening to note that opposition to this government, with the exception of the exemplary case of the Christian Democrats, is continually dominated by subversive and anti-Catholic fringe parties which the state has no option but to declare illegal for its own protection,' said the Minister of Justice on Radio Maria.