God's Dog

by Diego Marani

  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.

  Ivan had taken care of everything. He had bribed a male nurse to leave him the keys of an operating theatre, and one January night he had performed an abortion on Marta in th
e very department where she worked. They had left the clinic together, in a car belonging to the medical police, using a forged pass supposedly belonging to one of its members. But someone had informed on them, and the guardians of the faith had obliged Marta to undergo a medical examination. The result left no room for doubt. They were both found guilty of illegal abortion; he had been sentenced to ten years in prison, while she had managed to escape, had gone into hiding, and was now in charge of the Roman branch of the Free Death Brigade, her photograph still on the wanted persons list. But time, and a certain amount of ingenuity, had helped her to become less recognisable; she knew better than anyone else who her enemies were, and had learned the art of disguise accordingly. She had narrowly avoided arrest on two occasions, when she had helped other women who were seeking abortions. The police had ransacked her illicit clinic, breaking in just before she received a warning. But then the Free Death Brigade had changed tack. It was less risky to help women to go abroad for their abortions; a holiday in Corsica or the Balearic Islands would serve as cover. But the police were becoming aware of what was going on, and were now asking for ultrasound scans for certain destinations. During those same days the Roman branch was planning a deadly coup: an attempt on the pope’s life in Saint Peter’s Square on the day of Benedict XVI’s canonisation would have caused the whole world to quake. Marta and her associates had been waiting for such an opportunity for years. Preparations for the coup had exposed them to considerable risk. The members of the Free Death Brigade financed themselves through kidnapping and pushing drugs. Many of them had been arrested; the group had been virtually decimated. Marta was almost at breaking point, but she couldn’t give up now. Sometimes she regretted that she couldn’t lead a normal life, with a husband, a job and children to bring up. It hadn’t worked out with Ivan; yet while they were together, he had seemed to be the love of her life. She fell in love with him immediately, gave herself over to an all-engulfing passion, which suddenly gave meaning to her life and even had the power to deaden the all-consuming rage within her. The more helpless she felt in its sudden grip, the more serenely she yielded to it. He on the other hand had never managed to fall in love with her. He swore that he loved her, and in a sense it was true; but Ivan was a highly educated man, he used his head rather than his heart, and went about things with a doggedness which robbed his actions of spontaneity. Marta felt as though she were his daughter, rather than his lover; it was as though he were waiting for her to grow up so that he could let her go. Their being together had turned into an absurd expectation of her future maturity. They built nothing together, they were not even a real couple; he talked a great deal about the idea of the family, but the minute they were alone together all the life went out of him, he seemed to go into a decline; he seemed sad. He assured her that this wasn’t so, it was just that he was slow and careful by nature; but Marta could see that sadness was precisely what it was; or perhaps rather a repressed boredom, which was even worse. Ivan tried to convince himself that being with Marta was doing him good, but his whole nature was nudging him elsewhere. He had always scorched everything around him; he was made to be alone. So now Marta had nobody. Her father and mother were long dead, and she had no other family. This helped her to bear the weight of a life lived out in hiding. Hiding was not a problem, indeed she was quite happy to stay hidden; it spared her the need for choice. She was not vulnerable, there was no one in the outside world whom the police could pursue in order to track her down. At times, when she was sitting with those whom she helped to die, she felt that it was they who were her family: that army of dying people who looked at her with gratitude even as their faces were contorted with pain.

  The door was opened by an old woman with unkempt white hair and thick glasses. She stood in front of him without saying a word, her trembling hands pressed to her chest. Perhaps she had been expecting him. Her eyes were red; clearly, she had been crying, and her mouth was half-open, set, as though she were trying to repress further tears. She was wearing an apron over a grey wool dress, and shapeless carpet slippers; one of her stockings had slipped down almost to her ankle. Salazar went into the flat, leaving her at the door. The room at the end of the corridor, where Chiara slept, was now empty. The bed was made up in the double bedroom, though there was only one pillow. The lamps had been plugged in, and the wardrobe was now full of female garments, on coat hangers; old woman’s clothes, long and dark. The panama hat was still there, on a shelf, together with the odd towel. A large half-open suitcase stood in one corner. Salazar realised that this was the home of an elderly widow. Now at last everything made sense. He noticed things that had escaped his attention on his first visit: the yellowing curtains, the knitted bedcover made with scraps of leftover wool, the piles of old newspapers, a rickety table, a peeling mirror in a bamboo frame. He went quickly into the living room and opened the photograph albums. The more recent photos had been removed, but oddly enough their absence left no gaps: if looked at in sequence, these images told another story entirely. All traces of Chiara had vanished. The photos were of other children, nephews and nieces or friends of the lonely couple who had spent their lives going from one oil well to another. Chiara had replaced the old woman for just as long as it took her to bring about her husband’s death. She had pretended to be his daughter, and a devout Catholic, so as to be allowed into the palliative care unit. She had gone to live in the Bonardis’ flat and had the old woman hidden elsewhere; she must belong to a well-organised network if she could afford to arrange such things. Had Chiara herself gone into the hospital during the night, when the unit was under surveillance, or had the job been done by her fellow-conspirators? In that way, Bonardi’s death would not have aroused suspicion. But how had he died? What poison, what weapon was used by the angels of death? Salazar went back into the hallway. The old woman had shuffled quietly after him from room to room; now she was looking at him apprehensively from the kitchen doorway. A pan was boiling on the stove, causing the windows to mist over. The battered formica table was set with a soup plate, a spoon, a glass and a napkin. Salazar could smell the broth. Now he turned and looked at the old woman who was leaning up against the door frame, clearly rigid with fear. With a sudden shudder, he sensed that this house, though full of pain, had been freed of some ghostly presence. He went off without a word. When the automatic light on the stairs went out, a trembling hand on the fourth floor switched it on again.

