He watched Patta’s eyes widen in outrage at this inferior who dared to give advice.
Brunetti wanted it done quickly. ‘I’ll call them now,’ he said, looking in the direction of the door.
Angered by this as well, Patta wheeled around, walked toward the door and let himself out.
Feeling not a little bit the fool, Brunetti called his friend at the paper again and did it quickly, all the time conscious of how enormous a debt he was running up. When it came time to pay it back, and he did not for an instant doubt that this time would come, he knew it would be at the cost of some principle or the flouting of some law. Neither thought made him hesitate for an instant.
He was about to leave for lunch when his phone rang. It was Carraro, saying that a man had phoned ten minutes before: he’d read the story in the paper that morning and wanted to know if it was really true. Carraro had assured him that, yes, it was: the therapy was absolutely revolutionary and the only hope for whoever it was that had been bitten.
‘Do you think he’s the one?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Carraro said. ‘But he seemed very interested. He said he’d come in today. What are you going to do?’
‘I’m coming over right now.’
‘What do I do if he comes in?’
‘Keep him there. Keep talking to him. Invent some sort of screening process and keep him there,’ Brunetti said. On his way out, he put his head into the officers’ room and shouted a quick command that they get two men and a boat over to the entrance to the Pronto Soccorso immediately.
It took him only ten minutes to walk to the hospital, and when he got there he told the
The nurse on duty looked up at him in surprise when he appeared on her left with no warning, but Carraro must have told her to expect someone, for she got to her feet, saying, ‘He’s with Dottore Carraro.’ She pointed to the door to the main treatment room. ‘In there.’
Without knocking, Brunetti opened the door and went in. A white-jacketed Carraro stood over a tall man lying on his back on the examining table. His shirt and sweater lay across the back of a chair, and Carraro was listening to his heart with his stethoscope. Because he had the earpieces in place, Carraro was not aware of Brunetti’s arrival. But the man on the table was, and when his heart quickened at the sight of Brunetti, Carraro looked up to see what had caused his patient’s reaction.
He saw Brunetti but said nothing.
The man on the table lay still, though Brunetti saw the stiffening of his body and the quick flush of emotion on his face. He also saw the inflamed mark on the outer edge of his right forearm: oval, its two edges stamped out with zipperlike precision.
He chose to say nothing. The man on the examining table closed his eyes and lay back, letting his arms fall limply to his sides. Brunetti noticed that Carraro was wearing a pair of transparent rubber gloves. If he’d come in now and seen the man lying like that, he would have thought him asleep. His own heartbeat quieted. Carraro moved away from the table and went over to his desk, laid the stethoscope down, and then left the room without speaking.
Brunetti moved a step closer to the table but was careful to stay more than an arm’s length away. He saw now just how strong the man must be: the muscles of his chest and shoulders were rounded and taut, the result of decades of heavy work. His hands were enormous; one hand lay palm up, and Brunetti was struck by the flatness of the tips of those broad, spatulate fingers.
In repose, the man’s face had a quality about it that spoke of absence. Even when he had first seen Brunetti and perhaps realized who he was, little expression had been visible on his features. His ears were very small; indeed, his curiously cylindrical head seemed a size or two too small for the rest of that heavy body.
‘Signore,’ Brunetti finally said.
The man’s eyes opened, and he looked up at Brunetti. His eyes were a deep brown and made Brunetti think of bears, but that might be because of his general thickness. ‘She told me not to come,’ he said. ‘She said it was a trap.’ He blinked, keeping his eyes closed for a long time, then opened them, and said, ‘But I was afraid. I heard people talking about the story, and I was afraid.’ Again, that long, timeless closing of the eyes, so long it seemed that during it the man went off to some other place while they were closed, like a diver beneath the waters of the sea, happier to remain amidst that greater beauty and reluctant to return.
His eyes opened. ‘But she was right. She always is.’ Saying that, he sat up. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Brunetti. ‘I won’t hurt you. I need the doctor to give me the cure, and then I’ll come with you. But first I have to have the cure.’
Brunetti nodded, understanding his need. ‘I’ll get the doctor,’ he said, and went out to the nurses’ station, where Carraro stood, talking on the phone. There was no sign of the nurse.
When he saw Brunetti, he hung up and turned to him. ‘Well?’ The anger was back, but Brunetti suspected it had nothing to do with any violation of the Hippocratic Oath.
‘I’d like you to give him a tetanus shot, and then I’ll take him to the Questura.’
‘You leave me alone in a room with a murderer, and now you expect me to go back in there and give him a tetanus shot? You’ve got to be out of your mind,’ Carraro said, crossing his arms in front of him as a visual sign of his refusal.
‘I don’t think there’s any risk, Dottore. He could need one, anyway, for that bite. It looks infected to me.’
‘Oh, so you’re a doctor now, too, huh?’
‘Dottore,’ Brunetti said, looking down at his shoes and taking a long breath, ‘I’m asking you to put your rubber gloves back on and come into the next room and give your patient a tetanus shot.’
‘And if I refuse?’ Carraro asked with empty belligerence, wafting a breath in Brunetti’s direction that smelled of mint and alcohol, the sort of thing real drinkers make their breakfast of.
‘If you refuse, Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a lethally calm voice and reaching toward him with one hand, ‘I will pull you back into that room and tell him you refuse to give him the injection that will cure him. And then I’ll leave you alone with him.’
He watched Carraro as he spoke, saw that the doctor believed him, which was enough for his purposes. Carraro’s arms fell to his side, though he muttered something under his breath, something that Brunetti pretended not to hear.
He held the door for Carraro and went back into the room. The man sat now on the side of the examining table, long legs dangling toward the floor, buttoning his shirt over his barrel-shaped chest.
Silently, Carraro went to a glass-doored cabinet at the far side of the room, opened it, and pulled out a syringe. He stooped down and searched noisily through the boxes of medicine stored there until he found the box he wanted. He took a small, rubber-capped glass vial from it and went back to his desk. Carefully, he pulled on a new pair of rubber gloves, opened the plastic package and took out the syringe, and stuck its point through the rubber seal on the top of the small bottle. He sucked all of the liquid up into the needle, and turned back to the man on the table, who sat, his shirt now tucked into his trousers, one sleeve rolled up almost to his shoulder.
As Brunetti watched, he held his arm out toward the doctor, turned his face away, and squeezed his eyes closed much in the way children do when they receive inoculations. Carraro set the full needle down on the table next to the man, took his arm and shoved his sleeve up above the biceps. With unnecessary force, he jabbed the needle into the muscle and plunged the liquid into the man’s arm. He yanked the needle out, pushed the man’s arm roughly upright so the pressure would stop the bleeding, and went back to the desk.
‘Thank you, Dottore,’ the man said. ‘Is that the cure?’
Carraro refused to speak, so Brunetti said, ‘Yes, that’s it. You don’t have anything to worry about now.’
‘It didn’t even hurt. Much,’ the man said and looked toward Brunetti. ‘Do we have to go now?’
Brunetti nodded. The man lowered his arm and looked down at the place where Carraro had stuck the needle.