  The hairdresser’s and the beauty salon were barely thirty metres apart. Salazar went in and approached the first assistant available.

  ‘Excuse me, may I ask you a few questions?’ he said, pointing to his badge. The girl was mixing a dye. Before she could reply, a heavily made-up woman intervened.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, edging Salazar towards the door. She was chewing gum, and smelled strongly of violets.

  ‘I’m looking for this woman,’ said Salazar, taking the photo of Chiara Bonardi out of his pocket and edging the woman backwards in his turn.

  ‘Do you know her? She came to your establishment on 27 February.’ The woman took the photograph and put on the glasses which had been hanging round her neck; she looked at the face for a moment, frowning.

  ‘That’s Signora Loiacano! How young she looks! Look, Teresa!’ Salazar snatched the photograph from her hand.

  ‘Do you know where she lives? Does she come here often?’

  ‘She’s been a client of ours for years. But I don’t know where she lives. I think she’s local, though, because I often see her go by with shopping bags.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Salazar, and slipped out of the shop under the curious gaze of the two assistants. He wandered aimlessly through the streets around Piazza Risorgimento, looking at people at the tram stops, in shop windows and doorways with the secret hope of catching the woman by surprise. She lived round here; at this very moment she might be in the supermarket on the corner or the café opposite, or perhaps, unknown to him, she was at some window, observing him from behind the cur
tains. Salazar looked up at the uncommunicative façades of the buildings which lined the street: closed curtains, blinds half-down, the frosted glass of surgeries and offices. He looked at his watch: by now it was two o’clock and he hadn’t had anything to eat. He went into a bar and ordered a sandwich, casting an eye at the television that was hanging from the wall, at the piles of Easter eggs in the window and at the headlines of the newspaper being read by the man seated at the bar’s only table. The man had heavy, stumpy hands; when he put down the paper, Salazar saw that it was the South American from San Basilio!

  I’ve missed a trick here, no two ways about it. I should have followed the woman throughout the day, and searched the flat on Via Cornelia from top to bottom. I made a play at catching her out; in fact, the opposite has happened. I didn’t think that things in Italy had come to such a pass. These Free Death Brigades mean business. I am far from convinced that self-serving orthodoxy is the most effective strategy. Ever since abortion, the pill, assisted fertilisation and euthanasia were proclaimed terrorist offences, anonymous accusations have been raining down on the desks of the papal police, and those in charge of anti-terrorist activities have been wasting their time hunting down a handful of offenders in order to be able to boast of some headline-grabbing arrest. University professors, journalists, even the odd priest have fallen into the trap. Banner headlines, triumphal announcements, everyone congratulating everyone else, but where does this get us? Here every member of the hierarchy dons the mantle of defender of the faith and vies with all others in observance of the Catholic rule – purely to earn promotion, to curry favour, to procure themselves important positions in the curia. But, by so doing, such men lose sight of their goal. Here we see that same obtuseness which caused us such bitter setbacks in the past. Dogma is to be used against atheists, not against ourselves. There is no point in even trying to cure incurable ills. Giving placebos instead of drugs would solve the problem of euthanasia, as well as exposing the limits of what medicine can do. Courts sitting in judgement on the course of a disease serve no purpose, indeed they are counterproductive. The principle is correct: a sick person cannot take his own life because it is not his to take, it has been bestowed on him by God. But when decisions about treatment are entrusted to a court, and not to the patient himself, or to his family, then inevitably there will be ill-feeling. There are other, less controversial ways of taking this decision out of his hands. Indeed, he should be allowed to choose his own treatment: he will never know what is in the pills that he swallows. What counts, all in all, is not to prolong a man’s life for as long as possible, but to remind him that death is his destiny. That way, he is more likely to give himself over to the Church. What the curia is interested in above all is getting its hands on the property of the euthanasiasts, and may thus be seen as gaining material advantage from the situation; but that is tantamount to paving the way for the angels of death. I shall draw attention to this paradox in my report on this mission. Perhaps some enlightened spirit in the curia will read it.